If you love it, you deserve to have it (Love is the Qualification) || Acharya Prashant (2022)

Questioner (Q): Throughout all these years I have faced a lot of self-doubt. I believe self-doubt is in some way important because it teaches us how to examine oneself. But many times this self-doubt turned into anxiety, and this stopped me from pursuing many of the dreams which could have changed my life and everything. So, how to stop these negative thoughts and pursue the opportunities life has to offer?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Wonderful. What is self-doubt? How do you define it?

Q: I feel that self-doubt is an inner voice which tells me, “No, you cannot do this.”

AP: Cannot do what? What is this ‘this’? Which task? Which specific task?

Q: I feel some people are better than me.

AP: In pursuing…?

Q: In many instances. Becoming the seminars’ head and co-head, for example. At that time I felt like there were other people who could have done it better than me, but I pushed myself to do it; that was one instance.

AP: So, self-doubt is an inner voice, something from the mind that says, “You are not good enough, you are not fit enough, you are not worthy,” or that “Others are better than you in this thing.” That’s what self-doubt is, right? “Am I good enough for this?”—that’s what self-doubt says.

See, the rule here is: if it is something that you can really, heartfully love, then you deserve it; you are worthy enough. Simple. Do you understand this? There is nothing in the entire life, in the entire universe—especially in the inner world—that is good enough, beautiful enough to be loved and yet too big or too distant to be achieved. If it can be loved, it can be achieved. Your love makes it yours. Full stop.

So, the achievement then, if you see, is not even dependent on the object you are talking of, on the target you have in mind. No, the achievement or the probability of achievement depends only on the trueness, the vigor, the purity of your love. Self-doubt is then not a doubt on your capability; it is a doubt on the depth of your love. And there is a great difference between these two, please see.

Because capability is something that takes time—you cannot build capability overnight, or can you? Capability is also something that you may never actually be able to build beyond a point. For example, if you are five feet two inches, you can hardly aspire to become a national basketball player, right? It is not, therefore, a matter of capability; and that’s a great relief. It is a matter of the depths of your love. And love does not require time to build; love requires clarity.

Do you really know your target? That’s the question. Do you really know what you want? Do you understand your own desire? And if the object of your desire you know to be worthy enough, that itself inspires and empowers you. “I know what I want. I know the thing that I want, and I know why that thing I must have; and therefore, I will have it because there is no other option. I am not going to desire any random miscellaneous thing,” because that is a wastage of life and time, no?—to just run after this and that, to ask for this in the morning, that in the afternoon, and something totally different in the night.

And that’s the course of the usual kind of desire, no? At this moment you are wanting this, another moment you are wanting that. That which appears so lucrative right now becomes very disinteresting tomorrow morning. Does that not happen? We are not talking about that kind of desire, not at all; we are talking about desire that you cannot live without. When that happens, desire itself becomes the qualification. “Am I worthy enough, eligible, qualified?” Your desire is the qualification. And true, vigorous, energetic, pure desire itself is called love.

Want it rightly and want only the right thing, and then you will find that you are left with no option to back off. You just cannot retreat. Even if you know then that your capabilities are limited, you will strive beyond your capabilities. A power within you not dependent on your capability will arise into action.

Self-doubt and such things happen mostly when we start wanting something that is firstly not even worthy of being wanted. And that’s the case with most of us, right? Our desires are mostly blind. Do we really know why we want what we want? Do we? Sometimes we follow the crowd, sometimes there is the trend, sometimes there is just pure ignorance and instinct and impulse arising from the body or your past or your experiences or the pressures the society applies on you, and you just run after something, be it an educational degree, be it a particular type of career, a job offer, a thing, something in the market, a new dress, a new vehicle, a new phone a new gadget, a new boy, a new girl… Do you really understand why you want that thing?

And as if ignorance were not sufficient, we top it up by saying, “Love is blind.” Bravo! Somebody asks you, “But why are you running in that direction?” We don’t even take the pains to understand what is going on within; instead, we respond with bravado, “What? You know love is blind. Don’t ask me why I am chasing that thing or that person, because if love is true, it is blind.” No. If you are chasing something without knowing what is going on, you will very soon find yourself out of motivation, exhausted and in a great pall of self-doubt.

