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~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Video Information: Samvaad Session, 10.02.2018, Goa, India
Context:
~ What is confidence?
~ How to be confident?
~ How to live rightly?
~ Why there is need of confidence when in doubt?
~ Is confidence a medicine?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~~~~~~~~ .
Be a part of the Live Sessions: https://acharyaprashant.org/hi/enquiry-gita-course?cmId=m00046
📚 Want to read Acharya Prashant's Books?
Get Free Delivery: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/books?cmId=m00046
📝 Read 3 handpicked wisdom articles, just for you: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles?cmId=m00046
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Video Information: Samvaad Session, 10.02.2018, Goa, India
Context:
~ What is confidence?
~ How to be confident?
~ How to live rightly?
~ Why there is need of confidence when in doubt?
~ Is confidence a medicine?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~~~~~~~~ .
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The question is, I don't have confidence in myself, how to gain it?
00:17The question comes from an extreme, I do not have confidence in myself.
00:22But surely this question addresses a pain that all experience in varying degrees on
00:35various occasions.
00:36There is nobody who does not feel short of confidence at some point or other.
00:43There are many who keep feeling perpetually short, there are others who feel confident
00:48most of the times, but find that their confidence is deserting them often when they need it.
01:02You say you want confidence in yourself.
01:11You want confidence in yourself only when you are in doubt.
01:25When things are just flowing smoothly, is there need for confidence?
01:33When there is no fear, is there need for confidence?
01:44Confidence is a medicine.
01:49Confidence is not your natural state, just as medicine is not health.
01:57When you feel sick, then you ask for medicine and the role of medicine should be to make
02:07itself unnecessary.
02:11You do not want to have a medicine that you will perpetually need.
02:17What you must rather perpetually have is a normal and ordinary state of health.
02:28What you must normally have is a state of fearlessness in which confidence is not needed
02:34at all.
02:35If you are requiring confidence, it means that something has already gone wrong.
02:47How do you want to cover up what has gone wrong or do you want to directly address what
02:54has gone wrong?
02:55Because if the wrong stays wrong, then you will keep on needing confidence more and more
03:02and more frequently.
03:05When you are addressing your friends, do you require confidence?
03:11No.
03:12But when you are making a public presentation, then you require confidence.
03:17Do you notice that?
03:20When you are with your family members, do you require confidence?
03:24Hardly ever.
03:25But when you are in front of an interviewer, then you say that you require confidence.
03:31Don't you see that confidence has a lot to do with expectations, with greed, with fear?
03:42Why don't we address the root itself?
03:48As I speak to you right now, am I confident?
03:54Well, not.
03:56As I speak to you right now, is there a lack of confidence?
04:01Well, no.
04:04So that's a strange thing.
04:07If I am neither confident nor not confident, then what is my state?
04:13My state is one in which the word confidence is not relevant at all.
04:24Do you understand this?
04:26Confidence is a word relevant only when there is something bothering you, bugging you, weighing
04:34down upon you.
04:37If you are just alright, confidence is not needed.
04:43Confidence is a subtly violent response to fear.
04:51When you say that you are confident, don't you see what your situation is like?
04:59You are mildly, subtly aggressive.
05:06And you require that aggression because you are shivering inside.
05:14Justness, just being, sahajta, that is a much much higher empowering and healthy state
05:33of being compared to a confident state of being.
05:38When you are not confident, then you think about your state.
05:46Your state makes itself felt.
05:49And when you are confident, again your state makes itself felt.
05:55In both the situations, there is something that is in your mind, weighing upon your mind.
06:08You need clarity, not confidence.
06:13Confidence is just your belief in a certain concept.
06:19You can be confident of that, and if you are confident of that, then you are confident
06:24of a concept related to that.
06:26Or you can be confident of yourself.
06:29When you are confident of yourself, then you are confident of an image related to yourself.
06:34Just be so fully sure that you do not even need to think about yourself.
06:41Am I diseased?
06:44Well, I didn't think about it.
06:47Am I healthy?
06:48Well, I didn't think about it.
06:50Those of you who are healthy, do you keep thinking that you are healthy?
06:55The mark of health is that health becomes absent.
06:59It does not occur to the mind.
07:03If there is no pain in your knee, do you keep thinking that my knee is not paining?
