कामान्यः कामयते मन्यमानः स कामभिर्जायते तत्र तत्र । पर्याप्तकामस्य कृतात्मनस्विहैव सर्वे प्रविलीयन्ति कामाः ॥
kāmānyaḥ kāmayate manyamānaḥ sa kāmabhirjāyate tatra tatra paryāptakāmasya kṛtātmanasvihaiva sarve pravilīyanti kāmāḥ
He who cherishes desires and his mind dwells with his longings, is by his desires born again wherever they lead him, but the man who has won all his desire and has found his soul, for him even here in this world vanish away all desires.
~ Verse 3.2.2
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Acharya Prashant (AP): “He who cherishes desires and his mind dwells with his longings, is by his desires born again wherever they lead him, but the man who has won all his desire and has found his”—the reading with you says ‘soul’, make it ‘self’—“self, from him even here in this world vanish away all desires.”
This has to be read with a lot of care. Otherwise, it will lead into the conceptual mess and misinterpretation which already exists since long and in a great proportion of the population.
“He who remains involved in desires, whose mind remains immersed in desires, is by his desires born again wherever they lead him.”
What is the meaning of ‘born again’ here? For this we have to understand what the current birth is like, because the verse is saying that if you are lost in your desires, then you will be born again where your desires are.
So, a particular place is being talked of; you will be born again where your desires are. The question is: What is the current birth? Where are you right now?
Now, if you look purely in a bodily sense, then you are where you are sitting, where your body is. But human beings are more mind-identified than body-identified. Animals are purely body-identified. Most human beings would not mind being called ugly as much as they would mind being called stupid. It is the mind, a consciousness, the level of the consciousness, whatever the level is—that’s what defines a human being.
And if the mind defines a human being and the body defines an animal, then an animal is where his body is, and a human being is where his mind is. Remember, you are not where your body is; you are where your mind is. That is the reason why in any activity of any importance just being physically present does not mean much; what matters is where your mind is. And there might be situations when you cannot be physically present at a place; but if your mind is there, then it is more or less alright.
So, when it is said that you will be born where your desires are, it simply means that your mind will be where your desires are; you would start a new story where your desires are, and that’s a new birth; you would open a new thread where your desires are, and that’s a new birth. A ‘new birth’ here does not refer to physical birth, the birth of the body; ‘new birth’ refers to mental birth, and the mind keeps on taking several births and rebirths every hour.
And there is ample proof in the Upanishads to conclude that the rebirth they talk of is the rebirth of the mind, when it comes to the lifespan of an individual. And when they talk of the rebirths of the body, then they are not referring to the individual; then what they are saying is that bodies keep coming and going; the body keeps taking rebirth, the body, in the sense that there are bodies today and there will be bodies tomorrow. So, bodies are born again and again, again and again.
So, if you apply a little attention, it will be quite obvious. Fifty of us might be sitting in a hall, but actually we are at our respective mental places. And what are those places? Those places are where our desires are. You are your mind, and the mind is where its desires are, so you are where your desires are.
That obviously does not mean that if you keep desiring the USA—the money, the luxury, the pomp, the lifestyle that it offers—you will be reborn in the US, you will take your next birth in the US. Kindly do not interpret this verse to mean that kind of a juvenile thing. Or that if you keep thinking of the moon always, you will take birth on the moon next. That’s not going to happen.
It merely means that in the mental sense—which is the only sense that counts as far as our existence is concerned. If the mind vanishes, are we even called alive? Look at a patient in coma; his body might be functioning more or less normally, but the mind is gone, the consciousness has ebbed. After a while, even the doctors say that there is not much sense in keeping him alive; they start calling such a person a vegetable. Do you get this?
Physically healthy, mentally no more existent; he is considered next to dead. He is considered next to dead because in human beings life is defined not so much by physical activity but by mental activity. So much so that as long as your brain is functioning, you are not declared dead, and if your brain is gone, then you are surely dead—not even the heart, the brain.
So, as long as the mind stays desirous you will keep starting new stories, and a new story is a new birth. Each story starts with a certain act of doership and wants to end, consummate in an act of consumption. You sow something, and then you want to harvest; you invest at some place, and then you want to reap the profits; you begin a relationship, and then you want the right results—happiness, pleasure, etc.—from it.
Unfortunately, the story rarely proceeds as per the desire. Desire will impel you to initiate a new story—that much desire can surely do; if you are desirous, you will start something. So, desire will start a story, but the story will not move as per the desire. You can start something that you like, but you cannot make it move as per your likes; its movement is governed by other laws, laws that just do not respect your desire.
Therefore, you are free—in a very limited sense of the word ‘free’—to do what you want. A desire arises in you—and of course it’s a conditioned desire, so the word ‘free’ or ‘freedom’ does not accurately apply here, but I am using the word ‘free’ here in the common sense of the word.
So, you are free to do what you want, but you have no freedom in deciding the results of what you do. Go begin a new story as per your desire, but the story, the moment it begins, takes a life of its own, and its life will not be governed by your desire. The story will grow in its own way, and more often than not, you will not like that way; that way will not be the way you had desired or imagined. Therein lies suffering.
And that’s the reason why the verse now proposes a better option. What is the first option? Keep desiring, and with each desire that you patronize you will begin a new story; you will have certain expectations from the story, and those expectations are not going to be fulfilled. That’s the first scenario. Now the Upanishads propose an alternate, superior scenario, which is:
“The man who has won all his desires and has found his Self, for him even here in this world vanish away all desires.”
Now, this is to be understood. What does ‘this world’ mean? ‘This world’ means the world of facts, not where your imaginations are but where the reality is. You might keep imagining of this and that; you might keep regaling yourself with flattering illusions about your condition; living in a dilapidated hut, you might have convinced yourself that you live in a great palace. Do you understand the difference between fact and imagination?
