Liberation that we want is an extension of bondage || Acharya Prashant, on Niralamba Upanishad(2020)

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Transcript
00:00Bondage is to plan to devote oneself to Moksha.
00:16Bondage is the exclusive pursuit of Moksha.
00:25Man does not know what to say, where to stand, whether to exist at all.
00:36The teacher is telling him, the very pursuit of Moksha is bondage.
00:41And he says, what have I come to you for then?
00:47I have come to you to gain Moksha and you are saying the very pursuit of Moksha is bondage?
00:54Yes, it is.
00:59The Moksha that the ego desires is nothing but an extension of the ego.
01:09The liberation that bondage craves for is nothing but another dimension of bondage itself.
01:22Bondage has no business, no right asking for liberation.
01:31The only honest act permissible to bondage is self-observation.
01:42Bondage is bondage because it does not know itself.
01:47Bondage is bondage because ignorance is bondage.
01:55Bondage does not know itself and someone who does not know himself has no business asking
02:09for this or that or others.
02:15If you do not know yourself, how do you know liberation?
02:22You are not smart enough even to know yourself.
02:27But you know the name of the utmost thing possible.
02:37What's your name, sir?
02:41I do not know.
02:43But I know the name of the greatest one that ever lived.
02:53Are you a fool or do I look like a fool?
02:59You do not know your own name but you are telling me that you are sensible enough to
03:06first of all determine who is the greatest one that ever can be and secondly you are
03:14knowledgeable enough to know his name.
03:18Had you really been so smart, would you not have known firstly your own name?
03:27That's the problem with ego.
03:29It does not know itself but it thinks it knows liberation.
03:34Not only does it think that it knows liberation, it can talk about liberation in great detail.
03:43That gives the ego so much pleasure.
03:45It sings of liberation.
03:48It can write entire novels on liberation, many volumes.
03:54It can create wonderful, colorful documentaries on liberation.
04:00About liberation, it pretends to be a specialist.
04:11About liberation, the ego thinks it is a specialist.
04:16About itself, it is completely naive, knows nothing.
04:23And that is the reason why the ego's concept of liberation must be brought down.
04:34Liberation is one thing.
04:36Ego's concept of liberation is a totally different thing.
04:40And the difference between these two is the difference between bondage and liberation.
04:45Are you getting it?
04:50We know ourselves not, but we think we know very well what will be best for us.
05:10Like someone going to a doctor and the doctor says, right, so what is your name?
05:24That's usually the first thing that the doctors write on the prescription.
05:29What do they ask for?
05:33The fellow says, my name I know not.
05:37What's your age?
05:38That's the second thing the doctors usually ask for.
05:41The fellow says, my age I know not.
05:43What's your weight?
05:44That I know not.
05:47Then the doctor, puzzled, looks at the patient's face.
05:52The patient says, why are you ogling at me?
05:57Simply prescribe ibuprofen.
06:03I know the medicine that would work on me.
06:09That's the student of the common student.
06:12That's the situation of the common student.
06:17What's your name?
06:21What's your weight?
06:22What's your age?
06:23I know not.
06:27But I know what is best for me.
06:34The patient is telling the doctor, here is the medicine that would be best for me.
06:41Why don't you simply jot it down?
06:46That's how the ego behaves.
06:53That's why the role of the right teacher is to not entertain the ego with fancy stories
07:03about liberation, but to bring the ego down to earth.
07:14No fancy stories.
07:16See who you are.
07:18What's your name?
07:20What are you made of?
07:21Where do you come from?
07:25Where do you go?
07:35That's the role of the teacher.
07:39Even if the teacher is very eager to entertain the ego with all kinds of spiritual gimmicks,
07:51then the teacher is an entertainer at best and a fraudster at worst.
08:03Sometimes such teachers can be forgiven.
08:06They offer good entertainment.
08:09But usually such entertainment is very expensive.
08:15Along with entertainment, you get an extra layer of bondages.
08:20Are you getting it?
08:28Bondage is whatever springs from imagination.
08:36If you can imagine it, it is bondage.
08:46Needless to reiterate, the truth is not an object to be imagined.
08:56If you can imagine it, you can talk of it.
08:59If you can imagine it, the imagination itself is an experience.
09:04So you can experience what you are imagining.
09:08Imagination can give you some pretty strong experiences.
09:12We know that.
09:14So basically, the teacher is saying, whatsoever you can experience is really bondage.
09:31Truth is freedom from experience.
09:36More accurately, truth is freedom from the urge of the experiencer to gather more and
09:45more and more novel experiences.
