Made mistakes? It's ok! || Acharya Prashant, with IIT-Hyderabad (2022)

Questioner (Q): Sir, my question is about handling pressure—the pressure of expectations. Sir, when God in Bhagavad Gita says that a human being is bound to make mistakes, why society is not ready to accept mistakes? Everybody is judged in the end by only results. How would you work if you make a simple mistake and your graph nosedives always?

It is not only with education or career, I am seeing this in every field. We expect the same from our children. Our families expect the same from us. My question is, has Bhagavad Gita lost relevance in the present times, or we human beings are not worth the Bhagavad Gita?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Thank you. The answer is so simple, we all miss it. You see, we are two. This unit called the human being is not one but two things within, so it’s not elemental, right? There’s the two of us—that which is true, perfect, blemish-less, that which Vedant calls as the True Self or Atma, and there is the body-mind complex that we share with animals, and that which can be called as Prakriti.

So, the human being is Prakriti and Atma. Prakriti is our reality. Atma is our potentiality. And because we remain at a large distance from that potential, therefore we can rightly call ourselves almost purely Prakritik. We are the body and we are the consciousness arising from that body.

In that sense, we are much the same as animals. Animals, too, have their body, and the body has the genetic code, and the consciousness arises from that code, and all animals act and behave as per their bodily constitution, and so do all human beings. The only difference is that human beings, potentially, have something else possible to them, just potentially. But that potential is extremely lucrative. We want to be there.