The Rishi is saying that for the one who has found the *Ātman*—he uses the word ’*kṛtātman*’—all desires vanish exactly where he is. What does that mean?
Suppose you are in a hut. What does it mean to be beyond desires even in a hut? Suppose you are in a jail, in captivity; suppose you are surrounded by ill meaning enemies; suppose you are in a position where there is a lot of injustice all around you, and you are someone who has found his Self. Would you still have no desires? Yes, you will have no desires. What would you have then? You would have clarity. You would know what to do.
Understand the difference between acting out of clarity and acting out of desire. Desire keeps the future first, and then from the future it decides a course of action for the present.
What does desire say? “That’s what I want to achieve, that’s where I want to be; it’s a distant place in a distant time. A distant place, a distant time—that’s what I am looking at, and I want to be there. Then I project what I must do today if I want to be there tomorrow.” That’s the common mode of thinking.
“Tomorrow I want to be there, and if that’s where I want to be tomorrow, I need to figure out what I need to do today to be there tomorrow.” That’s the way of desire; that’s action born out of desire. It keeps the future first; at its center is an imagination. When you proceed from desire, then at your center is an imagination: “That’s where I want to reach.”
Whereas, the kṛtātman , the illuminated man, the person of the great true Self, keeps the fact, the present, the reality at the center. That’s what concerns him, and that tells him what to do. He is not working to reach somewhere; wherever he had to reach he has already reached because he is kṛtātman .
The man of imagination is working to reach somewhere; kṛtātman has no place to reach. All journeying and running and arrivals are now behind him. How does he act then? He acts from the fact; he acts from reality. He does not act to reach anywhere; he acts just because he must. Not because he desires a certain result, but because he must.
Now, this is something that will not be very comprehensible to us. What is this must-ness? Desire we very well know; we know what it means to be impelled by the pull of desire. What we do not know is action, strong action, vigorous action, determined action, that does not come from a desire for results but from an appreciation, an understanding of reality.
We really do not have acquaintance with the kind of person who says, “I know how things are, I know the facts of the situation, and because the situation is this way, therefore it needs redressal. I will act not because I need to achieve something, but because there is an impersonal need for action”—and that is called Dharma .
“Not that I am lacking something that I need to gain through my action. No, I am not personally lacking anything. My action might bring me any kind of result, I am not bothered about the result. But being alive, I must act, I have to act. Life is action. Even if I choose not to act, that is an action. I have to act and I know what the reality is like; therefore, I will act in the right way, I will do what I must. I am not acting because I want some fruit, some result from the action. I am acting because there is no alternative; I am acting because action is indispensable. One has to act, and if I have to act, I will act rightly.” It’s as simple as this.
“Something will be done through me this moment, and the next moment, the next moment, the next moment. And I understand, I have clarity, so I will do the right thing. I will just do the right thing, not the thing that fetches me rewards; just the right thing. Rewards I need none. Not that I am so great that I am spurning rewards; it’s just that I don’t need any rewards from action. What I need is of a much higher value, and I have acted rightly to satisfy that need already; that was my first project. Before I undertake any other work, I completed the first work that every individual must complete. I am kṛtātman , I am done; I am kṛtkṛtya , I am done. I am done with all that which needed to be done for my personal self. I am done.
“So, that part of my journey is already over; I have arrived at the destination. Now, being at the destination, I see that I still need to move, because life is movement. Life in Prakriti is a continuous movement. Inwardly, now I do not need any movement, I have arrived; but outwardly, movement is compulsory till the body lasts. There is no option there, there is no alternative. Because the body is there, so action has to be there. Inwardly, I have come to a standstill; I am okay, finished, done. You could call me completely alive or you could call me completely dead, but I am complete.
“Outwardly, there has to be movement, so I move. How do I move? Without desire. But I move with a lot of energy, with determination and dedication”—and that kind of energy and dedication can actually be possible only in desirelessness.
We obviously know the great force of desire. We know how people are greatly motivated when they have something to covet, to go after, to lust. We have seen that, right? We have seen that when a person is hugely desirous, then he is hugely energetic; we know all that. What we have not seen is energy of the man who acts without desire. There is a great difference there. What is the difference?
When the fellow who acts from a center of imagination, a center of desire, finds that his desire is not being fulfilled for long, he will be frustrated, his energy will drop because he is acting on hope. When hope dwindles, his energy will dwindle.
Whereas, the other person is not acting from hope; he is acting from must-ness, he is acting from Dharma , so he can carry on for very, very long—very long in a very high energy state. He can sprint a marathon because he does not want anything. He is running because he must run, so there is no question of disappointment.
You could say, “But sir, you have said that people who are still alive in the bodily sense are never really perfect. You have said that there is nothing called a final enlightenment, that one has to be constantly vigilant; imperfections are never too far away, the bodily tendencies are never fully gone.”
Well, yes. So?
So, you will say, “So, you know, some disappointment will be there. You said there will be no disappointments.”
Alright, point taken. He will be doing his marathon, and in between there would be disappointment and fatigue and many other things that happen to all of us. But relatively he will get over all of that very quickly. That’s the advantage. I hope that satisfies you.
Now, that will not only satisfy you but it also makes this story much more relatable, because perfection is something that you can have no relationship with. Perfection is just a good ideal. And what does ‘ideal’ mean? Something that exists only in ideas.
So, this person who acts not from a center of desire will be able to overcome his disappointments very easily, very smoothly. He will remind himself that an outcome was anyway never the first thing, that the work in the first place was never for a particular result; the work was for the sake of the work itself. So, if results are sour, if results are unsavory, it is irrelevant because the work was anyway never for the sake of results.
So, he will have setbacks, he will have his frustrations and all those things. But none of that will be powerful enough to stop him in his tracks. Maybe he will pause for a while, maybe he will deviate for a while, maybe he will be stranded or lost for a while, but then he will again pick up the speed, pick up the threads. Relatively, compared to the person who acts from the center of desire, this fellow will be far more focused, much less susceptible to distraction.
