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Acharya Prashant
  • 3 years ago
Video Information: 20.03.2023, IIT-Patna (Online), Greater Noida

Context:
~ What does it mean by self-esteem and self-respect?
~ What is approximate?
~ How much do we know about ourselves?
~ What is self-awareness?

Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Transcript
00:00 Ego and self-respect, they are quite different concepts.
00:11 Ego is simply I exist, I am, I am.
00:17 And because you just cannot be without being anything, therefore ego completes the statement
00:25 I am by saying I am a male, I am a student, I am a professional, I am wise, I am smart,
00:32 I am handsome, I am distressed, I am suffering, I am happy.
00:37 These are all ego statements.
00:39 I am X, I am Y, I am Z.
00:42 All this is the ego.
00:44 What is self-respect?
00:45 It's a very hazy thing.
00:49 What is respect?
00:51 If respect means to value, if the real meaning of respect is that you value someone highly,
01:03 then the process of respect involves two things.
01:07 One, you must know what to value.
01:11 Secondly, obviously, the object must deserve that value or have that value.
01:21 So do I really know what is important?
01:26 And the moment I say do I really know what is important, I am referring to the ego, right?
01:32 Because the I is the ego.
01:36 So does the ego really know what is important?
01:39 No.
01:41 One very central defining characteristic of the ego is that to the ego only the ego is
01:46 important.
01:49 Because the ego is false and little and insecure, it just does not have the courage to give
01:55 anything beyond itself much importance.
02:00 In some way or the other, directly or obliquely, the ego accords importance only to itself.
02:08 I am important.
02:09 If I am important, then those who are related to me will become important.
02:13 If I am important, then my thoughts will become important, my imagination will become important,
02:17 my ideas will become important, my country will become important, my clan will become
02:23 important, my past will become important, my dreams and my desires will become important.
02:29 All these are ego statements and all these are founded on the mother statement, I alone
02:35 am important.
02:36 That is ego.
02:38 I alone am important.
02:40 The ego just cannot see beyond itself.
02:43 So whenever the ego gives respect to something, what is it that the ego is respecting?
02:50 Nothing but itself because the ego has no capacity to truly appreciate anything beyond
02:55 itself that requires courage and that requires clarity.
02:58 The ego has neither courage nor clarity.
03:01 Are you getting?
03:04 So when you say self-respect, that merely means that you are looking at your reflection
03:10 in the mirror and admiring it.
03:14 And irrespective of how you really are or how you look, that's the way several people
03:20 are, don't you know?
03:23 Irrespective of the position they are taking, they keep backing their position.
03:29 Irrespective of how foolish their concepts or ideas or dreams or targets are, they keep
03:35 chasing their dreams.
03:39 That is self-respect, a mark of stupidity.
03:44 If I am not mistaken, the word respect comes from the ability to look cleanly and clearly
03:59 at something.
04:03 I think the root word is pīkire.
04:08 So re, looking at something again, that's respect.
04:14 Looking at something again and again with the intention to come to the truth, that's
04:19 respect.
04:22 Respect does not mean offering value to something without even knowing the value.
04:29 For example, an elder comes to your place.
04:35 The elder happens to be not merely an elder but an elder relative and you have been taught
04:41 to offer respect, have you not been?
04:46 So the fellow has come and you do not know the fellow.
04:48 You do not know how virtuous he is, you do not know how courageous or loving he is and
04:54 yet you are supposed to offer respects.
05:03 The fellow comes in and you offer some salutation, you greet him by saying sir or namaste or
05:17 welcome or something.
05:19 Now that's the way of the ego.
05:22 It does not know itself, therefore it does not know what to respect.
05:30 To know the other, first of all you must know yourself.
05:35 Before you can tell how beautiful somebody's eyes are, you must have the eyes to look at
05:41 his eyes.
05:46 But the way of the ego is that it just cannot look.
05:50 It has beliefs but no vision.
05:54 It has dreams but no reality.
06:00 So it respects out of bias or tradition or influence.
06:06 It does not respect, that is, it does not evaluate based on merit or clarity.
06:14 Are you getting it?
06:18 So just as you offer your respects to the other one in a blind way, equally people keep
06:26 respecting themselves or sometimes even disrespecting themselves in a blind way.
06:34 So self-respect as a prerequisite needs self-knowledge.
06:45 If I say I respect myself, I must be asked who respects what?
06:54 You say you have self-respect, so that would mean you respect yourself, correct?
07:02 Then I must ask you who respects what?
07:06 You say I respect myself, I'll say who respects what?
07:10 Do you really know yourself?
