Speaker: Be present to life and that is sufficient, improvement will come. It will happen on its own. You know, there are people who when they want to reduce weight make great plans. When it comes to the moment of exercising and jogging, then I am absent. After that, what do I do? I make plans. What can the plan do? You are sitting in this building. Do you have an escalator over here?
Listener 1: Yes, Sir.
Speaker: Why to use the elevator? The great opportunity is right there. Walk, run, climb. But you will make a plan; a diet plan, a calorie plan. You will not walk up that staircase that is right in front of you. The stairs are right here. You will not climb them, but you will make a plan. And the plan gives you so much of happiness. I have done it; security. You won’t study. When the moment of studying is there, you won’t study, but you will make a plan.
‘Twentieth June, two hours, I will complete this topic. Twenty- first June, four hours, I will complete this topic’. And then you feel so happy. Isn’t that so? How comfortable you feel, after making a plan. It is eleven in the night and the book is open right in front of you. What do you do? You make a plan of studying in the morning, set the alarm and go to sleep.
Do you know why you make plans? So that you don’t have to do anything right now. You have set the alarm for the morning so that you don’t have to study right now. You want to escape studying, that is why you make plans for future. You want to escape living in the moment, so you want to make plans in the future. Your plan is a dirty escape. If I really love that book, will I wait for the morning? Will I study right now, or will I plan for the morning? What happens in the morning? You know it very well. The alarm goes off, and then you plan again. Great plans!
Listener: Sir, plans are only bad when we don’t follow them.
Speaker: Plans are bad when you make them. At 11 p.m. in the night, what is happening when the book is in front of you, you are not studying but making a plan? Plans are not bad because you do not execute them. Plans are bad exactly in the moment when they are being made.
When the book is there, study it. Why plan? Study, do it right now. The very thought of planning comes from the thought of escaping from the moment. And remember I am not talking of the physical planning. If I have to build an auditorium, a flyover, a new operating system, then there it is alright, it is understandable, but not for life.
You know it’s like this, it happens with couples. The wife is sitting next to the fellow, and the fellow is busy in making plans that we will have great fun together when they go to that hill station next month. The wife is sitting right here. You can have great moments right now, but he is busy making plans and searching for some nice location. What can that location do? The wife is here. Right now you don’t bother about her, but you are making the plan for the next month. And if you are actually with her, will you care to plan?
Live, don’t plan. Life is here.
Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.
