Can you go to the past and choose something or unchoose something? And life is happening right now. So your power to respond to life is right now. But the moment you say it is happening due to the past, then you have surrendered your power to choose, because you cannot do anything with the past. You cannot change the past. You can’t choose the past. You can’t unchoose the past. You can’t modify it. You can do nothing.
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Questioner: Actually, it was not my question, my friend’s question. We keep discussing. She says that actually her children are very good at studies and all, and financially okay, but whenever it comes to entrance exams and all, children who were taught by them get better ranks. She says, “It is all my karma from the past life, that’s what I’m bearing, all this.” And she asked me to ask that question: is there karma? Because the soul changes from one body to another.
Acharya Prashant: Wrong. It doesn’t. And material effects have material causes, right? Material happenings, material phenomena do not have transcendental or intangible causes. One thing, when it comes to an entrance exam or something, your result is dependent so much on many variable factors.
The first variable factor is competition itself. You might be quite accomplished, you might be a very good student, but then there are others, right? And you might still find that you are ranked 5,000 all-India, and you look at 5,000 and feel depressed about yourself, “My God, 5,000!” But then you have to see how many wrote the exam. Probably you are still in the top one percentile or five percentile or something, but there are not so many seats. So, rank 5,000 will probably fetch you nothing. That doesn’t mean you are a bad student.
