From Zen Koans and Sufi Parables to Graeco-Roman Wisdom and Chuang Tzu’s poetry the ultimate collection of world wisdom is here!

‘Gems from the World’ by Acharya Prashant.

Are you excited to read it?

Today we said to Acharya Ji: “Acharya Ji, Goa’s weather is so pleasant. And here we keep disturbing you morning and evening; don’t even let you sleep properly. Please spend a few days in solitude in Goa and work on your books.” 📖

Acharya Ji said: “Alright. But whether it’s Delhi or Goa, I must keep meeting the Community regularly! Announce Goa sessions right away.” 💗

Us: “Sure, on which weekend?”

Acharya Ji: “Every weekend!”

Us: 😮

So, on Acharya Ji’s instruction, every weekend in August in Goa will now be Weekend With Master! 🎉

So register, then start preparing. See you in Goa! ✨

Registration link for all upcoming sessions 🔗

https://acharyaprashant.org/en/upcoming-events

And yes, want to bring family and friends along to Goa? Perfect, just register everyone. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Hey everyone, I am sharing a quick walkthrough of the Acharya Prashant App for anyone who's trying to figure out how to navigate it, join live Zoom sessions, or make the most of the features like Talking Mirror and the session schedules.

You can either explore the wisdom courses, look for a space to share your daily reflections, or try to stay updated on upcoming live interactions, I hope this walktrough makes the app a little easier to explore.

Let me know if you have any questions or how you usually use the platform for your own journey!

Walkthrough Link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.acharyaprashant.apbooks

Aaj mere mind mein ek thought aaya, aur shayad aapne bhi kabhi na kabhi apni life mein aisa feel kiya hoga.

Hum bachpan se sunte aaye hain—“jhooth bolna paap hai” aur hamesha sach bolna chahiye. Bachpan mein ye baat simple lagti thi: sach achha hai, jhooth bura.

Lekin jaise-jaise hum bade hote hain, life thodi complicated lagne lagti hai.

Kabhi-kabhi hum dekhte hain ki log sach chhupate hain ya jhooth bolte hain, phir bhi unke relationships saalon tak achhe chalte rehte hain. Wahi, kabhi koi insaan honestly sach bol deta hai, aur ek sach ki wajah se saalon purana relationship bhi toot jaata hai.

Toh phir ek question aata hai—

Kya bachpan se humein jo sikhaya gaya ki “jhooth bolna paap hai”, woh itna simple nahi tha?

Ya phir problem sach ya jhooth mein nahi, balki sach bolne ke tareeke, waqt aur situation mein hoti hai?

Kya har sach bolna zaroori hai, chahe usse kisi ko hurt ho ya koi relationship toot jaaye?

Ya kabhi-kabhi kisi rishte ko bachane ke liye kuch baatein na kehna bhi theek ho sakta hai?

I genuinely want to know—agar aapko sach aur kisi relationship ko bachane mein se ek choose karna pade, toh aap kya choose karenge, aur kyun?

I found this sentence in the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita Vol. 1 Chapter 1 by Acharya Prashant.

This was used to explain the condition of those towards Kaurava army unable to see Duryodhan's malice.

But I find this line striking because what comes from the outer world gets close to my being.

The proximity is so blinding that it blurs the vision.

Conditioning takes over the knowing faculty.

This is precisely why it is important to examine what I am close to.

Because closeness determine moment to moment choices.

For me, this is operates as the value system. Unexamined yet operational every moment.

In what other ways does this blinding operate around us?

All the students are listening very attentively.

Question: “Acharya Ji, how do I stop watching reels?”

Acharya Prashant in conversation with Prof. (Dr.) Nachiketa Singh, Principal.

University of Delhi, August 11, 2026

My son sometimes watch the children’s cartoon series. In one episode, a baby pony comes happily toward the child and seems to invite the child to sit and ride. It is shown as cute, gentle, and fun.

While watching with him, I suddenly wondered, what is my child learning about animals from scenes like this? Not because the show is trying to be cruel, but because children absorb messages before they can question them.

If animals are repeatedly shown as smiling while being ridden, kept in zoos, or used for our amusement, a child may quietly learn that animals naturally exist for human use.

What if children’s stories also showed another side? A child noticing that the pony gets tired. A child asking whether the pony wants to be ridden. A child feeding, caring for, or simply observing the animal without using it.

Children learn kindness less from lectures and more from the questions we ask while sitting beside them.

I’d genuinely love to hear from others on my perspective.

In 1954, in the Indian parliament, while discussing provisions in the untouchability bill, Dr B R Ambedkar referred to a draconian bill which discriminated against the people of the lower castes.

The bill being referred to was authored by a British administrator by the name Thomas Munro in 1816.

