Individuality

What you are is what you get. If you are continuously getting rubbish from the world, you know who you are. If you are constantly being mistreated in this life, then you know who you are.

The Saints have lived like kings, even though the world has often prosecuted them.…

Be engaged in a kind of work that does not make it necessary for you to seek relief or relaxation or recuperation or rehabilitation over the weekend.

Work is life. Work must not be something that taxes you and drains and saps out your energy. Work must be something that…

Questioner (Q): I am troubled by nihilistic thoughts. I feel that nothing in this world has any real existence or importance. Sometimes when I study, I start questioning its importance and start thinking that I should abandon the studies. I sometimes think about abandoning the material world altogether, but I…

Questioner (Q): I'm not feeling completely good with myself. So, I'm trying to search for that missing part in others. Every single time I see someone, and I think, “Oh maybe I can be complete with this guy or with that guy”, and it comes irrationally, and I get sick…

Questioner (Q): How to be happy without depending on others?

Acharya Prashant (AP): First of all, one begins by seeing that the happiness that is obtained by depending on others has certain transience about it. That helps us be disengaged from that kind of happiness. Otherwise, if one is certain…

Question (Q): Acharya Ji, being in Satsang, my mind is peaceful. But after some trigger happens, it gets deviated. How to deal with these external problems?

Acharya Prashant (AP): The trigger does not work really automatically. You program yourself to be triggered. You are standing and a fellow comes over…

Acharya Prashant (AP): The words our friend is referring to read "Remain untouched. Remain unshakeable. Remain untouched and remain firm centered undisplaced." Those words make sense only in the context of our present condition.

What is our condition? Everything touches us. It touches us and puts its imprints upon us.…

Questioner: Sir, youngsters in India and the world over, often rebel against rules and regulations in the name of freedom of choice or freedom of expression, the list of complaints is long and all have one bottom line: My life my rules. What do ancient wisdom and Vedanta say on…

Questioner (Q): Pranaam sir, my question is- I have this very low self-image of myself in my mind, and I have this need to seek validation from others all the time and this has been for a long time for almost till whenever I can remember. But, just recently I…

Questioner (Q): Sir, what is maturity? What is the real age of being mature?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Good. So, Aakrati has opened the session she has asked, “What is the real meaning of maturity?”

Aakrati, whenever we mention the word ‘maturity’, we mention it in the sense of growing up.…

Acharya Prashant (AP): What is leadership?

Questioner (Q): The quality to lead others.

AP: Why must I be interested in leading somebody? Don’t I have my own life to live? Why must somebody be interested in following me? Doesn’t he have his own intelligence?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Vikram is asking, “Sir, I can kind of see that personality is a mask, but then why is the world giving the personality so much of importance? Why does everybody seem to be giving the personality so much of importance?” Right, Vikram, that’s what you are asking?…

Questioner (Q): Watched a video of yours stating that if you love yourself, only then there is more to life than the way one lives. I know that this routine life is useless and that there are other important things in life which one needs to think of. But, one…

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, Pranam! We have been taught not to be selfish. If we start to love ourselves, where to draw a line before we get self-obsessed? Or is self-love the same as self-obsession?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Self-love is a wonderful thing. But one has to really know what…

Question: Acharya Ji, every thing that we develop, comes from conditioning. How do I then find my real identity?

Acharya Prashant(AP): Pallavi (the questioner), had everything been coming from outside, then this question could not have arisen.

Acharya Prashant: Just ask me how to not lie sleeping, don’t ask me how to awaken my potential.

The potential doesn’t have any habit of sleeping, you forcefully put it to sleep, intelligence is not habituated of lying dormant. You habitually put it to sleep by acts like these (pointing…

Listener: How to get rid of fear of losing my image in front of others?

Acharya Prashant: Sit, what’s your name?

Question: My beliefs have come out of my experiences and my experiences have shaped my individuality. If I give up my beliefs, then I am giving up on my individuality?

Acharya Prashant: (quoting the questioner) My beliefs have come out of my experiences and my experiences have shaped my individuality.…

Question: “Whenever I’ve tried to be independent in a relationship, I end up being indifferent. There is some bitterness. I’m unable to give healthy space. How can one actually feel complete in aloneness?”

Acharya Prashant: You go to a vegetable market. You want vegetables. And there are lots of shops,…

Question: How do I call this brain my own if this is nothing but a collection of experiences from the past and influences from the outside?

Acharya Prashant: Me and my brain must be called as two different entities. Right? This question surely wouldn’t have been in your mind a…

Question: I really believed that I had all things that happened to me, that it was terrible. Oh! that I was so unlucky. Oh! everything happened to me. I really believed that, until.

But, I mean, I still cannot not feed my mind. But I am at a point that…

AP: So today, we are going to take a look at something that perhaps fascinates all of us.

“Heroism”

We’ll talk about heroism. Heroes enthrall us, fascinate us.

Question: Sir, it is written in Bhagwad Gita and is often quoted by wise “Karam kro, fal ki chinta mat karo” (Act and don’t think about the result.), so my question is that in this contemporary world, is it really possible for any one of us to do…

Acharya Prashant: Praveen is asking, “Why do we always require somebody’s company?”

Even when there is somebody who is lying on the side of the road, let’s say an accident victim waiting to be helped, we wonder whether we are the first one or the only one who would be…

Question: Is it always true that a man or a woman will give their best performance due to pressure only?

