00:00 Acharya ji, Pranam.
00:09 Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter 18, Verse 38.
00:15 Even when living without any support and eager for achievement, the stupid are still nourishing
00:24 sansar while the wise have cut at the very root of its unhappiness.
00:33 Dear Acharya ji, Pranam.
00:35 Is the root here the ego?
00:38 And if the ego is without any support, how can it still continue to nourish sansar?
00:45 Even when living without any support and eager for achievement, the stupid are still nourishing
00:55 sansar while the wise have cut at the very root of its unhappiness.
01:02 Yes, you could say the root is the ego.
01:09 Subhankar.
01:21 Then you are saying, and if the ego is without any support, how can it still continue to
01:26 nourish sansar?
01:29 It's a very good question.
01:38 Please answer it.
01:43 How do you manage to live?
01:56 It's almost like asking, why was I shrieking in the dream?
02:06 Because you were in a dream.
02:13 It's only now that you can say that the dream was a dream.
02:21 In the dream, you hardly took the dream as a dream.
02:29 When you are with an Ashtavakra, when you are sending over questions to me, then you
02:40 come up with the fantastic revelation that the ego is without any support.
02:48 But look at your dream-like day-to-day life.
02:52 There do you realize that the ego is without any real support?
02:59 In your dream, all appears so real.
03:07 In your everyday life, all that the ego creates appears so real.
03:19 The ego itself appears to be the foundation of your world.
03:27 That is why the world stands.
03:31 Otherwise having seen that the foundation is non-existent, your world would have collapsed.
03:39 The very fact that a personal world stoutly stands erect for you, testifies that for you
03:58 its foundation is not unreal.
04:02 You are inhibiting that world.
04:11 You are living in that building.
04:15 Would you ever live in a building if you fully well knew that it has no foundation?
04:25 But not only do you live in the building of your sansar, you invest a lot in it.
04:33 You decorate it.
04:35 In that same building is your house and your office.
04:41 Would you build your house and your office in a building that has no foundation?
04:49 No.
04:50 But you have done that.
04:52 And if you have done that, what does it prove?
04:55 That you assume that the building has a very solid foundation.
05:01 So now you are saying that the ego has no support Acharyaji.
05:08 But look at your actions and your decisions.
05:12 They prove that you think that the ego has a lot of support.
05:19 What is the ego?
05:20 Tell me.
05:22 The ego is your sense of yourself.
05:30 The ego is not you.
05:36 It is your sense of yourself.
05:48 You are walking along an empty street in the middle of the night.
05:53 Nobody around you, nobody to really disturb you.
05:56 Nobody to talk to you, nobody to point to you.
06:02 Nobody to intercept you.
06:10 Nobody to remind anything to you.
06:15 And still do you see how much keeps going on in the mind?
06:23 That's the ego.
06:35 All might appear alright around you in your body and yet your mind might be very very
06:50 laden, very gloomy, burdened and distraught.
07:05 That's the ego, your sense of yourself.
07:15 It does not have any foundation.
07:18 It has no reality.
07:20 It is not grounded in anything objective or metaphysical.
07:28 It just needlessly exists.
07:30 You can walk through that empty lane even without the buzz in the head.
07:44 The buzz in the head serves no real beneficial practical purpose but it still exists.
07:55 Like the buzz in the minds of many of you right now even as I speak.
08:04 Does it serve any purpose?
08:09 You do far better to just shut down the buzz and simply listen.
08:16 But the buzz refuses to be shut down.
08:19 That's the ego.
08:21 It needlessly exists and makes itself feel indispensable.
08:31 Without me how would things work?
08:33 As if without all the internal chaos you cannot walk through that street.
08:43 Can you or can you not?
08:46 But if you ask the ego, the ego would say how dare you dismiss me and keep walking when
08:52 something so very important is pending for you.
09:00 So even as you walk you must attend to the very important matter that I am presenting
09:05 to you.
09:11 Walking then becomes a sideshow.
09:15 The center stage is occupied by the inner buzz.
09:24 Does that happen or not?
09:30 That's the ego.
09:31 The ego of all important matters.
09:38 The ego of things momentous.
09:49 The ego of heaven and hell.
09:54 Ego of life and death.
09:58 Ego of urgencies.
10:00 Ego of emergencies.
10:07 Ego that does not allow you to do one thing straight in life because it always presents
10:14 you with too many things too important to not to consider.
10:27 And as you slowly get lost considering those greatly important things, that which is real,
10:44 keeps fading away from your inner radar.
