Rebirth

Spirituality does not replace the fear of ghosts with belief in God. It asks us to question the mind that creates both fear and belief. Ghosts, gods, and stories can all become projections of imagination. The spiritual path begins by dropping assumptions, investigating “Who am I?” and understanding the source of suffering. With attention, right knowledge, and self-inquiry, fear loses its power and one becomes inwardly free.

A true relationship is not built on need, possession, or emotional dependence, but on a shared commitment to Truth and inner growth. A worthy companion reflects your reality like a mirror rather than performing a role to please you. Real love is effortless, rooted in one's nature, not expectations. When your highest commitment is to excellence and Truth, relationships become a natural outcome—not the purpose of life itself.

Victory is not decided by the trophy you hold but by the battle you choose to fight. Real strength lies in making the right decisions, staying true to your deepest values, and refusing to be ruled by fear or circumstances. When your actions arise from clarity rather than ambition, the outcome loses its power over you. The moment you choose the right path, you have already won.

The Bhagavad Gita is often accused of supporting caste and misogyny through selective quotations that ignore context, grammar, and the text's central teachings. A closer reading shows that its emphasis is on inner qualities, conscious action, and spiritual equality rather than birth-based hierarchy or gender discrimination. Misinterpretations arise when isolated verses are detached from their broader meaning, while the Gita consistently points toward self-knowledge, freedom from ego, and the universal possibility of liberation for every human being.

Science and philosophy arise from different kinds of inquiry. Matter seeks continuity of state, while the ego seeks continuity of existence and constantly changes identities to preserve itself. Fear, danger, and suffering are rooted in the ego’s sense of “I,” not in material reality itself. Questions are valuable because they expose hidden beliefs, and genuine learning requires challenging assumptions through inquiry, dialogue, and self-examination.

Sixty million followers do not necessarily indicate a transformation in consciousness. Large numbers may reflect persistent outreach rather than deep commitment. Truth is often avoided not through opposition but through indifference, convenience, and self-deception. Real change requires sustained effort, inner honesty, testing one's understanding, and the courage to face uncomfortable truths instead of seeking comfort, validation, or easy inspiration.

Fear, social conditioning, and painful memories often shape how people live and make choices. True growth begins by questioning inherited beliefs, refusing to remain trapped by past wounds, and acting from understanding rather than conformity. What appears to be sacrifice is often just the abandonment of conditioned habits. Freedom comes not from external systems, but from the courage to see clearly, learn, and move beyond fear.

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.

Global conflicts stem not from geopolitical interests but from the ego's fundamental incompleteness. Nations are merely expressions of collective egoic consciousness. Leaders represent humanity's worst tendencies, not its average. The ego requires duality and boundaries to survive. True disarmament means detoxifying the ego itself. External wars reflect internal disturbance. No diplomatic solution addresses the root cause, only wisdom and self-knowledge can dissolve the ego's need for conflict and separation.

Overthinking trivial matters stems from inner emptiness. Fill your life with something genuinely important, a worthy cause, a meaningful pursuit. When you're truly immersed in what matters, random anxieties lose power. Develop strong inner immunity through purpose, not by fighting thoughts. Like Bhagat Singh, marry yourself to something noble. Immersion in the essential is the best meditation and antidote to mental suffering. Without importance, life becomes scattered doing nothing in particular.

The only principle that truly runs this world, created by all of us, is the principle of greed and power. What do you think that fellow has earned his billions for? He didn't become a politician to be noble. The only thing that separates us from animals is the intellect, not the center the intellect is operated from. Don't locate the problem and the responsibility somewhere out there. We change ourselves; the world changes.

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.

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.”

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."

There can be no self-respect without self-knowledge. And we have been repeatedly saying that the ego survives only in lack of self-knowledge. The less you know yourself, the denser and more crystallized your ego is. Self-respect is nothing but self-awareness. The more you know yourself, the more you realize who you are not, and that brings you to who you are. That is real self-respect, knowing oneself.