07:09But when your knee pains, then you start thinking there is pain in my knee.
07:14When the pain disappears, then the thought of disease disappears.
07:20Does that mean that the thought of disease is substituted by the thought of health?
07:25No.
07:26The pain disappears, the thought of disease disappears.
07:30That does not mean that now the thought of health comes.
07:33No.
07:34Thought itself disappears.
07:37Similarly, when fear goes away, then confidence too goes away.
07:43And if you walk around all puffed up and confident,
07:47then please pause and look at your state.
07:50There is fear lurking behind your confidence.
07:55Confidence is a veneer.
07:59Confidence is a superficial treatment that you give to your fear.
08:04Ease is the word, not confidence.
08:08Ease.
08:11Be easy, not confident.
08:14And there is a great difference between being easy and being confident.
08:22If you say that you want confidence, then you are just asking for an ointment.
08:29Ointments won't help.
08:34When we have cancer in the arm,
08:40and it's a systemic disorder,
08:43it does not call for superficial massage or ointment.
08:48Yes, superficial ointment can cover up the disease for a while,
08:52but that will make the disease even worse.
08:55If you are afraid from within, but you try to act confident,
09:00maybe for a while you will succeed,
09:05but that will make your disease even worse.
09:08Better it is to face your fear.
09:12And facing your fear does not require confidence.
09:15It requires faith.
09:17It requires devotion.
09:19One has to say that come what may.
09:25There is something that needs to be done.
09:30And that something that needs to be done is bigger than preserving my current state.
09:38I'll be bold enough, I'll be young enough,
09:41I'll be strong enough to face my fear.
09:44I will not give them a cloak.
09:49I'll not disease myself.
09:51I'll just ask myself, firstly, why am I afraid?
09:54Why do I need to be afraid? What am I going to lose?
09:57What is so precious that I am destroying my peace, my stillness, my life for it?
10:04Is there anything so important, so precious, really?
10:10When you address fear,
10:13and when you are able to uproot fear,
10:16after that you find that not only has fear vaporized,
10:22confidence too has gone away.
10:26Fear and confidence are two sides of the same coin.
10:33I once said many years back to students like you,
10:36confidence is nothing but the other name of fear.
10:40It sounds strange because that's not what we have usually heard.
10:44But if you will apply your mind, then you will know what I am saying.
10:49This is the classical law of duality.
10:53Hope and despair go together.
10:56Where there is despair, hope will be needed.
11:00And where there is fear, confidence will be there.
11:06Go for the total holistic and right treatment.
11:13Don't just shy away.
11:16You are intelligent, you are young,
11:19you have a life to live.
11:22You cannot keep just pushing things under the carpet.
11:28Be bold enough to challenge that which terrifies you.
11:35Talk face to face to it. Say, come over, come on, we'll talk.
11:41I won't pretend that all is alright.
11:45I am ready to accept that there is disease.
11:50And then there would be just ease.
11:55You see how closely the words dis-ease and ease are linked?
12:02The answer to disease is ease.
12:06Not medicine that continues perpetually.
12:10The role of medicine is to be there for a while
12:13and then make itself redundant.
12:23All fear rests upon the assumption
12:27that you will lose something.
12:37And you fear losing only that which you consider valuable.
12:43Be with yourself. Be silent and ask yourself
12:46what is really valuable?
12:49And can that be lost?
12:52And if that cannot be lost, why do I live in fear?
12:57But before you can challenge your fear,
13:00before you can see the falseness of your fear,
13:03you will have to sit with yourself,
13:06you will have to give time to yourself,
13:09you will have to consider yourself important.
13:13It is very strange but we do not love ourselves enough.
13:17We do not love ourselves enough to give time to ourselves.
13:21We are involved in all kinds of activities on the outside.
13:25But we do not look at that which is going on inside.
13:29We consider that unimportant just because
13:32our education has not taught us that this is important.
13:35Our education has taught us that that is important,
13:38that is important, that is important,
13:41that the science of technology is important,
13:44the rules of the universe are important.
13:47But me, my life and my mind are important
13:50that has not been brought to us by our education.
13:53So don't give it time.
13:56Give this time. It deserves time.
13:59You are important.
14:02You must have a certain respect, regard and love for yourself.
14:06And then you will not need
14:09superficial remedies like confidence.