The Heart is enough

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

Listeners: I was reading a book of yours, Personality. It was written that whatever you liked from your heart, the same thing you should do in the outer world. But if we talk about it in a practical aspect, maybe in a professional or personal life point of view, that is something other, that people expect from you and mostly it is considered failure. What to do to connect the internal as well as the external world?

Acharya Prashant: Two things, firstly, what we usually call as our heartfelt liking, has not much to do with the heart. It is just another part of the conditioned mind. The heart is no particular entity. It does not have any set likes and dislikes. It is not in favor, or in opposition, of anything. It does not like activities. It does not have expectation from activities. And, what the heart might suggest is never knowable in advance.

One cannot come up and say that this is what my mind wants, and this is what my heart wants, and there is a conflict. The ways of the hearts are very very subtle, not comprehensible, not knowable, purposeless, indeterministic. Just because one has a sharp like for something, and that likeness might be mixed with some emotionality. It does not mean that the liking is arising from the heart.

The heart stands for…