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.

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.

Every living being, from humans to the smallest species, is trying to change the world to suit its own needs. But this is not intended to do any good to the world, it is just coming from the little ego. And the ego will not say, “I'm not all right;” it will try to change the world. So, if your idea of ‘good’ is only relative to your personal self, is it right to impose it on others? You must be clear about why you aspire to change the world, and whether you have brought about any change in yourself first.

Karma is a reflection of who you are. You are the doer. Karma means action. You are the actor. The principle of karma is: do not focus on karma; focus on karta, the doer, the actor. That is karma, that’s all. There is nothing mystical about it.

Can you go to the past and choose something or unchoose something? And life is happening right now. So your power to respond to life is right now. But the moment you say it is happening due to the past, then you have surrendered your power to choose, because you cannot do anything with the past. You cannot change the past. You can’t choose the past. You can’t unchoose the past. You can’t modify it. You can do nothing.

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.

Joy is not a problem. Suffering is a problem. I am the sufferer. And if this ‘I’ is the problem, the sufferer, then firstly the ‘I’ itself has to be approached. And when I find that my efforts are getting saturated, I will have to go to a book that talks exclusively of the ‘I.’ The Upanishads are such books, because their subject matter is nothing but the ‘I.’ So, if you come across something that is dealing in stories, beliefs, and deviating from the self, you must know that it is not Vedanta at all.

The theoretical reply would be that if condemnation hurts you, then somewhere you are looking for praise. Even if it’s implicit praise or subtle praise, there is some hunger for praise. Or the inner condition that the ego has set is, don’t give me praise, but don’t condemn me either. So there is some condition that the ego is setting on the world. The fact is, the world has a movement, a flow of its own. You cannot set any condition on it. If you are getting hurt, it means there is an expectation, a condition.

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.

At the level of the body, this world will have an influence on you, and there is no need to even contest that. Let it happen, because it is going to happen anyway. But inwardly, let there be a place so sacred that nobody is allowed to enter — not even you. And when that is there, you can freely participate in the world because you'll no longer be afraid. You'll say, “Come what may, I'm secure within.” Then you will live in deep security, and we all know how pleasing security is.

The self is a hollow, incomplete thing by its own admission. It has no free existence of its own; it is nothing but associations with the objects around it, absorbing its worth from the environment. To hide this absence of self-worth, you keep running after all kinds of things, yet the promise of fulfillment is never kept, and you are deceived. Therefore, to have any self-worth, you must have clarity about the self. All wisdom literature is about clearing away your false notions of the self.

Question: If love is death of ego, then how will we live? Man is made of only these things. So, the only thing left will be ‘soul’. So we can say that we have moksha (liberation).

Speaker: The question is: If love is death of ego, then a loving man…

Questioner: If love is death of ego, then loving man will be just soul. So, is love Moksha (Salvation)?

Acharya Prashant: Everything that you just said, is a concept in your mind. Ego lives on concepts; ego lives on thoughts—concepts are thoughts.

What is the definition of a concept? Where…

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.

You are the quality of your present action. You are, right now, attention itself, if you are indeed listening to me. Unfortunately, this identity won't last. Soon you will be distracted. You'll become somebody else. The discipline lies in holding on to the highest identity possible, that which you know to be the highest, given your limited capacity. That's who you should be. That's the answer to — ‘Who am I?’

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.

The soul is a myth. Even god is a myth. Spirituality has nothing to do with soul or gods; these are mental concepts. The mind itself is a myth. The experiencer himself is bodily, the experiencer and the body are one — how can there be an out-of-body experience? The reality is that you experience your own existence, and that is called the ego. The ego is an accumulation of influences, impressions and when those are cleared away, what you have is the freedom of the ego, and that is called the Truth.

