Albert Camus

हमारा मिजाज हमेशा दूसरों और परिस्थितियों पर निर्भर करता है। नतीजे आपकी उम्मीदों के मुताबिक नहीं रहे। इसलिए अब आपको मनोबल बढ़ाने वाले किसी प्रेरक वक्ता की ज़रूरत है। जैसे ही वह व्यक्ति चला जाता है, आपकी ऊर्जा भी थम जाती है। लेकिन जीने का एक और तरीका भी है। अपने भीतर गहराई में, मुझे एक ऐसा बिंदु मिलता है जिसे कोई बाहरी परिस्थिति छू नहीं सकती। जो कुछ भी होता है, वह सतह पर ही घटित होता है। वह स्थिर, उदासीन और तटस्थ बना रहता है। तब आप सचमुच स्वतंत्र होते हैं।

Questioner(Q): What is the process of clarity? Is it just listening with immersion and no resistance? What is Truth? How we decide it?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Listening without effort, plus if there is Truth in what you hear, there is change and transformation, and that Truth becomes the master. We…

How did the Buddha look then? Who is the Buddha? Let’s try to understand with the story of Gautama Buddha, The ‘Shakya Muni Buddha’ as we call him. So, who was he? Let’s look at his central characteristics. One, someone who is well versed in the knowledge of his time. Buddha had deep scriptural knowledge. He was born in a Hindu Kshatriya family, he was a prince and ever since his childhood he was quite talented. So, one thing about him is that he was quite well-read. Second thing is, he was deeply interested in knowing the depths of life. He did not want to remain merely at the superficial levels, so he would observe a lot, he would think a lot. https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/todays-buddha-1_4d1b6bf

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,…

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.

Prarabdha refers to the sum total of (apparent)movements in time and space that have resulted in the (apparent) formation of the jiva – the human being, or any other being.Everything that the being appears to be is prarabdha. And prarabdha is all past.

So,– having 5 fingers is prarabdha…

श्रद्धावान् लभते ज्ञानं तत्पर: संयतेन्द्रिय: | ज्ञानं लब्ध्वा परां शान्तिमचिरेणाधिगच्छति || ४, ३९ || जितेन्द्रिय, साधनापरायण और श्रद्धावान मनुष्य ज्ञान को प्राप्त होता है तथा ज्ञान को प्राप्त होकर वह बिना विलम्ब के तत्काल ही भगवत्प्राप्तिरूप शान्ति को प्राप्त हो जाता है। —श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता, अध्याय ४, श्लोक ३९प्रश्नकर्ता: आचार्य जी,…

प्रश्नकर्ता: नमस्ते, आचार्य जी। मैं ईशावास्य उपनिषद् पढ़ रहा था जिसमें नौवाँ, दसवाँ, ग्यारहवाँ श्लोक था विद्या और अविद्या पर। तो उसमें यह लिखा था कि अविद्या इज़ ऑब्जेक्टिव नॉलेज एंड विद्या इज़ अविद्या विद सेल्फ नॉलेज (अविद्या भौतिक ज्ञान है और विद्या भौतिक ज्ञान के साथ-साथ आत्म-ज्ञान है)।

तो…

“I will beat him!”

“I will destroy her!”

“Did you just insult me? Did you?”

Four hours forty-eight minutes of deep intellectual perspiration!

“Did she? Did she not?”

Have some mercy upon yourself. Learn to ignore, please. Bypass the small issues. Learn to ignore the small for the big, would…

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…

Worrying is the other name of hope. When you think negatively about the future, you call it worry. When you think positively about the future, you call it hope. So, worrying is just as equally bad as hoping.

Conserve your energy. Train your thoughts. Discipline your little self. Time is…

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…

Just as the ego loves to take credit, it also loves to play the victim.

If something good has happened, “I did it!”

If something bad happened, “It happened to me.”

“Good things I do, bad things happen to me”—this is astounding.

Playing the victim is a favorite pastime of…

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…

There was this king of the demons; his name was Hiranyakashyupa. The king worked really hard. He kept austerities, he forced even God to come down and bless him. So, it would have required a very special effort. But then, what did he want from God? Nothing but the extension…

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.

You have to, first of all, clearly…

Let nobody say that he or she is making the right choices in life because she does not know. We all know. We prefer to suppress the inner knowledge. It’s an inner conspiracy against ourselves, just because we want to continue enjoying certain privileges in life—certain physical privileges, material privileges,…

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.

There are places better and higher than the place of your gender specific hormones. Why do you want…

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.

It is…

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 Upanishads were not composed to give you the normal kind of comfort and happiness. The Upanishads are there to give you an exalted happiness, a transcendental happiness, an eternal happiness. A happiness so rare and exquisite that it is not called as harṣa or moda or prasannatā; a…

You are so powerful actually that you are scared of yourself.

There are three ‘you’s in that statement. The first two refer to the small self or the ego. The third one refers to the best that you can be, the Great Self, the Truth—classically, the Ātman. And classically…

Emotions, they can do whatever they want to do. It doesn’t matter how I am feeling. What matters is what I must do.

