Video Information: 24.10.2021, IIT-Bombay session (Online), Rishikesh
Context:
~ Are you afraid about your future?
~ How to overcome the fear of the future?
~ What is fear?
~ What is fear of failure?
~ Is there any scriptures who says everything is predestined?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Context:
~ Are you afraid about your future?
~ How to overcome the fear of the future?
~ What is fear?
~ What is fear of failure?
~ Is there any scriptures who says everything is predestined?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The question is, there are some scriptures in the Hindu text which suggest that everything
00:07we do is predestined and we are actually controlled by Brahman.
00:11So if that is the case, what are the incentives for me to put my hard work in my life?
00:16No, no, there is no such scripture, please, or if there is, I do not know, kindly come
00:24and quote.
00:27At least over the last one decade, in fact, more than that, I have been absorbed in scriptures
00:37and never have I come across anything that suggests that Brahman controls the strings
00:44of this universe.
00:45No, no way.
00:47All that is just popular iconography.
00:52Those things are figments of popular culture and imagination.
00:57This is not spirituality.
01:00This is some kind of fatalism that Vedanta has nothing to do with.
01:11You as you are, are the ego, right?
01:17First thing, you as you are, are the ego.
01:21And the ego is characterized by choice.
01:25If there is no choice, the ego is gone.
01:29So you have choice.
01:33Nobody is operating you through a remote control from some other look.
01:40You have choice.
01:41Now that choice can be a boon or a bane.
01:45It depends on you.
01:47Choose rightly and life is heavenly.
01:54Choose wrongly and you will live as commoners do, right?
02:02So you are aham, aham.
02:06And aham is aham precisely because it at least thinks it has choice.
02:14And you are choiceless in having a choice.
02:18Even if you tell yourself you don't have a choice, it is a choice you have made, right?
02:26You are condemned to be a choosing agency.
02:31So choose rightly and do not play the dirty game of attributing your wrong choices to
02:39some God.
02:42If you suffer today, it is because somewhere you have been making wrong choices.
02:46Now do not say this is what God has had in store for you.
02:49No, no, no, no, no.
02:51It's not about your horoscope or God or something, something, no.
02:55Don't even call it a random event.
02:58Random events can inflict pain on you.
03:01Suffering is always a choice.
03:04You chose wrongly, therefore you suffered.
03:08I am getting it.
03:11Advaita Vedanta is a thing of immense power, immense power.
03:19It takes away everything that is feeble within you.
03:26It won't allow you to continue feeling a victim of circumstances.
03:36It will take away everything from you that makes you lifeless, dull, insipid, fragile,
03:48fearful.
03:51None of that will be allowed to remain.
03:53That's Vedanta for you and that's why Vedanta is the mother of all Indian philosophies and
04:00religious streams.
04:02Irrespective of where you are coming from in India, directly or obliquely, you are a
04:10Vedanti.
04:11In fact, I dare say that everything in the world that is beautiful today has actually
04:18its philosophical roots in Vedanta.
04:24If there is something that can be called as the core of Indian religion, rather all religiosity,
04:33it is Vedanta.
04:36You can't be religious if you do not have anything to do with Vedanta.
04:44And if you are religious, then you are a Vedanti even if you haven't ever studied Vedanta.
04:56Vedanta is the very essence of religion.
05:01Vedanta is spirituality itself.
05:08I didn't say one particular religion.
05:10I said religion, dharma.