Your best is expressed only in Joy || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Question: Is it always true that a man or a woman will give their best performance due to pressure only?

Acharya Prashant: No, who said that?

The question is, ‘Is it true that we give our best performance only under pressure?’

Not at all. On the contrary, pressure brings the worst out of you. It is the bad bad education that teaches you that pressure is important.

All pressure is violence, all pressure is a torture, a distortion of the mind. The mind is being pushed by an external factor.

But what happens is — I understand from the way you are coming — what happens is, when the mind is deeply conditioned for a long period of time, it loses its internal capacity to see, to move freely. It becomes like a car whose engine in spite of being beautifully designed has become dysfunctional because of disuse.

A beautifully designed engine will not work, if you do not use it for ten years, twenty years. Will it work? It may be the best engine in the world. The same is the case with the mind. Our mind is a beautifully designed machine. It’s an instrument of the highest order, an instrument that man cannot make. But because of conditioning, we do not use the mind, instead we start using memory. Using the mind means, application of intelligence but our education is such that we substitute intelligence with memory, then the mind become dysfunctional.