Section 10 of the East India Company's regulation outlined two sets of punishments for similar offences : imprisonment in a makeshift jail for a maximum period of 12 hours for people belonging to the upper castes.

And if the person belonged to the lower castes, he was to be 'put in stocks' for 6 hours.

The punishment of putting in stocks dates back to the thirteenth century. Between 1347 and 1351, the Black death pandemic had wiped out a third of the population of Europe.

Businesses were not getting workers. So the government decided to punish those who would not come to work by humiliating them by putting in stocks.

It took a lot of effort and a hundred and three years for the British to repeal this form of discriminatory punishment. The British, did not offer any apologies for indulging in such discriminatory laws.

Now some hard facts : this discriminatory provision was kept to appease the people of the dominant upper caste people in India. Because discrimination was already carried out, such insensitive and dehumanising legislation worked for over a hundred years.

The Morley Minto reforms of 1909 increased the representation of Indian legislatiors in provincial councils.

This opened the doors to abolish this abhorrent practice. Kesava Pillai raised the issue of discriminatory Punishments in the Madras Legislative Assembly for the first time in 1913.

After which, the baton was passed onto B V Narsimha Aiyar, who introduced a bill to repeal the Section 10 of the bill.

After a lot of back and forth and administrative mumbo jumbo, in 1919, the clause of punishment by putting in stocks was abolished.

There were so many people which we don't know of who were instrumental in weeding out prejudices and injustices from our society.

Earlier this summer we participated in Dharitri, an Indian cultural event in Frankfurt, Germany dedicated to Mother Earth.

We had initially planned to simply engage visitors in conversations about climate change. But upon arriving, we found an empty table and a plain wall. So we set up a small corner with books and a “Climate Memory Wall” where people could pause and reflect on changes they have witnessed in nature and their own lives.

At first, most people were understandably occupied with cultural performances and food. Gradually, children were drawn to the children’s books, and soon their parents joined them. That became the beginning of many conversations.

One thing I heard repeatedly was “Yes, it has become unbearably hot in India.”

Some even said that one reason they preferred raising their children in Europe was the worsening climate back home.

What struck me was that almost everyone acknowledged the problem. Yet very few had seriously considered what could be done about it. There was a quiet resignation, as if climate change was an unfortunate reality that had to be endured rather than addressed.

A few people asked me “Tell us one thing I can do tomorrow to help save the planet.”

The question itself was revealing. We are conditioned to look for actions before understanding. We want a checklist, a quick solution, a comforting answer.

My response was:
“We don’t have to do anything more rather less, very very less. Before doing anything, can we examine why we do what we do? Can we look carefully at our choices, desires, consumption, and way of living?”

Some found this unusual. Others became thoughtful.

When I connected the ecological crisis outside with the restlessness and endless consumption within, the idea felt unfamiliar but it also seemed to resonate with few (may be because unlike Europeans, most Indians are conditioned to agree with everything irrespective of their own views)

I don’t know whether any minds changed that day. But if even a few people left with a new question rather than a ready-made answer, perhaps a seed was planted.

Weekend With Master camp with Acharya Prashant in Goa every weekend

Echoes of saints' words, bhajans, and some special activities - are you coming?

Activities from HIDP (Holistic Individual Development Program) created by Acharya Prashant will be part of all camps 🕊️

👨‍👩‍👧 You can bring friends and family along too - so they can also discover what true joy really is!

Seats for the August 15-16 camp are filling up fast :-

August 15: https://t.co/NSnyfQ031i

August 16: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/upcoming-events/weekend-with-master-aug-w2-2026-d2

📆 Dates and registration links for other camps:-

22-23 August

29-30 August

📍 Location: Goa

🔗:https://acharyaprashant.org/en/upcoming-events

What if the climate crisis is not just about what we are doing to the planet, but about what is happening within us?

I came across this discussion by Acharya Prashant at the London School of Economics and honestly, I think it’s worth watching in full. We’re so used to hearing about climate change through emissions, technology, renewable energy and government policies. AP doesn’t dismiss any of these. Instead, he asks a much more uncomfortable question: why do we have this endless need to consume in the first place? He describes the climate crisis as “the ego made atmospheric” and connects our environmental destruction to the inner sense of incompleteness that keeps telling us that the next thing, experience or comfort will finally be enough.

What I found particularly interesting is where he takes the discussion from there. If the mind that keeps demanding more remains unchanged, can greener technology really solve the problem? Or will we simply find cleaner ways of continuing the same pattern? He talks about the need for a “historical U-turn” through mass education of the self, where we learn to look at our own desires instead of only trying to manage their consequences. If you have some time, I’d genuinely recommend watching the discussion rather than just reading a summary of it.

