Questioner (Q): In the spiritual journey, it is very, very difficult to find companionship, community, or like-minded people—people you can talk to about your experiences on this journey. So, it becomes a very lonely conquest. It is obviously a very lonely conquest because eventually it is a conquest of the self, but I feel that in the beginning some kind of a community is very important. Eventually, your friends actually also start becoming fewer; they actually don’t understand the things that you are saying. So, if you could talk a little bit about that, I would appreciate it.
Acharya Prashant (AP): Yes, yes. It’s a lonely conquest, and if you have to carry on the conquest then you have to conquer loneliness itself. It’s not as if it’s a lonely conquest; loneliness is to be conquested, because if the feeling of loneliness persists, then it will drive you towards the company of undeserving people. And that is exactly opposite to the purpose of spirituality.
When we say the mind is polluted, corrupted, conditioned, and that’s why we need to be spiritual, to come to the pure mind, it becomes pertinent to ask: what corrupted the mind in the first place? The fundamental thing is of course the physical body that took birth, but then after that it is the companionship of others that corrupted us is it not? It is the others—‘others’ meaning the entire world, the world is the other—it is the others who corrupted us.
So, the problem itself is the others. The others, the otherness that we are carrying within, that itself is the problem. Now, if that otherness is the problem and to solve the problem we still depend on others, then that hardly solves the problem; in fact, we are just then continuing the problem in another name.
