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What does it mean to be practical? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Acharya Prashant
940 views
13 years ago
Practicality
Intelligence
Understanding
Conditioning
Action
Habit
Freedom
Awareness
Description

Acharya Prashant addresses the question of what it means to be practical in life and in one's profession. He explains that the word 'practical' is related to 'practice', which means 'doing'. He identifies two sources of action: the force of habit or conditioning, and the force of intelligence. He argues that most human actions are driven by dead conditioning and habit, similar to a fan that rotates without understanding its own mechanism. To act without understanding is to be a slave or a machine, where one's reactions are predictable and controlled by external 'buttons'.