So, “The man who has won all his desire and has found the Self, for him even here in this world vanish away all desires.”
To him exists only this world, the world of reality. He does not live in illusions. Most of us do not live in real worlds; we live in illusions, like the backbencher in the classroom who is constantly looking out of the window. Is he in the classroom at all? Where is he living? He is peeping into the other classroom across the corridor; he is staring at the football ground; and if the window opens over a road, he is counting the vehicles. Where is he? In the classroom? Not at all. He is not living in the fact; he is living elsewhere. Even when he is looking at the vehicles, he is imagining that one of those vehicles would be soon near him to take him away to his home. Is he living in the fact?
Most of us live like that backbencher. Our association with reality is very weak. We live in our very imaginary universes. The man who has conquered his desire, understood his mind, does not need to live in desire. He knows how things are. Things might be great, things might be bad; to him things are neither good nor bad, to him things are as they are. And knowing perfectly how things are, he knows perfectly what his actions must be like.
Why does he act at all? Well, all that we can say is: he does not act for himself. He has no personal self left to act for. What does he act for, then? Well, as long as this universe exists, there would be plenty of reasons, plenty of causes that would demand action. He acts for those causes.
I repeat, his personal needs are all met already. His personal story finished long back. Now he exists to restore order wherever he is; now he exists to restore Dharma wherever he is.
“But sir, what if he is at a place where there is nothing wrong at all? What will this person do then?”
He will relax. He will relax because he has no inner compulsion to act. He is anyway always relaxing within. And if the situations do not really merit any action, demand any action, he will be very comfortable not acting at all; that will be the right action. So, he will then display what is very difficult for most people: an ability to unconditionally and unapologetically relax.
The condition of the commoner is that when action is demanded out of him he is found short of energy: you demand action, and he won’t be able to act in the way that is required. And if there is a situation where he can fully relax, you will find that he is not able to fully relax either. That’s the commoners situation.
When he needs to act, he cannot act; when he needs to relax, he finds he cannot relax. Isn’t that how most of us are? In the office you are scolded because you are not diligent enough, and then you get scolded by your spouse because you can’t keep the laptop or the phone away at home. Your boss is scolding you because when you are in the office you cannot keep the wife away, and your wife is scolding you because when you are on the vacation, you cannot keep the boss away.
We neither work nor relax. That’s the punishment for lack of self-knowledge. The kṛtātman can lie as actionless as a python. There is an entire Gita devoted to the kṛtātman : it is called the Ajagar Gita , the Python Gita. When he will relax, he will be totally unapologetic. When he will work, he will be unstoppable.
Most of us, because we do not work deeply enough, remain apologetic about our relaxation; we carry what you can call as a guilty conscience. Because our work is not yet complete, therefore our sleep is interrupted by nightmares involving work. In the day you didn’t complete the work, so in the night you are having bad dreams about the incomplete work. Had the work not been left incomplete, you would have had no dreams about the incomplete work. So, the day is bad because you didn’t work hard enough, and the night is bad because the day is bad.
You think it is today that you have come upon the cool catch phrase, ‘work hard, party hard’. The Rishis were the first to coin it and they knew the real essence of this. To you it is just a cool catch phrase; to them it was something arising out of realization.
Remember that only the kṛtātman can work hard and then sleep hard. The one who has little self-knowledge, very little realization, shallow attention, no spiritual orientation—such a person can neither work hard nor party hard; he will be a middling fellow, a mediocre thing in everything that he does.
And the world is full of such beings who belong neither here nor there. When they are working, they are sleeping; when they are sleeping, they are trying to work. At the end of their life they discover that they have neither worked nor slept, and the time has come for the final long sleep.
Being able to work hard is a privilege. Very, very few people can afford to work hard. It is not a decision, mind you; it is your being. Unless your being is illuminated, your very existence is not right; you just cannot work hard even if you want to.
You may decide at 7 a.m. in the morning, “Today I will work very, very hard”—as most people do, no? You are supposed to have morning resolutions; you want to belong to the 5 a.m. club. Fancy things, you know—5 a.m. club. So, you say, “I too will get up and do this thing, that thing.”
Fine. Try! You will soon find you can author an alternate book, “The 8 a.m. club”, which will tell how everything that you decide at 5 a.m. gets shattered by 8 a.m.—and this club will have huge membership. Even those who belong to the 5 a.m. club will be secretly enrolling in the 8 a.m. club. What do you think, they are all illumined fellows? It’s just that it is cool to act the poster boy and make others jealous of you.
Working hard does not come from your decisions; it comes from your being. You have to be the right person to work rightly.
This might not go down well with most people. They will say, “No, no, no! It’s just that we have not chosen to work hard till now. Tomorrow we will decide to work hard and we will work hard!”
Sir, please do decide and test. Please do decide, at least once, to work hard, and then see whether you can.
It’s like the 135 kg meatball declaring that tomorrow morning he will do the treadmill for 45 minutes. And very confidently he says, “I could have done it any day I wanted, it’s just that I didn’t choose to. Tomorrow, if I choose to, of course I can do it!”
Well, for 45 minutes you can at most stand on the treadmill, sir—that too if your legs can afford that.
But we remain confident: “No, no, no, it’s a matter of deciding. The moment I decide that I want to do this, I will do this!”
You are incapable. You cannot work hard. It’s not that you have not chosen the right life till this moment; you are incapable of making the right decisions. Try and test. It’s a challenge. Try!
But you won’t even try, because somewhere you know it would expose your self-deception. So, you say, “No, no, there is no need to test; I know in advance. My old Ambassador can do 150 km/h any day I want it to fly—any day! It’s just that I choose to drive it at 25 km/h. It’s a choice, you know; it’s a choice.”
It’s not a choice, sir; it’s a compulsion. Try taking it beyond 60; it won’t accelerate, it will disintegrate. I hope the difference is clear.
