How to test whether your wisdom is growing? || Acharya Prashant, on Yoga Vasishta (2017)

All the arts acquired by men are lost by lack of practice, but this art of wisdom grows steadily once it rises.

~ Yoga Vasishth Sara, Chapter 1, Verse 13

Questioner: Acharya Ji, what is the litmus test to determine whether one’s wisdom is rising, or is it new clothes on the old self?

Acharya Prashant: It becomes very self-evident. Forget about having new clothes on old self, even the old self is not permitted to remain as it is; it starts appearing foolish.

Assume that you now weigh 50 kgs, and three years back you wore a lot of flab, and you weighed 80 kgs. How do you feel looking at those old photographs? Big, ungainly, fat woman, having a lot of unnecessary stuff. And you juxtapose these two photographs, the eighty kg one and the fifty kg one. How do you feel? Would you ever allow yourself to go back to the 80 kg days?

That’s what a Saint means, when he says, “This art of wisdom grows steadily once it rises.”

The very fact that you have known what it means to be foolish, will not allow you to be foolish once again. Foolishness is not merely a concept for you. You have been through it; been there, done it. “Yes, I know idiocy. I have been the most stupid one, and I don’t want to be there again.”