In victory and in defeat, you are always a winner || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Question : Sir, is truth necessarily cruel and dangerous? Whenever I listen to you, I feel fear of losing something. Why is it so?

Speaker : Who is losing something? If you unnecessarily identify yourself with somebody who has possessions, only then you feel that you are losing something. We will understand a few things.

First, there is no need to take any of your possessions seriously. Because what is really yours can never be taken away. You will be wasting your energy by being serious about it. See, you are feeling serious about something, and you are afraid that you might lose it. Right? You are saying, “Whenever I listen to you, I fear that I will lose something.” If there is the fear that you might lose something, then this fear is the proof enough that, ‘that’ thing is external. It is not really yours.

You can use it for a while. If needed you can be with it, you can interact with it, but you need not claim to possess it, because it is anyway not yours. Had it really been yours, then there was no question of it being taken away, and hence there was no question of feeling afraid. You couldn’t have felt that fear.

(Confirming the name of the questioner) Jaanhvi? Right? If I call you by some other name a thousand times, say Rekha, would you still be afraid that your real name might be taken away? And remember, the name is still something external, because it was given to you by somebody. So even in the case of something as superficial as your name, you do not feel afraid that the name might be taken away. Just because the external condition is like that, just because an external agency