Bhaj Govindam

The Bhagavad Gita deserves reverence not because of inherited beliefs about its author, but because of its power to dissolve falsehood and reveal Truth. Real devotion is not ritual or blind faith—it is understanding, inquiry, and living the wisdom of the Gita. Through sincere study, one discovers the true meaning of Krishna, making the Gita the most authentic path to knowing and worshipping Him.

True learning is not built on memorizing answers but on understanding reality. Memory may help in examinations, but life constantly presents new questions that demand clarity, presence, and intelligence. Education becomes meaningful only when knowledge is deeply understood and lived, not merely remembered. Real understanding frees us from dependence on rote learning and enables us to respond wisely to every new situation.

Modern culture often celebrates rebellion, travel, and endless experiences as symbols of freedom and happiness, but they can become just another form of conformity. Genuine personal development begins with mindfulness and creating the right mind space to understand oneself. Without inner clarity, changing places, trends, or identities only repeats old patterns. True freedom comes from self-understanding, not from chasing new experiences or fashionable rebellion.

Real change begins not by changing the world alone but by understanding the one trying to change it. Laws, technology, policies, and scientific progress have value, yet they cannot solve problems rooted in human consciousness and endless desire. Truth remains the same across cultures and disciplines, requiring only a change in language, not in essence. Lasting solutions emerge through honesty, self-inquiry, and inner transformation, because no external system can replace a change in the human mind.

Human beings are born into uncertainty, surrounded by beliefs, identities, and social conditioning that offer ready-made answers to fundamental questions. Real spirituality begins not with accepting collective or personal beliefs, but with honestly examining one’s own suffering, fears, and false identities. The journey is not toward comforting ideas, but toward self-inquiry, where truth is discovered through questioning, observation, and the gradual rejection of illusion.

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.

Operating from the highest inner point means living with honesty rather than self-created illusions. The ego becomes “higher” not through mystical growth but by dropping false self-images and testing its claims against reality. When honesty weakens, lower motives take control, creating inner conflict and disorder. Real growth lies in continuously questioning oneself, facing uncomfortable truths, and preventing the ego from being driven by comforting but deceptive beliefs.

The debate around nudity and movements like “Free the Nipple” miss a deeper issue: true freedom is not about clothing, but freedom from psychological conditioning and body-based identity. Clothes themselves neither oppress nor liberate. A truly free society is one where the body becomes ordinary and irrelevant, not a source of obsession, shame, validation, or social control.

You look at Iran, at revolutions, and ask: can systems really bring freedom? Revolutions keep replacing one system with another, yet the chaos remains. The real question is rarely asked: what within us creates these systems? Real freedom is not political or social; it is inward. Without inner change, every revolution only rotates power, never resolves suffering.

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.

Question: A gentleman was saying that a person, who is drinking or is drunk, he still has got some kind of stability on mind, and he too, can judge. That is what I felt to be perhaps wrong. A person who is drunk probably loses his judgement and whatever we…

Joy is not something that you can think of as something wonderful. You cannot go somewhere and say that, looking at a mountain, I experienced joy. Joy is something which is always there, obfuscated; hence, it is the absence of obfuscation. A complete absence of all rubbish is joy, and that rubbish includes both pleasure and pain.

The one who is religion-less. A real Hindu does not have any religion. To go beyond all religions is to be a Hindu. There are religions that are on one plane, and then there is Sanatan Dharma, which is another dimension — the eternal religiousness. Liberation from religion is religiousness. Sanatan Dharma is awakened intelligence.

Listener: (Reading a quote of Acharya Prashant from a quote-calendar)

What lies beyond mind?More mind.What is more mind?What and lies and mind.Questions, perceptions on the concept of the mind.

Acharya Prashant: Any question about beyondness would be a useless question because the question itself is coming…

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.

Shiv isn’t a person who existed at some point in time. Shiv isn’t confined to a specific place. Stories are sometimes useful pointers to the truth, but in our ignorance, we take the pointers themselves as history, facts or Truth. Shiv is the joy of pure consciousness. When false identifications and attachments are dropped in the light of self-knowledge, what remains is called the untainted essence of Shiv.

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.

Ignorance is not about not having some particular knowledge. Ignorance is not an absence; ignorance is having knowledge. That which your mind is full of is ignorance. Ignorance is your basic sustenance. In such a situation, this utterance, “In reality, you are the One,” I repeat, must not be taken as the Truth in the sense of an affirmation. It is a method to help you drop that which fills you up. All it is telling you is this: “You are an entire universe sitting in your mind; you are not that.”

Often, in the name of financial pressure, what we are really kneeling down to is something else. But because that something else is not nice enough to be named, what we quote is financial pressure. Nothing is ever forced in a tangible way. The way is kept gentle in appearance. But there is something else at work inwardly. What is that thing? That is what you have to uncover. You have to be honest towards yourself, very honest.

All happiness that your mind feels is directly proportional to how unhappy you are. So, if you want to be really happy, become totally unhappy. This is called the law of duality. The deeper your pain, the more relieved you will be. That is the nature of the mind. When you are moving towards happiness, actually the journey towards unhappiness has begun.

If you are religious, then shouldn’t you be truly religious? Religion is about a total commitment to the Truth. You’ll have to recognize that the objective of religion is not to attain heaven, not to please a holy figure, but to come to your own inner Truth. All good books exist to awaken your consciousness. When it comes to you and the Truth, do you want somebody in between? And wherever you spot fakeness, falseness, hollowness or ignorance, drop it.

