Question: Acharya Ji, how to move towards freedom? How to overcome obstacles in freedom?
Acharya Prashant Ji: You are asking me, “How to move towards Freedom? How to answer the call of Truth? What efforts to make? How to choose?”
You have been listening to me since long. Don’t you watch me? Don’t you observe what I am doing? You keep asking me the same question. What do I do? I try from ten different sides. Don’t I? So what should you do? Try in different ways.
If this, that you are asking for, is really dear to you, what would you do?
Questioner: Try in different ways, to get it.
Acharya Prashant Ji: Try this way, try that way, come back to the first way, jump over to the third way. But never cease trying. Do I have a ready-made way? Do I know in advance what life would throw at me? What questions the audience would have to say to me, do I know that?
Questioner: No.
Acharya Prashant Ji: What do I do?
Questioner: Face the questions.
Acharya Prashant Ji: That would be real followership.
If you really want, you must want it so desperately, that you have no time left to complaint against the results. Before the result of one attempt is declared, you should already be invested in preparing for the next attempt. And so when the results of the previous attempt come to you, you hardly have any time to cry over them. That must be the intensity of your Love.
Questioner: The situation is such that I am not able to move .
Acharya Prashant Ji: Then change the situations, or come out of the situations.
Questioner: I am not able to change.
Acharya Prashant Ji: “I don’t ‘want’ to change. I have stakes.”
Never say, “I cannot do it.” When that which must happen, happens, are you able to stop it? When death will come to you, will you say, “I cannot die”?
Dharma, you must take like death. When it comes, it comes. Unavoidable – irrespective of the situations.
You are in the market place, death comes, would you say, “No, no. Not the right situation”? You are in the loo, death comes, would you say, “Need ten more minutes”?
*If you are really in Love, then you either achieve results within your situations, or* *if you find that within the situation the result cannot be achieved, then you no more allow yourself to be contained by the situation.*
Even kids know that.
And parents too know that when it comes to kids, but parents do not know that for themselves. The kid is unable to study at home, because the situations at home are not conducive. What do the parents do then? They send the kid off to the hostel. He cannot study properly at home, so let him go and study somewhere else.
Parents know that very well when it comes to the kids. Why don’t they apply yardstick to themselves? And if you find it too big a price to pay, remember the price that you are already paying by foregoing the precious years of your only life.
One life, a few years left, and they are all drifting by. How big is this price? Humongously big. The price that you would pay by altering your situations, is a very negligible price in comparison.
Whenever Freedom starts appearing too expensive, do consider the alternative. And then you will see that Freedom at all costs is very affordable.
When Freedom starts appearing too expensive, just consider the alternative. And then you will see whether Freedom is expensive, or the lack of it.
Are the situations arresting you with handcuffs, or are you choosing to stay in those situations? Please. Are the situations chasing you, or have you gone to those situations? And if you move out of those situations, would the situations rush from behind and pull you back?
One thing about spiritual progress is that – one must never label her choices as her ‘helplessness’. *What you are ‘choosing’, with all due respect to your personal notion of your personal welfare, cannot be called as your ‘helplessn*ess’.
You weighed in everything, you considered all factors, and then you said, “On the criteria of personal welfare, this I choose to be the situation I want to be in.” So, it is a well-thought-out, well-considered, deeply-deliberated, conscious decision. How do we now call it our ‘helplessness’?
All I am saying is – there is something that one gains by being in a particular situation, you too are gaining something by being in that situation. There is something that one gains by coming out of that situation.
Impartially, wisely, weigh both of these things, and see.