Acharya Prashant: No, who said that?

The question is, ‘Is it true that we give our best performance only under pressure?’

Acharya Prashant: Man loves identities. Castes are just another identity. If you take away castes, man will just stick to some other identity.

Listener 1: Man just wants to belong.

AP: We want to have some name to address ourselves with, so it doesn’t matter. I mean, if you have

Question: Ashtavakra talks about being desireless, dispassionate, and egoless. A wise man is defined to possess all these virtues. But how?

Acharya Prashant: See, look at the wordings. You are saying Ashtavakra talks about being Desireless, Dispassionate, and Egoless. Mind these three words. The conclusion being drawn by the questioner

Question: Sir, from the article “Why am I always thinking of the society?” there is this extract:

“Now, because of years of colonisation, in fact, decades of colonisation, you have a great emphasis on fair skin in India. There are all these companies that are selling fairness products in India…

Questioner (Q): (In tears, sitting next to the Speaker, by the Ganges and the Himalayas. Overwhelmed by his weeklong presence in the Speaker’s discourses) Why is it difficult to even be here?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Something is difficult if you try to fight. Something is difficult only if you try…

Questioner (Q): Am I so incomplete, that I need to be constantly reminded of my ‘complete’ nature?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Yes, complete you are. But when you have started believing in incompleteness, what is the option?

Questioner: Let’s say, you have a couple of friends, they would come, they would stay, you would sit together and you have fun. And then sometime they leave. So, for that moment you think you are right but then the things turn upside down and you start thinking that they…

Question: Sir, why is comparison required for growth and what is the real meaning of comparison?

Speaker: Why is comparison required for growth and what is the real meaning of comparison. As we look at the world, all we see is things, objects, materials, and everything that we see with

Question: Sir, how can we control the internalization of thoughts which we get from society and other people?

Speaker: When you get them, are they external? Or are they already internalized?

Questioner: When I send Advait’s broadcasts to the world, the world sends me back some stupid videos and posters. That irritates me a lot. Though I delete them, yet I remain disturbed. What is this disturbance?

Acharya Prashant: This disturbance is your hope that your relationships are all not really…

Question: What are memories? We are happy, we get sad, we get flashbacks. What are they? What do they mean?

Speaker: Memories are residues.

I would like to put it this way. There are two kinds of memories. Capacitor memories and current memories. What are capacitor memories?

Question: Sir, you have said that a real leader does not need followers. I want to understand this.

Speaker: To understand this statement, you will have to go into the word need.

Questioner: Sir, how should I spend my time?

Speaker: Whatever you have in imagination, can be spent only in imagination. Do you really have time? If you have time, show me where is time? You are talking about spending life. I am asking you, do you have it? How…

Question (Q): Sir, why do people always classify anything on the basis of good or bad, right or wrong?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Because we need some kind of a guideline to live by. You see, you are always faced with choices all the time. Right? All the time we face…

Question: How we get the real definition of freedom?

Speaker: We have to first start with understanding what is slavery? Freedom is not something that comes from outside. Freedom is our very basic nature. What comes from outside, is slavery. So, slavery when understood and gotten rid of, what remains…

Question: On one hand the HIDP tells us to be individuals, on the other hand we are being asked to read texts. Why are we not allowed to write what we think?

Speaker: What is the difference between an ‘individual’ and a ‘person’? Let us understand this. Let us depict…

Speaker: The first requirement of living intelligently is to close the mind from the external occupations, to ask it to find out its own truth.

‘What are you doing? Why are you so noisy? Why are you always so bored? Why are you confused and frustrated? When you enter in…

Questioner: Sir, it was mentioned in some of our notes that personality is fake and we should just be ourselves. Then why is it often considered good to have a good personality?

Acharya Prashant : Praanjal, it is emphasized that one must have a good personality ‘precisely’ because most…

Speaker: The topic of ‘Compulsion’ and ‘Free-will’ is what we are concerned with. When do you call something a compulsion?

Listener 1: When I am not interested in doing something and I am forced to do something.

Speaker: What is the relation of interest and talent with individuality?

Interest and talent as we know them are just acquired personalities. What we normally call as interest, what we normally call as talent, are nothing but acquired states of mind. Born in India there is a great chance that…

Question: Why do persons not like to be individuals?

Speaker: Because the person is the opposite of the individual. The individual is the death of the person. The individual is the death of the person, just as waking up is the death of the dream. The person wants to continue.…

Questioner: Sir, I saw one of your videos titled, ‘Ready to write a new story?’ In this video, you have said that we should not follow the same old story. I understand that we should write our own story. I know what I want to do and I am walking…

Questioner: Personality is what the society gives, and individuality is what we are. When we look around, we see that we do everything as per the society. We know of our ourselves as what society tells us. So what is the difference between these two? A person is never an…

Question: Sir, my question is that why are we often so afraid of putting our thoughts in front of others? Why do we care? Many times we care about others, about the people around us. Why is it so?

Speaker: You have been wanting to ask a question from the…

Speaker: There is this water-bottle over there. Can you estimate the number of water molecules in this?

Listeners (everyone): No, Sir.

Speaker: One mole of water has how much grams of water?

Question: Sir, good afternoon. While I speak before you, I will try to choose my words very gracefully. Sir, I have many things in my life that keep me happy but it is life and we are not supposed to have everything. I have lacked something in my life that…