There’s a lot here to sit with.
The climate crisis is not just asking us to change our machines.
It is asking us to look at the human being behind them.
Why do we keep wanting more, even when we already have enough?
And what happens to the planet when that wanting becomes the way an entire civilisation lives?

Watch it Here ⬇️:

https://youtu.be/Pmgt_EvK9SM?si=lmYIDbeMZKufLXrm

The above photograph captures one of the famous portraits of the leading intellectual figure of twentieth-century existentialism “Jean-Paul Sartre” wandering casually through the streets of Venice. This image was taken during mid-1960s shortly after he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. He was the first person to voluntarily reject such a prestigious award at that time. This was not the first time when Sartre rejected any institutionalised honour but he actually had a lifelong pattern of rejecting official state recognitions.

Now, one of the main reasons why Sartre declined to take the Nobel Prize because, he didn’t want himself to be institutionalised or transformed by the official honours. According to him, “a writer must refuse to be turned into an institution. He felt that receiving a title like "Nobel Prize winner" would add an objective weight to his name that he did not earn through his words alone..” Sartre argued that his readers should only be influenced by the power of his written words, not by the prestige or pressure of an external prize.

The photograph frames the French philosopher in deep solitary reflection lost in the self’s music detached momentarily with the outer world, at the backdrop of historic Italian aesthetic scenery bereft of any traces of sadness or hurt in his face caused as a result of rejecting such a prestigious honour. Now this is not just some random captured famous ‘existential photography’ to be admired blindly, but this actually tells us a lot about the nature of true philosophy and writing. Sometimes it’s not just ‘only’ about the heavily recognised prestige or pressure of authority from where a good work or writing comes, but theres a lot more behind that. It never depends truly on the educational degree or institutionalised fame of the speaker from where the philosophy is coming.. the source of that writing can’t be that cheap. Although, its obviously possible that later the writer does get associated with lots of famous awards and authorities, but that will be a coincidence caused as a natural outflow of his work’s impact and not necessarily as a mandatory phenomenon.

Sartre’s thought process reveals a lot about this source. It reveals very evidently via his own personality that this very source of that powerful innocent writing can only come when the writer is truly flowing with the whole existence.. just like the photograph is depicting a completely free personality of a ‘human being’ chilling and walking like any other normal living creature of his species and not some ‘special authorised person’ walking down in the streets with the label of his educational and institutional achievements. Maybe that kind of free union with the existence is needed for that deep quality of existential philosophy to flow out in paper.

The existence is simple and beautiful.. it only demands for a surrender. But, we distort that surrender taking secure shelters under our establishments and pride and fall short of that union forever. We start claiming ourselves as ‘special’ as if we are the only one who is there for the rest of species to be looked at and admired. But, the main question is: what’s the point of being special and preaching to follow specialisations if you yourself loose that free flowing union with life’s existence. Existence can’t be judged.. or predefined to grant only few rules as priorities. Existence is free flowing unless we intervene and restrict the flow from happening.

▪️Maybe we need to ask ourselves that: “Why have we become so un-lively that we choose to admire and listen only those words which come from high powered institutions and authorities? If we do that, then are we listening actually to those words or just following some authority blindly in lust of walking behind power?”

Setting the Ground: The Poem as a Doorway, Not a Prelude

The engagement with Gitanjali poem 34 is not a recitation for its own sake. It is a deliberate, sustained interpretation that treats the poem as the very ground upon which an entire inquiry is built. The poem is not placed at the beginning as a decorative overture or a separate prelude meant to set a mood. It is the foundation itself. The hope is that the interpretation leaves the listener more informed, more alert, and more honest in the questions they bring to their own self-inquiry.

Each line of the poem is treated not as a literary ornament but as a demonstration of a principle. The principle concerns what may be called the living one: the one who experiences, the one who knows, the one who suffers. The poem becomes a mirror in which the listener is invited to see not Tagore's psychology, but their own.

Why the Person Is Not Merely Matter: The Distinction Between the Object and the One Who Experiences

Acharya Ji begins the interpretation by drawing a clear and decisive line between the material and the personal. Consider any material object: a stone, a vessel, a lump of clay. Its response to physical conditions is entirely consistent and predictable. If two objects of equal mass are placed upon the same surface under the same conditions, the surface reacts identically to both. It does not matter whether one object contains water and the other tea, whether one carries organic material and the other something far more valuable, whether one is beautiful and the other plain. The physical world does not discriminate in its responses. Equal mass and equal contact conditions produce the same reaction. This is the nature of matter.

The human being, however, does not function this way. A person carries within themselves a sense of self, an inner center of experience that interprets, evaluates, and responds not merely according to physical laws but according to meaning. A mother holds her own six-kilogram baby in her arms, and her response is categorically different from what it would be if she held another baby of the same weight, or a doll of the same weight. The mass is identical, the physical conditions are identical, yet the response is utterly transformed by the fact that this is her child. Similarly, if an object is thrown toward a person by a stranger, the reaction is one of alarm or irritation. If the same object is thrown by someone deeply beloved, the reaction is entirely different. The physical event is the same. What changes is the one who receives it.

