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From the ego’s perspective, life appears as a continuous narrative of agency and consequence: I do, and I suffer. This sense of personal authorship — aham karta, aham bhukta — feels unquestionable. I recently attended a lecture by Acharya Prashant, where this deeply ingrained assumption was examined not as truth, but as a foundational misunderstanding. As he points out, this certainty itself is the seed of human distress.
The ego is a cognitive error, a false centre that claims ownership of both action and experience. It accepts praise and blame, binding itself to expectation — asha parama dukha, expectation being the highest sorrow.
Though ahankar is not material, its consequences are unmistakably real. It drives behaviour, ambition and excess. Unlike material processes, which unfold in time, the correction of this error does not require duration. The illusion of the doer can collapse instantly the moment it is clearly seen. Seen clearly, this insight is not philosophical abstraction but a lived possibility, available in ordinary moments of attention, restraint and honest self-observation. Life offers infinite chances for such seeing. Every illusion dropped is a rebirth; every illusion acquired is a subtle death.
This false sense of doing is not limited to individual suffering; it has planetary consequences. The climate crisis humanity faces today is the direct result of our karma — our collective doing. The modern response seeks more action, more solutions, more growth. But the deeper answer, Acharya Prashant suggests, is withdrawal. Not doing. Stopping the relentless idea of growth as we know it — economic, extractive, consumerist.
Consumption in itself is not the problem. Nature consumes. Animals consume. Plants consume. Prakriti gives abundantly and lovingly, and life takes only what it needs to survive. Human beings alone consume for their ahankar — to assert identity, dominance and accumulation beyond need.
The ego survives by constant engagement. Doing becomes its proof of existence. Withdrawal and non-engagement, therefore, are not passivity but clarity. What is often described as virah vedana — the pain of separation — is in truth pashchattapa, remorse for having moved away from wholeness. Where truth stands, the imagined “I” — the doer and sufferer — cannot.