Spirituality is not the renunciation of life; it is the art of living fully || Acharya Prashant (2014)

Question: I am not sure about what to do in life. Whether I should go for a spiritual path and leave all material desires or do what everyone is doing. Divergence is always there in my mind. I am practicing meditations regularly, but it won’t clear my path. Secondly, how can only knowledge bring a change in me? Surely no one changes just by listening to talks?

Acharya Prashant: Why is it so that what you call as the ‘spiritual path’ must be equated with leaving something? Do you find any renunciation in existence? Do you find anything in existence that is bent upon giving up something, or dropping something?

Listener: But one cannot have all the things at once.

AP: If life were meant for dropping, then that whom you call as ‘God’ should have first of all dropped the universe. When he is running the universe, not dropping it, in spite of the world being as silly, as pointless and as rotten as it is, then why must you think of leaving all the desires behind, and going to the spiritual life, leaving all material behind, and doing something else?

Is the flower ever on the path of renunciation? Are animals, mountains, planets and stars, giving up, renouncing, rejecting, negating? Each is there, fully there, located at its own center. You too find your center.