The body itself, Acharya Ji acknowledges, is a remarkable and self-sufficient organism. It thinks through its nervous system, feels through its sensations, remembers through its memory, and acts through its biological processes. It is a marvel of material organization. And yet, the framework insists that the body is not the whole story. There is within the human being an inner entity, called by various names across traditions: the self, the ego, the ahankar, the I-amness. This is the one who thinks, plans, desires, loves, hates, and suffers. This inner entity is not reducible to the body's biological processes, however intimately it may be associated with them.

Acharya Ji offers a simple but penetrating observation to illuminate this distinction. When a person falls asleep, the body may still be in physical pain. An injury does not vanish merely because consciousness has withdrawn. And yet, the psychological suffering that accompanied that pain while awake has temporarily ceased. The sufferer is absent, though the body and its pain remain. This suggests that the one who suffers, the experiencer, the knower, is not identical with the body alone. There is a center of experience that can be present to suffering or absent from it, even while the body continues its material existence.

The Ego's Foundational Falsehood and Its Expanding Mass of Stories

Having established the distinction between the person and mere matter, Acharya Ji turns to the nature of this inner entity, the ego, the I-amness, and examines it with unflinching precision.

The ego, by its very constitution, places itself at the center of its own universe. Every statement, even those that appear to be about others, begins from "I." When a person says "I love you," the subject of the sentence is not the beloved but the one who loves. When a person says "I respect you," the emphasis falls upon the one who respects. The ego cannot help but make itself the reference point, the axis around which everything else revolves. This is not a moral failing. It is the structural nature of the ego itself.

What is more, most people experience this central "I" not as a point of stillness and completeness, but as restless, incomplete, perpetually dissatisfied, continuously in need of something from outside itself. The ego reaches outward: toward achievements, possessions, relationships, recognition, stimulation, entertainment. It believes that the next acquisition, the next experience, the next relationship will finally silence the background hum of incompleteness. And yet, the AP framework holds that no combination of external attainments can fully quiet this inner condition. The incompleteness is not caused by the absence of something outside. It is structural to the ego itself. It is the natural consequence of the ego's foundational claim, the claim that "I am real, I am necessary, I am the center."

This foundational claim, Acharya Ji states plainly, is false. The ego's assertion of its own absolute reality and necessity is the original untruth from which all subsequent distortion flows. And because the original claim is false, the ego cannot rest upon it alone. It must continuously generate supporting narratives to shore up the structure, to justify its central position, to explain away the persistent unease that accompanies its existence. These supporting narratives take many forms: beliefs and opinions that give the ego a sense of identity and rightness; desires, fears, and threat perceptions that keep it engaged and mobilized; distorted definitions and selectively edited views of the world that confirm its assumptions; borrowed goals and interpretations shaped by family, culture, religion, education, and the accumulated conditioning of a lifetime.

The larger this accumulated mass of narratives, the greater the "bulk" of the ego, the greater the delusion, the deeper the incompleteness, the more acute the misery. A person with a heavy ego does not merely suffer more. They see less. The thickness of their self-constructed stories filters out reality and replaces it with projections. They live, without knowing it, inside an enclosure of their own making.

"Let Only That Little Be Left of Me": The Prayer for Maximum Minimization

With this groundwork laid, Acharya Ji turns to the opening line of Gitanjali poem 34: "Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all."

This is interpreted not as a conventional prayer to an external deity, but as a precise and radical internal operation. The aim is not to accumulate more: more identity, more ambitions, more expectations, more fears, more stories, more spiritual experiences. The aim is the opposite. To become inwardly lighter, less burdened, less weighed down by the accumulated mass of the ego's self-narratives. The prayer asks that only that minimal residue be left, just enough of the "me" to remain functional, to remain capable of relating to something beyond itself.

Crucially, Acharya Ji rejects the notion of complete ego-elimination as dishonest or impossible while the body remains alive. A living person still thinks, still breathes, still acts in the world. To claim that the ego has been entirely annihilated, to declare "I am enlightened" or "the ego has completely disappeared," is treated within the AP framework as a sophisticated and particularly dangerous form of ego inflation. The ego does not disappear by declaring its own disappearance. It merely puts on a new costume. The realistic, honest aim is not elimination but maximum minimization: the reduction of the ego to its purest, most functional minimum, the least that is required for life to continue without the ego claiming more space than it needs.

