The mind must be given very little to carry forward

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

Acharya Prashant: Suppose at this moment you are disturbed, then future is created for you. How? You say, I am disturbed right now so I must have Peace in the future. So, now, you want Peace, and disturbance has created a future. Now, if your intellect is sharp, if the mind is in the proper place then you will say that Peace will come from the Truth or from the Guru; you want Peace and it will come. Future has still been created but you are finding the right door to Peace.

But, if your intellect is not sharp, if your tendencies are hazy, stained then you will say, “I will find Peace in the future through money, through pleasure or through miscellaneous other things”. In both the cases, a future has been created. The lack of Peace has created a future in both the cases. But in one case, the future will extend no more because you will go directly to the Truth or Guru. So, the search for Peace will stop there. And, in the other case, the search for Peace will indefinitely continue because you will be searching for Peace at places where it cannot be found.

More important is the carefulness that this birth or that birth, past life or future life, these words are not to be taken literally; they are symbolic. They are not meant to indicate that you will die and when you will reincarnate somewhere. When you will die then everything that is personal about you will be finished. So, no human being reincarnates. We are born as bodies, we accumulate stuff from the world, and when we die all this body-mind thing disappears totally.

Listener: And, this death might still happen while we are in the body. As you said it happens all the time.

AP: So, really, death is happening continuously and the one who realizes that, is no more afraid of death because he says that I am anyway moving into the new continuously so why be afraid of death; death is continuously happening.

The realization that death is continuously happening is called total Death. Now, you have died totally to all your notions, principles, abstractions, dreams and beliefs because all of them rest on the assumption of continuity of life. Now, you have realized that there is nothing…