07:12 There can be no self-respect without self-knowledge and we have been repeatedly saying that the
07:17 ego survives only in lack of self-knowledge.
07:23 The less you know yourself, the more dense and crystallized your ego is.
07:34 Self-respect is nothing but self-awareness.
07:38 The more you know yourself, the more you realize who you are not and that brings you to who
07:44 you are.
07:48 That is real self-respect, knowing oneself, but knowing oneself is not a direct or positive
07:55 process.
07:56 Knowing oneself can happen only through the root of discarding all that which is not you.
08:05 This is not me, this is not me.
08:09 You keep rejecting all that and that brings you to the real self and that is self-respect.
08:16 Essentially that means that people who do not know themselves are the ones who greatly
08:22 disrespect themselves.
08:27 And that is quite interesting because if someone comes and says a few abusive or coarse words
08:37 to you, you feel hurt, you say the fellow disrespected me.
08:43 But this disrespect is nothing compared to the disrespect that we heap on ourselves by
08:51 remaining ignorant of ourselves all lifelong.
08:56 You live for 80 years without ever thinking deeply about yourself, your life, your relationships,
09:04 your dreams, your hopes, your regrets, your suffering, your phobias.
09:10 You never think about these things and you live for an entire 80 years and then you die.
09:16 That is the deepest disrespect towards the self, to not to know oneself.
09:23 And this disrespect towards the self is also called as ego.
09:28 Ego is another name for self-illusion.
09:33 I do not know who I am, yet I keep saying I am.
09:36 That's the ego and that's disrespect.
09:42 Now come to the next part of your question.
09:45 What are you saying?
09:46 I mean, sir, why can't we just let it go when some people intentionally or unintentionally
09:56 hurt our so-called ego?
09:57 I mean, when I try to let go of things and people who hurt my ego and or self-respect,
10:06 I observe that after a period of time, people don't take you seriously and you're open
10:14 to them.
10:15 I mean, I'm a little confused in being a humble person or a person having an attitude because
10:23 attitude makes you look confident and attractive and there is disrespect in this society.
10:29 The important thing is to first of all be assured of who you are and what you have.
10:42 You must be confident of your own truth in the first place.
10:50 You are carrying a textbook of advanced calculus and a class four student starts spitting at
11:03 it and says, "This is all nonsensical and what is this integration science?
11:08 Is this some snake or something?"
11:12 Would you feel disrespected or humiliated, dejected?
11:16 How would you feel?
11:22 But if you yourself are like that class four student, then your self-esteem will take a
11:29 beating.
11:30 You will say, "Oh my God, my book has been dishonored".
11:38 How are they able to bother you with whatever they are doing?
11:46 How are you not assured of what your truth is?
11:50 And if you are assured, how can you take them seriously?
11:55 A class four student who knows nothing about anything comes and starts debunking a PhD
12:06 thesis.
12:08 Should he be taken seriously given some importance?
12:14 No sir, because he doesn't know about what he is doing.
12:20 The thing is, do you know?
12:22 Do you know of what you have, what you are saying, what you are?
12:27 When you are assured of yourself, then what the world is saying, it does not matter too
12:33 much.
12:36 But when you are yourself, half here, half there, uncertain, then anybody can influence
12:50 you.
12:51 Humility, that's the word you used.
12:58 Should I be humble or should I not be humble?
13:01 What is humility?
13:06 Humility is about knowing that your default identity is the ego.
13:15 That's humility.
13:16 Humility is to know how vulnerable to mistakes you are.
13:23 Because that's the nature of the ego.
13:26 It can survive only in mistakes.
13:29 Those are not even mistakes.
13:32 Those are ego's compulsions because without them it cannot survive.
13:39 That's humility.
13:40 So, when somebody attacks you and you feel hurt, humility lies in looking at yourself
13:47 and smiling and saying, see how vulnerable I am.
13:54 They are tossing nonsense at me and yet I am giving it importance.
14:04 What they are saying has no ground, no foundation and yet I am taking it seriously.
14:10 See how stupid I am and this is humility.
14:13 You must be able to always recognize your own weaknesses and when you recognize your
14:21 weaknesses you do not say they are my weaknesses.
14:24 You just say they are systematic, they are biologic, they are social, these weaknesses
14:36 and when you say thus then you can smile at them with detachment.
14:42 That's humility.
14:44 Humility does not lie in surrendering to others or bowing down to others.
14:51 Someone who cannot call a spade a spade is not humble.
14:59 The humble person is one who can call illusion as illusion.
15:03 That's what humility is about.
15:05 To call illusion as illusion.
15:09 Anything else on this?
15:17 No sir, my all thoughts have been cleared.
15:23 Thank you sir.
15:25 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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