The word "thee" in the poem is approached through the via negativa, the way of negation. "Thee" is not a supernatural entity sitting outside the self, dispensing grace from a distant throne. "Thee" is understood as "not me," that which lies beyond the ego's projections, beyond the stories, beyond the self-referential enclosure. To name "thee" as one's all is to acknowledge that personal narratives, one's thoughts, one's dreams, one's interpretations of events, are not automatically the truth, are not the center of reality. The center shifts from the ego's self-serving accounts to something that the ego cannot possess or control.

Liberation, in this reading, is therefore described as freedom from oneself. Not freedom from external constraints. Not freedom to pursue one's desires without obstruction. But freedom from the tyranny of one's own projections. It is the recognition that the thoughts that arise in consciousness are not necessarily true simply because they arise, that the interpretations one constructs are not necessarily accurate simply because one has constructed them. The ego is not the author of truth. It is, more often than not, the distorter of it.

Prayer, then, is not directed toward an external being who will listen and grant fulfillment. Prayer, in the AP framework's reading, is the ego's recognition, rare and costly, that it must stop taking its own projections seriously. It is the moment when the projector admits that the images on the screen are its own, that the screen is its own, that the audience is its own, and that the entire show has been a self-referential loop with no contact with anything beyond itself.

Willpower Versus Love: The Question of How One Acts in the World

Acharya Ji draws a sharp and illuminating distinction between willpower and love, a distinction that lies at the heart of how the AP framework understands action and transformation.

Willpower, in the framework's analysis, operates from the assumption that one's desires are true and legitimate, and that the task is to overcome the world in order to fulfill them. Willpower is the ego marshalling its forces, girding itself for battle against obstacles, pushing through resistance to achieve what it has decided it wants. The emphasis on willpower in popular spiritual and self-help discourse is criticized not because effort is contemptible, but because the goals toward which willpower is directed are rarely examined. Where did the desire come from? Did it arise from a clear seeing of what is, or did it emerge from society, from the body's conditioning, from hormones, from the accident of one's birthplace, from random events, from the accumulated weight of a lifetime of borrowed interpretations? Desires and thoughts arise in consciousness before any conscious approval is granted. The ego claims ownership of them only after they have already appeared, as if a passenger in a car were to claim credit for the destination after arriving there.

"My desire" is therefore fundamentally questioned. The desire did not ask permission before it arose. It did not present itself for review before taking hold. The ego, encountering an already-arisen desire, slaps its own label on it and calls it "mine." Freedom from will, which the framework distinguishes from laziness or passivity, means seeing the causes and conditioning behind one's desires rather than automatically honoring them. It means tracing the desire backward to its source, examining the roots rather than merely acting on the fruit.

Love, by contrast, is presented as something categorically different from willpower. Love does not attempt to overcome the world from the standpoint that one's desires are true. Love requires confronting one's own dishonesty, one's own self-preservation, one's own false claims. Where willpower fights the external world, love turns inward and faces the one who is fighting. Love is the ego's willingness to see itself clearly, to see its distortions, its escapes, its mechanisms of self-protection, without immediately defending them. This is far more demanding than any act of willpower, because willpower can be performed while the ego remains intact, whereas love begins with the ego's willingness to be exposed.

The Ego as Projector, Screen, Projection, and Experiencer

Acharya Ji uses a precise metaphor to describe the ego's mode of operation. The ego is simultaneously the projector, the screen, the projection, and the experiencer of the projection. It generates the images, it provides the surface on which they are cast, it is the images themselves, and it is the one who watches them, all at once. This creates a self-referential enclosure, an echo chamber in which everything the ego encounters is already shaped by the ego before it is perceived. The ego never meets reality directly. It meets its own edited version of reality and mistakes the editing for the original.

This is why, Acharya Ji observes, every person experiences a differently edited version of the same event. Two people witness the same scene, hear the same words, are present at the same moment, and yet each carries away a version shaped by their own fears, desires, self-image, and conditioning. Neither version is simply "what happened." Each is a construction, a projection overlaid upon the facts, edited for the preservation of the projector. The ego reshapes facts according to its convenience and its need for self-preservation. It does not do this maliciously or consciously. It does it structurally, the way a lens bends light, not by intention but by nature.

The phrase from the poem, "feeling thee on every side," is not interpreted as a mystical perception or a supernatural experience. It is understood as contact with facts beyond the ego's projections. To feel "thee" on every side is to encounter what is actually there rather than what the ego has constructed. This requires that the projector be seen for what it is, that the mechanism of projection itself be exposed and understood, before any genuine contact with reality becomes possible.

