Chasing Success, Carrying Anxiety: The Karma You Don't See

Questioner: Hello, sir. So, my first question is: in practical life, we see that restlessness is kind of rewarded. There's this concept of a side hustle in working professionals. You are, if you're not working a side hustle, if you're not working on your next great startup idea, then you're wasting your time. So it seems that we've built a world that does not allow us to come to a place of self-understanding and this place of effortless rest. So I wanted to understand.

Acharya Prashant: Why do we hustle? We hustle because we feel there is an inadequacy within, and if I achieve this or achieve that, I'll be able to plug the void. There is a loneliness or restlessness within, something incomplete, and if I elbow out the other, there is that prized catch, there is that fabled destination. If I reach there, then I'll be home.

It has happened not once but several times in my last one month of stay at Bangalore. I take long walks and I meet youngsters. The city is full of youngsters only, and they would come and discuss, and 80% of the discussions, sir, have been about the hustle itself.

You know, people from this city, that town, UP, Rajasthan, Bihar, Odisha, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, they have all aggregated here to hustle, and they have been hustling, and they have reached some position. And when they meet me, such is my bad luck. They only talk of all the bad things. So they'll say, "We came here, we tried so much, and now we have this kind of a pay package, but still that incompleteness is there. What do we do? What do we do?"

And typically, when I'm walking, somebody is beside me, one person, two person, the ones you choose to walk with, and they would record the conversation. And then this person, the youngster who has come to talk, the boy, the girl, the young person, they would open their hearts. They would speak their self out, everything.

And my colleagues, then they would say, "We also want to attend your sessions. Where are you speaking next, and when? Please share the venue." And when the venue and everything would be shared, then replying to the same WhatsApp message, and it's been an unbelievable trend. It's a pattern that we can almost predict now. Replying to the same message where the venue and the details have been shared, the fellow would say, "Well, you recorded the conversation. Please don't upload it, what would my mama say?" Yeah. And these are all educated and so-called empowered young people. That's what your hustle gives you. Absolutely nothing.

You were fearful when you came to the city, and after spending five years in the city, you are still fearful. You were the dominated one when you ran away from your little town or your village or whatever your kasba, and you said, "Now somehow I managed an IT job in Bangalore or something else, management job, something. I have managed it." And you come here, and you earn it for yourself, and now you are 30 or something, but you are still that timid, scared self that you were 10 years back.

So hustling does not give you what it promises to give you. When you hustle, when you achieve, when you say, "I'll play by my ambition," then there is a hope there, right? The hope, and hustling promises to fulfill the hope.

Now hustling is a liar. It promises but never delivers. You remain the same. You are still that little shy girl, very, very afraid of the parents, that she supports this one, actually earns and sends money back. Yeh kamati hai, inhi ke paison se wanha par UP me kanhi par ghar chal rha hai. And still she's so scared. She said, "No, no, no, no, don't publish this."

So the fellow will say, "Fine, we'll blur your face." "No." "Okay, fine, we'll use AI to kind of change your voice so that nobody detects it." “No, no, no, no, no.”

And what does she say again? She, because there are a lot of such people we met. “I used to sir, I came to Bangalore, I started smoking a lot, boozing, clubbing and all those things, and I was very restless and I had fallen into depression, and then I got your book or your videos, and now I have emerged sane from all that. So, I'm much better off." So all that has happened.

This one was not really reluctant to get into addiction or even depression. But when it comes to sharing the truth with his or her parents, there is such great fear. Now, please tell me, what have five or 10 years of hustling given you, really? If you are still so timid and so scared within, what does hustling give you? I would advise you to hustle at infinitum if it delivers on the promise, but it doesn't. You can hustle all your life and still remain the petty one. That's the problem with hustling.

I don't know whether I have communicated something.

We had a LinkedIn post. Somebody posted that, "In Bangalore, I feel like a beggar even with a 70 lakhs per annum package." What has hustling given you? Definite kinds of costs, right? A cost architecture that is a liability. It hasn't delivered on the promise of liberation. If it doesn't leave you more free, more empowered, you still remain indebted. You still keep covering, you still keep crawling. That's the problem with hustling. It doesn't deliver.

Listener: So that is a very good point. You see, I have very little personal experience because I worked in the corporate sector for one year, and took one deep breath and in merely a year I quit. But maybe I'm a quitter. So your question is, I want to be there and still not do it.

