Suffering and courage

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Acharya Ji, as you said that the realisation, the understanding, or seeing, frees us as a spontaneous action. How does it arise? Whatever I understand through my thinking, analysis, knowledge, I understand a bit. But that understanding does not free me of my habits.

So, my question is: How is ‘my understanding’ is different from ‘the understanding’ that you are talking about? Is it also born out of knowledge?

Acharya Prashant:

It is born out of suffering.

There is no other transformative force.

You do not need to transform, if you are not suffering. If you are already alright, do you need to change? So, all Spirituality springs from there.

Wisdom, Realisation, and Understanding are needed, because man is not alright.

So you have to come face-to-face with the fact of your inner disquiet.

And that requires courage.

That requires a dedication to Peace.

Why does it require courage? Because disquiet does not live within us carrying the name of ‘disquiet’. ‘Disquiet’ lives within us carrying very lovely, and sacred names; names in which in which we have made a lot of investment. Therefore, to call disquiet as ‘disquiet’, is a courageous decision. It means mentally writing-off a lot of your investments. Giving up on a lot of your assumed receivables.

Hence, courage is needed.

Disquiet hides within us as love. And it requires courage to confront the fact that, that which you have been calling as ‘love’, is not love at all; it is just noise. And why does that require courage? I repeat, because in that so-called ‘love’, we have already invested a lot. So when you acknowledge that love has not been ‘love’ at all, you are mentally writing-off all the resources that you have so-far invested in ‘love’.

And mind is greedy, it doesn’t want to easily write-off any money. Do we want to write-off things easily? We want to cling to hope. We want to keep hoping that an investment will come good, that some money that others owe to us, would be returned to us, sooner than later.