To maintain silence is to maintain yourself; your silence is the noise that you are||AcharyaPrashant

Question: Why is it so difficult to give up on yourself even though it is the cause of so much suffering?

Acharya Prashant: It might become easier had we not been using these attractive names. Knowledge is such an attractive name. Is it not? Now suffering is called knowledge and knowledge is pure – “How can I give it up? I am here to give up my impurity, not my purities.”

A while back, you would have been chit-chatting, somebody talked of gossiping in the group. Now is this any different? Tell me sincerely. Is this any different from that? Has not just the form changed? Will not that same form return very quickly? Then, you felt, you thought, that it was good to chat. Now you are ‘feeling’ that you must not talk and sit a little calmly. Has anything changed?

Superficially – yes.

Actually – no.

At that time too it was your feeling that was dominating, even this time it is your feeling that is dominating. ‘You’ are feeling like sitting quiet. You have not been stunned into silence. Nothing has taken possession of you. It’s your own decision to stay quiet for a while, and if the duration of the session exceeds a while, then you will take another decision which would be to not to stay quiet. If I keep talking like this and haranguing you; let’s say, for the next two hours, then your decision to stay quiet would be reversed. It would be reversed by ‘you’ because it was ‘your’ own decision. The Real has not come upon you; you have changed form. The Truth has not come; the false has changed forms.