The secret of the disciple and the Master || Acharya Prashant (2016)
Acharya Prashant (AP): The master and the disciple, they exist at two levels that are related, yet different.
Let us understand them.
At the most fundamental level which you could call as the real level, there is only the disciple, just as in the world, there is only the mind. And this disciple, this mind is characterised by its restlessness. Its defining property is that it moves. It’s not still; it wants, desires, strives, achieves, desires again. That mind alone is the disciple. And that which the mind so desperately wants, yet consciously knows nothing of, is the destination. That which mind wants is the destination.
It’s a strange thing: the destination. On one hand, the mind is crazy after it; it won’t settle down before achieving that final destination. On the other hand, the mind knows nothing about it. All that the mind knows of is not the destination. But given that the mind can chase only that which it knows of, the mind ends up chasing everything that is not really what it actually wants. So, in its desperate attempts to reach the destination, it keeps moving in directions that don’t take it to the destination. That’s the mind, the mind and its mystical destination, the mind and its unnameable destination.
The relation between the mind and its destination has to be understood. It is a very strange relationship. We’ve already said that the mind is crazy for what it wants; we’ve already said that the mind does not actually know what it wants. So much about the mind, what about the destination? It is the destination that guides the mind. The proof of that is that had there been something within the mind that was guiding the mind, then the mind would have easily achieved what it wanted to. Because whatever is within the mind —thinkable, predictable, achievable, will in some way or the other be achieved.