There is a search within the human being, always for the greatest, the absolute, and that is what differentiates humans from animals. India was fertile, and there was abundance. You had ample leisure, and in that leisure there was space for intellectual inquiry. The sages and the seers would talk to each other purposelessly. And from that purposeless discussion, from silent observation of life for hours, days, months, and years, came those insights that you today recognize as Indian philosophy.

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.

This has always been a hugely profit-making sector of all economies, just that it has always been a small sector controlled by the priestly class. Now the attempt is to make this sector really big and on an organized scale, because the profits are very tempting, and there is no quality control. There can be no external auditor. All kinds of objections, audits, and scrutinies are ruled out. Getting it? So it’s a very tempting sector.

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.

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.

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

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.

That’s what the entire spiritual process is about, collecting the airfare. So that you can rise up, otherwise, you stay crawling on the highway. Life is not so that you just remain a crawler, a creeper. Life is so that you can take off.

The tiger chases the buffalo calf and brings it down. Does that disappoint you? No, because that was expected. Similarly, expect animal behavior all the time from everyone around you, including yourself. Everything we do comes from the jungle, so don’t be disappointed. Disappointment always arises from expectations. You really have to strive to be someone who is not an animal. And the first step in that striving is to address your own inner animal.

We teach our kids to write applications: “Humbly I beg to submit that today I have an ache in my tooth.” “Humbly I beg to submit!” If you are stating a fact, if the toothache is real, why the hell are you groveling? If that is the Truth, why are you begging? Drool, drool, drool. That’s become our culture. If your philosophy tells you to submit and surrender to several masters, you will never be a truthful person, because in Truth there is no authority but the Truth.

Manifestation is simply an expression of your desire. You desire something, and then you imagine your desire has been fulfilled. What does the common man desire? ‘Give me more money.’ What will the politician desire? ‘Finish off democracy and give me power for life.’ We have very stinking desires. Do we ever desire anything that is really good for everybody? The question remains: Was that thing worth it? You gave it so much time, so much respect, did it deserve that?

Duality is Truth wanting to know itself. If there is no duality, what will the Truth do? Alone, absolutely alone. He too needs a partner. So, it divides itself into two. All our sufferings, all imperfections are important. There is no reason to feel small about it. Without you, how will the Source know what it is to fail, what it is to suffer? Indulge yourself fully, but remember what all this really is. Don’t forget that.

This in itself is a philosophical question. This is why you should study philosophy, because you already have this question. Philosophy is your affection for the Truth, your leaning towards the Truth. Don’t you want to know the Truth? How many of you are happy with lies? Nobody. So, it is this love for Truth that we all innately have; that’s called philosophy.

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.

Drop the center of confusion, come to the center of clarity. Drop what the masses practice, come to the direct route of self-realization. That’s what it means.

In the rule books of the courts, there are offenses of a thousand kinds, but when it comes to life, there is just one offense, ‘Did you live by the Truth or did you betray it?’ Remember that chap called Bhagat Singh and his associates. The courts declared they were guilty, and they were still joyful because they were absolutely not guilty in front of life. Live rightly, and then don’t apologize. That’s it.

Some battles need to be fought just because they deserve to be fought, not for the sake of victory but for the sake of the fight itself. And victory is indeed possible. We are not fundamentally evil. We are all hypnotized since birth. That’s what is called Maya. Just as somebody can hypnotize us, somebody can also break the hypnosis. It is possible! Never, never lose Faith.

On one hand, there is a great danger that if you seek Light, you will seek the wrong kind of light; you will just seek darkness disguised as light. On the other hand, there is the equally dark option of not seeking at all. Between these two possibilities, I prefer the possibility of seeking Light, with all its associated dangers — that is still better than not seeking at all. Isn’t it better to die fighting in the battle than not fight at all?

Our definitions of beauty and greatness are all egoistic. Something is beautiful if it corresponds with our likes and with our taste — then we call it beautiful. Whereas the real definition of beauty is that which silences you, that which does not leave you even in a position to utter a "Wow!" That's beauty. That which takes you beyond yourself — that's beauty.

The worldly philosophy says, “Even if you lead a corrupt life, at the last moment you utter ‘Ram, Ram’, and you are redeemed.” I say just the opposite. Even if you have lived a life of wisdom, you can still lose it in your last breath. Even your wisdom requires a supporting and nourishing ecosystem. You can never afford to be complacent.

The Bhagavad Gita, in essence, is a struggle of mukti (liberation) against sanskriti (culture). Shri Krishna urges Arjun to discard misogyny and cultural superstitions; the only thing that matters is mukti — liberation. Culture and traditions are time-bound; they hold meaning only when they point towards Truth — timeless, Sanatan. Have great traditions, and always be careful that your traditions are pointing towards the Truth. Only then do the traditions have life.

You are the subject, Puruṣa, and everything you can experience, perceive, speak, imagine, or think is Prakṛti. The only real spiritual question is to determine the right relationship between Puruṣa and Prakṛti. India came up with a beautiful answer: Worship Prakṛti with reverence, but do not try to possess or exploit her. The Shakti tradition with the Devi-puja is nothing but an answer to this question of right relationship. Durga, Ambika, and Kali — they all represent Prakṛti.

Do the right thing before you can be a non-doer. You are anyway used to doing, and you have been doing all the wrong things. Now that you have been doing the wrong things, wake up to your power to choose, your right to choose, and do a few things right. And then you will slowly discover that you don’t even need to do. That is called ‘non-doership.’ For choicelessness to descend upon you, at least first make good choices.