Ask yourself: Had you not been feeling this way or that way, what would have you done? And you will get a very good answer.

When you…

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’.

And if you…

The past is a great resource. It is not to be wasted away or thrown away or forgotten. If you do not really decode your past, you are bound to repeat your past. Forget all the propaganda coming from the neo-spiritual circles that say that the past is something to…

“Enjoy the moment! Go with the flow!” What is that flow? Where is it coming from? Why should I go with it? Why don’t you just pause and ask, which flow are we talking of?

The tsunamis are coming to take you away, and the great master is teaching you:…

There is someone you say you love dearly. You tell that person, “You are my life!” That person passes away; within a few hours, you are found having your meals. You are in grief—the body is not in grief, the brain is not in grief. The brain is telling the…

If it was possible for one man to move towards greatness, it was possible for everybody. Nothing hurts the small man more than seeing a great man in his vicinity, or a small man trying to move towards greatness. It’s an utter insult.

The moment even one person defies smallness…

Several people dislike their few glimpses of joy. They hold themselves accountable, they hold themselves guilty for having tasted even a few drops of joy, because joy is not a socially sanctioned kind of happiness. Joy is deep, disruptive, rebellious. It takes you far away from everything into yourself. It…

Facebook spirituality says, “The greatest religion is not to hurt others.” Just Google it, you’ll find a million responses. What is the greatest religion? To not hurt others.

If there is one fellow who is a bigger culprit than the fellow who gets easily hurt, it is the one who…

For us, life means reactivity. Life is not peace to us. Life is not meditativeness to us. We feel alive when we are tense, reactive, and agitated. Then you say that now you have come alive.

The fellow is sitting silently and peacefully, unnoticeable. You will say he is a…

What is the wrong choice? Anything that involves helplessness is the wrong choice. That’s the definition. Whenever you say, “I got angry”; whenever you say, “I am depressed,” it is a wrong choice because you are not admitting that you have chosen to be depressed. You are not admitting that…

We deeply disagree with freedom. We may keep saying we want it, but we agree only with the cage. Why do we agree to the cage? Because the cage gives us fruits and vegetables. Freedom means, no more fruits and vegetables. Freedom means, now you are on your own. Go,…

“Why do you want to follow their science? We will follow our science!” This kind of thing too you are hearing these days, no? This science and that science, as if there are multiple sciences all opposed to each other. Spiritual sciences! What kind of foolishness is this? Pandit-ji is…

There is a subtle pleasure in worrying. Surely you are stealing time away from work so that you can indulge in worries and anxieties and fancies of all kinds.

The opposite of this self-centered worry is immersion in action. Immerse yourself in the right action, and then where is the…

The lion kills all his life, but he cannot be called violent. He cannot be called non-violent either. He is just doing what his physical conditioning compels him to do. He has no option. Man has the option to kill and not to kill. Man has the option to choose…

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…

Is there discipline without pain? You have to get up at some point in the morning—doesn’t that involve pain? Pleasure is to keep sleeping even after the alarm has rung—is that not pleasurable?

So, all discipline is nothing but pain. It’s very well-directed pain, it’s very discrete pain, but nevertheless,…

अजीब सी स्थिति यह है कि एक साधारण दिखने वाली लड़की से शायद ज़्यादा मुश्किल है एक सुंदर लड़की की ज़िंदगी, क्योंकि उसके खरीददार बहुत ज़्यादा हैं और उसे बहुत कुछ मिल जाएगा। और यह जो तुमको मिल जाएगा न अपनी सुंदरता के कारण, यही नर्क है तुम्हारा। तुमको लगेगा,…

तुम्हारे सामने पहलवान खड़ा हो लड़ाई के लिए, और तुम उस वक़्त कहो कि, “मैं अब ज़रा दंड-बैठक करता हूँ, शरीर बनाता हूँ”, तो तुम पिटोगे ही नहीं, बहुत बुरी तरह पिटोगे!

एक सज्जन थे, उन्हें सलाह दी गई थी कि, ‘साहब! आपका कॉलेस्ट्रॉल बहुत बढ़ गया है, तो आप…

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…

Worrying is nothing but an unauthorized concern for results. First of all, it is a concern for results. Secondly, it is an unauthorized concern for results. You are trying to speculate about something you are not authorized to think about. You have no authorization, no locus standi to think about…

मुक्तिका उपनिषद् है, उसमें राम ही कह रहे हैं, ‘एक उपनिषद् को कोई पढ़ ले वो तर जाएगा।‘ अच्छा एक में काम नहीं होता तो चलो जो १० या ११ प्रमुख उपनिषद् हैं उनको पढ़ लो! अच्छा उनसे भी काम नहीं होता तो लो मैं सूची दिए देता हूँ १०८…

दूसरे आपका हाथ मरोड़ रहे हैं, समझिए क्यों। क्योंकि आप हाथ मरोड़वाने के लिए तैयार खड़े हैं।

धोखा एक बार हो सकता है न, बार-बार हो तो इसका क्या मतलब है? कोई व्यक्ति आपके साथ एक बार दुर्व्यवहार कर गया, ठीक। बार-बार कर रहा है, क्या मतलब है इस बात…