Ahimsa

Freedom begins when a person stops handing over the authority of life to others. Society, family, and tradition can offer opinions, rewards, or disapproval, but they cannot truly stop someone unless there is inner dependence on their approval. Many conflicts that appear external are rooted in psychological dependence, fear, greed, obligation, or the desire for validation. Clarity does not come from controlling every outcome; it comes from ensuring that decisions are not driven by inner confusion, and then allowing life to unfold naturally.

The climate crisis is not merely an external environmental problem but a reflection of inner human greed, desire, and psychological disorder. Drawing from the Gita’s idea of yagya as desireless action, it says real ecological healing requires inner transformation. Outer pollution, exploitation, and destruction mirror the ego’s inner confusion, making personal consciousness and planetary health deeply inseparable.

Gen Z isn't rebellious or individualistic - they're simply following their generation's conditioning, just as previous generations followed theirs. Real rebellion begins with honest inquiry into why you live as you do. The primitive restlessness driving all humans remains unchanged; only its expression differs. True freedom requires questioning borrowed desires, recognizing that your ambitions, tastes, and choices aren't genuinely yours. Vedanta teaches this: stop chasing false questions and confront who you actually are beneath all conditioning.

You are not truly young, you carry centuries of inherited beliefs, prejudices, and conditioning. Youth is the ability to change and create the new, not follow fixed patterns. Before asking what to do next, question and free yourself from the past. Only by breaking from inherited constraints can genuine freshness emerge.

Acharya Prashant (AP): That which you call “Vipassana” today, is a very recent phenomenon. They claim that it comes from the Buddha, actually, it is not. The stream flowing from Buddha got extinct around the 8th or 10th century AD. This modern Vipassana came up in Burma, just around a…

Listener: Why is it that people don’t recognise?

Acharya Prashant: There is nobody who does not recognises. Everybody recognises. They just don’t speak about it, it’s a secret. It’s a well kept secret. If you speak about it you will be ostracized.

L1: Because you are then a threat…

Question: Dear Sir, a few questions:

Why am I so attracted to the personality and mannerisms of all my teachers, often curious about their lives than the truth of their teachings? When I read Jiddu Krishnamurti(JK), am I conditioned by him? Is JK’s method really ‘via negativa’ all the time?…

Who is a practical man? One who understands before acting. To be practical means to understand and put it into practice. If my work, my action, and my practice is arising out of clarity, then I'm practical. Clarity is not some state, clarity is not some picture and clarity is not ideal. Clarity is not something to be achieved. Clarity is your inherent ability - your very nature to understand, to know, that is called clarity.

There is nothing called woman’s liberation in isolation. Woman is oppressed and the man too is oppressed, albeit in a different way. Woman’s liberation is man’s liberation. Together they suffer, and together they will celebrate. Their attempts to have freedom only for themselves are their bondage. She is love, he is awareness. There is no love without awareness. Let both know, let both be with each other. In that alone lies liberation for both.

Superficiality offers pleasures. Superficiality offers cheap salvation. Therefore, it is easy to be attracted to superficiality. On the other hand, true spirituality challenges you to pay a heavy price. So, you see, all this knowledge has existed since antiquity. Yet there are people who do not want to read the Gita.

I am asking you, who is more important? The mobile phone or the man holding the mobile phone more important? Unfortunately, your education is such that it will tell you everything about the mobile phone, but nothing about the man. They ask you to keep looking outwards but they never tell you to look inwards. Self-education is more valuable than the rest of your education put together. Has your education ever brought you close to yourself? Now you decide what is more important.

Clarity is not a state. Clarity is like clean air, air free of pollutants. It is not something you arrive at. It is not a finality. There is a lot that you believe in, and you must keep testing it and rejecting it. You can never say, “I have achieved clarity.” It is a lifelong process, because pollutants keep entering the air continuously. So you have to keep clearing the air continuously. That is the process.

Truth is not about lofty words and scholarly theories. Truth is, first of all, a deep desire to help. If they see that you want to help, they will listen. Then they will listen even if they are not able to make perfect sense of your words. To your words, people listen later. The first thing that they listen to is your empathy. They want to see whether your face and your eyes carry their pains. If your eyes contain not a bit of the pain that they live in, they will not be able to listen to you.

There is no revolution possible without the Gita. That’s the reason why even those who are not remembered particularly for their spiritual inclination, people like Subhash Chandra Bose, even they founded their core on Gita. What kind of revolution can you do if it’s the body that’s always at the top of your mind? You require a Gita to tell you that this body is perishable and would anyway go. Gita only teaches you, "Endure and fight."

When I say, “I want the right action,” surely I have an image in mind. That image is coming from the past. But the right action, by definition, is one that cannot come from the past. Please remember that whenever something really right happens in life, it does not happen as a result of one’s decision. The really good, the right action, happens on its own, provided you do not become the decision-maker and the actor.