10:52 All that is inconsequential becomes your life.
10:58 Reality turns into a distant star to be seen, to be coveted, but never to be had.
11:10 One thing that ensures that the ego continues is its great weakness.
11:24 It is not the ego's strength that enables it to continue, but its great handicap.
11:34 What is that handicap?
11:36 The ego has no power to observe itself.
11:41 The ego cannot self-reflect and that enables it to continue.
11:47 The ego cannot know itself.
11:50 Had it had the faculty to know itself, it would have simply collapsed.
12:01 It is quite strange, but it is the blindness of the ego that helps it survive.
12:12 And that is why the day the ego comes to learn about itself, it finds nowhere to hide.
12:26 And therefore the ones who know the least about themselves would be the ones who would
12:35 live the longest.
12:42 As you grow in self-knowledge, you find that death is nearer and nearer.
13:08 So bad news Subhankar, your D-Day just came closer by a couple of years.
13:30 A few more months with me and you would probably be ready to take off.
13:47 Bad news.
13:47 While addressing one of the answers, you said that ego continues just because it is
14:08 weak and that is what urges it to continue.
14:13 In one of the scriptures, I came across a sentence, "Nayanatme balheen labhiyo"
14:20 where balheen or the strength has been referred to what?
14:25 Basically the ego itself.
14:27 So how are these things linked?
14:31 I said the ego is weak.
14:33 It has a handicap and what is that handicap?
14:36 That it cannot look at itself.
14:40 That it has no capacity to self-reflect.
14:42 That is what I called as the weaknesses.
14:45 So if you have no capacity for self-knowledge, if you have no capacity to look at yourself
14:50 and know who you are, then would you ever know how weak are you?
14:59 So the ego in spite of being weakless, supportless, foundationless, rootless keeps thinking and
15:08 assuming that it is strong.
15:14 Actually it is weak but it takes itself to be strong and the illusion continues because
15:24 the ego cannot know itself.
15:36 And hence, "Nayanatme balheen labhiyo" because it cannot know itself, hence the truth is
15:41 not available to it.
15:51 And then it keeps wondering, it says the truth should not have been available only to the
15:56 balheen, to the powerless one.
15:59 Who am I?
16:00 The powerful one.
16:01 Why is the truth eluding me?
16:04 You think that you are powerful, you are not.
16:08 The very fact that the truth is not available to you proves that you are powerless.
16:16 But then instead of admitting that you are powerless, you keep struggling with the contradiction
16:23 or a supposed contradiction that in spite of being so powerful, why do I not get the
16:30 truth?
16:31 If you do not get the truth, that merely means that you are not powerful.
16:42 Happens you know.
16:50 There was a time when re-checking of board papers used to be free, for free.
17:03 But that brought in a deluge of re-examination requests, rather re-checking requests.
17:12 People would not say that I did not do well.
17:19 They would say there lies a contradiction, I did well.
17:24 But the marks are not as per the expectations.
17:28 It's another matter that 99% of the re-checking requests proved to be of no avail.
17:37 There were people who would attempt 70 marks worth questions and would be surprised when
17:48 they would get 72, they would say we were expecting 85.
17:56 Having attempted questions worth 70 marks, they would find it highly surprising that
18:01 they got only 72.
18:07 So finally the board authorities realized that a fee has to be kept.
18:17 The fee was kept high enough to deter some of the daydreamers.
18:27 We do not look at the hard facts.
18:34 We operate from the center of our assumptions.
18:37 So we say my assumption has to be the truth and if the fact does not tally with my assumption,
18:44 then there is something wrong with the fact.
18:46 Now the fact is a fact.
18:48 How can there be something right or wrong with the fact?
18:50 The fact is an objective reality.
18:53 You cannot quarrel with it.
18:57 Obviously if something within you is in disagreement with the fact, then the thing within you has
19:05 to be challenged and scrutinized and changed.
19:11 But we don't want to do that.
19:12 That's ego.
19:13 The I assumption which has no grounding in fact but still exists.
19:23 Could we learn to really live by facts alone?
19:41 As any spirituality.
19:48 That too would lead to liberation.
19:55 Just living by facts alone is in itself liberation.
20:05 But we live in a dirty contradiction, a chaotic mess.
20:13 Sometimes respectful to the fact, sometimes siding with the assumption, never fully knowing
20:24 which way to go.
20:43 (gentle music)
20:45 [Music]
Comments