You see, the difficulty is that we want all the goodies and benefits that we think the corporate sector gives, whether it could be promotion or job or salary or incentives. We want all those things, and then these things will therefore come. Should I do this, that and the other? I think if you want all those things, you'll have to suffer the consequences of mental stress. Because the one who is actually seeking the kind of thing that he's talking about, he or she will royally step back, mujhe nahi chahiye. So that is the difficulty.

So I keep going back to, you know, either Christ or Nachiketa goes to Yama, and he asks questions like you only, and Yama says that, "Don't ask these questions. Don't worry. His Brahmastra is that there is something after death, there is something not after death." "Please tell me what the Truth is." And he said, "No, no, no, don't ask this question. Ask something else." He said, "No, no, I want to know this." Then he says, "I'll give you kingdom, I'll give you wealth, I'll make you CEO, I'll give you stock options, whatever, all those things I'll give you. I'll give you beautiful women or whatever beautiful men, in the case of whatever he wants to give." And one after the other, he gives him all the temptations of the world.

The same thing happens with Jesus Christ. The devil takes him to the top of the mountain and says, "Here is the world. I'll make you king of the world. Don't worry about the spiritual things." So Christ says, "Get behind me, Satan." You know, that is his fear. The same thing Nachiketa says to Yama, "I don't want all these things. These are ephemeral."

So first, think about this. It won't happen. I want to have the cake and eat it too. Kaise hoga. The same mind, if the same mind is so obsessed with all these worldly benefits, the same mind has to do introspection and go inside. You decide what you want. It's up to you.

So these are the examples I give you, Nachiketa, all of them, Jesus Christ, so many people. So that way you will not get distracted.

But there is a karmik theory also that whatever each individual's karma is, his karma has made him a famous Acharya, and you, whatever it is, each one, we are playing it out. But if you do it like that, that, yes, for whatever reasons, known and unknown, I am in this role, I'll play it out. If you keep doing it with that, there'll be less tension, there will be less.

And the other thing I found very useful is this is a golden statement, I mean, which my father told me when I was a kid: by the company of, well, you can call it holy people, spiritual people, either through reading books, YouTube, or actually physically meeting such people, constant company of good people, noble people, it definitely all these questions start going away. Think about it.

Acharya Prashant: Yes. But the problem would be that the same ignorant one might be using his ignorance to identify who is to be called as noble, and that defeats everything, right? At the first step, finished, khatam.

You know, how do I know? I mean, keeping everything aside, how do I know that any of the names we have mentioned today were noble at all? Because it is my own biases, my own conditioning, my own colored lenses that I'm, and my own tradition and the hearsay that I'm using to determine who is noble and who is not.

So, taking examples, I'll take a couple of examples closer to your condition, to your city. You asked about the hustle culture.

Listener: Just tried to be a little provocative, so you don't think that Jesus Christ and Ramana Maharashi are…

Acharya Prashant: No, I'm saying unless my vision is cleared, I cannot identify. You see, sir, there is not one Jesus. Your Jesus is different from mine, from him, from him, from him. So when you say, do I believe Christ was enlightened or Buddha or Shri Krishna? What do we mean by Shri Krishna or Buddha? You know, the Lok Dharmik Shri Krishna is very different from the Shri Krishna of the Gita.

So it depends on who is uttering the word, the name Jesus or Shri Krishna or Buddha. So, taking examples or setting role models is an inviting thing. It's a very tempting thing to do. It seems like an easy thing to do. But it's also a very dangerous thing because I cast my role models in my own image. In my own image. So the Gandhi of the ignorant one …

Listener: Is different from the other Gandhi.

Acharya Prashant: You know, so Gandhi is not one person.

Questioner: So the me that is thinking about the future is false because my current self is false. So how do I? Everything around me is reinforcing this idea that I have to prepare for the future. I have to worry about the future. If I'm not doing that, then I'm doing something wrong. How do I reconcile the values of Vedanta with practical life?

Acharya Prashant: You see, care for the future is that, that must be questioned, whether it is a convenient escape from really caring for the present. If I say I want to care for myself of the future, then essentially you are claiming that you care for yourself so much, so much, that even the self that would be one year down the line would be worth caring. Right? That's what you are declaring, right? If the self of one year later would be worth caring, what about the self that is there right now sitting within you? speaking from within you, are we really taking care of it?

