Family

Your parents don’t want you to speak, your teachers don’t want you to speak, and religious preachers, obviously, they are very afraid if you speak up. So you don’t ask even the most basic, logical, sensible questions, and you keep accepting even the most amusing kind of trash as if…

What is it that we are usually engaged in? Feeding our stomachs, and feeding the stomachs of those who are related by blood to us. That’s what our life really is: fulfill your desires and fulfill the desires of those who are related to you by blood and semen. That’s…

Two or three people are discussing some nonsense, and three more will join in, and then probably three more. What connects them? What makes them relate to each other? Nonsense. That’s the benefit that nonsense gives you, and that’s why you remain steeped in nonsense: it helps you feel connected…

Questioner: I would like to join the army, but my family and friends are not very supportive. They say that when I could easily get a good job in Delhi or Bangalore, what is the point in risking my life as a soldier? What should I reply to them?

Acharya…

Questioner (Q): We have so many liabilities and responsibilities family, society. Is freedom possible? What is real freedom?

Questioner 1 (Q1): I’m a single parent and I have a son. He gets a lot of homework from school, but instead of doing it he likes to just play around. Next day, when his teacher tells me that he hasn’t done anything, how should I react?

Acharya Prashant (AP):…

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, how should I deal with my anger, especially with my kids? I always get annoyed very easily and it bothers me a lot. Kindly help me to get rid of this tendency. Thank you, Acharya Ji.

Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, the kid has stolen a…

Acharya Prashant (AP):Abhishek asks—and it’s very cute of him to ask—he says that “I am not at all interested, yet I want to make my parents proud.”

I am trying to see how you will make your parents proud when you are not into it and what would they…

Acharya Prashant (AP): (Reading the question) “Acharya Ji, my concern is about relationships we share with our near ones. I find so many limitations in every relationship which I make. What to do in such situations where my parents do not understand me? What to do to have them understand…

The verse says: A seeker of liberation, who being learned; able to discriminate between the Real and the unreal, believing the Vedas as the authority, fixing his gaze upon the Self, the Supreme Reality, and being seeker after liberation, will he, like a child, consciously run after the unreal, which…

Question: In this materialistic life, we realise the importance of Freedom that you are speaking of. Then what should we do?

Acharya Prashant (AP): what she is asking is, "I am already engaged materially. I work somewhere, I have commitments there; I have a family, I have responsibilities there. And…

Question (Q): Dear Acharya Ji, pranam. Since the last few days, I have been sharing my learnings with my parents. Every time I discuss something with them, I have to deliberately attack their conditioned mind to make them aware of their conditioning. I feel sorry for them, and I…

Questioner: Acharya Ji, I have noticed that people who know me since childhood are now facing difficulty in understanding what I am doing. For instance, it took me two years to convince my wife and relatives, etc., to even allow me to do what I am doing.

When I say,…

Question: Acharya ji, there is someone in my life, who is close to me. But, when I talk to that person, the person doesn’t listen to me. But, I know that deep down, he is a sensitive person, and wants Truth. How do I deal with this person?

Acharya Prashant…

L: I feel that I should give all the things to my parents, and everything. I internally feel that. That is nothing coming from the society. I feel that they gave me so much so I should give them too.

AP: See, it’s a very obvious thing if you would…

Questioner (Q): Sir, how to deal with the expectations of parents?

Acharya Prashant (AP): See, it’s not about parents only. Everybody expects. Yes? Expectation means there is a desire. Desire means there is a sense of incompleteness. That there is something missing from life, right? That is what leads to…

Questioner (Q): When I used to ask questions to my mother and father, we would have conversations, and our conversations often ended on a bad note. My brother and sister would say, “You better not talk to them like this, because if you are right, then they are wrong; and…

Questioner (Q): Where do we draw the line between responsibility and love towards family members or relatives or friends? How do we know what is responsibility and what is really coming from love? Because of the conditioning, there is partiality involved, we see people with different ways.

Q2: Conditions of…

Speaker: You see you’re young. Right? If you love somebody, do you want to chain him or her?

Listeners(everyone): No, Sir.

Speaker: Even a pet dog. Do you like to keep the dog in a closed room all the time or do you let it be free? Do you want

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THis is AP Article

समोऽहं सर्वभूतेषु न मे द्वेष्योऽस्ति न प्रिय:।

ये भजन्ति तु मां भक्त्या मयि ते तेषु चाप्यहम्।।29।।

samo ’haṁ sarva-bhūteṣhu na me dveṣhyo ’sti na priyaḥ

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Sunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian Column

Love would have helped you fly. And now you have captivated love within four walls. As wise men and women, if you are married, wonderful. As wise men and women, if you are not married, wonderful. The point is not really marriage. The point is wisdom. https://dev-main8.vedant.life/en/articles/marriage-and-love-1_0ff5cad

