Enlightenment is to be shamelessly unenlightened || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Questioner: My spiritual path is taking me very long and I sometimes feel stuck and I am a bit discouraged. If you can give me some inspiration at this point to, as they say, drop the false. How actually to drop it? It’s not happening, it seems so far.

Speaker: Let’s begin with the basics. When you say ‘spiritual path’ and when you say that it is taking too long, you surely have some idea of where you want to reach. And that is why you are able to say that you probably have not reached there and that it is taking too long a time. Now, let me say, I am standing at a point A, I am standing at point A, I imagine point B as a point of Peace or enlightenment. I imagine B, standing at A. I am not very satisfied with A, that is why I imagine some other point to be the point of Peace. But B is imagined by A. Are we together?

Listener: Yes

Speaker: Point B is imagined by A. You know what A is? A is the state of mind one is in. So B is a function of A. One imagines B only because one is at A, which means that even though B, ostensibly, is a different point, a point of apparent satisfaction yet B is a point imagined from a state of dissatisfaction. The one who imagines B is a dissatisfied one, that is why he imagines B. So standing at A, I imagine some distant point B, I also imagine a path to B and my idea then is to reach B through that path. I can also dream up a few other alternative paths also. But the idea is to reach somewhere and that somewhere, where I want to reach is a function of where I am standing. Now in a dissatisfied state, whatever I imagine or think of, or target, will that not be a product of dissatisfaction? – I’m not at peace with myself, I feel some