And the result might also then be lack of self-worth, because if repeatedly you keep making targets and missing them, very soon your internal self-image becomes one of a loser: “I tried for this thing, didn’t make it; wanted to be there, didn’t reach; tried again my hand at that thing, fell short. So, who am I? A loser.” And the more you allow that to happen to you, the more you find it becomes difficult for you to believe in yourself. And that happens not because, I repeat, not because you are unworthy or incapable, but because fundamentally you chose the wrong target.

As young people, you must learn to differentiate between desire and love; and that’s probably the most important distinction you can ever make in life. More so as people of your age, because desire runs amok when you are eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. If you can know whether it is just a blind, biological, chemical force arising from the physical apparatus, or the momentum generated by years of social conditioning and programming, or something way beyond that—if you can distinguish the third one from the first two that we just named, you will go a long way.

When something deserves to be achieved, then you go after it irrespective of whether or not your current capabilities support you. You simply keep aside the practical fact of your current capabilities. You say, “It might actually be possible that factually I am not capable of going after such and such target. But how does that matter? I am in love; therefore, I don’t have an option.”

Now, this state of becoming optionless is the most beautiful state you can ever be in. Simply optionless, simply choiceless, not because you are blind, but because you are seeing so clearly that you can see only one thing and nothing else.

Greatness lies not in being super capable or superhuman; not everybody can be a superman or a superwoman. Greatness lies in exceeding your capabilities; greatness lies in fighting your limitations. In a very poetic way, greatness lies in not even caring for your limitations—not because you are mad, not because you are ignorant, not because you do not know your limitations, but because you are seeing something way beyond your limitations.

You will find people who just do not know the fact of their limited capability—and we all have limited capability, right? There is nobody who is not limited. There are some people who, because of their misplaced ego and blurred inner vision, do not know the fact of the limitations of their capability, so they boast a lot, they brag too much. I am not talking about them, right? “I don’t even know how ignorant I am and therefore I keep shouting from the rooftop, ‘I will achieve this, I am the best one.’” And you will often find these people display zero self-doubt; they are utterly full of confidence. Have you seen a few such people? I hope not in the mirror. Have you seen such people? So full of confidence. No capability to examine oneself at all. We are keeping these ones aside; not these. They are free of self-doubt because they do not know the self. Their ignorance keeps them very confident.

Unfortunately, this kind of personality has become the hallmark of our times, has it not? A totally confident and ambitious young person full of dark ignorance, no? Not humble, not polite; outspoken, extrovert, loud, bashful—not at all, that’s not what we are talking of. We are talking of freedom from self-doubt. That freedom comes when the self is in love. We are talking of the condition where you fully well know where you stand in terms of experience, capability and such things, and yet you say, “I cannot give up. I have to get up. I am in love. Maybe I will fall a thousand times, maybe I will be defeated a thousand times, but I will never be finally defeated.” Because it’s love that wins you wars. It may not win you wars, but it makes you invincible. It may not make you a winner, but it will never allow you to be defeated, because defeat is a choice; defeat happens only when you accept that you are defeated.

Be so clear about what you want that you never accept a defeat, and in that lies a wholesome victory. Because victory by chance is always subject to the vicissitudes of fate. Today’s victor is tomorrow’s loser. But someone who is not prepared to accept defeat because there is no life in defeat is the one who is an eternal winner. “If I accept defeat, how will I live? Because to accept defeat is to accept separation from what I love, therefore I cannot accept defeat, I have to keep trying. And even if I spend my entire life just trying, it’s a life well spent.”

Do not give too much importance to the fact of achievement. It’s not that final achievement that counts but the vigor, the intensity of your love, the indefatigability of your drive. You understand fatigue? “I am tired.” We want the kind of desire that never tires—indefatigable, never tires; therefore, it will be with you all your life. And when it is with you all your life, life becomes lively, life gets lit. Else, why do we live? If there is not that beating heart within, why do we live?

Self-doubt must become something intolerable, therefore non-existent. To doubt oneself must become the harrowing prospect of doubting your love itself. And you can’t just bear that humiliation. “If I doubt myself, that’s equivalent to entertaining the thought that I am not fit enough to go after that. Anything can be admitted, but not this thought.”

Bottom line: want very carefully. Not everything is worthy of being desired. Be free of desire as much as possible; don’t run after every second thing. But when you do indeed choose something to go after, devote your entire life to that. Flimsy objects do not deserve your attention. Worth should be the central criteria. You should be someone who says, “I do not want much, I do not want frequently. But that which I want, I want with all my might, I want with all my life.”

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