When students started studying away from home

Today, if a student goes to another city to study, the first question is, “Where will I stay?”

But this question is not new. As universities developed, there came a time when students began travelling away from their homes and towns to study. In medieval Europe, at educational centres like Oxford, arrangements for such students to stay gradually began to develop.

Where did students live at Oxford? There is evidence of teaching at Oxford as early as 1096. Around 1190, a student named Emo from Friesland arrived there, considered the first known overseas student at Oxford.

At that time there were no hostels as we know them today. Students lived in small groups in inns and lodging houses. In other words, those who came to study had to find their own place to live. Then came the ‘halls’

By the 13th century, academic halls started to develop at Oxford. These were places for students to live; over time, some also developed shared routines and academic features, such as meals, discipline, and teaching. Hart Hall was one such example. In the 1280s, it was set up as a lodging house for students. Many such halls existed in Oxford at that time.

It wasn’t only about convenience; it was also a city problem. With the growing number of students, tensions between local townspeople and students also increased. According to Oxford’s history, conflicts between “town and gown” in the 13th century hastened the establishment of organized halls of residence.

These halls were part of the background from which colleges developed. Between 1249 and 1264, the early colleges like University, Balliol, and Merton were established.

So today’s hostel didn’t just appear out of nowhere First, students started coming from outside. Then they needed a place to stay. Living spaces gradually began to include shared study and routines.

They evolved into more organized halls. And later, residential colleges developed from medieval halls and endowed houses. Today’s hostels and PG accommodations are not direct descendants of Oxford’s halls, but they respond to a similar need: giving students a place to live while they study.

The history of student accommodation shows us something else as well: when a real need arises, humans create new structures to respond to it. There was a need for accommodation for students coming from far away, so halls of residence developed. Over time, study, discipline, and communal living also became part of some of them.

But what new need stands before us today? True education doesn’t happen only in the classroom; it happens in the entire ecosystem. Where a student lives, whom they live with, and the kind of environment they get, the hostel is also a part of that education. So the question is: are our hostels really becoming a part of this ecosystem of right education? If the living space is good but there is no education to understand the ‘self’, is the education truly complete?

Education is not just the accumulation of information, but the capacity to see the right thing at the right time. This also made me think about a question I’ve come across in discussions of self-inquiry: how much of education helps us examine our own minds, desires, and choices?

Today, which kind of education do you see as the greatest need around you?

A. Only syllabus and formal education

B. Education for employment and practical skills

C. Education for living better in society

D. Education to understand one’s own mind, desires, and choices

E. Education in Vedanta, which offers a way of examining oneself

Sources: Historical details are based on the University of Oxford’s history page and Hertford College’s account of Hart Hall.

Conditioning is the way in which the external environment shapes behavior through learning.

Classical conditioning is the pairing of a neutral stimulus with one that triggers a reaction (Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell).

Operant conditioning is the reinforcement or punishment of a behavior (a reward following an action increases its likelihood; a punishment decreases it; Skinner’s key insight).

Skinner: Is free will an illusion?

B. F. Skinner argued that free choice is in fact behavior that has been reinforced and punished, and thus controlled by, external events.

Your likes and dislikes, the habits you have formed, and the associations you make are all products of the conditioning you have undergone.

So too is your sense of “free choice” over these things, your feeling that you could have made other decisions, a conditioned response.

According to Skinner, “free will” as an entity controlling behavior is an illusion; there must instead be a search for causes preceding the actions performed.

Awareness as a possible escape from conditioning

Some (notably philosophers and spiritual teachers) argue that while we may be controlled by conditioning, we can become aware of this conditioning and thus exercise control over it.

By becoming aware of our conditioning, we can recognize when we are about to act out old patterns, and instead respond more consciously to the triggers that would have otherwise caused automatic reactions.

In this way, we can achieve a different kind of freedom, one that is not completely uncaused, but not “willed” in the earlier, more constrained sense either.

The security-seeking trap

A prominent Indian philosopher Acharya Prashant argues that human beings are largely like machines in the way that they habitually respond to words and events with fixed reactions.

People are constantly seeking security, certainty, feeling safe in who they are and how they act, but the world itself is unpredictable, and so our attempts to achieve this internal security often lead to conflict.

He describes two ways in which a person might approach life:

Living from the conditioned responses of the ego, one is forever seeking to defend and prove a conception of oneself (“I AM SMART/NOT SMART ENOUGH/I HAVE BEEN WRONGED”) and one’s worldview, and reacting habitually to perceived slights and dangers.

