You are a Lao Tzu when you don't have a Lao Tzu as your ideal || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Shri Prashant: The biggest damage that you do to others comes as very innocuous, unnoticeable, run-of-the-mill actions, like the street vendor selling his oily and stale food. It appears so very normal, does it not? Have you ever seen the street vendor, huh, selling his street food? Does he strike you as abnormal? They dot the streets. They are there after every fifty metres, are they not? When you look at them, do you jump with surprise? Do you say, “Oh my God! What an enemy of mankind!”? Does that happen?

That street vendor is you, very common, apparently very harmless, but really, very, very harmful, and tasty as well; delicious, attractive. And when somebody would tell you that you are a burden upon public health, you would say, “No, no, no. I am only doing what everybody else is doing. I am just taking away 10 minutes of everybody’s time.”

All the literature that we study, spirituality, this and that, that is useless without an observation of our daily life. And daily life is right now, nowhere else.

We read Lao Tzu and then we take 20 minutes in just assembling in this place. What are we doing? That’s what mankind has been doing with Scriptures – treating them as mere words, not letting them come to life.

We read so much. We know every bit of Lao Tzu. But we don’t know how to live.