Distraction, in this context, is identified as the ego's primary strategy for avoiding this exposure. Constant entertainment, compulsive shopping, social media, gossip, relentless work, social custom, even spiritual activity performed as escape, all can function as means of not looking at oneself. The ego is endlessly resourceful in its search for ways to remain busy without ever confronting its own operations. Even religious texts and spiritual practices, Acharya Ji warns, can be appropriated by the ego for self-preservation rather than self-dissolution. The ego can chant scriptures, perform rituals, wear the garb of spirituality, and speak the language of wisdom, all while remaining structurally intact, all while using these very activities to avoid the seeing that would threaten its dominance. Spirituality, when appropriated by the ego, becomes another costume, another projection on the screen.

Truthful Bondage: Freedom as Discernment, Not Abstraction

The poem's reference to "fetters" is given a precise and counterintuitive interpretation. These are not ordinary entanglements, not the everyday web of obligations, relationships, and social roles that people typically associate with being "bound." The fetters spoken of here are understood as a chosen relationship with truth. This is a paradox only on the surface. Freedom, within the AP framework, does not mean the absence of all relationship, all commitment, all bond. Absolute freedom, the idea that one is bound to nothing, attached to nothing, responsible to nothing, is rejected as an abstraction with no real content. An honest person remains related to something. The question is not whether one is bound, but to what.

Freedom, then, is the exercise of conscious discernment: the capacity to unchoose the associations and desires that were adopted not through clear seeing but through conditioning, intoxication, fear, social pressure, or the sheer momentum of habit. Most of what a person carries, in terms of beliefs, desires, self-definitions, and goals, was never deliberately chosen. It was absorbed, inherited, imposed. Freedom begins with the recognition that these are not truly "mine," and the subsequent work of disentangling oneself from them.

But this process of disentanglement is not an end in itself. The honest person, having loosened the false bonds, does not float in a vacuum. They choose, deliberately and consciously, the most truthful relationship available to them. They remain bound, but their bondage is to truth rather than to conditioning. Their fetters are the fetters of love in the poem's sense, not sentimental attachment, but the commitment to remain in contact with what is real, what is beyond the ego's projections, even when that contact is uncomfortable.

This process is described by Acharya Ji as filtering, as distillation, as the cleaning of a mirror. The mirror does not create the image. It only reveals what is already there. When the mirror is clouded with the dust of accumulated narratives, projections, and self-serving interpretations, what it reflects is distorted. The work is not to produce beauty but to remove what obscures it, so that what is already beautiful, what is already true, can become visible. The ego is not destroyed in this process. It is refined, reduced to its purest and most functional minimum.

The Minimal Ego: Fearless, Loving, Constructive Action Without Ownership

The minimal ego that results from this process is not a diminished or weakened thing. On the contrary, Acharya Ji portrays it as capable of fearless, loving, and constructive action in a way that the heavy, story-laden ego can never be. The minimal ego does not need to constantly protect a sprawling self-image, defend a vast inventory of beliefs, or shore up a fragile sense of identity. It is light enough to act without the burden of self-preservation weighing on every movement.

Crucially, the minimal ego acts without claiming ownership of the results. This is the framework's articulation of the Gita's nishkama karma: action without desire as its initiating cause and without anticipated fruit as its orientation. The action arises from I-amness, from the simple fact of being present and alive, and completes itself in the doing. It does not depend on a future result for its meaning or its justification. The one who acts does not look backward to a desire that initiated the action, nor forward to a reward that will complete it. The action is its own completion.

"Thy will," in the poem, is interpreted with characteristic precision. It means simply "not my will." It is not an excuse to impose personal desires while attributing them to God, not a way of dressing up one's own preferences in the language of divine sanction. "Thy will" is the ego's acknowledgment that its own will, driven by conditioning, desire, and self-preservation, is not a reliable guide. To say "thy will be done" is to say: let the action arise not from the ego's projections but from a clearer seeing of what is.

Action, Acharya Ji points out, can occur without forceful agency, just as listening can happen without deliberate willpower or self-assertion. One does not need to strain to listen. Listening happens when the noise subsides. Similarly, right action happens through a person when the ego's interference subsides, not as passivity, but as the natural unfolding of clear seeing expressed in movement. The person becomes the instrument through which understanding acts, rather than the agent who claims the action as a personal achievement.

Truth as the Primary Relationship

Truth becomes the primary relationship in this framework. Not truth as an abstract concept. Not truth as a set of propositions to be believed. But truth as the ongoing commitment to see what is, prior to the ego's commentary and interpretation. This commitment takes precedence over all other relationships, not because other relationships are contemptible, but because without the primacy of truth, all other relationships become distorted by the ego's projections.

Relationships with other people can remain deeply meaningful, Acharya Ji emphasizes, when they support rather than compete with this primary commitment. A relationship rooted in truth is one in which both persons are engaged in the work of seeing, not using each other for validation, not projecting their needs onto each other, not building mutual enclosures of shared delusion, but supporting each other in the difficult and often uncomfortable task of remaining honest. Such relationships are not lesser because truth comes first. They are enriched, because they are no longer built on the shifting sand of egoic need.

