Forgiveness

Truth cannot be forced upon anyone, but neither should falsehood be entertained. Genuine love is not about preserving relationships at any cost; it is about helping oneself and others break free from illusion, even if that means risking the relationship itself. Spiritual growth begins by questioning conditioning, examining falsehood without bias, and choosing authenticity over comfort. Real relationships are built on the courage to seek freedom, not convenience.

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.

The Bhagavad Gita is not a separate spiritual path or an escape from everyday life - it is a mirror that reveals the truth of your present life. Real spirituality begins with self-observation, not rituals or temporary practices. Lasting transformation comes when work, relationships, career, and personal growth become one integrated life driven by awareness, love, and freedom rather than ego, fear, money, or social pressure.

Vedanta reveals that freedom is impossible as long as the ego seeks to preserve itself. Meditation may bring temporary calm, but real transformation begins only when the false sense of individuality dissolves. Whether through devotion or knowledge, every genuine spiritual path culminates in the complete dissolution of the seeker into Truth. Liberation is not the experience of Truth by an individual—it is the end of the individual who wants to experience Truth.

Love is not a special emotion reserved for selected people or relationships but a way of relating free from self-interest, possession, and psychological dependence. Most relationships become transactions driven by insecurity, where the ego seeks completion through ownership and exchange. Genuine companionship arises without the urge to control or claim another, allowing affection to exist naturally, freely, and without conditions or expectations.

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.

Modern relationships often create more insecurity, not less, because people are conditioned to seek completion, validation, and identity through another person. Social institutions, media, culture, and tradition continuously reinforce the idea that fulfillment lies in romantic attachment. As a result, relationships become driven by dependence rather than love. Real companionship becomes possible only when one is inwardly at peace and not using another person to fill an inner void.

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.

Love is not attraction, possession, dependency, or a transaction driven by personal gain. As long as relationships arise from insecurity, ownership, or the desire for psychological completion, they remain centered on the ego. Love is simple, natural, and free of self-interest, flowing without preference or exclusion. The ego seeks security, continuity, and suffering because they preserve its identity, while freedom and joy threaten its existence. A meaningful life begins when one stops repeating old patterns, accepts uncertainty, and chooses freedom over the comfort of familiar cages.

Climate change, population policies, and social conflicts often arise from a common source: narrow love. People, communities, and nations justify actions that benefit their own group while overlooking broader consequences for humanity and the planet. True care is not exclusive or identity-based; it is expansive and inclusive. Even motherhood, patriotism, and family concern can become limiting when reduced to narrow self-interest rather than guided by wisdom, freedom, and universal responsibility.

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.

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.

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: Sir, people these days emphasis on the idea of the ‘Power of now’. But you say that the present is different from the now. Please elaborate.

Speaker: This whole talk about the power of now is a great sham. It is deep materialism disguised as spirituality. The present is…

Questioner (Q): Why do we forget?

Acharya Prashant (AP): The question is, "Why do we forget? Why forgetting is a property of the mind?"

Do not ask, "Why do we forget?" Just remember that we forget. Because when you forget then you don’t ask this question that, "Why do we…

Love has to be seen as the need of the mind, the attraction of the mind towards Peace, towards rest. All attraction is there only with a desire; the hope is of fulfilment. So when the mind says ‘love’, along with love it has a picture of love. How do you know that somebody loves you? Only if he behaves according to set patterns. When real love comes to us, we close our gates to it. Love is not with a particular man or woman; Love is the natural state of the mind.

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.

The kinds of meanings that we associate with love are actually quite demeaning. It’s not your own self-interest that you think of in love. Love is not an emotion; love primarily is a spiritual understanding. Saint Valentine would not be quite pleased with the meanings we have associated with his name and his day. The saints laid down their lives so that our faulty definition of love could be corrected, and that is probably the best use this day can be put to: correcting the definition of Love.

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.

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.

Real Love is a very pure thing. It is pure and it purifies. If you really love her, forget about the families, you won’t even bother whether she loves you, because Love does not demand anything in return. Forget about marriage or anything else. You love, you know love, and that is all, sufficient. Love unconditionally, and then a way will emerge. Unconditional Love is very, very intelligent, and knows no fear. It knows where the solution is, it will find a solution.

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.

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 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.

You have to get into your own life, thoughts, feelings, actions, decisions, and see what holds you back. And freedom from what holds you back is the most important. That is what is most important. And then you can accept whatever price you have to pay for that most important thing. So it all starts from you. what is really important is a subjective thing. It depends on you. Nobody else can tell it.

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.

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.

That’s the purpose of life, no? To know your real destiny beyond your physical limitations and social conditioning. Most people do not know that such a dangerous thing is surreptitiously happening to them. I have found that we are quite big on media and social media now, so comments flow in their hundreds. And women actually have a self-righteous position when they say that we are not supposed to work and you better not expect that from us. Equally, men are conditioned about the roles they are supposed to play in life at home, in society, and how they are supposed to feel about themselves.

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

I have desires and you are the means to fulfill those desires. That’s why I come to you and I say I’m a loving person. This is not love. Most of that which we call love is actually just self-interest. A lot of our comforts, conveniences and identities depend on the other; therefore, we want to hold the other. Real love is possible only when you know that the other cannot bring anything to you. You relate to the other to share, not to gain.

We keep carrying the unexamined burden of the past all our life. That’s a great problem that we have. If you want to carry something from the past, if you want to remain related to it even today, then you have to ask: how does it benefit you? Because it’s an expensive decision to make. The purpose of life is to unburden yourself. Relate to something or somebody in a way that will help you clear away a lot of useless relationships.

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.

Women, the way they are brought up in our country, anyway do not have much to lose. If I do not have much in life, and then there arrives a person who is attractive, earns well, is strong, then why, as a woman, will I not go for him? Your body is impelling you to take a particular decision, and you don't even know that it's coming from the body. The only solution is understanding, real, deep, honest observation of life. And this you could also call spirituality.

"As long as you are giving me pleasure and satisfying my needs, there will be peace. The day you stop, there will be war.” This is the usual social contract in which we exchange pleasures and dependencies. This is why there is a lot of violence. But there can be another way of relating to the other, where you are existentially complete within. There can now be beautiful, loving, compassionate relationships because you are not looking to be a parasite or a commander.

“I love my job as long as I'm paid for it.” Can you work without being paid? If yes, then probably there is some beginning of love. There are ten things we all like, and all liking or disliking is conditional, and the mark of love is that it survives all conditions. If you come to something that is dearer to you than life itself, then you know what love is. Love is dangerous, because it would mean you have come to something that's more precious to you than life itself.

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.

The fellow is the worst kind of human being possible. But you will not accuse him of disloyalty, infidelity, or cheating, because he still reserved his body for you. This simply tells that the relationship is founded on the body. The woman has been trained to consider herself the body, and so has the man. Why don't we broaden our definition of loyalty? Please ask, “You couldn’t be loyal to any kind of virtue. How will you ever be loyal to me?”