Questioner (Q): Sir, I had a question, it's not regarding spiritualism, but I see you as a graduate of IIT and engineer. You graduated from IIM, then you did civil services. So, I wanted to ask, how versatile you are and how your time management was, like how were you able to crack so many different fields, like Commerce, Science and Arts.
Acharya Prashant (AP): I respect time a lot because I know that everybody, including me, has only a limited supply of it. So, that's one thing that I really dislike, a day badly spent and that's a battle I always keep fighting. Check where your time is going. Ensure that not a moment is wasted.
Q: How do we prioritize your tasks? What to do and when to do?
AP: No. You must know what is important, and that must be done. Where is the question of prioritization? You know what is important. Don't you know what is important? Everybody knows what is important. It is just that we do not remain alert enough and sensitive enough and honest enough, and in spite of knowing what is important we do something else. Is that not the real problem? Or is the problem that you do not know what is important? I'm asking you, please. More often, what is the problem?
Q: Not doing.
AP: Not doing what you already know to be important. So, we already know, at least, what is relatively important. We might not know what is absolutely important, but if you know what is relatively important, then why do you indulge in other things? And you must have a love for learning. Another name for deconditioning, another name for love is learning. In spite of, irrespective of how occupied I am, I carry multiple devices and more than a hundred tabs are always open in each of them and I leave those tabs open because I revisit whatever I have read.
So, also, I make it a point to visit and revisit, and I'm always reading and especially when everybody is gone, just a couple of hours before I finally sleep off. I read a lot. If I can't read books and I'm actually quite disappointed that I can't read books so much these days. I've recently bought this Kindle, yet I have not started with it. I hope it works well for me, but the mobile phone, that's my device.
I do constant, constant and not just out of curiosity, very purposeful reading. I want to learn what is going on continuously that's about the world, that's about the objective universe and then inner learning. I love to keep an eye on myself, just as I'm looking at you at this moment, I'm also looking at myself.
So, I enjoy being sensitive to what is going on in the body, in the mind and I love to catch myself coming up with ready-made reactions and I take it to be a thing of pride, for want of a better word. Pride is not the best word, but I take it to be a thing of pride to defeat myself. If a situation arises today and I have been in a similar situation two years back, I feel satisfied if my response today is better than it was earlier. So, that kind of challenge I keep giving to myself. A continuous fight against oneself, so that one may improve.
One may know learning is an infinite journey but you must know what is going on in the world. There is just so much greatness, there is so much beauty, great works created by our predecessors, our ancients, you must know of them. That's called external knowledge or avidya and equally you must always be aware of what is happening within — the emotions, the reactions, the frustrations, the anger, the happiness, and the lust for pleasure. You must be conscious of all these things as they happen and you must be able to watch them from a bit of a distance so that they don't overpower you. So, if you can know both these things — what's happening in the external world and what's happening in here — I think it will do you a lot of good.
Q: And I have another question. You did IIT, then IIM, then civil services and today you are in a totally different field which did not require your education qualifications. So, do you have any regrets? Like you wasted your time, or you did something wrong?
AP: I wanted to be in Goa. And they said, “Jaipur is great in winter.” So, from Delhi, let's say, I came to Goa via Jaipur. Now, having reached Goa, will you ask me do I regret not being in Jaipur? First of all, Goa is great. Secondly, I never wanted to be in Jaipur. I didn't set out to be in Jaipur. Jaipur was just an enroute. It was one of the things that came along the way.
I never intended to settle there, and the journey is such that it has to pass through several places. Any journey passes through several places, but that does not mean you missed not being there. Is there any journey that does not pass through any place? Even if you are flying, they announce and tell you that now you are flying over Bombay and now you are flying on, you always pass through certain places, right? You never intended to be there, it’s just that they were along the route.
So, I mean fine, and this question is frequently asked. As a seventeen-year-old, if you decide to go to IIT, I mean what better could you have done? It's not the forty-four-year-old me deciding to go to IIT, it's a seventeen-year-old me and that I could not have done any better among all the available fields that appeared relatively better. So, I said I'll go there, I have continuously talked of choosing the option that appears to be relatively the best one. Where have I stood, right? In my IIT days, particularly IIT-Delhi appeared to be relatively the best option I had. So, I went there, and having gone there I saw a little more of the world and said fine, fine now this appears best. So, I went there. It's a continuous journey. People don't understand this, they talk as if the 'self' is a fixed entity. They say, “if you had to become a ' baba ' why did you waste a seat?” As if when I was age three, I decided on Prashant Advait Foundation. It all evolves and it all comes along the way.
Q: Thank you, sir.