Questioner: A lot of students that I talk to — it’s the fear of the society, it’s the fear of the unknown, it’s fear of the expectations that they are carrying, that pushes them to become an engineer and then they figure out that probably this is not something that they wanted to be. And that is the reality of a lot of individuals and not just engineers. Probably, here is something that is stopping me from taking a plunge of starting something of myself, right? Fear is something that is stopping somebody who is in a relationship for ten years to take that step to get married. Where does this fear come from? Acharya Prashant: Lack of love, which comes from lack of self-knowledge. You see, when I tie my sense of existence, my very identity, to something that is unreliable, I will have to be afraid. It’s like putting my heart on this table. Now, how can I live in security? The heart is out there on the table, anybody can take it away, anything can happen to it. Or the heart might grow legs and walk away on its own. My very existence has been subjected to something that is not in my control. Something that is definitely going to deceive me at some point, that is fear. My sense of self-worth comes from my monies, my bank account, I will be afraid. That bank account can be closed anytime, anything can happen. My sense of self-worth comes from my physical appearance. I very well know, time will take it away, I will be afraid. Right? Who am I? I am the one who is praised or worshipped by the society. Oh! I will be so afraid, so afraid! You talked of people working for their images, they would be living a cursed life. Because, their heart is out there in the hands of strangers. Their entire identity is tied to their image and the image is in the eyes of other people. So, the image can be distorted or can disappear any moment. Just imagine, how afraid they would be all the time. That’s with the ego. Because, the ego, as I said, is a fundamental sense of incompleteness. Therefore, to complete itself, it just associates itself to anything possible. And the things that you are associating yourself with, they are not reliable. They belong to the world and the world can take them away. They belong to time. They came with time and with time all those things will disappear. And you have tied your identity to those things. Now how can you rest in peace? That’s fear. If you do not have self-knowledge, you will always be afraid. My identity is linked to my husband’s identity. Now the husband has two legs. And the husband has a brain, a mind of his own. If your identity comes from your husband’s name, as happens in India at least, you would always be afraid as a wife. The husband can change his mind any day. You would always be, you know, having one eye on his secretary, and the other eye in his email and mobile phone. What’s he getting into? Who’s texting him? Why is he on the phone so late in the night? Because you are afraid if husband goes away, what happens to you? Your very existence depends on the husband. That’s fear. When you operate from the ego centre and make something very, very important for yourself and that something belongs to the world, it can go away anytime, and you are afraid. And in that fear, there can never be love, never be love. If you are afraid of losing something, you will be very violent towards it. Nobody lets his money go and have a walk down the road. What do you do? You lock up your money. That’s violence. When something starts becoming very meaningful to you, you lock it up. You don’t want it to have freedom. And that’s violence. So, love and fear just cannot go together. If you are dependent on something or somebody, you will be afraid. And that dependence cannot be called love. And that is a confusion, we often get into it. Just because you depend on somebody and somebody depends on you, you start feeling as if it is love, it is not. Questioner: Just like the way political parties think that people love them but it actually is fear. Acharya Prashant: Exactly! Love is a rare quality and rarer in politics. Questioner: So, if I am interested in a particular profession, do I not pursue it wholeheartedly? Do I pursue it wholeheartedly knowing very well that the results can either be zero or one? Acharya Prashant: One has to go into the very nature of interest. Aren’t we interested in cricket? Aren’t we interested in seeing songs in movies? Practically, everybody in India is interested in cricket, nobody in Brazil is. And nobody in India is interested in ice hockey. So, that’s how flimsy the whole thing about interest is. In India, if you don’t get a movie with songs, you say, “I am disinterested.” The movie would bomb. In Hollywood, if you have a movie with songs, that would raise eyebrows, what’s going on? Occasionally, you have an OD song but typically there is no song. So, that is the nature of interest. It is never something of the heart. Love and interest are not the same thing. Interest is something that is given to you by your body, by your environment, by random chance, your circumstances and all these. So that’s how your interests come to you. So, if you are interested in a vocation, first of all, you have to ask yourself, “Just two years back, I was interested in something else and two years before I was interested in that and when I was four years old, I was interested in becoming a fighter pilot. What happened to all those interests?” Today, I smile at those things and just shrug them off, “I don’t want to be a fighter pilot.” What you want to be today? Oh! I want to be an investment banker. What happened to the fighter pilot? You were so interested in that. And how do you know, tomorrow you will not be looking at this I-banker, just the way today you are looking at the fighter pilot. The self of a five-year old appears so naïve and immature when you are twenty-five. How do you know that at thirty-five, you will not look back at this twenty-five year old self and say, “What the hell! How was I taking this fellow so seriously?” So, interest is something that you must look at with healthy contempt. Interest, mind you, can even be induced in you. Interest can be aroused in you. That’s what the entire advertising industry is about. They can make you feel Interested in things that is intrinsically worthless to you. So, of what value is this thing called interest? But, then in today’s world, we place so much premium on this word 'interest.' Do what interests you, this, that. Whereas, it is wisdom to realize that interest is the last thing that you should ever go after. Then people come up and say, “No, should we do things that we are not interested in? No.

How do you, asks the chief of police, patrol a city, where the butcher shops are guarded by vultures, where bulls get pregnant, cows are barren,

Does the person you are with encourage you to read? You have to ask, “What does he bring for me, roses or books?”

Be very cautious of those who bring roses for you, especially red roses. Books are what we all need, and books are dangerous. Books are dangerous because…

Now, mind is movement, right? Why does the mind move at all? The mind wants to reach somewhere. Where does the mind want to reach? Is that place within the mind? The mind wants to reach somewhere. Every thought, every action, every motivation, every emotion rides on a desire, is