Confusion

There is nothing in spirituality that will ever violate science. It’s just that spirituality will venture into areas where science never goes at all. Spirituality, for example, will talk about you. Science never talks about you. That’s the difference—that’s the only difference.

It is very, very sad that 99%, I…

Hope is a very dangerous animal. It can make you do the most stupid things. It can make you fall in the same trap one million times.

There was the Cricket World Cup in 2003, and the finals were played between India and Australia. I know of a man who…

If someone practices black magic, then you say that he is badly conditioned by centuries of rituals, right? If you find somebody practicing black magic, then you are quick to decry, “Oh! Medieval rituals!”

And how old is this ritual of procreation? I ask you. And why must this continue…

If someone comes to you quoting this kind of a logic that, “You know, if I am eating the goat or the chicken, then you too are eating the rice grain and the wheat grain, and the rice plant and wheat plant have been slaughtered. So, if I am guilty…

If you want to know an atom, you have to go to nuclear physics. There you do not just proudly claim, “Oh, I know atoms. Everything is an atom. I have been with atoms since my birth!” There you want to read a book. There you want to consult somebody…

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…

On its own, stupidity is so feeble; it can be crushed very easily. But because stupidity is feeble, it knows one thing: it must gather numbers. So, it forms huge organizations, colonies where all the stupid ones can stick around, and then they are very difficult to tackle.

If there…

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…

Heaven should be a happy place instead, but all the happy ones are found in hell. All hours in hell are happy hours, and heaven is such a dry place. Why have you allowed that? All the people who are laughing, giggling, they are all found in hell.

Somebody said…

All powerlessness is just a pretense. Even in your feeblest moment, you are still powerful enough to exercise choice, and you must always hold this very close to your heart.

The world can take anything, everything away from you, but nothing and nobody ever can take away from you your…

X says, “If I am with A, I want to keep A running after me because that’s what makes me feel important.” The more A tells me that “Without you I feel lonely, lonely, and lonely,” the more X feels important.

Does X sound familiar? Most people in the world…

The old scriptures warned us that if you do bad, you will receive bad. You can be utterly evil and yet lead a very, very happy life. In fact, the more evil you are, chances are, the more prosperous and more happy you would be found.

So, the ancient trick…

Please remember this very, very clearly: Whenever you find something unscientific being said, just get up and walk away—anything, even remotely unscientific.

It is very, very sad that ninety-nine percent of that which we call as spirituality today is just illogical, unscientific superstition. And it is being pedalled very loudly,…

You are fantasizing: “When I meet that man, such and such great things will happen. And now we are having coffee, and now we are watching the movie, and the movie is wonderful”—and the entire three-hour movie you are visualizing.

What is at the basis of this entire fantasy? That…

You might be twenty-five today; where is the one who was twenty yesterday? Isn’t he gone? How can you stop the other from departing when you couldn’t prevent even your own old self from departing?

Remember your old self, the one that was there at the age of five, ten,…

Look at most people who, for example, learn to play guitar. What is their objective? You just carry the guitar, get yourself photographed, learn a few basic tunes, impress girls or impress boys… It all looks so romantic, doesn’t it? Guitar by a bonfire. A bonfire by a river on…

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,…

There is this new bunch of spiritual hoodlums who come up and say, “Be yourself. Accept yourself as you are.” And who are you? Somebody fundamentally dangerous to yourself. We said the ego is its own bleeding wound, and you are being told, “Be yourself, remain the wound. Remain the…

Ask yourself this one question: The way I am living, is it reducing my inner darkness? This question, only this question, determines whether you are living rightly.

It doesn’t matter how well fed you are, how well clothed you are, how well monied you are, how reputed, how respectable you…

Never forget your essential reality beyond your immediate fact. You are really, really all-powerful, though that is not testified by the way you live, eat, breathe, act, decide, think.

We live lives of helpless compulsiveness. Looking at the way we exist, it becomes impossible to believe that we are omnipotent.…

Even in those situations that we call as utterly woeful, utterly hopeless, if we just do that which we are capable of doing, would there be space and opportunity and time to despair? If you do what you must, where is the time to suffer?

In fact, the more impossibly…

Your action has to be one with the Truth. Let wisdom guide your action. That’s Yoga of Wisdom. What is the other kind of action? Prescribed action.

Each of us, in each moment, has to make this choice. Where is your action going to come from? Is it going to…

We are brilliant artists—makeup artists. We are adept in calling false happiness as happiness. We pretend to be happy when we are not even happy, and all of us know fully well what I am talking of. Go to your social media pages and you will see what we are…

A certain word falls upon your ears and there is an instant reaction, is there not? Your entire body can get heated up. One word falling on your ears can raise your temperature by two degrees within two minutes. Is it not a chemical reaction?

This body is a bunch…

Passion, too, comes from surroundings, but passion becomes dangerous because it presents itself as if it is something internal. Not only does it present itself as something internal, it decorates itself as something of the heart.