09:53The more fascinated you are by a particular quality of new or exclusive experiences that
10:08you have had, the more ignorant you are about the nature of your bondage.
10:18The more you say that I felt liberated in the company of such and such person, the more
10:28survile you are to that feeling.
10:48Getting it?
10:57It is not about feeling in a particular way.
11:04It is about your association with the very concept of feeling.
11:18If you feel great and you call it liberation, or if you feel liberated and you call it liberation,
11:28then you know neither liberation nor the nature of feeling itself.
11:43It is not about how you feel.
11:45It is about the distance you have from how you feel.
11:54Feelings could run this way, that way.
11:56They could really run amok.
12:02Does it mean that there is no difference between the feelings of the spiritually evolved one
12:11and the spiritually immature one?
12:13No, there is definitely a difference.
12:18But that does not mean that the spiritually evolved one allows his evolved feelings to
12:27matter to him.
12:30The thoughts and feelings of the spiritually evolved one are definitely different from
12:37the thoughts and feelings of the spiritually immature person.
12:42There is a difference, certainly.
12:46But it is not the difference that characterizes a spiritually evolved person.
12:51Not this difference.
12:53It is the distance that the evolved person has even from his evolved feelings that characterizes
13:02his spiritual evolution.
13:12So the spiritually unevolved person, first of all, has very raw and juvenile thoughts
13:21and feelings.
13:23Secondly, he is not able to maintain any separation between himself and his thoughts and feelings.
13:34On the contrary, the spiritually evolved person has evolved thoughts and feelings,
13:42but still he does not identify with them knowing fully well that evolved or unevolved thoughts
13:50and feelings are just thoughts and feelings.
13:53It does not matter what their quality is, irrespective of their quality, I cease to
14:02associate with them.
14:04Now it's strange.
14:08The other fellow had really poor quality of thought, had really excitable and puerile
14:19feelings and still he was sticking to them.
14:24And here is the evolved fellow whose thoughts are wonderful to behold, whose feelings carry
14:33a certain beauty and still he does not want to identify with his thoughts and feelings.
14:41Wonderful are his thoughts and feelings and still he maintains a separation.
14:47And you get this.
14:49Acharyaji, in the last verse that you discussed, you said that the one who is spiritually matured
15:03has a certain distance from his evolved feelings.
15:07So is this distance something which has been deliberately created or practiced or it just
15:13happens on its own?
15:15Feelings are evolved only when you have a distance from them, otherwise feelings won't
15:19evolve.
15:20Feelings would remain raw, mature-ish.
15:24So it's not as if there are great feelings that you want to really hug, but you want
15:29to practice at the same time the discipline of distancing yourself from the feelings.
15:36How else would your feelings reach maturity?
15:41Feelings reach maturity when you dissociate, detach yourself from them.
15:50Thoughts not burdened by the I are the best thoughts.
16:02Those thoughts can even aid in liberation.
16:07But when at the center of all thoughts lies I or the urge to self-defense, then thought
16:16is nothing but a burden.
16:21What do you think?
16:24The liberated one cannot think, so you for sure can have thoughts that really do not
16:33come from your little petty personal center.
16:39It is possible to think without the personal center.
16:44Similarly, it is possible to feel without the personal center.
16:52If you read the life stories of the saints, you might get an impression that many of them
17:00are quite emotional.
17:04So they indeed were people of great feeling.
17:11They used to feel much more than the usual person.
17:19No.
17:20You should wonder that if all feeling is conditioned, why are the saints so emotional?
17:31The answer is, it is possible to think and feel and emote from an impersonal center.
17:43You can have tears.
17:47You can cry buckets without crying for yourself.
17:55So there is emotion without the need for self-preservation.
18:01You can think a lot without the intention to protect yourself or enrich yourself or
18:13further yourself.
18:15Now this really is called free thinking.
18:21A free thinker is not someone who keeps thinking in all directions.
18:25That's our usual definition of a free thinker.
18:30A free thinker is one whose thought is free of himself.
18:35That's the right definition of a free thinker.
18:45All the people in universities and all the intellectuals, they are not necessarily free
18:51thinkers, even if they think copiously.
18:59And they do.
19:00They're just thinking, thinking, thinking.
19:02It's not about how much you think.
19:07It's not even about how freely you think.
19:10It's really about whether your thought is free of yourself.
19:17That's free thinking.
19:21Same with feeling.
19:26And that, by the way, is also the criteria to assess the quality of thought or feeling.
19:37What is meant by high quality thought?
19:42Thought that is free of yourself.
19:46What is meant by low quality thought?
19:50Thought that has your interests at its center.
19:57And same with feeling.

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