That’s our life. It moves at 25 and we pompously keep assuming and declaring that any day we want it can move at 250. We want to call our compulsions our choices. There is no choice there; there is just bondage.
Questioner (Q): The description of the kṛtātman illumines me and inspires me to be like him, and the process to achieve that would probably be called as sādhana (spiritual practice). But wouldn’t this practice with this aim be just another future-oriented effort, action from the center of desire, as we discussed before? How to understand sādhana correctly in this context?
AP: You see, one thing the Upanishads are very clear about—and that’s the most important thing that we too must have clarity on.
Right action does not arise from a vision of the future. It’s just that since long, in popular culture, there is just too much undue respect for visionaries. That is because Vedanta hardly ever became the mainstream thing at any time, for various reasons.
So, we keep thinking that the greatest kind of action is when you have the greatest imagination in your vision. This thinking is so deeply ingrained in our culture here and elsewhere across the world, that it appears intuitive to everybody. Set a goal, go after it; decide where you want to be and choose a road accordingly; have a target—such things. Because these things are so deeply prevalent in culture, therefore they penetrate spirituality as well—not true spirituality but pop-spirituality, the common kind of spirituality.
So, the common kind of spirituality is borrowing from culture, it leans on culture. It does not correct the culture or purify the culture or give birth to culture; instead, it is a slave to culture, it is a slave to the going conditions. Therefore, you will find the wrong kinds of spiritual teachers talking a lot about culture. What does spirituality have to do with culture? But they find a great need to talk of culture because their spirituality is nothing but a slave to culture. All that they know is culture and conditioning, and they want to uphold the cultural conditioning.
So, they allow culture to dominate their brand of spirituality, which means that if culture says that you must have a vision, they will say that your sādhana must have a vision, because their spirituality is following popular culture. In popular culture, every action must follow a vision; therefore, the pop-spirituality also follows a vision. They will say your sādhana will have this kind of target, and a lot of people will be lured towards that kind of sādhana . They say, “If you do this sādhana , then you will get such results.”
So, the results are told in advance. Like a company luring prospective employees; the salary is told in advance. “You come and you will get such a thing.” Or a shopkeeper attracting buyers. He will not say, “You come here and you will be desireless!” Will he say that? No, he will say, “If you come here, this is what you will get.” The vision is sold in advance, and then the real sale happens. The vision is given for free, and then the customer is charged.
The vision is free, the thing is charged. And the thing can be charged only when the vision is given for free, because if the vision is not there, the thing will not sell. Do you see this? That thing will not sell if, first of all, the shopkeeper doesn’t disburse the vision for free. That’s how it happens in popular culture, and then that takes in its fold the shallow kind of spirituality as well.
So, one fellow is asking, “What kind of sādhana do I need to do so that I can read the minds of others?” The vision is already clear to him: “Please tell me the kind of sādhana that enables the seeker to read others’ minds.” Somebody must have told him all this.
Actually, you do not need somebody to tell this to you; eight kinds of siddhis are popularly known to exist. And if you do not know the exact meaning of those *siddhis*—anima , laghima , garima , and all those—then you can easily misinterpret them to mean these kind of things, you know, that some siddhi will be there, and you will be able to read the other’s mind and such things.
But we are right now not talking about the real meanings of those aṣṭasiddhi , we are talking about sādhana that proceeds from a vision. The beginning point itself is desire: “If I do this sādhana , I will reach such a place. If I do this sādhana , I will acquire such powers.” It’s obviously quite nonsensical.
Sādhana must not proceed with a vision in the eye. It must start with a realization of your current bondages. With chains around your neck and on your arms and legs, obviously your vision cannot be to visit Disneyland. What will you do there? You have to start from your current condition, and your current condition is of bondage. That’s what you have to look at.
Instead, most spiritual sādhana is about Disneyland, la-la land, and such places. The so-called seeker does not want to look at his bondages, and the so-called guru has no commercial interest in telling the seeker of his bondages. But there is great commercial interest in selling Disneyland tickets. “You carry all your chains and come with me to Disneyland! There is that great pool there, you will enjoy swimming”—and you are being sold the vision of that wonderful pool. What will you do in that pool with your legs and your arms tied? All that you can do there is sink. But you will happily buy the ticket, and the guru is happy; the “*sādhana*” is selling.
Real sādhana is not some premeditated, prescripted activity. It is a continuous encounter of all that which limits your life. Real sādhana is a continuous 24-hour challenge to all that which circumscribes your freedom. It is not about sitting in a corner and doing this, that, some kriya , some paddhati , some pūjā , some chanting, some mantra—all that is just pitiable self-delusion.
All that you have is your reality, this one life. Imaginations are just fluff; keep them away. Please look at how things really are with you. Don’t shy away from the facts. And if you are looking honestly at the facts, you will know what needs to be set right. Nobody will need to come to you and tell you a particular course of action; you will just know—just know. That’s the power of facts. If you really are courageous enough to know the fact, you will now also instantaneously know what to do next.
Q: The right action is what the world requires, but if the world economy was to be structured around it, then wouldn’t that make most of the prevalent jobs and business models obsolete? Can such an economy even work?
AP: Work for whom? And work for what purpose? What do you mean by ‘work’? When you say the economy is working today, what do you mean by that? You mean that today there is a certain system of prevailing conditions and today’s economics is supporting that system. You want the prevailing conditions to continue? Economics, obviously, is inseparable from the way the world order is, and the world order is inseparable from the way man’s inner order is. Are you alright with these two, how man is within and how the world is without?
You are talking of maintaining the status quo as if the status quo is heavenly. You are asking me, “Will a new kind of economics work?” as if the current economics is really working. Look at your assumption. Is it functional, or is it deeply dysfunctional and we are living in a dystopia?
It is such a common argument, that if people become spiritual, what will happen to economics? I mean, why aren’t you asking what kind of economics is promoted by people who are not spiritual? Economics is just human activity. If man changes, economics will change; economics will not disappear, economics will change. A lot will change.
