What is each experience craving for?

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

Question: I cannot really wrap my head around this when I say, “Okay fine, at this point that I am greedy for experiences, and I want to go out and may be get a massage for myself.”

So once I have understood that I am greedy for new experiences, and I am seeking a new experience, this means that I am supporting the greed. How am I supposed to understand, so that I am free of this greed? As Jiddu Krshnamurti says, “If you understand fear, you are free of fear.”

What is this ‘understanding’ then?

Acharya Prashant: You are not greedy for the experience. You are greedy for what the experience would purportedly bring to you.

The experiencer wants fulfillment, and that is what the experience promises to bring him. It is not the experience that is paramount, but the promise. And it is okay to buy into that promise sometimes. But don’t you want to verify that the promise has been kept?

You bought into a promise. You bought yourself a massage. Has the promise been kept? Has the massage delivered what it promised? That’s what you should verify.

Q: Should I do this for each experience?

AP: Obviously.

Q: Or, understand one experience?

Acharya Prashant Ji: Obviously, because that is what is making you invest yourself in all these experiences. If you are paying for each of these experiences, don’t you want to verify each of the bills? Or would you say, “Should I verify one bill? Or each of them?”

You paid for each of these bills, didn’t you? You paid with your time, energy, your life, your money. What have these experiences really brought you?

Q: What if the promises are not kept?

AP: Don’t buy them again. Blacklist the massage parlour.

(laughter)

Q: If we end up choosing the next massage parlour?

AP: May be, if you are still carrying a hope. A point may come when you are disillusioned with massage parlours as such. Now you know that none of these shops are any good.