Acharya Prashant: Man is born in a battlefield; man will have to deal with challenges. Now it is upon you, which challenges you chose to deal with. You could either fight several miscellaneous, petty, worthless wars that cannot really be called as wars, call them skirmishes, squabbles. Or he could devote himself to the one mighty project that befits life. And if you are not committed to that one single project, then it is obvious that your time, attention, energy, will all be dissipated in a thousand directions. You will not even realise and life would bleed out of you, like a man who has a thousand cuts on his body bleeds to death. None of those thousand cuts might be significant enough to cause you deadly harm on their own, but taken together they are fatal.
Questioner: Acharya Ji, I read a quote; “By believes, the Mind becomes strong and Samadhi gives the Being wonderful knowledge and he attains salvation after destroying sinful and holy actions.” I could not understand, how can the actor destroy his own actions?
Acharya Prashant: Your attachment to action. When you think that a particular action can bring you salvation, then that action becomes very important for you; you become the actor. Destruction of action means destruction of the actor, destruction of doership itself.
Questioner: The destruction should happen despite it being called as sinful or holy, both kinds of action?
Acharya Prashant: What is being said is, there are many actions per se that are considered holy, pious, for example, religious ceremonies. The author of these lines is insisting that nothing is of use to you if it does not fulfil the basic criteria. The basic criteria is – is it making your daily life better? Just calling a particular activity as virtuous, or holy, or religious will not suffice. You have to ask, what am I getting out of it? You have to be very business minded in spirituality.
