The shopkeeper’s business is to sell his goods, and that’s what most gurus of today are: they have to sell their goods. When that is what you want to do, how can you afford to antagonize a big chunk of the population? And you would never, never do that if…
This is the age of mass production. The fellow who is owning and running the machine, the corporation, the empire, out of his greed wants you to consume.
“I am producing so much, but people are not buying it. Why? Because they do not need it. So, what do I…
Very, very vulgar demonstration of consumption of thousands of litres of milk… So, they will take the milk and put it in a pond and say, “This pond is all full of milk!” or they will even encourage their followers to bring lakhs of litres of milk on some holy…
We worship the cow, and we torture it no end. When people talk about desi gai ka doodh (milk from the Indian cow), desi gai ka ghee (clarified butter from the Indian cow), they do not even know what they are doing to the creature they call as ‘mother’.
There will be people who will be prepared to lay down their lives if they are asked to eat meat. They will say, “We are prepared to get killed, but we will not take meat!” I respect that sentiment. But these are the very same people who have no scruples,…
Questioner (Q): I am concerned about what will happen to me when I grow old. There are retirement homes one can resort to, but that is not a viable option to everybody. My mother, for example, got very sick when she got old, and if we had not been there…
Questioner (Q): This discussion today is a followup to a conversation between Acharya Prashant and my colleague, Dr. Evan Goodstein, the director of Bard’s graduate programmes on sustainability and the ‘Solve climate by 2030’ program. In a conversation we held earlier, you gave my colleague an answer from a deep
Questioner: From the videos that I have watched, I understand you’re a strong veganism promoter. Now as institutes like IITs and IIMs, and institutes which people look up to and get influenced and follow, what do you believe institutes like these should follow and promote? Do you also believe that…
Questioner (Q): Dear Acharya Ji, for the sake of not sounding hypocritical, I have to admit that I have killed more than one mosquito in my life and many other insects too, but never intended to cause pain and suffering to them. Now hearing, let alone seeing the relatively conscious…
Acharya Prashant (AP): (reading the question) Swami Vivekananda has said, "First of all, our young men must be strong. Religion will come afterwards. Be strong, my young friends; that is my advice to you. You will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gita. These…
Question: Acharya Ji, there are people who quote the Vedas and say “A Hindu is a good Hindu only if he drinks milk from the mother cow.” What is your take on that?
Acharya Prashant: See if you have named the Vedas, what is the central teaching of all the…
Questioner (Q): Having seen your videos and being in constant touch with you, one can see that the central idea of your teachings is, as you very lucidly have said, “You are not missing the secret, you are missing the obvious.” For us…
The world is your playground. So don’t be so particular about moving only within your pre-existing circle. If your cause is worth it, show some courage and move out.
If you have a tender and precious sapling in your palm, would you plant it in a desert? No. You will…
Hurt is not automatic. Somewhere there is an admission from you that you are hurt, and that you would be hurt, and that you would call yourself as hurt. Don’t call yourself as hurt, and see what happens.
Hurt is not an obligation. Hurt is a choice. Insecurity, fear, temptations—none…
Have you looked at kids playing? If you look at kids playing and if you look at animals playing, you won’t find much difference. In fact, human kids go along very well with animal kids. Later on, when we cover ourselves with a lot of acquired knowledge, with a lot…
Welcome pain. You have no option. That’s the way life is meant to be. Life is suffering. Because not only are you designed to have pain, you are also designed to resist pain.
Have pain, and have a lot of depth in your being. So much depth that it can…
One can become an entrepreneur, for example, in the field of killing animals, cutting animal flesh, and supplying freshly cut flesh to people at their doorsteps. And this might be a successful business model.
This kind of an entrepreneurship is idiocy, perversion, profanity. The evil was present right in the…
Happiness and sadness are both wonderful, are both welcome.
