Questioner (Q): Sir, as a woman, how should I perceive religion? Religion and culture are supposed to help, but I have practically seen that religion is associated with patriarchy and misogyny. Please tell me, as women how should I look at religion? Acharya Prashant (AP): See, the relationship…
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Sunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian ColumnSunday Guardian Column
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, and calves give milk three times a day, where mice are the boatmen, and tomcats row the boats, where frogs keep snakes as watchdogs,…
A strange situation is that a beautiful woman’s life is perhaps more complex than an average-looking woman’s life, because a beautiful looking woman has a lot of men eyeing upon her, and she can get whatever she wants. And what you will get for your beauty, that is the real…
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…
सङ्करो नरकायैव कुलघ्नानां कुलस्य च ।। पतन्ति पितरो ह्येषां लुप्तपिण्डोदकक्रिया: ।।1.42।।
saṅkaro narakāyaiva kula-ghnānāṁ kulasya cha patanti pitaro hy eṣhāṁ lupta-piṇḍodaka-kriyāḥ
When the castes mix, that spells hell for the family. It destroys the family, in the way that the ancestors all fall because they are deprived of the Pindokdakriya.…
If you are someone who cannot take care of herself, how will you be sure that your presence, your company is not becoming an influence of sickness on the other person?
Be very, very alert about cohabitation. Just don’t start living with anybody. Be very, very conscious of your personal…
If you take yourself as primarily physical, then beauty too for you would be something just physical. You will look at the woman most capable of successfully reproducing. That’s the prakritik definition of beauty.
The first thing that comes to mind is flowers. What are flowers? Flowers are the reproductive…
The politician, we very well know, is a criminal and yet we belong to his fan club. So, who is it who is promoting crime, then? Look at the parliament of the country. I suppose half the parliamentarians have criminal cases against them, close to half. And they didn’t muscle…
When you say that you go to your workplace for a purpose, the purpose is never work, or is it? The purpose is the salary cheque. In fact, if work could be bypassed and you could straight away reach the salary cheque, then who would want to work? Now, why…
Why must man consume with careful consideration? It destroys your inner world. Inwardly it pushes you deeper into the belief that by means of more and more, increased and increased consumption, you will be able to get rid of your inner disquiet.
So, it is not good for you inwardly,…
What is it that Shri Rama stands for? He stands for detachment. He stands for fearlessness. He stands for compassion. He stands for Dharma.
Is there Dharma really in your life? And by Dharma I do not mean a creed or a cult, or observation of certain rituals, or the…
Man has the capacity to choose, and man must take responsibility of how he is living his life, what he has turned the Earth into.
In fact, I feel impelled to say this: When I was in the process of quitting my corporate career and moving to teaching, I was…
If the mind is a diseased organ, then why do you trust it so much? If it is a diseased organ, then whatever you see through it, why can’t you just reject it? Why do you trust this unfaithful servant so much? If I have a machine that continuously gives…
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.
What do you mean…
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…
I’ll tell you what the rape of the mind is. When the mind has nonsensical purposes, that is rape of the mind. When things like stuff that happened in the childhood or teenage attracts you and dominates you, then the mind is being raped. Forgive me the clichéd expression, but…
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,…
Money is nothing on its own. Money cannot bring you peace. But established in peace, money and material and the world can be perfectly dealt with. Now you neither need to renounce money nor do you get attached to money, because your real need is peace not money. Now you…
Even if you want a deeper pleasure, you will have to go deeper into the mind, and going deeper into the mind is what the spiritual process is all about.
If the fellow is a lover of the good things of life, let’s say a complete hedonist, then encourage him…
If a bad thought is persevering in your mind, continuing in your mind, then it means that you are just calling it a bad thought. Deeply you are supporting it; deeply you think that it is a good thought. We call them bad. We actually do not consider them bad.…
There is something honorable about dying against a major enemy. But what honor is there in being consumed by the little?
Set a great goal. Even if you lose, it will at least be a great defeat. And if you set a timid, scared, conventional, narrow goal, then even if…
It is final that meat eating is stupid for all kinds of reasons, and they will not that final conclusion arrive soon. It will arrive, just as it arrived in the case of cigarette smoking, just as it finally had to be accepted by the tobacco industry that cigarette smoking…
Teach the kids that this planet cannot tolerate even one more human being now. We are already eight billion. At the current rate, we are projected to be eleven billion by 2050. We cannot even tolerate eight point one billion.
