We have all put down a book that could have helped us, or dozed off halfway through something that mattered. A man who could not keep food down was given medicine, and he threw that away too, since it went in by the same route. Most of us strike a similar deal: we move into a place that stinks and, within a week, call the smell normal. Show our fifteen-year-old self the life we lead now and they would scoff. What would change if we admitted we do not like our condition?
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[From a Bhagavad Gita session at St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, 2026]
Acharya Prashant: You see, you pick up a book. You say, “I don’t like it.” You throw it away. And the book could have been a very useful one, full of science, full of facts from history, full of beautiful poetry. You throw it away. Obviously, what you have done is not good. But then the Upanishads come to you, the Gita comes to you, the great works of sacred wisdom literature from the entire world, they come to you, and you throw them away. Now, this can’t be pardoned. And not that there would be an external judge. We are repeating that.
There would be no external judge, and there is no God upstairs keeping a CCTV on you. Nobody. You will punish yourself for what you have done.
You throw an ordinary book away. That is not good. That is not right. That’s a problem. But you throw the Gita away, or you skip a verse. Or you sleep in the middle of a chapter. Now, this is something for which no pardon. No pardon. What happened? Oh, nothing. You know, I was tired, so I slept in the middle of the session. The judgment has already been delivered. You could sleep in the middle of a movie. You could drop dead in the middle of a football match you are watching on the screen. All that is okay. You started dozing at your workplace. You will be punished, but fine. The punishment will end. You dozed off at the steering. This will meet with punishment, but even this punishment will end. You will pay some fine, and you banged your car. You got injured. One day you will be discharged from the hospital. The punishment will end. But you doze off in the middle of the Gita, and the punishment is everlasting.