Living from awareness allows one to see conditioning for what it is and thus free oneself from it, responding more consciously rather than from habitual fear or anger.

Conditioning that forms valuable skills (musical ability, physical skill, intellectual habits) is obviously desirable.

However, conditioning that forms attachments and defenses around a particular self-view only brings insecurity and suffering.

I would really like you to share your perspectives to broaden my view!

Sources: https://acharyaprashant.org/on-youtube/d9976be

How often do we feel comfortable being inwardly naked in front of anyone?

Physical nakedness is perhaps easier. You can remove your clothes, and there is nothing more to hide physically. Lovers do that all the time. But inward nakedness is much harder. To become inwardly naked is to allow everything that you have been protecting, your fear, confusion, attachment, helplessness, ignorance and self-image, to be exposed.

There is an interesting story about Duryodhana. Before the war, Gandhari asked him to come before her completely naked. Her gaze, through years of austerity, had the power to make his body as strong as iron. Duryodhana went to her, but even before his own mother, he felt embarrassed and covered his genitals. That was the one part of his body that remained vulnerable.

The story is about physical nakedness. But look at the parallel with Arjuna.

Arjuna is also a mighty warrior. He is standing in the middle of a battlefield, with everything that he has known about himself and his duty suddenly collapsing before him. He is afraid, confused, attached and helpless.

And yet, he does something much harder than removing his clothes. He becomes inwardly naked before Krishna.

He does not protect his image. He does not try to maintain the image of the great warrior who knows what to do. He does not hide his confusion or manufacture arguments to appear right. He simply exposes his actual situation before Krishna.

And this is precisely why Arjuna becomes the worthiest recipient of the Gita. Because he was able to become inwardly naked.

It could have been very different. Arjuna could have thought, I am Arjuna. I am a great warrior. What will Krishna think if I reveal that I am afraid, confused and unable to decide? He could have protected his image and continued to argue from that image.

But if Arjuna had been afraid of this inward nakedness, the Gita would not have happened at all.

The Gita became possible because Arjuna was willing to say, in complete helplessness, that he did not know. He stood before Krishna almost like a child before his father, without protecting himself from being seen.

This is why Arjuna's nakedness is harder than Duryodhana's. Duryodhana could not even become physically naked before his own mother. Arjuna was willing to become psychologically naked before Krishna.

And this nakedness goes even deeper than the physical body. Revealing one's clothes does not necessarily reveal anything. Revelation happens when what is within is no longer protected. Arjuna had this willingness. And perhaps that is why the Gita became available to him.

The question, then, is not merely whether we can remove our clothes. The much harder question is: can we allow ourselves to be inwardly naked?

The dustbin has become smart, when will the human?

Imagine this: in the middle of a fair, a dustbin opens its lid on its own and tells you by itself that it’s full. Haryana has planned an IoT-based waste management system for high-footfall areas like pilgrimage sites, religious places, fairs and festivals. These sensor-enabled smart bins will show how full they are and open automatically. Every 50 meters there will be separate bins for four types of waste, so that segregation happens right from the start.

There will also be waste audits, crowd data collection, and geo-tagging of dirt “hotspots”. Three temples are included in the first phase. It will also be checked how well the provisions of the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 are being followed, in terms of sanitation workers, equipment, and the arrangement for cleaning twice a day. Until now, only temporary arrangements were made for fairs. The goal now is a system with continuous monitoring. This initiative can be appreciated.

But there’s one thing no sensor can catch. It can say the bin is full, but it can’t say why we, standing right next to the bin, still don’t use it. Wherever we go, we leave our garbage there, assuming someone else will come and pick it up.

That’s exactly where our ego steps in. It wants the benefits, but wants someone else to pay the cost of cleanliness. “My garbage” quietly turns into “someone else’s job”. This is why people say there is a lack of civic sense in the country, meaning, the ego runs away from responsibility.

The easiest thing is to assume that the problem lies only in the system. Then we ourselves stay outside the circle of questions. Technology can monitor our waste, not our tendencies. Habits begin to shake only when we honestly see where we absolve ourselves of responsibility, and then intend to change.

The last time you left trash somewhere thinking, “Someone else will pick it up,” what exactly did you save by doing that?

This is a part of qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan based on Saint Amir Khusrau's poetry.

"It was the blessed night of union, I stayed awake in company of my beloved."

Light, sight, being awake are used in order to explain the truth. Because it's not really that something new has entered, just darkness has faded away.

"The body is mine but the mind belongs to the beloved."

Though self-preservation is my instinct, still how can I claim my dissolution to be my own doing? It's impossible. It's not done by me. I couldn't have been so brave, so it is grace, the higher possibility of mine.

