Full Video: How to identify the real master? || Acharya Prashant, on Ashtavakra Gita (2019)
Link: https://youtu.be/-vx1ilLcDC4?si=18V-8dtMqjVKEkOn
Video Information: Shabdyog session, 15.05.2019, Advait Bodhsthal, Greater Noida, India
Context:
~How to identify the real master?
~Are all saints saying same thing?
~What is the objective of spirituality?
~ Why should one read scripture, if one can learn from life itself?
~ Are reading scriptures just an acknowledgment of knowledge?
~ What is scripture?
~ Can one attain enlightenment without reading scriptures?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Link: https://youtu.be/-vx1ilLcDC4?si=18V-8dtMqjVKEkOn
Video Information: Shabdyog session, 15.05.2019, Advait Bodhsthal, Greater Noida, India
Context:
~How to identify the real master?
~Are all saints saying same thing?
~What is the objective of spirituality?
~ Why should one read scripture, if one can learn from life itself?
~ Are reading scriptures just an acknowledgment of knowledge?
~ What is scripture?
~ Can one attain enlightenment without reading scriptures?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00How can I identify a master with my limited knowledge?
00:11How can I judge his words to be true or false?
00:14How does a patient know the doctor basics?
00:16Where are you?
00:17What are you doing?
00:26Which doctor do you thank?
00:28The most reputed one in the town or the one who is curing you?
00:37After delivering the baby, to whom does the mother go?
00:44To the great hospital in the town or to the one doctor who helped her?
00:59The great hospital is so very reputed and imposing.
01:04It's a multi-specialty hospital and it's also quite expensive.
01:08It's just that it didn't take you in.
01:10It was of no use to you.
01:12What's that great brand, the great hospital of any use to you?
01:15Have they been of use to you so far?
01:17And I ask that to everybody who is listening to me right now.
01:22Have the big ones been of use to you?
01:25If they have not been of use to you, why do you even call them big ones?
01:29How are they big if they are not useful?
01:41Now you will say, oh, instead of being spiritual, you are being polemical.
01:52Instead of being supportive, you are being disruptive.
01:58Yes, I am being disruptive.
02:07The doctor's task is to disrupt the pattern of the disease.
02:18Have some love towards yourself.
02:21How can somebody be great if he has not been able to help you?
02:39And if you'll go deeply into it, it is not even about that person.
02:48It is about your own world and the images that you have of your person, of that person.
02:53And it is against that image that I talk of.
03:03When you do not even know me well, in spite of me being with you since probably a year
03:12or more now, you obviously do not know the greats of the past.
03:17You were never with them, but still you claim that you know them.
03:23What do you know, in fact?
03:27An image.
03:28I am disrupting, therefore, not that person, but his image.
03:37The image that you carry of him is false.
03:42But you worship that image.
03:43Not only do you worship that image, you also call the image as the person.
03:51I have no intention of attacking any person because the person is anyway gone.
03:57And the person might have really done a lot of good.
04:03The person is gone, what is it that remains with you?
04:07An image, because most of us are lousy.
04:11We do not even work hard enough to know what or how the person really was.
04:18What do we carry?
04:19We carry juvenile images, moth-eaten images.
04:27And then we live by those images.
04:35We have definite images about who Shri Krishna was, about who Shri Ram was, about who Jesus
04:39was, about who this particular teacher was, about how that particular teacher was and
04:45we have ideas and stories.
04:51There are so many people who have never even touched the Gita, but they still carry images
04:57about Shri Krishna and they want to live by those images.
05:01I want to attack that image.
05:05That image is false.
05:06Go close to the Gita and then you will discover who Shri Krishna really was.
05:11The image that you are carrying is a false and useless image.
05:17It will not help you.
05:19That image is just an extension of your own ego.
05:21How will it help you?
05:36But that's how the ego is.
05:41It does not want to go to the Gita.
05:48But it wants to maintain that it loves Krishna.
05:52What kind of love is this?
05:56How many people bother to really respect the Gita and read it?
06:02Very few.
06:03Very very few.
06:06But so many people claim that they love and respect Shri Krishna.
06:11Now this is hypocrisy.
06:21I am attacking the image of gods and teachers and prophets that you carry because those
06:30images are false.
06:34Those images are false because first of all you have no originality.
06:39You have no meditativeness and all your knowledge is secondhand.
06:44Secondly, even if you were not meditative, you could have at least gone to the original
06:52scriptures.
06:53There are two ways of knowing.
06:56The best way is to know through one's own meditativeness.
07:02The next best way is to learn from the scriptures.
07:06You neither know through your own meditativeness nor are you hardworking enough to give time
07:16to the scriptures.
07:21But you still have opinions.
07:23How do you have those opinions?
07:26By listening to this and that.
07:37Either be so meditative that all the knowledge contained in the Upanishads starts arising
07:43from your own heart.
07:45That can happen or at least be honest and diligent enough to read the Upanishads.
07:54But neither are we meditative nor are we diligent.
08:02We still claim that the Upanishads are wonderful and we maintain an image of the Upanishads.
08:08How?
08:09By listening to the neighbor.
08:14The neighbor says that Upanishads are great.
08:16So they must be great and the neighbor has told a few other things about the Upanishads
08:21and that's how we carry that pretty picture.
08:24This is how the Upanishads are.
08:25I want to attack that picture.
08:28I want you to really go to the Upanishads.
08:32Either really go to the Upanishads or at least don't say that you know the Upanishads.
08:41At least don't pretend that you respect them.
08:45At least don't start randomly quoting the Upanishads.
08:53So some random story you would bring from an Upanishad and then you will try to make
08:59opinions and conclusions based on that story.
09:04Now how will you be able to derive any meaning from that story?
09:09If you have not read the scripture and no Upanishad is greatly tedious to read.
09:18They are very very precise documents and some of them indeed do contain stories.
09:26So you pick up a story from an Upanishad without knowing what that Upanishad is really about,
09:30without knowing what Vedanta is really about and then from that story you come to some
09:35conclusion.
09:36How are you coming to that conclusion?
09:37Have you worked hard enough?
09:40Is your meditativeness telling you the essence of that story?
09:44No.
09:45Secondly, have you read a few Upanishads?
09:52Have you read even that particular Upanishad from where the story is coming?
09:56No, not even that much.
09:57But you will quote that story and from that story you want to arrive to conclusions.
10:04This is disgusting.