During London Climate Action Week, a Public Session on the Avadhuta Gita

Acharya Prashant delivered a public session on the Avadhuta Gita in London on 25 June, held during London Climate Action Week 2026 and followed by a conversation with former climate diplomat Gautier Houel. The session drew a large in-person audience, and more than one lakh viewers joined online.

Speaking within a week ordinarily given over to policy and technical debate, Acharya Prashant pressed an unfamiliar diagnosis. Humanity’s drive toward external achievement, its appetite for consumption and its extraction from the natural world, he argued, are all powered by an inner insecurity and an ego that cannot rest. The climate crisis, on this reading, is not fundamentally a question of technology, policy or carbon accounting but the outward trace of a restless psychological hunger that seeks permanence through possession and accumulation and never finds it.

The session’s most pointed exchange came during the question period, when a participant raised the exploitation of Global South countries, India among them, by developed nations. Acharya Prashant answered that exploitation in the present order rests on a relationship of consent, and that exploitation without consent has become almost impossible, which is why it has been given formal shape. It no longer works through force, he said, but through signed agreements, and the signatures on those documents belong to the exploited themselves.

The session opens the second leg of a tour already notable for its reach. During the first leg Acharya Prashant addressed the Cambridge Union, the University of Oxford and the House of Lords before returning to India for his ‘Weekend With Master’ retreat on 20 and 21 June. He resumed the tour on 24 June with a keynote address at the London School of Economics on the theme of ego and emission.