The fellow will say, “My heart beats for cricket.” You must ask him: Why…

You want the other person to be nice. We are such idiots. We want the other person to be nice. And if the other person is not nice, we feel there is no love. We do not understand anything. We are prepared to give up our life probably when somebody…

Desire defeats all the petty evils. Desire is the great evil that defeats all the petty evils. For the sake of desire, you can shake hands with your worst enemy. Don’t you see that happening every day in politics? In national politics, in geopolitics, everywhere.

You know what ended the…

In fact, if there is one unpardonable crime, it is bad parenting. You are not even killing someone; you are disfiguring someone and sentencing him to live an entire life. How does that sound? It is like chopping off somebody’s limbs but ensuring that he lives—and he lives an entire…

We talked of enlightenment. We are talking of deceptions in the spiritual field.

So many people say they are enlightened. Would they have talked of enlightenment had there not been other so-called enlightened people before them? Even their concept of enlightenment is a borrowed concept. Such a borrowed enlightenment!

Real transformation does not occur with an end in sight. It does not say, “I am on the second floor and I have to go to the tenth floor.” It says, “I don’t have to be on the second floor, that’s all. I don’t have to be here. Doesn’t matter…

“To do as I want to do”—is that not what freedom means to us? The ones who have better sense, they say this is nothing but the freedom to remain a slave. “So, I will be a slave of my choice.” Everybody is free. In the country of slaves, everybody…

Strength is your nature. If you have managed to remain so weak, so fragile, so brittle for so long, it is only because you have been defending your weaknesses. You have been arguing in favor of your weaknesses; you have been reasoning out your weaknesses. You have simply not been…

We talk of the mother-child relationship as a classic case of love, at least that is the convention. But see what happens when the child doesn’t live up to the parents’ expectations or, worse still, actively breaches what the parents want. There can be murders.

When the mind is such…

I am saying this as a friend of the woman. I am asking her, why is the male sight or the male gaze so important to you? If you want attention from people, if you want respect from people, why can’t it be for higher reasons? Why do you want…

Do not wait for the great institutions to act. Do not wait for the right day to arrive. Do not wait for your capacities to build up. In your little capacity, in your little way, do whatever little you can.

How was the world spoiled in the first place? People…

If the fact of your enslavement curdles your blood, it means there is free spirit in you. But that free spirit gets invoked only when presented with the fact of slavery. If you do not know that you are enslaved, your free spirit remains dormant. Or, if you keep presenting…

Look at the stats released by the Durex company; it manufactures condoms. In the Valentine’s Day week, sales of condoms spike by twenty to thirty percent. And then there are the stats available from the medical organizations: March is the peak month for termination of pregnancy.

So, love is not…

If you have to catch a train or a flight, you very well do see that time is limited. When others are dying in front of you, you do see that time is limited. It is only yourself that you consider immortal. Everything else is perishable. “The train would leave,…

As long as you are living a socially adjusted and internally compromised life, as long as you are living resigned to your limitations, even your agony is limited. There won’t be much even in your sadness. You will cry for a while and then the moment somebody shows you some…

You know suffering. Where does it come from? It comes from pursuing paths that lead to nowhere, that just turn around at some point and bring you back to where you started from. That is what is called in India as the cycle of birth and death.

You thought that…

Before you accept or reject something, before you get wildly drawn to something, or before you just ignore something and move on, pause for five seconds and ask, “What is in it for me? What is the real importance it holds?”

Do not be carried away by emotions. Do not…

Pain is due and legitimate. You will have pain. Now live through it like a man.

What is suffering? Suffering comes only when you start espousing the flawed concept that life must be pain-free. When you start feeding that concept, when you start nourishing and identifying with that concept that…

Gynaecology is psychology. Where else does the whole thing come from? And it’s not as if I am talking exclusively of women; with the men it’s just the same.

This entire body is just genitals expressing themselves in various forms. One part of genitals you call as genitals; the other…

Things that are absolutely rubbish keep on occupying important places in our minds and, therefore, in our lives. Stuff that you would never value at all if you were not so heavily conditioned comes to become the center of your life. And when you are asked, “But why is this…

All your life your experiences have fooled you, right? When you looked at that woman, you experienced pure love; next year, you were filing for divorce. What happened to that experience?

Don’t you know how your experience fools you all the time? Don’t you see the most beautiful woman in…

There are many who say, “You know, eating flesh is alright.” If eating flesh is alright, why is it not all right to eat human flesh? A line is drawn between the human being and the animal. You say, “No, the human being cannot be eaten because he is highly…

There are people who indeed say that, “No, everything is fine with us.” They are not lying. It’s just that their fineness is superficial.Yes, there is fineness in your life, but that fineness is just this deep: scratch the surface and the fineness will evaporate. A little tragedy hits you…

Walking down the same lane, how will you come to a new destination?

Look at the lifecycle of the normal human being: Be born, get educated, get a job, get married, get a house, get a few luxuries, get a car, deal with your kids, deal with your wife or…

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: Sometimes when I listen to you, or when I read verses from the scriptures, there is a certain centeredness within me. What is that, and how can I remain centered? Please explain how to remain in peace and in the Loved One.

Acharya Prashant: You say that you get…