Why does one crave to become better?

Acharya Prashant
5 min readMar 31, 2020

There is a person who is dreaming about betterment and sitting at her place she is visualising how things would be after betterment and she says that the visualisation energizes her and fantasizing about the endpoint make her happy. This is the situation let’s go into it.

I think of betterment because I take myself as deficient.

If I don’t take myself as incomplete or deficient, I cannot think of betterment. In contentment it is absurd to think of further improvement, we are talking of the ‘I’ sense. The ‘I’ sense that takes itself lacking in something because it takes itself lacking in something so it thinks of betterment.

What we miss here often is that the thought and the thinker will always share the same quality. The action and the actor will always share the same quality. The imagination and the one imagining will always be of the same quality.

Now if I say I’m imagining precisely because I do not like the way I am. I want to change because I do not feel alright with the way I am. Then who am I in my own estimation? Somebody deficient, somebody incomplete. And if I am incomplete, then sitting where I am, what would be the quality of my action, thought and imagination? They too would be of incomplete nature.

So incompleteness is projecting more incompleteness for itself and then trying with all its might to reach more incompleteness. How will that help?

Let’s take an extreme and gross example of a drunkard. If one is drunk and one is thinking of improvement in his drunken state. And when you’re drunk, you think of a lot of things that you usually don’t think of. If one is drunk and one is thinking of improvement and one is thinking of improvement precisely because one is drunk, then what would be the quality of that dream or vision? I have already declared myself as lacking or poor or deficient and if I am lacking or poor or deficient, how will I dream of a total and complete and whole future? My vision too would just be a polished version of who I already am and I am in my own estimation not good enough. My dreams would only be a refined version of my current state, they’ll not be able to take me beyond myself. And that is why dreamers keep failing. That is why the progress that dreams give us are only cosmetic. Yes, something…

Acharya Prashant