Today you work for the sake of results, and results in economics is money, right? It is money that matters, so people want to snatch money from each other. But if you are really spiritual, you will work for the sake of work; money will become irrelevant. Obviously, there would be an economic upheaval. Somebody will come to take away your money, and you will have no problems because it is not money you worked for.
Right now, everything is money-centric. And if people work at all, it is because they want money. And because everything is money-centric, therefore there is very little emphasis on right work, and all the emphasis is on counting notes.
Obviously a lot of things will change. The very definition of richness will change. Today the rich person is the one who has the maximum money. If the world turns spiritual, can you see who will be called rich? The one who has the greatest work to do; he will be the richest person. And the great thing is: you cannot tax this person, nor can you take away his riches.
Today, the rich are in constant insecurity; their richness can evaporate any moment, the stock market might crash. Because the super rich are typically feasting on their shareholding, it’s not cash that they have in the bank, so their networth can reduce to half over a period of a few hours. Obviously there is a lot of insecurity continuously, because your riches are outside of you and dependent on unpredictable conditions.
So, a lot of energy of mankind just goes towards protecting money, and obviously when you are spending so much time and effort in just protecting money, you are not creating value, or are you? How will you have time to really work rightly if so much of your time is going towards earning and defending and securing money?
Can you imagine the kind of frontiers that you will open up if you do not need to defend money? Can you imagine the creative possibilities?
Today, our workspace, rather workscape, is very distorted. We do not do what must be done; we do that which will fetch us money. So, we are not really creating the right value because a lot of that which you are doing—you understand creation of value? Creation of something that has real value. A lot of the work that we do does not amount to creation of value; it only amounts to creation of money—not even creation of money, but accumulation of money.
And money, mind you, does not always follow value. You can have something very valuable but it might not be valued by the society; therefore, it will not fetch you much money. At the same time, you might have something of zero value, but it might be valued by the society, and you will find yourself mega rich.
That’s what happens when you are not spiritual and your value system is distorted. In the economy, money starts chasing very hollow, very meaningless things. The things have no intrinsic value at all, but a lot of money is chasing them in a very hot way. All this is just distortion in economics, is it not?
But when you are a spiritual person, then your work will be directed solely towards value creation. Whether the thing of value that you create is awarded money by the society or not, you will say, “I do not bother whether this thing that I am creating is going to fetch me money; I am not bothering about that. I am kṛtātman . It suffices that I know that this thing that I have created is a thing of value.” If there are many such persons like this, if there are entire societies like this, can you imagine the creative output? Can you imagine?
Today, people do what will fetch them money, and what will fetch you money is what people consider worth putting money on. So, you are not being innovative; you are just being a servant to the people. Real innovation people might not understand, so you will not risk real creativity and real innovation; you will instead, let’s say, in the name of innovation, come up with a cute app that delivers food to people’s doorstep—you know, an accumulator kind of app—and you will earn lots of money and you will come up with an IPO, and people will say you are super smart.
But what is the value you have created? Please tell me, what value have you created? Has any real value been created? No, just that you have grown rich—and that’s all that you wanted: money. You had never sought richness in work; all you had ever sought was richness in your bank account, and you got that: your IPO is oversubscribed by eight times. And what are you doing? Collecting food from here and delivering it there, and you have made thousands of crores. Tell me, what is the value you have created? But then, creating value was never an objective at all.
Such a person suffers and such an economy suffers. And at the root of this suffering is just an absence of spiritual values. The other day I was saying:
Good spirituality is good economics.
Q: Can we say that value creation is about something that uplifts the consciousness of man?
AP: Yes, exactly that. What do you mean by creating value in the economy? Creating value in the economy means creating goods and services and an environment that uplifts you in the direction of the right values. A thing is valuable if it can add value to your inner life.
Why am I saying ‘inner life’? Why am I not saying ‘outer life’? Because what is valuable in your outer life is determined by how your inner life is. If you are inwardly insane, then how will you know what is valuable to you in your outer life? For example, in the outer life we all wear clothes. If you are insane inwardly, will you know the right clothes to wear?
So, first of all, value has to be created inside. What does it mean to create value inside? Lift your consciousness. And once your consciousness is high enough, pure enough, you know what is valuable outside as well, and what is not valuable, what is not to be respected.
All that uplifts you is valuable. All that drags you down is not to be valued, valueless.
And that’s how all goods and services in the economy must be assessed: What is this thing going to do to my consciousness? What is the value of an expensive mobile to me? I must know what it is going to do to my consciousness, what is the purpose I am going to use it for.
What am I getting this new camera for? I might be getting a new camera because I want to shoot a documentary that will expose the destruction of glaciers to the world and will therefore help raise environmental consciousness; that might be one reason I might want a camera. The other reason I want a camera is because I want to shoot a pornographic film and make money. Why do I want to have that camera?
If I need the camera for the right reason, then the camera deserves to be bought even if it is very expensive, because it is valuable. If I need the camera for the wrong reasons, then I should throw away the camera even if it is given to me for free, because it holds no value for me, because instead of uplifting my consciousness it will degrade my consciousness.
So, every thing has to be looked at from the point of view of consciousness. What is it going to do to you once it enters your life? If it is going to help you in the inner sense, get it at whatever cost possible; and if it is going to corrupt you inwardly, throw it away even if you get it for free. That’s how real economics must work.
But for real economics to work, first of all you need to have real people. The moment you find that people are making decisions based on their consciousness, you will find that the marketplace is now automatically full of goods that uplift you because that’s what the people are now demanding.
Can you imagine how the entire scenario will change? You go to a shop and you will find that all the things that were principally used just to defile your inner self are now suddenly gone, they are nowhere in the shelves—why? Because there are no takers anymore. People are now conscious; people do not want rubbish. All the flesh items have gone off the menu—why? Because people don’t want them anymore.