But in some deep sense, sadness is a little better than happiness. It teaches us a little more than happiness does. It elevates us a little more than happiness does. It has a certain purifying effect that happiness does not quite…
If you are suffering, there is nobody but you who is responsible. Unless you fully accept that responsibility, there is no freedom. If your suffering is just incidental, then how can there be freedom from it?—because incidents can happen any way, any day.
To love is to see that the other is in trouble. To love is to extend a helping hand. Love is not about admiring somebody’s physicality or using someone for some means. Love has to be an exercise in compassion.
Only two kinds of associations are right in this world.…
Both the genders have become even more anchored to their physical identity. The more you do that, the more you are in misery because, really, the body is not who you are.
The woman is simpler, more innocent. I would dare to say the woman is simple and innocent just as animals are, because woman, just like animals, is biology-driven. She is emotional, and her emotions do not really arise from understanding, not even from intellect. Her emotions arise from her body, from her biological conditioning, from her hormones.
Truth - The Most Famous Verses of the Bhagavad Gita
You see, what does it mean to say that “righteousness is on decline”? Mind is moving away from Krishna. Mind is moving away from Krishna. Krishna is the centre of the mind. Right? Krishna is the centre of mind. As soon as the mind moves away from the Krishna, the centre applies a spring like force on the mind.
"The real war is the one the ego wages against honest seeing, the war between what it is and what it insists on being taken for. It is the hunger the ego carries meeting a reality that will not satisfy it; the persistent feeling that something is missing whose name cannot be found because finding it would require looking at the one who feels it."
Is Acharya Prashant Building a Cult Around Himself?
"Cult means personality worship. Where the entire teaching is that personality is false and the Self is truth, where will personality worship come from? And there is nothing in my personality worthy of personality worship. If one wants to worship like that, there are many standing in line whose entire job is to polish their personality.”
Does Acharya Prashant Dismiss Alternative Teachers?
"I am fully in support of learning in all ways from everywhere and everybody but I am not at all in support of foolishness and hypocrisy. Get the difference please. I am absolutely in support of learning from wherever it is possible to learn but I am not at all in support of using the various avenues to learn to not to learn."
“Revolutions always promise change, and they usually deliver something that merely looks like change. Regimes collapse, flags are replaced, slogans change, but something remains untouched. The question we refuse to ask is simple: when the wheel turns again, what will have changed?”
When your expectations are not fulfilled, that is the situation you call anger. Your expectation is nothing but a desire that the other person should behave according to your image of him. You create images because you are afraid. If you are not afraid, you cannot be angry. All these diseases come from a basic fountainhead — ignorance. They go away once ignorance goes away.
Anybody who believes in astrology cannot be rational. All you have is a set of beliefs—the belief that this thing will happen. There is no logic in it, only fear and insecurity. Science is based on verifiable and falsifiable experiments, whereas astrology is not subject to verification; hence, it is just a story. It's a story that is making big money for a lot of storytellers.
Not allowing the soul to manifest is suicide: Acharya Prashant
Acharya Prashant says:\n“If you wouldn’t call this foeticide, then what would you call it? When an unborn child is killed in the womb, you consider it wrong—you call it a sin, a crime. But what do you call the way we are killing ourselves from within? Not allowing the self to manifest is suicide.”\n
\"If one relies on events, shock is guaranteed, again and again, because most misdeeds never come fully to light. Scandals are not reliable teachers. If one understands the principle, shock loses its grip, because what unfolds is recognised rather than discovered.\"
In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media In media
If you are fond of playing the game of Love, then come over
Love is not a mental or physical need. Love is not for the faint-hearted. Love is not for those who fear the loss of relationships, reputation, possessions or life. Love is not for those who are afraid of family, society, or uncertainty. Love is not for those who seek sanction from tradition or culture.
A guide to handling difficult periods, adapting to unexpected changes, learning from experiences, seeking support, and continuing forward with confidence and patience.
