Confusion

Question: I want to know why the world is at the moment so harsh?

Acharya Prashant: There is nothing that one group, one community or one person experiences that the other has never experienced or is not experiencing even to the slightest degree. Fundamentally we are all one. As human…

The world is a habit, but drugs are a worse habit. The one who is finding refuge in drugs is fed up of the usual stuff of consciousness, that is certain, but he is taking a very wasteful route. It’s like feeling cold in Delhi in the month of December

Acharya Prashant: The four yugas in the Vedic tradition have been Satyug, Treta, Dvapara, and Kaliyug. Now, what do they represent? Do they represent the passage of time? Do they represent something historical? We have been led to believe that way, right? We believe that time is something external that

Acharya Prashant: You must never be afraid of questioning others. More importantly, you must never be afraid of questioning yourself. The second part is tougher. It is easy to question others, relatively easy at least. Questioning oneself hurts the ego, but that’s what one must practice.

Question: If a student has to select a stream after class twelfth and he is interested in both medical and engineering, how does he select the stream without thinking about the future?

Listener : Why is there confusion in the mind?

Question: What is absent mindedness?Answer: Absent mindedness is mind being anywhere. Whenever you are occupied with anything, it is absent mindedness. Any act of focus, concentration, having ‘something’ as important in mind, becoming a subject,all these are acts of absent-mindedness. Mind busy with any object is absent-mindedness.

You are fantasizing: “When I meet that man, such and such great things will happen. And now we are having coffee, and now we are watching the movie, and the movie is wonderful”—and the entire three-hour movie you are visualizing.

Your action has to be one with the Truth. Let wisdom guide your action. That’s Yoga of Wisdom. What is the other kind of action? Prescribed action.

Strength is your nature. If you have managed to remain so weak, so fragile, so brittle for so long, it is only because you have been defending your weaknesses. You have been arguing in favor of your weaknesses; you have been reasoning out your weaknesses. You have simply not been

There are people who indeed say that, “No, everything is fine with us.” They are not lying. It’s just that their fineness is superficial.Yes, there is fineness in your life, but that fineness is just this deep: scratch the surface and the fineness will evaporate. A little tragedy hits you

Questioner (Q): We encounter these nodes in the path of our lives where we have to make decisions. The majority of us have a lot of duties associated with our life, and these duties also come with some demands associated with how we must act. For example, right now I

Question: If one lives in stories, the stories that are conversations with oneself, how does one get out of them?

A certain word falls upon your ears and there is an instant reaction, is there not? Your entire body can get heated up. One word falling on your ears can raise your temperature by two degrees within two minutes. Is it not a chemical reaction?

I’ll tell you what the rape of the mind is. When the mind has nonsensical purposes, that is rape of the mind. When things like stuff that happened in the childhood or teenage attracts you and dominates you, then the mind is being raped. Forgive me the clichéd expression, but

Were our bodies to reflect accurately and honestly the state of our minds, none of us would have been able to walk firmly even for a distance of ten meters. Our legs would have shown up as cut, wounded, bruised, fractured the way, exactly the way our mind is.

Even in those situations that we call as utterly woeful, utterly hopeless, if we just do that which we are capable of doing, would there be space and opportunity and time to despair? If you do what you must, where is the time to suffer?

Gynaecology is psychology. Where else does the whole thing come from? And it’s not as if I am talking exclusively of women; with the men it’s just the same.

As long as you are living a socially adjusted and internally compromised life, as long as you are living resigned to your limitations, even your agony is limited. There won’t be much even in your sadness. You will cry for a while and then the moment somebody shows you some

Questioner: Sir, it is told to us that options create confusion in one’s life. But wherever we go, whatever we want to do, we have to search for options. Why?

Look at the stats released by the Durex company; it manufactures condoms. In the Valentine’s Day week, sales of condoms spike by twenty to thirty percent. And then there are the stats available from the medical organizations: March is the peak month for termination of pregnancy.

Questioner (Q): I have discovered that being a little altruistic, a little selfless makes me feel that I am elevating my consciousness. That is what works for me. But one problem associated with this is the problem of the violation of boundaries. So, suppose I want to help a person

We are brilliant artists—makeup artists. We are adept in calling false happiness as happiness. We pretend to be happy when we are not even happy, and all of us know fully well what I am talking of. Go to your social media pages and you will see what we are…

You want the other person to be nice. We are such idiots. We want the other person to be nice. And if the other person is not nice, we feel there is no love. We do not understand anything. We are prepared to give up our life probably when somebody

Pain is due and legitimate. You will have pain. Now live through it like a man.

You might be twenty-five today; where is the one who was twenty yesterday? Isn’t he gone? How can you stop the other from departing when you couldn’t prevent even your own old self from departing?

In fact, if there is one unpardonable crime, it is bad parenting. You are not even killing someone; you are disfiguring someone and sentencing him to live an entire life. How does that sound? It is like chopping off somebody’s limbs but ensuring that he lives—and he lives an entire

I am saying this as a friend of the woman. I am asking her, why is the male sight or the male gaze so important to you? If you want attention from people, if you want respect from people, why can’t it be for higher reasons? Why do you want

Questioner: How did sages like Ashtavakra and Adi Shankara attain wisdom at such an early age of fourteen or eight? You have said in many of your videos that unbearable pain coming from falseness is the starting point of the journey towards the Truth. How can someone have this kind…

Desire defeats all the petty evils. Desire is the great evil that defeats all the petty evils. For the sake of desire, you can shake hands with your worst enemy. Don’t you see that happening every day in politics? In national politics, in geopolitics, everywhere.

Questioner (Q): After an initial period of spiritual awakening and consequent exploration, I radically transformed many areas of my life, including leaving a secure European life to live and work in rural communities in India. The sense of calling, satisfaction and peace were very strong. But for the first time…

Questioner: Sometimes when I listen to you, or when I read verses from the scriptures, there is a certain centeredness within me. What is that, and how can I remain centered? Please explain how to remain in peace and in the Loved One.

Acharya Prashant: You say that you get…

There are many who say, “You know, eating flesh is alright.” If eating flesh is alright, why is it not all right to eat human flesh? A line is drawn between the human being and the animal. You say, “No, the human being cannot be eaten because he is highly…

Questioner (Q): When we do a root cause analysis of mistakes, we find two major components, intent and action, and they seem to be in constant conflict with each other. For example, Robert Oppenheimer was one of the leading members on the founding team of nuclear bombs. His intent was

Walking down the same lane, how will you come to a new destination?