That’s the kind of economics we want: where people decide the value of a thing based on how it will contribute to their inner life. Consciousness has to be the criteria: What is this thing going to do to my consciousness?
Q: One of the main objectives of economics is to figure out how to distribute resources in the society. Could you please elaborate on how this would be handled in a spiritual economy?
AP: First of all, what do you call a resource? When you say you want to distribute resources, what do you mean by a resource? A resource is a sādhana , and a sādhana is meaningful only when there is a sādhya . What is sādhya ? An objective, a target.
So, when you say these are resources, what do you mean by resources? You are saying you want to distribute resources, but what for exactly? Do you even know what you are going to use those things for? Distribution comes way later.
You have five knives and you have five kids, and you are saying there must be equal distribution of resources. Are you distributing resources or misery? First of all, have you taught those kids what is worthy of having in life, what to use any resources for? Or do you just want to put knives or money in their hand? Without teaching a person what to do with money, if you just redistribute money, I am asking, are you distributing money or misery?
People are poor for several reasons; lack of opportunity is just one of the reasons. You can have that kind of a mindset: “I will either print more money, or I will tax the rich, and then I will redistribute everything”—and the underlying reasons that made those people poor are still very much there, and you have put money in their hands. Will the money last?
When you understand that the most important thing in life is consciousness, then your first priority is not the distribution of resources or any such thing; then your first priority, in compassion, is to create conditions where the entire population can have an elevation of consciousness. The kids must know what to value; the adults must know what to live for. And when you know what to live for, then the tendency to accumulate is far lesser.
There is this metric called the Gini coefficient in economics; it measures the skew in wealth distribution. Typically across the world, the top two to three percent of the people have ninety to ninety-five percent—or even more—of the wealth. Why does a person need to accumulate so much wealth? Because he does not know what to do in life. And when such a thing happens, then you start talking of resource distribution and such things.
Now, redistribution is not the answer; the answer is education. You have to educate those who indulge in accumulation. Had those people been spiritually educated in the first place, accumulation would have not happened at all.
But instead of addressing the root cause, what you are saying is: “We will take money from those people and distribute it to the poor, or we will generate money in some way, and we will borrow from overseas donors or from the central bank, and we will put cash in the hands of the poor”—without firstly understanding why the poor are poor, and why so much money has been hoarded by just a few people. You do not want to address that faulty human tendency. Address that tendency, and so much else that you are forced to do today will not be needed anymore.
The world over we have been crying aloud, “Let’s remove poverty, let’s get rid of poverty,” such things. What has happened? On an average, yes, today the world is more prosperous than it ever was in its history. But, at the same time, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened immensely. And so, relative poverty today is as deep as it ever was.
In an absolute sense, on a per capita basis, people today have more money compared to their father or grandfathers; that is good. But then, people live in their minds, and the mind lives in comparison. In a relative sense, probably even those who are in the middle class today are poorer than what they were hundred years back in spite of having more money, because the upper classes have just moved into stratospheric economic zones.
So, tell me, have you been able to really get rid of poverty? And the process is only accelerating. Each passing day more and more money is getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Why can’t we address the root cause? Why can’t we address that hollow in man’s being which he tries to desperately fill with money and keeps failing? And the more he fails, the harder he tries, the more he accumulates.
Money can buy you stuff. Money cannot tell you what to buy—and that’s the entire thing. There is so much you can have with money, but not even all the money in the world will be able to tell you what to do with that money; that wisdom can come only from spirituality. Only spirituality can tell you to what extent money is useful to you and what is it that money cannot fetch you.
When you know what money cannot fetch you, then you do not indulge in money beyond a point. Now you know that money is useful to this extent, so you must have this much money, and beyond this point money is anyway not going to help, so there is no point making efforts to have money beyond this point. Beyond this point something else helps; I will go after that.
All the economic theories, all the economic systems, are predicated on this premise, based on this assumption: that the goal of man’s action is to have more money. This they call as welfare, or even luxury. In some theories they say maximization of luxury is the objective of man’s efforts. But even this luxury that they are talking of is just money, material things.
So, all the economics that we see is inherently faulty because it assumes that all that man wants is material comforts. No economic theory takes into account that what man really wants is liberation, not monetization.
All the economic theories start from a fundamentally flawed assumption, and therefore all that they say is very limited and often harmful, and leads to the kind of inner deprivation that we see all around. When your very system is founded on the idea that man must live for money, then you are compelling man to live for money. And when man lives for money, then he lives a very poor life.
Q: Generally, I see that the common people have very little vision. Is there something called the right vision? Would it make a difference if people had the right vision?
AP: You can call it right vision, but the difference between wrong vision and right vision will be that wrong vision will come from fancy imaginations, and right vision will come from immediate, naked facts. Even if you want to have a vision—if that’s how you want to put it in words—then right vision is that which springs from the open, naked, uncovered facts of your present life. That’s the right vision.
The right vision will never be something that you superimpose on the unseemly, ugly facts; the right vision would always be something that challenges your current condition, not something that decorates your current condition, not something that helps you float away into a dreamland because you cannot stand your current condition.
The right vision will not take you far away; the right vision will be all about challenging things as they really, truly are in front of you. And therefore, the right vision cannot have space for future, because you just cannot know what will happen when you challenge your conditions. All that you know is that you need to challenge; what you can never practically know is what will happen when you challenge.
Whereas, the wrong kind of vision will always be about a particular result, a particular endpoint, a particular fairytale scenario: “That’s where I want to reach.” The problem is, the point you envision reaching is actually the point that your bonded self envisions reaching; therefore, that point that you want to reach is just an extension of your bondage.
Therefore, the common kind of envisioning is just stupid. You are just imagining a furtherance of your current state, and your current state is not good at all. Like a drunkard totally obsessed with liquor, and hence reduced to dire poverty, is envisioning that one day he will be enjoying the costliest kind of liquor.