You do not merely want to have kids; you also…
Man’s hunger is not so much in the stomach; it resides in his mind. And no fruit is enough when it comes to the mind.
So, man has been destroying everything he can touch, and climate change is the most recent, the most devastating, and probably the most final symptom…
I have nothing against marriage. I have a lot to do with the mind of man. The mind that rushes towards security, the mind that wants to possess and hold captive another living being, I want to talk of that mind.
Marriage will decide the kind of work that you…
Who told you that rape is merely a sexual activity? Anything that you look at just as a body, as a material to be consumed, is rape. A mind that cannot love will only rape. And we all rape. Look at the way people spread dirt around. Is that not…
Man was never so powerful with respect to his environment as he is today. No virus can harm you; no bacteria can harm you; there are no plagues, no black deaths. You can produce as many objects as you want, you can order them at the click of a button;…
You have all the right to make a choice. But if you make a choice and don’t do justice to it, then that is very bad. In fact, correction of choices happens only when you have first of all fully tried out what you are doing. Unless you dedicate yourself…
If you are occupied in something really worthwhile, would you really care for things like pain? Even an ordinary sportsperson would tell you that when you are pursuing something even as normal as victory in a match, pain ceases to be a big botheration. Unless it becomes crippling; then you…
The mind is not evil; it is just stupid. You cannot put somebody to the sword just for stupidity. And how will you kill the mind? Does the mind stand independent of you? Does it?
The mind is your shadow. If you change, the mind will change. And that is…
Distinctions are a burden on the mind. If A is different from B, then one has to remember both A and B.
It is wonderful when A to Z are all one; then you can just remember A and forget everything else.
And if A to Z all are nothing,…
What is it that blocks creativity? A cluttered mind, an obsessed mind, a worried mind, a mind too particular about results. Just as creativity is uncertain, similarly are the results of creativity. And if you are someone who bothers too much about results, then you cannot be creative.
You would…
Every time you walk past a meat shop or come across a menu containing a lot of flesh, let that harden your resolve. No point throwing that menu on the waiter’s face. The waiter is a puny fellow. He didn’t even write the menu; he has nothing to do with…
The teacher’s role is to show that a teacher is not needed. That is the rightful role of the teacher. I repeat, the teacher’s role is to show that you are unnecessarily coming to the teacher. You are self-sufficient.
Look at the way the world is—violent, chaotic, anarchic. Every thought…
Whatever has come to the mind has come with a promise. What is the promise? The promise is: I will give you peace.
The mind feels inadequate. The mind feels incomplete. Whosoever promises it completion, the mind latches on to it. It could be a thought, it could be a…
It is very well known that one tree over the course of forty years would absorb just one ton of carbon dioxide, and that is if that tree lives to get forty years old. How effective is that? Please. One tree over forty years absorbs one ton of carbon dioxide.…
Once I said, your face is smeared with mud, and religion is like pure water meant to be thrown on your face so that you get cleaned up. But when that water hits your face, the water too gets muddy.
Falling on your face, the water has cleared away some…
If there is one thing that we must not talk of as something very beautiful, it is the coming of the next generation. It is not beautiful. It is not auspicious. It is not something to be talked of with a smile. It is something to be talked off with…
“I love my Xbox”—and it’s not illegal. But it is performing much the same function as banned narcotics. If we were a conscious society, then we would see that.
All kinds of substance abuse, psychedelics—that’s a temporary relief that returns with vengeance. It hits you, bites you, and makes you…
Your mind keeps racing—you find that a problem? Next time your mind runs away from the office, you too run away. Don’t say, “Oh, this fickle mind, it can’t rest; it is not spiritual enough!” Great that it is not spiritual enough; great that it is not tolerating rubbish.
Why…
Were our bodies to reflect accurately and honestly the state of our minds, none of us would have been able to walk firmly even for a distance of ten meters. Our legs would have shown up as cut, wounded, bruised, fractured the way, exactly the way our mind is.
Unfortunately,…
The mind is a dislocated child. The mind is a wanderer looking for its home.
There are only two kinds of inputs that can come to this lost and wandering child. The first kind of input is the one that takes it back to its home. The second kind of…
It is extremely important to see and realize that we are living in an extremely sick world. What you read in the newspapers is sick. What you see around yourself is sick. The markets are sick. The shopping malls are sick. The streets are bustling with sickness. Educational institutions, political…
