Your best is expressed only in Joy

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

Question: Is it always true that a man or a woman will give their best performance due to pressure only?

Acharya Prashant (AP): No, who said that?

The question is, ‘Is it true that we give our best performance only under pressure?’

Not at all. On the contrary, pressure brings the worst out of you.

It is a bad bad education that teaches you that pressure is important.

All pressure is violence, all pressure is a torture, a distortion of the mind.

The mind is being pushed by an external factor.

But what happens is — I understand from the way you are coming — what happens is, when the mind is deeply conditioned for a long period of time, it loses its internal capacity to see, to move freely. It becomes like a car whose engine in spite of being beautifully designed has become dysfunctional because of disuse.

A beautifully designed engine will not work if you do not use it for ten years, twenty years. Will it work? It may be the best engine in the world. The same is the case with the mind. Our mind is a beautifully designed machine. It’s an instrument of the highest order, an instrument that man cannot…