In the universe, there is no good, no evil. Ask instead, ‘To whom is good, and to whom is evil?’ The self, the ‘I,’ the ‘me,’ the one who wants to define good, the one who wants to define evil — he is evil, because he does not exist. Spirituality is giving the evil something right to do. If you do not give the evil the right thing to do, it will pick something else, making itself feel relevant, whereas the fact is that it has zero relevance. Work to remove yourself. That's your task.

Because you underestimate Maya. Because maybe you are in the illusion that you have conquered, that you have left her way behind. Because probably you do not perceive that you too are still threatened. You feel, 'Oh, the thing is so easy, I overpowered it. Why is my dad not able to accomplish this simple feat?' Maybe it's actually so difficult that not only your dad is failing—even you have not fully succeeded.

Overview

Fighting Duryodhana is Dharma. Fight Duryodhana in the way you can, that is swadharma. Dharma is the same for everybody, but swadharma varies according to your physical, social, temporal conditions.

But remember that swadharma can never be in contradiction of Dharma; swadharma will always be something…

Adi Shankaracharya goes to his teacher and is asked to introduce himself, and he says, “Cidānandarūpaḥ Śivoham Śivoham — I am pure blissful consciousness; I am Shiv, I am Shiv." My real identity is not at all related to the body. The great teacher is very clearly telling us that Shiv is the one who has nothing bodily about himself. But because we are bodily, our ego does not allow us to admit that there can be anything beyond who we are. And that’s also the cause of all human suffering.

Doing or not doing — both are functions of the doer. The doer is the instrument. Is the instrument, first of all, reliable? Know who you are. Know what it is that you lack. Know what it is that you need to shed. And then the deed is right. Then you know the one right direction for you — choicelessly. It's not just about doing something. It's about knowing the doer.

Explore Books on Lord Shiv by Acharya Prashant, revealing deep Vedantic insights into Shiv’s true essence, symbols, and spiritual wisdom beyond misconceptions.

Human beings are in a peculiar situation. They can choose to side with their animalistic conditioning or they can choose something higher. They can choose freedom, joy, love, liberation, compassion. Therefore, humans have a responsibility. Animals don't have that responsibility.

If you have not been benefitting from the Guru, either you are too full of yourself or you are not really devoted and putting in the right efforts. Ashtavakra puts it very simply: Even if Brahma, Vishnu, or Shiva are your teachers, yet if you cannot get rid of yourself, you will not benefit. Only somebody who has seen the total failure of his ways is so determined to get rid of suffering that he can sacrifice anything, anybody — only such a person, such a mind, can be helped by the Guru.

When you look at the body, you see that the body was founded by something outside of itself: one cell from the father, one cell from the mother. And whatever the body feeds on — food, water, air, sunlight — all of that comes from outside the body. You, who are conscious, have hardly anything in common with the body. Also, the wise man says, “The body is not mine,” because he doesn't control the body. The body will die one day whether one wants it or not.

A surgeon’s table is never a beautiful sight to look at. Poets will find nothing there. There are scissors and instruments, and iron and blood and flesh cut apart. There is no happiness there. There is nothing pleasant there. Seekers of pleasantness will be disappointed looking at a surgeon’s table. But that table saves lives.

A common misconception that many of us have is that ‘ego is pride’, but it is far more pervasive than pride. It is the sum total of everything that we have taken from the outside and accepted as our beliefs and identities without applying intelligence. But we are not a sum total of external influences. Even if everything external is taken away, the pure existence still remains — we have an existence of our own. Ego is this forgetfulness of our pure existence.

Acharya Prashant: You will see that I'm repeatedly stressing on Shri Krishna as the demolisher, on Shri Krishna as someone who not only does not accept our prevalent definitions of right-wrong, true and false, humility, authority, right action, non-violence but, in fact, unabashedly and actively demolishes them. It is one…

Behind all FOMO is the fear of missing out on what life has the potential to deliver to each of us. Since we don't know ourselves fully enough, there is a general kind of anxiety — "I'm missing out on something." Let's identify what we are really missing. And the process is of negation and rejection. Reject what is not needed. If the inner rubbish can be cleaned up, you realize — that's all.