Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, you once said that motivation and ambitions are symptoms of suffering but I think if one lives with ambition, the journey will teach him a lot. Life will become disarrayed. Please explain.
Acharya Prashant (AP): Don’t you see an obvious contradiction in what you are saying? With a goal, there is no journey possible. When you have a goal in mind, journeying is not possible. Take an extreme example, how did you arrive at this centre today? Which vehicle?
Let’s say, you used your personal car, let’s say you parked your car a little distance away; let’s say 300 meters. Now as this session is on, someone comes a little hurriedly and whispers into your ears, “Your car has caught fire.” You rush, you rush towards the car. As you rush towards the car, there are all these books kept by the wayside and the walls have been decorated with posters.
How many of these posters would you read? How many of those books would you admire? There is that little squirrel chattering on the branches, how many minutes would you take to be with her? There are kids playing outside, how many games would you play with them? I am asking you, please.
Q: None.
AP: Don’t you see that journeying is not possible when you have a goal? Don’t you see that when you have a goal, the journey is just an impediment? What else has been man trying? If you have to cover a thousand kilometers and you have a bullock cart then you take weeks and months, don’t you? Had journeying been so beautiful, man would have stayed with the bullock cart or would have walked his way through the thousand kilometers because that would have given him a longer time to journey.
