Image of the so-called enlightened one makes one scared of enlightenment || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Question: I have a confused question. Can I confess that I don’t know if I want to be awakened or not! I am afraid to realise myself. I am curious but I am stepping back from the Truth.

Acharya Prashant: “I am afraid of being awakened!” You must be afraid. All these so-called spiritual people have painted such a horrible picture of awakening that it is normal to be afraid of awakening. When you look at all those who call themselves awakened, it is very normal to say, “I do not want to be awakened, if awakening means this!” If you look at all those who call themselves enlightened, you say, “I do not want to be enlightened, if this is what enlightenment means.”

Walking like zombies, not acting like human beings, talking fancy stuff, not talking any earthly matter at all! Only uttering—Meditation, Consciousness, Awareness, Samadhi, Moksha, Nirvana, Turiya! The vocabulary has a total of fifteen or twenty words; wearing just one color, and often horrible color. Carrying a beard that hardly suits them; either emaciated—all bones or this fat!

If this is what awakening means, who wants to be awakened? Not capable of any one-to-one interaction, not capable of human warmth, not capable of coming close and sitting down at your level, always talking up from there (from a podium), talking down to you. Always sending a message that they are godly. And they will come down to the earth, just so that you can have some darshan and some touch. Who wants that?

Awakening is really something very-very simple. And since it is so simple, we keep missing it. We have fancy notions about liberation, awakening, enlightenment. We keep looking for that. And we keep missing the obvious. It has been drilled deep down into us that the awakened one is a special person. Or sometimes, not even a person at all. What is he then? Pure consciousness. So it was pure consciousness visiting the loo a while back? Yeah! The saint emerged from there—Eighty-five kilogrammes of pure consciousness! And then you say, “No! I want to remain