Know where your interest really lies || On Vivekachudamani (2018)

Questioner: My wife has recently joined me on the spiritual journey, and she has been watching your videos since the last few weeks. She still feels strongly that she is the body and mind, and the possibility of being beyond body and mind is just a concept for her. The question is, how to control resistance to end the suffering of an illness?

Acharya Prashant: But she is doing quite well. Isn’t she already saying the right thing? As we live, we are the body and the mind, aren’t we? So, she is stating the obvious fact quite innocently. She is at least not pretending that she is the great uncorrupted Self, Ātman, or something else, holier than thou, holier than holiness.

If she says she is the body, true. If she says she is the mind, that too is an obvious fact. Most people are living as the body and as the mind. So, that’s all nice. The enquiry must be somewhere else. The enquiry must be: What is the consequence of living as the body? What is the consequence of living as the mind? Do I like that consequence? Is it my nature to like that consequence?

One has to go into this question: What do I like? Do I like the fruits of my beliefs? I believe I am the body, and that’s a fact. I do believe that I am the body. That’s how mankind lives—as the body. What is the fruit of this belief? And whatever be the fruit, is the fruit acceptable to me?

And once you ask this question—is the fruit acceptable to me, do I like the fruit, what do I like—you will have to go into your nature. And those who have known have told you repeatedly that you do not like to suffer. That’s your nature—not to suffer. In fact you dislike suffering so much that you call freedom from suffering as bliss, whereas freedom from suffering is just freedom from suffering. But you had been disliking suffering so much that when freedom from suffering came, you celebrated it as bliss.