Acharya Prashant (AP): We do not just get excited about anything. We get excited only about that which we have taught ourselves to get excited about. So excitement is always furtherance of the existing patterns. The body is, for example, born sexual. The body is born with the programming that certain things would be titillating. Certain organs and zones in the body would be erogenous. You know what would be exciting.
Similarly, if you have been conditioned to be a particular way, the way itself decides what you find exciting. If you are a thoroughbred Catholic, or Brahmin, or Muslim or whatever; then is it not already certain what is going to excite you? So excitement is just a furtherance of one’s biological or social patterns. Socially acquired patterns.
Becalming is something very, very different. You cannot know what is going to be-calm you. You can only know what would trouble you. But if you already know what is going to soothe you, then you are not being soothed. You have just been given a predetermined relief. Getting it?
If you are, for example, very tensed or nervous, you can pop a pill and that pill can appear to give you relief. But then, just as you are biologically programmed to get excited, you are equally biologically programmed to feel relieved by the action of certain chemicals. That has nothing to do with Truth. That is not real peace. It is just a game of those patterns. Patterns getting excited and patterns getting relief as another form of excitement.
Real calmness, real peace is not when the patterns are excited or when the patterns contract a little. Excitement and relief are just pulsations of patterns. Excitement, relief; excitement relief; the same thing is pulsating. Real calmness is when the patterns break down. The thing that used to throb and pulsate is no more there. The pattern itself is gone. Now, who is there to get excited? Now, who is there to benefit from the relief?