And the proof that we are not taking care of it is that we are more concerned about the future self than the current self.

If I were really loving towards the self, really loving towards the self, would I care more for the future self or the current self? And since the current self is not looked after, not cared for, therefore it is in a state of anxiety, tension.

And all dreams of the future and all insecurities and so many ambitions and plans, they arise from this anxiety, which is coming from neglect. I'm neglecting.

Look at the process, please. I'm neglecting what I have inwardly become right now. It is a result of historical processes and social influences and biological conditioning and all that. That's fine. But as a result of all this, I have indeed become somebody within, right? And this somebody within is not healthy, is not settled, is not joyful, is not peaceful, and that's the reason it is so bothered about the future.

So it is bothered about the future, but the real botheration is right now because even the concern for the future is arising right now, which means there is something wrong, not in the future, but in the present. So should I treat the imaginary disease of the future or the current disease right now? Which one should I look into?

But I escape away. I don't want to look at it because that appears life-threatening. So what do I do? I dishonestly relocate the disease. I say the disease lies in the future, as if the present is healthy. The disease lies in the future, as if the present is healthy. And declaring that the disease lies there is a good way of diverting and distracting attention. No? You start looking that way. "Oh, the problem lies there. The problem lies..." Sir, the problem does not lie there. The problem lies here. And that's why you are projecting a problem there. The projector is here (within). And it is from this projector that a problem is being projected there.

Why not look into this one, the anxious one, the one sleepless about what would happen six months later? What if I don't get the right job? What about the promotion and the appraisal? What is my wife doing? What are my kids doing? You know, what's your current state? And when you look into your current state, you find out that you may decide to acknowledge that. That's a decision. So finding is comparatively easy. Acknowledgement is much more difficult.

You may find that this, the worrying one, the tense one, the anxious one, is not real. You got it from somewhere. You have been taught to think in a particular way. You have been taught to take yourself as somebody. And it's easy to see that when you see, you know, that's not happening in the neighboring country, that was not happening even in this country 200 years back, that is not happening in the developed world, that's not happening even in your own city in a different segment of population. So obviously, what you are experiencing is not a universal Truth. It is a conditioning relative to your experiences, your upbringing, your body.

Whenever the future troubles you, look into the present.

If the future is troubling you, the trouble does not lie in the future because there is nothing called the future. How can trouble lie where there is nothing?

Does the future really exist? No, it does not. So if the future troubles you, the trouble lies really in the present. Turn inwards. The mischievous one within survives only as the diseased one. So it wants you to look away from the disease because if you look at the disease, who knows, healing might be possible. And the one within does not want to be healed. It can survive only as the sick one.

Never look at the future, or the same thing, the mirror image, the past. When the past bothers you a lot, look at the present. There is some sickness, some void, some inward trouble, some inconsistency in the present that is making you look at the past. Otherwise, the past is just a memory database. It cannot have an animated life of its own and come and trouble you. The energy that the past seems to have is actually the misdirected energy of the present. The present is activating the past. The problems of the present activate the past. So better look into the problems of the present.

Listener: You were saying that why should we live in the future? Why not in the present, or what is that whole thing about? And he gave a very wonderful answer. You see, our scriptures and the Zen philosophy and so many people say the same thing, that live in the present, and he tried to explain why and why should we not.

But what I found is that, again, you know, I'll give you some... Again, I always give extreme examples. So Jesus Christ says, "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be added into you." So, Ramana Maharshi left home with a kaupin and never touched a lie. He didn't worry about the future. Now, these are extreme examples, but that doesn't mean that we ignore it. So, for those blessed people who have either realized the Self or who are completely surrendered to God. Yes. And they're telling you what they, as they call, a siddhant, that live in the present, don't worry about the future.

Now, coming down from the levels of such great people, we should not be obsessed. But if you don't worry about your health and your old age and you don't save for the old age, and after retirement you find ki paise khatam ho gaye, then you're being stupid because if you ain't going to look after yourself, nobody else is going to look after you, as they say, the Americans say. But we should not be obsessed about it.

And he made a very good point: while we are thinking about all that and just planning a little bit, with 10% of mind, we should improve our life here and now. That's what I feel.

Questioner: Yeah, definitely. Thank you, sir.

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