Questioner: At one place you say, “To know your intentions watch your actions”. But at some other place you say, “Action does not matter, the actor does.” I see a contradiction here. Kindly clarify.
Acharya Prashant: When I say, “To know your intentions watch your actions”, I want you to be guarded against the hypocrisy of the Ego.
The Ego loves to carry images of everything, it lives in imaginations. It has no truth therefore all that it has is images. So it has images of everything, and obviously, it has an image of itself as well. So the Ego thinks: “This is how I am, this is what I want”, and it obviously carries a self-concept that is conducive to its own survival. That’s all the Ego wants. It wants to keep fattening. It wants to continue in time — survival is its aim.
So the Ego carries an image, and obviously, it’s a false self-image. How do we challenge this image? How do we know that this image is false? By seeing what is it that we are actually doing, how is it that we are actually living. And there we would usually find a gap, a dissonance.
We might keep thinking to ourselves that we are quite brave but then, we are forced to look at our life, our decisions, that is when we discover that there is hardly any bravery evident in our actions, in our choices. If you do not look at your life, you can happily keep imagining, for a long time, that you are the bravest one on the earth.