Fight the right battle and forget the outcome || IIT Kanpur (2020)
If you do not like the result that comes from the right action, then your like is not right. The result is still right. Challenge your likes and dislikes, not the rightness of the result.
where mice are the boatmen, and tomcats row the boats,
where frogs keep snakes as watchdogs,
…
I had to unlearn a lot of things, and I am grateful to all the sources—the books, the people and the experiences that helped me unlearn. And I am grateful to that within me that had the courage to unlearn. A lot of unlearning is needed. I often say you need to learn love. By that what I mean is that you need to unlearn false love. And it’s one mighty task to unlearn false love, transactional love, the transactional love that both biology and society teach you.
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The meat eater is a self-deluder. You cannot eat meat without firstly lying to yourself. He will not want to know what the reality of meat consumption is. He will not want to know how animals are kept and how they are slaughtered. He will not know what the conditions…
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Veganism cannot succeed if you just keep talking of animals. You keep saying, “Oh, it is bad to look at animals as a commodity. It is bad to exploit animals.” If man is exploiting man, why will man refrain from exploiting animals?
So, veganism has to be holistic, comprehensive. You…
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“Good things I do, bad things happen to me”—this is astounding.
Playing the victim is a favorite pastime of…
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There are places better and higher than the place of your gender specific hormones. Why do you want
If an apple and an animal are the same thing, then an animal and a human being are the same thing. Eat the human being as well. And if you do not eat the human being, then extend the same logic to not eat the animal as well.
Obviously it is inhumane to kill an animal to consume its flesh, and that’s one of the biggest indicators of our inner depravity. But then, who are the Americans really to point fingers at China? You kill pigs, you kill lambs, you kill cows—what to say of chicken and fish?…
When you say sadness is just sadness, then you have gained freedom from sadness. It means being free from the obligation to label sadness as a loss of self-worth. If you let sadness go deeply into you, there is no way it is not going to touch joy.
How do we justify our anger? We justify our anger by feeling short-changed, cheated, or victimized; by continuing to assert that we are incomplete, while simultaneously bemoaning the incompleteness. If you have grudges within, if you feel a victim of situations, or past, or persons, and if you lend credence…
The approach of self-help is: “I am sad because my desires have not met fulfillment. So, the way to help myself is: fulfill desires.” It’s a dimensional difference. Therefore, self-help pleases but helps not. It is not then ‘self-help’; the genre should be more correctly called ‘self-gratification’.
The temperature of this city is already higher than what it should be. It won’t be higher in the next twenty years; it is already higher today. Read how many people are dying and by how many years has the average life expectancy already reduced—already reduced.
If someone comes to you quoting this kind of a logic that, “You know, if I am eating the goat or the chicken, then you too are eating the rice grain and the wheat grain, and the rice plant and wheat plant have been slaughtered. So, if I am guilty…
A fellow reproducing blindly is a threat to the entire humanity. How is his family his personal matter? Somebody sets a bomb inside his home, and the bomb is powerful enough to bring down the entire building, not merely his apartment. Will you say, “It is his private matter. How…
The Earth doesn’t have resources to support eight billion or eleven billion vegans. Veganism doesn’t help the cause of climate change beyond a point. We need two things: less people and less consumption, and both of them together.
You need a situation where there are not more than two or…
You must be wondering why I am speaking about this thing regarding procreation, regarding having kids. It is because this is the single most important issue facing you and me and the planet and the millions of species today. This is the one thing that man immediately, today, this moment,…
If the two of you could together shout and scratch and bite and tear and break—if all those things could be done together, why not meditate and be loving and compassionate together? Or is companionship only for biting into each other?
So, having been companions, now it is your responsibility…
Episodes of physical sickness are occasions when you can truly test how much spiritual mettle you have.
You do not want to deliberately have a sick body; as far as possible, avoid sickness. But then, sickness is inevitable, just as old age is inevitable. Sickness will come.
