Acharya Prashant: What is this thing called Ambition?
Its simple, really simple. The brain only has past, correct? And the future that the brain projects is nothing but a reflection of the past. You can dream of no future except that which is already present in your past in some way.
Now, that will come as a surprise to most of us because we dream of fresh and new and beautiful future. All of us want a new future. But there is a bad news that you can never want a new future, the brain will only want that which it has already experienced. What it has not experienced, it cannot know of. It is impossible for the brain to know of something, to dream of something, to desire something that it has no experience of from the past. Are you getting it?
You all want to taste a particular dish, let’s say. And how many of you would want to taste say a dish like Kakatua? You won’t because you have no experience of it. Forget about tasting it, you haven’t even heard the name before. All of you have some dream career in mind, how many of you would want to become an espiano engineer? You may want to become a software engineer, aeronautics engineer or this and that, but very few of you want to become an espiano engineer because you have no experience of it, you haven’t have read about it, you haven’t heard about it, you don’t know about it. So, there is no desire. All desire comes from the past. What you didn’t know in the past, you can’t want in the future. What you don’t know of in the past, what’s not stored in the brain, the brain will not ask for it in the future.
So, there is a golden rule now, which is all desire is nothing but a stale, worthless repetition of memories. The brain has only two things: Memories and those memories translate into desire.