That’s how all visions are, mind you—all visions. The drunkard has been reduced to deep poverty because he is a drunkard, and therefore he is envisioning that one day he will be relishing the costliest drinks. That’s how our visions are. Even in your vision you are just furthering your tendency to drink.
In his vision he is a rich man, so that much he is able to change. So, the future he is envisioning as different from today—in what sense? “Today I am poor, tomorrow I will be rich.” But beneath the change there is something that he has assured, that remains constant, unchanging—what is that? To remain a drunkard: “And tomorrow, too, I will be a drunkard. In fact, I will use the riches that I will get tomorrow as per my vision just to have a costlier drink.”
That’s how all visions are. They do not exist to fundamentally change something within you; they exist to change your outer conditions so that your inner condition does not need to change. You want to change your outer conditions just to secure your inner condition: “I want to have more money so that I can drink a more sophisticated brand.”
The real vision will have no place to go to, it will only have a place to fight at. “This is my battleground, this is where I need to act. Where will things flow from here? I neither know nor care to know. I have no dreams for the future; I only have an urgency for the present. I have no imagination for tomorrow; I only have an imperative for today. And if I do what is imperative today, tomorrow will flow from today.” It does, usually, no?
Q: How to know the right time to stop? Actions may lead to further actions, and one can remain caught in them. When should one stop?
AP: No, you can never stop. As long as you are alive the flow of action will continue. So, there is no stopping as far as the limbs are concerned, as far as the mind is concerned. Till your last moment, your body will be functional, your mind will be functional. Stopping can occur only in an inner sense.
Your inner self is continuously moving to attain a certain contentment. When you go to the root of your inner discontentment, you find something: that which you find is called contentment. But that contentment is found only when you are courageous enough to not only face your discontentment but actually penetrate it.
Penetrate your discontentment and see what you get. It will not be as per your definitions, but what you get, that you can call as contentment. Not the contentment of your dreams, not the contentment that you have so far experienced in life; it will be something different. Whatever it is, call it contentment, provided you have honestly penetrated your discontentment.
So, there will be that inward cessation of movement, that inward cessation of knocking from door to door, that wandering across the landscape of misery—that will stop. And once that stops, then journeying in the usual flow of life is called joy. Now you can journey having stopped. You get into things, you commit to things, you fight hard, you win, you lose, there are so many things that happen. But inwardly, you are unperturbed; inwardly, you have arrived; inwardly, you have stopped. No thing means the inner self to you anymore.
It’s not that things have lost their meaning; things retain their meaning, but no thing now means the Truth to you; no thing now means the Self to you. Things mean what things must. You lost a laptop? You lost a laptop, you didn’t lose your heart.
It seems obvious when I put it this way, but then, go meet someone who has just lost his laptop, and you will know that the poor fellow feels that he has indeed lost his heart. Or, if a laptop appears too material to you, then go to someone who has just lost a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse or a lot of money, and you will know what is meant by a person feeling as if he has lost his or her heart.
Once you have arrived in the inner sense, then things remain things; nothing becomes the heart to you. You lose a thing, you feel sad; you feel sad because you lost a thing, and you feel only as sad as the loss of a thing deserves. You win a thing, you feel happy; but you feel only as happy as the achievement of a thing deserves. Nothing gets added or reduced within, be it an achievement or a loss.
So, keep doing the right things; there is no question of asking where to stop. You should stop when it comes to things that you must not do. And if there are things that you must do, why ask where to stop? Continue. All that requires that you first of all observe life and do not continue with an unnecessary thing within. Find it, face it, drop it.
Q: If all choice is conditioned, then what is the point in trying to be better or making the right choice? How is there any hope in getting better if the position one is in is intrinsically incapable of improvement?
AP: No, please understand. You cannot accelerate from 25 to 250 in your Ambassador. You cannot change your speed from 25 to 250 as long as you stick to that Ambassador. If you want to change your speed, it is possible; don’t be hopeless. 250 is possible, but not if you are obsessed with your Ambassador. That’s the message.
We are not saying that you are condemned to remain at 25 or 45; what we are saying is that if you retain your being as it is, then you are just fooling yourself by thinking that one day you will fly at 250. Your Ambassador will never fly at 250. It’s not a question of choice, it’s a question of JC (joint control); we said it will disintegrate. The damn thing is not designed to go beyond whatever limit.
So, I hope I am not giving the impression that our fate has been sealed and no change is possible. Rather, what I am saying is that change is possible only when you firstly decide to bring about a deeper underlying change. Want to change the speed? Firstly change the car. Without changing the car, you won’t be able to change the speed beyond a limit. Is that clear now?
So, it’s not then a matter of choice while retaining your being; it is a matter of choosing to change your being if you really love to make the right choice. Let your love for your choice be so strong that you are prepared to drop your being for it. You say, “If being myself I cannot get the right thing or drop the wrong thing, then I will drop myself.”
I am wearing a very expensive jacket, an extremely expensive jacket, and I am very fond of it. It caught fire—what do I do? That’s the thing.
You will not be able to save yourself if you want to keep wearing your old self. Drop your old self if you want to save yourself.
What is the point in running hither and thither, calling up the fire brigade, and googling for a water tank while remaining obsessed with your pretty jacket? “You know, I want the fire people to come and douse the fire.” Why not do the straightforward thing? Throw the damn jacket away! Why are you taking all kinds of self-deceptive measures? And you are convincing yourself: “See? I am working so hard to put out the fire to save myself!”
If you really want to save yourself, don’t call the fire people or the ambulance; just get rid of the jacket.
But that’s what we do: we keep wearing our being, our flawed being, our false being, and then we work very, very hard to douse the fire. Our entire life we are firefighting. Why? Because we won’t give up the jacket.
