00:00 One of my friends, she's young, she's quite young, 17-18 years old, unki ek thi aaj, I
00:08 met her somewhere in Rishikesh, some 5-6 years back.
00:12 She had a very, I don't know, it looked like a serendipity, she lost her brother, then
00:20 she next year lost another mausi's beta.
00:26 Like this, she lost her mami, then she lost her mausi.
00:31 In the last 10 years, she told me today, please ask this from Acharya ji, she has lost around
00:39 7-8 of her familial lines, like people, all brothers and all mausi's eradicated from
00:47 the face of earth.
00:49 So I wanted, she was asking me kya cause hai, and I wanted to understand the deeper meaning
00:55 of this pattern, like, I mean, how do you explain such phenomena?
01:01 Very random na, life is random sometimes.
01:08 There is no deeper meaning, the meaning is obvious, the meaning is the same as it is
01:17 to the rest of us, life is death, death is there in front of us all the time, it's a
01:28 matter of chance, unfortunate chance, that it struck a particular family in this way.
01:40 There is no deeper significance contained in this, it can happen with me tomorrow, with
01:49 you tomorrow, and to act as if it is an especially wild kind of misfortune, it's to be naive,
02:10 the sword is hanging over everybody's head, it can fall here or there, nobody is conspiring
02:21 against anybody and nobody has been blessed with special fortune, the random chance it
02:31 falls here, it falls there, I am not talking of cases in which, let's say the family atmosphere
02:38 is so toxic that it compels a couple of members to commit suicide, I am not talking of such
02:45 cases.
02:46 It was very accidental actually, in her case it was very accidental.
02:48 I am talking of accidental deaths, accidental deaths are exactly that, accidents.
03:02 So it could have happened to me but then the rule of nature chose her family for this occurrence.
03:25 That's all, that's all, and the one thing they could learn from it, we could learn from
03:35 it is, the impermanence, we do not know whether the sun will rise tomorrow, the bell tolls
03:44 for thee, so it's not that those 5, 6 or 10 people have gone, we should see our own departure
03:59 in their funeral pyres.
04:03 We too are going, going, gone in the physical sense, this thing that we live in, believe
04:16 in, breathe in, time, is such a limited thing and we call this limited thing our life, so
04:28 we better make good use of it.
04:37 In fact it's also obvious, firstly we live for a limited duration, secondly we do not
04:46 know even what that limited duration is, what is certain is nobody is going to live for
04:54 240 years, nobody is going to get out alive, nobody is going to live even 200 years, you
05:03 are going to live for 60, 70, 90 years maybe, and even that is uncertain, the whip can be
05:15 cracked any day, so that should make things glaringly obvious to us, don't waste time,
05:28 don't waste time, firstly you have little of it, secondly you do not know how little.
05:42 When you operate from the right place, you will see the world very differently, the way
06:02 people go about their business, the way we go about life, eat, drink, try to be merry,
06:16 catch hold of a person from the opposite gender, breed a family, have two or three kids and
06:24 then send them to school and then arrange their marriage or try to arrange their marriage
06:35 and then expect them to further the cycle, what nonsense is all this?
06:47 What can I do, I don't want to come back to this world.
06:49 We are not here for that, obviously not here for that.
06:56 (Pause)
07:24 Away from suffering there is duty, there is responsibility, once you begin getting
07:38 liberated from it in the personal sense, you start realizing you have a massive responsibility
07:47 now on your shoulders, it's not as if you realize that all this is just Maya and falseness
08:01 and therefore you escape away to your own blissful and joyful solitude, that's not going
08:10 to happen.
08:14 Once you see this for what it is, once you know you have a zero or close to zero personal
08:29 stakes left here, you find that a very onerous duty called dharma is being entrusted to you
08:54 and that is to bring the same realization to these beings who are in it and being slaughtered
09:16 every day, I am not talking just of animals, I am talking of every person who goes to his
09:23 office every day, every person who attends to his business every day, the man, the woman,
09:31 the doctor, the patient, the housewife, the kids, the slaughterhouse.
09:52 And you cannot evade that responsibility, you have to bring others out and that alone
10:10 is some kind of liberation from suffering, so if you suffer, you do not need joy or bliss
10:28 or you need duty, duty not in the social or institutional sense, you understand the duty
10:43 I am talking of?
10:45 Duty of the larger cause, the ultimate cause I guess.
10:49 Duty of the only cause, the only cause and only that helps others, only that takes you
11:04 away from your personal confinement, it is like the password out of your personal prison,
11:15 you are in your cell and the way out is duty, dharma, so that allows you to unlock the door
11:36 which otherwise is unbreakable, you go out and you help others emerge out of it and as
11:50 long as you are helping others, as long as the intention is to not retreat to the cell
12:01 to enjoy all the physical benefits one gets in the cell, you will maintain your freedom,
12:12 but outside there is insecurity and tiredness as well, they can make you want to retreat
12:21 to the comforts of the cell.
12:24 I call it the cold cage.
12:27 But it is a very welcoming cage, so one wants to go back because the tendency to retreat
12:36 to the cell is contained in every cell of the body, these are called cells for some
12:43 reason, cell in the sense of the prison cell, so we are carrying too many cells in the body
12:51 itself.
12:52 The memory of servitude.
12:55 So, they want you to get back to the cell and there is, I said, you are battered outside,
13:03 it is not easy, it is not easy just tolerating your own freedom and it is not easy for others
13:16 to tolerate that someone is pushing them towards freedom, you don't want to tolerate your
13:24 own freedom, they want to tolerate being pushed to freedom, so there is a lot of incentive
13:31 to yield to your cells.
13:40 But as long as you continue with the duty, you will remain free of suffering.
13:53 The day something takes precedence over duty, suffering would return.
13:59 So, there are no formulae or mantras, but if there could be any or one, this probably
14:13 would be that, choose the right duty, the right battle, the right cause and be absolutely
14:25 committed to it, think not of victory, think just of perseverance, you are not here to
14:39 win, you are here to not to quit, just continue without even having any goal in sight, because
14:52 the battle is endless, goal is always limited, continue without any hope of victory or any
15:03 final target in the vision, just continue, continue till you end.
15:12 What a way to end.
15:19 Thank you so much for your time, my goodness.
15:25 I am hopeful it would help you, all those who watch this, and me, and everybody.
15:35 Definitely.
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15:40 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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