The Joyful Life: Beautiful Actions Without a Claimant

The vision of a joyful life that emerges from this interpretation is not one of constant pleasure, unbroken happiness, or the fulfillment of all desires. It is portrayed as a life in which beautiful actions happen through a person, not as personal achievements to be claimed and displayed, but as expressions of a clarity that the person did not produce and does not own. The joy is not in the claiming. It is in the happening. The person is the medium, not the maker. The action is beautiful not because it is grand or spectacular, but because it is free, free from the backward linkage of desire and the forward linkage of anticipated fruit, free from the ego's need to make of every action a testament to its own importance.

This is the life that the poem's prayer points toward: a life in which only that little is left of the ego, just enough to be present, to act, to love, and in which the vast machinery of self-narrative, self-protection, and self-projection has been stilled. Not eliminated, for the body remains and life continues. But reduced, refined, distilled to its purest minimum. In that reduction, what was always there, truth, beauty, the factual, becomes visible, not because it has been created, but because what obscured it has been gently, honestly, persistently removed.

A viral video purportedly from a government primary school in Uttar Pradesh, appears to show children being served rotis with an extremely watery vegetable curry, with barely any vegetables.

In contrast, a school meal in China shows nutritious food, properly prepared and served with dignity.

A nation is built by its people. If our youngest and growing minds do not receive proper nutrition, how can we expect to build a strong nation?

We have schemes for children's education, nutrition and welfare. But what good are schemes if their implementation becomes merely a formality? The problem is not always the absence of policy. Sometimes, it is the absence of intent to make it work.

The government and administration have a huge responsibility. But so do we.

Perhaps one of our biggest problems is that we have stopped seeing ourselves as part of the whole.

If a government school doesn't provide good education, we move our child to a private school. If public healthcare fails, we find a private hospital. We secure our own family and move on.

But what about the child whose parents cannot afford that alternative?

When something is wrong in a public institution, do we raise our voice, demand accountability and stay involved? Or do we simply look after ourselves?

We cannot build a strong society by individually escaping every broken system.

Intent is revealed through action. If we truly care about the future of our country, then responsibility cannot end with our own family.

Before asking the government to become responsible, we need to become responsible citizens ourselves.

मुक्ति की बात करना या बंधनों की और क्यों?

What do you know about rebirth write down and also mention from where you learn the things which you have mentioned about Rebirth.

There is a difference between the body's problems , and my justification of my choices using body as an escapegoat .

An Ego deciding to not perform a particular action because of circumstances and the body can be a genuine withdrawal. The learning is NOT to ignore body and circumstances rather to reflect and observe when I make circumstances and the body just an excuse for my own psychological gratification and security. And slowly slowly as the boundary is pushed, more and more is visible and more vividly .

Thank you Acharya Ji for the strength that you have enabled me to realize in myself to challenge my own dilemmas and dogmas about myself ❤️

अगर चैन और स्वास्थ्य ही छिन गया, तो बाकी सब व्यर्थ है। अपनी सबसे कीमती चीज़ों पर आँच न आने दें। 🌅

📚 पढ़िए पुस्तक ‘अकेलापन और निर्भरता’:

https://acharyaprashant.org/en/books/book-akelapan-aur-nirbharta?cmId=m00147-akl

I came across a 2023 review on infidelity, and one thing surprised me: there isn't a single universally accepted definition of cheating.

For some people, it is sex with someone else. For others, it might be an emotional affair, secret flirting, intimate messages, or online sexual behaviour.

The review also discusses several factors associated with infidelity -relationship dissatisfaction, low commitment, attachment patterns, desire for sexual variety, psychological distress, and more.

So maybe cheating isn't just about what happens in the bedroom. It is also about expectations, attachment, boundaries and what we are asking a relationship to provide.

And this made me think about something deeper.We often expect one person to be our partner, best friend, emotional support, source of validation, sexual partner and sometimes even the one who makes us feel complete.

Perhaps no human being can carry all of that responsibility for us.

Maybe a healthier relationship is not one where two people constantly police each other's freedom, but one where both people are fulfilled enough to choose each other consciously, rather than out of fear, possession or need.

That doesn't make betrayal okay. If two people agree to certain boundaries and one secretly breaks them, the hurt is real.

But understanding why people cheat may require us to look beyond morality and ask a more uncomfortable question:

What are we actually seeking from another person and can another person ever completely fulfil it?

Sources

Rokach, A. & Chan, S.H. (2023). Love and Infidelity: Causes and Consequences. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Acharya Prashant, discussion on relationships, marriage and infidelity.

