
Question: What do I do to cross the river? To me, it is such a challenge.
Acharya Prashant: Crossing the river is easy. Just hold the hand of someone who knows the other side, and cross. You have already crossed the river a thousand times with me. Your failure is elsewhere: You are not burning the bridges. Cross the river and burn the bridges. If you do not burn the bridge, rest assured, you will use that bridge. You have left too many unburnt bridges in your life. That is why you cross, and still, do not cross. You succeed, and yet remain failed.
Unless you have burnt down your options, the options will not let you live the Truth.
Merely crossing over is not sufficient. Do not cross over like a tourist, cross over like a native. Anybody who wants to distract and confuse you will keep giving you options. Know your enemy by this sign: He puts choices in your head. If options are there, they will be used one day. Have you burnt the damn bridge?
As a doctor, can we limit our responsibility to the one particular body or to the set of few bodies that come to us for treatment? Or is the patient actually a representative of an entire society, an entire ecosystem? Can I really be a good doctor of the lungs, if I support a society that pollutes the environment in the name of development? So, if I'm a doctor, then health is my responsibility in the holistic sense, not just one patient.

It’s not going to be right when the patient starts playing the doctor. We need to grow up; and having a kid, in that sense, is an opportunity. You want to be of some use to the kid, then grow up with the kid.

A suicide is a sad event because it prevents us from realizing our possibility and potential — there was an opportunity to live, learn, grow, realize, and be liberated, but it was wasted. But how many of us actually manage to realize our potential even if we live to 80 years? Hardly anybody. For our species, the extent of aliveness is proportional to the freedom and height of our consciousness. So ask yourself honestly: How close am I to the best I could have been?