Life need not be so tough; we have made it unnecessarily tough. What’s worse, we are fighting the wrong battles. So, things would have been tolerable had the battle been tough but right; what we have is a double-whammy: our battle is tough and wrong, which means that even if you win it you get nothing. The fire people might actually come and douse the fire, but your jacket is inherently inflammable; tomorrow it will again catch fire.
So, even if you succeed in putting out the fire, you have obtained nothing because tomorrow you will again find yourself burning. Tough battles are alright, provided they are the right battles. But it is extremely foolish to fight a tough battle which is also not going to yield you any results, even a victory.
So, fight hard and fight without concern for what happens tomorrow, but fight the right battle. No point putting so much energy in foolish battles.
Q: Does living life like a kṛtātman mean that you have an on-off button for yourself?
AP: No, you don’t live “like” a kṛtātman ; you can’t emulate these things. You live as kṛtātman . I hope I am not giving any blueprints or role models or stereotypes to follow; I hope I am not just feeding your imagination. That’s what happens: in spite of one’s best efforts, one finds that somewhere words fail to communicate what needs to be told.
Repeat the question please.
Q: Does living life like a kṛtātman mean that you have an on-off button for yourself?
AP: It’s an automatic on and off button, even if there is one. You don’t operate that button, you are aham (ego); Ātman operates that button. Kṛtātman means: now the Ātman is the operator. You have given away, surrendered the rights to operate; you are no more the operator, the runner, the owner, the manager, the executor; you are the follower, the servant.
And you won’t even know when to switch on and when to switch off; it just happens then—just happens. You get a knack for the right thing and you can sniff out the wrong thing, within and without. Without a method, without a process, no algorithm—it just happens; you know what is the right thing to do.
In fact, you respond rightly even without knowing the right response. That’s more accurately put. You respond rightly even without knowing the right response; you bypass the mental faculty of knowing. There is no need to know and then act; acting becomes instantaneous; action follows Ātman . No intellectual justification is needed.
Later on, if somebody comes and pesters you for a justification, then you can stitch together some kind of a story and tell him, “You know, I did such a thing for such a reason.” But no reason is real because the happening was actually without a reason. Later on you can fabricate a reason, that’s fine, but the thing happened absolutely without a reason, and it is right; it is reasonless and right.
Now, what I am saying here is pretty dangerous because exactly the same kind of a thing happens when you are totally conditioned as well; it’s just that then it is reasonless and wrong. When you have absolute clarity, then it is reasonless and right; when you are absolutely conditioned, then it is reasonless and wrong.
So, one has to tread carefully. Reasonlessness is not sufficient. Even animals are often reasonless; they operate on instinct rather than reason. So, mere reasonlessness is not sufficient. Reasonlessness arising out of clarity—you are so clear that you do not need to think; you are so clear that even thought is a disturbance now. You are so clear that you have cleared yourself away from the scene. Your life is now clear of you—that’s clarity.
The scene is absolutely clean because you are nowhere to be seen; you were the pollutant. You are gone so the scene is clean. That is called clarity.
Q: How to not let the ego reward itself while doing the right action?
AP: No, you want a reward only when you are famished. What if the ego is already rewarded and then, out of the reward, out of the completion, it decides to act?
See, your car is short of fuel, really short of fuel, and you are deep into night and looking for a fuel station. How pleasurable is the ride? And you do come upon a station; the map indicated there exists a station 8 kilometers ahead of you, and you reach it. And what do you find? It’s closed because it is 2 a.m.—and what have you done? You have burned whatever few drops of fuel you had in coming up to this point. How do you feel?
And now you hinge your hopes on the next dot appearing in the map. There is the next station there ahead of you, 6 kilometers. The car is great, the road is empty, the breeze is cool—how are you feeling? Very miserable. Because you are empty from within and you are seeking a place that will fill you up—literally fill you up—so the ride is a misery.
That’s how most people ride through life: constantly looking for a place that will fill them up. And unfortunately, such fuel stations do not exist. Some do fill you up—half a liter, one liter—you move for a while, and then you again find the dashboard is warning you: blink, blink, blink; low fuel, low fuel, low fuel. So, again you are rushing towards the next place that offers to fill you up.
Now, contrast this to someone whose tank is already full, 55 liters, and the scene is great, the breeze is cool, and the highway is wonderful—how does he drive through life? In joy, because he is already rewarded, because he is already full.
So, it’s not necessary that the ego works for rewards; it is possible to live the kind of life where you are already full and hence able to enjoy life. And if you are not already full, then you are not enjoying life; then you are just somehow existing. All your struggle is then to exist in the psychological sense—not enjoy, just exist, because you are insecure. And when you are insecure, your aim is not enjoyment but existence.
The first thing is to get rid of that inner insecurity, and that inner insecurity you will not remove through some gas station or fuel counter; the method will be spiritual. Fill yourself up inwardly, and then go wherever life takes you. You will do the right thing, because wrong things are done only when you are hollow within; that’s the only reason wrongness happens in life.
What can you do? You feel that compulsion: “I know that road is infested by robbers, but that’s also the road that probably has a fuel station, so I will go that way. What can I do? I am helpless.” That’s how wrong decisions are made in life: out of a feeling of inner helplessness, which is an inner vacancy. That makes you helpless, and then you go down all the wrong roads and get robbed, obviously.
So, get rid of that sense that “I am this, that; if I achieve that I will be alright…” The method won’t be material; the next job promotion or a bigger flat or a fancy spouse will not fill your inner hollow. The method has to be spiritual.
And when you are totally compact from inside, fully loaded—as that ad used to say, “Fill it, shut it, forget it”—then you can forget all about your psychological welfare. Fill it, shut it, forget it—what do you do then? Go for a ride. The weather is great.
The weather is great only when “Fill it, shut it, forget it”; otherwise, you are on the highway for the fuel. The fuel is not helping you traverse the highway; rather, you are on the highway for the sake of the fuel. The fuel is no more your resource; rather, you are a resource for the sake of the fuel.