Why is there so much violence in Prakriti?

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

Questioner: Dear Master, if everything is consciousness, why does prakriti (nature) exist? Why for the survival of one specie one must take another life? Why this effort must be done to sustain the body, when we are not the body?

Acharya Prashant Ji: Shirin, when you are not the body, then obviously you need not make any special effort to sustain the body. But then you also are not concerned about making the body fall. Then you just let the body continue on it’s own.

There are two ways of associating with the body. One way is — ‘I am the body’. The second way is — ‘I am not the body’. When you say, “I am the body,” what is at the center of your statement? The body. ‘I am’ is the subject, and ‘the body’ is the predicate. Correct? When you say, “I am not the body,” what is it that you are talking about? What is it that you are interested in? The body.

Real affiliation to the Truth, real expression of the True self contains no mention of the body.

Not only will it not say, “I am the body,” it will also not bother to say, “I am not the body.”

Do you say, “I am not the pole”? Do you say that Shirin (the questioner)? Do you say, “I am not the grass”? Do you say, “I am not the floor”? Why don’t you say, “I am not the pole”? Why do you not feel the need to forcefully and emphatically declare — “I am not the pillar”? Why don’t you declare that? Because it would be absurd.

You are obviously not the pillar, and it never occurs to you that you are the pillar. Because it never occurs to you even by chance that you are the pillar, so there is no need to say, “I am not the pillar.” Similarly there is no need to declare — “I am not the body.” If you are not the body, let the body be, just as you let the pillar be.

Let the body be, the body knows what to do. The body is a self-sufficient machine. Hands are there, the digestive mechanism is there, the brain is there. The body knows what to do, let the body go ahead and do whatever it wants to do.

You do what you must do.

And in doing what you must do, if you need to use the body, use it, just as we sometimes use the pillar…