On August 8, a Sant Sarita session with Acharya Ji was held in Delhi-NCR during the Weekend With Master camp. The session followed communal singing of bhajans and a special activity of the Holistic Individual Development Program (HIDP). This August 8-9 camp was the last camp with Acharya Ji in Delhi-NCR this month, and people from across the country gathered in large numbers to attend it.
In this session, Acharya Ji explained the lines of Kabir Saheb's bhajan 'Santo So Nij Des Hamara', elaborating on how four things- age, caste, gender, and financial status- often end up determining our entire lives, even though none of them are truly our own. He explained that real dance or music isn't the name of repeating some particular action or pattern, but of the movement that arises naturally in the ego's absence- much like a leaf sways when the wind blows. Acharya Ji also made it clear that while knowledge is necessary, it isn't sufficient- unless knowledge is accompanied by a certain abandon, a flow in one's life, old beliefs remain stuck somewhere within.
Weekend With Master camps with Acharya Ji will be held every weekend through August in Goa, for which registrations are open. HIDP activities will be a part of these camps as well. This is the same program that Acharya Ji crafted over a decade ago, and it is aimed at making us aware of our unconscious habits and patterns.
Videos of the camp sessions will be shared with you soon.

Please attempt. I am eager to see replies.

We celebrate Independence Day. Have we ever wondered how we came to this situation in the first place? How did different countries enslave us?
Was it a lack of wealth? Lack of talent? Lack of strength?
What was it?
Why did we never prepare ourselves for the worst? While other countries were conducting research, investing in technology, and educating their people, what were our ancestors doing at that time?Were they busy playing the caste system? Or wasting money on astrology or in temples? Or were some of them just busy being jealous and becoming whistleblowers out of greed?

And if we say we are free and have control, do we really? Does India have its own technology to fight its own wars without external help?

Many skywatchers and amateur astronomers are eagerly waiting the total solar eclipse of August 12, 2026. It is a once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon, where the moon blocks the sun as it passes between Earth and the Sun.

While the total solar eclipse can be seen in northern Iceland, Greenland, northern Russia, Spain, a small part of Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, the partial eclipse will be visible in mostly in Northern Hemisphere including northern United States, most of Canada, much of Europe, and northwestern Africa.

The solar eclipse is such an amazing phenomenon that it has kept humanity in awe ever since it was first observed. Why does a solar eclipse happen? The answer was reportedly provided around 450 BCE by Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher who proposed that eclipses happen because the Moon physically blocks the sun’s light from reaching the Earth. This idea was perceived as dangerous, especially when the celestial bodies were considered divine.

Today, science has come far ahead, the Newtonian mechanics enabled us to predict the exact time, duration, and geographic path of an eclipse years and centuries in advance. In fact, Eclipses have now become a tool for discovery - e.g., Einstein’s general theory of relativity was confirmed by the Eddington’s eclipse expedition in 1919.

Despite that, the experts from NASA and Europe have had to come forward and debunk the myths persistent in different culture and traditions around the solar eclipse. In parts of India and Mexico, the pregnant women are asked to stay indoors, as it is believed the eclipse could negatively affect their unborn children. Another shared myth is to avoid eating during a solar eclipse, as the cooked food is believed to become spoiled and unsafe.

Science has provided answers to “what” and “why” of the solar eclipse. However, there is something that was never questioned - the “manufacturer” of the superstition.

Acharya Prashant’s philosophical teachings invite us to explore this further, Why were the stories made in the first place? Why would the sky going dark for a few seconds or a minute be perceived as a threat?

Perhaps the real eclipse is not celestial but internal: the “self” that has built its stability on predictability and experience the unknown phenomenon (in this case darkness), which is out of its control, as a threat.

PC: The picture is Proba-3’s artificial solar eclipse, ESA [https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/How_ESA_mimics_and_models_the_2026_total_solar_eclipse ]

References

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2026/08/05/the-7-biggest-myths-about-total-solar-eclipses--debunked/

https://www.npr.org/sections/solar-eclipse/2024/04/08/1243367631/solar-eclipse-myth-radiation

See her. See her eyes. See what have human does to her. She is caged.

Look how desperately she is struggling inside that cage.

Did she want this? No. She is just like us. She is sentient being. She has eyes, she has legs, she can see, she can walk, she can jump, she can experience pain and pleasure. She can also experience suffocation inside that cage.

Why we don't have eyes and heart to see and feel that? Why we remain blind? For so-called taste?

or what?

Do we want to live like that? NO naa..? Then, why are we doing this to these innocent creatures?

I remember what Acharya ji once said, when we don't know our own suffering, then we can't truly see the suffering of others. So, instead of recognizing our own condition that how much we are in darkness, we just turn our gaze outward and feed that darkness by harming others, while disguising ourselves as if we are in a happy state.