Shri Krishna is saying: the mind is conditioned to move towards objects and perceive only their surface, periphery, or form. Develop the practice of penetrating further. Let Truth be your practice. The moment you would look at something, and you are in no position not to look at things being embodied, you would look at things. Nobody said that you have to practice lust. Lust just comes. You might be a total fool, an utter retard, and still you will find yourself getting sexually excited once you reach a particular age. Did you need some practice? No, you didn’t. It just happened. But if you are to understand lust, if you are to cross over, if you are to be a master of your body, then it will require a lot of practice, and that will necessarily and obviously tell you about your predicament.

You really think the world is being run by an authority outside of yourself? No. We are the ones running this world, and we have made a mess of it. But we don’t want to own the responsibility, so we bring somebody else in between. And that somebody else, poor God, cannot even come and argue for Himself, defend Himself, and claim innocence and say, “No, no, no, no. I have not brought the world to such a pathetic position. You have done it.”

We have a great interest in claiming that there is something special about us. But there is nothing special. We too are just machines made of material, just a system. And this system, in the course of evolution, has now given birth to another system, which you call artificial intelligence. But calling it artificial is just vanity. We too are equally artificial. This “I” feeling that we carry is just a product of our physical constitution.

Most of us look outwards for reasons of security, of prestige, because we want to have career progress, or because we are just curious and we do not even know what’s behind the curiosity. And then there are those who want to know the curious one itself. If there is no conscious point behind your choices or actions, then the default point is biology. The other center is when you are coming from an illuminated point that wants to know, not because it does not know why it wants to know, but because it is interested in knowing, and therefore the knower itself.

There is no issue at all in being with one person or even five persons. That’s fine. The problem is the desperate center the need arises from. And when that center, that desperate, that unexamined center, is at the root of the relationship, the relationship will never be auspicious. Never. Let your relationships come in a natural way. You are all right with yourself. It just so happens you come across somebody worth being with, and then there is a natural companionship

It’s a great thing not to be submissive to authority. One doesn’t needlessly bow down, because that would be detrimental to one’s interests. So, it’s all right if you are careful. But being careful is one thing, and becoming psychotic about that is another thing. Obviously, let’s try on one’s own first. But we all know how limited we are beyond a point. And when we come to that point, one needs to look beyond herself, that one needs to seek help.

Oh, we are so selfless towards our kids, come on, and then we expect compliance and returns and obedience, basically ROI. It becomes very difficult to explain to the other that, no, you cannot act selflessly, not because of you, but because you are Homo sapiens. Our species is not designed to act selflessly. Therefore, trying to practice Nishkam Karma (selfless action) without knowing what the “Self” is, is actually self-deception, not selflessness.

The mind has been living for long in patterns. It knows no other way of being. The movement of patterns is gross. The movement of egoless action is very subtle, and the habituated mind will initially fail to notice it. You will have to wait like one waits for a lover. Do not expect that the new action, the new voice, the new guide will be of the same type, the same nature as the old one. This will be new, really new. Be ready to be surprised.

Beliefs can’t talk to each other. You will say, ‘The world was created on a Sunday.’ He’ll say, ‘No, on a Monday.’ He’ll say, ‘Tuesday.’ He’ll say, ‘Wednesday.’ Now talk, how will you reconcile this? You can only fight. Why do you need to believe? You look at the question, "What should I believe in?” Well, nothing.

If you close your eyes and write, do you need to see what you have written? Observation is an honest acknowledgement: “This is what I’m writing.” It is a subtle thing of honesty that happens on its own. What obstructs it is your determination, your stubborn resolve not to see the inner fact. That’s what you have to dispense with. “I refuse to buy the arguments of the false.” Once you refuse that, then the inner fact is obviously visible.

Adam and Eve are people with a body and choice. ‘Garden of Eden’ is the state of bliss that one enjoys as long as one keeps making the right choice. ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is the intellect that has an ego as its root. ‘Bitten Fruit’ is taking sustenance from intellect rather than God. Jesus is that man who is not quite a man because he is left with no choices, he is the highest potentiality of Adam and Eve.

Why do you expect the universe to be a fair and just place? That’s not philosophy, that’s a lot of fiction. This whole thing is very, very random. But we want to assign causality to it. We want to say, “Things happen for such and such a reason.” Why are we allowing randomness to assume meaning? A life without meaning terrifies us. There is no meaning in external material life; it is absurd. But there can be meaning in the one who you are.

As a doctor, can we limit our responsibility to the one particular body or to the set of few bodies that come to us for treatment? Or is the patient actually a representative of an entire society, an entire ecosystem? Can I really be a good doctor of the lungs, if I support a society that pollutes the environment in the name of development? So, if I'm a doctor, then health is my responsibility in the holistic sense, not just one patient.

It’s not going to be right when the patient starts playing the doctor. We need to grow up; and having a kid, in that sense, is an opportunity. You want to be of some use to the kid, then grow up with the kid.

If I’m working in a machine that helps accumulate money for one person or a group of persons, and then that money is used for the ugliest kind of consumption, for example, one that worsens the climate spectre, then there is a problem. The question is: where is the heart placed? If the heart of the system is at the right place, then at the micro level you can do your best in it. Minor flaws will remain even in the best system that you construct on your own.