The one who chose you is you.

It also suggests as long as there is body, this instinct would be there. And also the choice to dissolve.

"The two are of the same color."

When I saw myself honestly, I found out that my stories and narratives are false. With this seeing, my falseness started shedding away, and I started dissolving, until I got dissolved to my beloved. The beloved is nothing but the removal of my falseness. In a sense, me and my beloved became one.

"Love is the river whose current follows the other way."

Usual actions come out of self-preservation. This is not love. Love is when this instinct itself is rejected. Therefore all the social and cultural conventions based on the same instinct also meet the same fate.

"Whoever enters this river is drowned, the one who surrendered and sank, reached the other shore."

Only the one who showed enough courage to get into the stream, could reach the other shore. This is something that you can get only by drowning, by losing yourself.

"Having fashioned an image of myself, I went to my beloved. But when I saw the beloved's image, I forgot my own."

I had preserved myself when I went to him, I was such a miser. But when I willingly gave up myself, it was mystical. Beloved is not an image at all, he is the name of my own disappearance only. I got to know that I was my own bondage.

"You have taken away my identity, every mark of who I was, just by meeting my eyes."

I think the same thread is running in each sentence. This is a song that fits the ego that enjoys its own dissolution. Ego loving its dissolution means basically all the objects it possessed it is losing grip on those things that made it up. It's seeing its own falseness with pleasure that can be seen in the hymn itself.

Ego is 'I am X'. It is an incompleteness, that continuously identifies with xyz objects. On its own it is nothing. It can't say I am. Falling of ego is joy, because ego itself was suffering. This isn't absence pain, it's the absence of one suffering and therefore suffering.

I was also able to relate one quote to the song:

The highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the REVERENCE due a god. ~Ayn Rand

This love itself is the highest thing in a man. It's that in him that loves his own dissolution. That is respectable. The dissolution of falseness, identity, and ignorance. A self that was likely to love preservation keeps giving up itself continuously.

Share your perspectives in the comments section below.

Sources:

AP Framework: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/ap-framework?did=d8f3ca08-f603-4882-9ef6-0180d51aeea0

In the famous saying by the Iranian/Persian poet Rumi, he says:

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

The “wound” here refers to the various pains in life that shake us from within, like failure, humiliation, isolation, feeling insecure or inadequate, or losing something or someone dear to us.

Typically, when we are faced with some sort of pain, we want it to end as soon as possible. But when the pain begins to occur, the very grandiosity of a person is questioned, the way we want to look at ourselves, our image, and how we imagine ourselves to be in the future. That image can often be the root of so much strife in our lives. These are our expectations and hopes. Failure can often be a big mirror. for us to see how much we had our identity tied up with achieving and succeeding. Usually we tend to be self deceptive. And when we are not able to receive the comfort or sympathy to still remain a victim, perhaps we are forced to see something more vulnerable in us: I am not the best. I am not what I project myself to be.” The ego doesn’t like to feel vulnerable or helpless; it would always want to feel, “I am good. I am well. I know what's right for me”

So pain is not simply saying, “Something bad has happened to me.” Rather, it raises the question, In the way I was living, what was there that contributed to this pain?” Resilience also is a part here. It is not that suffering inevitably builds resilience. In a similar situation of pain or failure, two people might react to it entirely differently. To a large extent, resilience depends on how we respond to the problem, the hurt, the wound that we have. We can learn from the pain, or turn that same pain into our new identity. The difference lies in looking at the pain and investigating it, or spinning stories around it?

The ego holds onto the past, stories, and memories, and it is deliberately hurt when those get challenged. What was false gets challenged. Unless the ego gives up its instinct of self preservation hurt and bitterness will be fostered towards the mirror. And perhaps that is where the “light” in the quote can be understood: not as pain automatically making us wiser, but as the wound creating an opportunity to see what was false in the way we were living. I am conveying resilience as joy in self-dissolution here!

These wounds are just the old rust washing off. They can expose what has been covering the truth within us. Only by allowing what is false to be challenged can our lives really acquire a more truthful direction. And I think that can be the way to look at the quote.

Suchika Tariyal asked the philosopher Acharya Prashant a question that particularly interested sportspeople: if he could suggest just one thing for sportspersons to adapt in life?

He advised to keep looking because it is a field where performance and glamour are all over the place.

The response was not what was expected. He said, “to look at oneself.”

Sports involve spectators, expectations, rankings, medals, praises, criticism, comparisons, and gradually, the actual game ceases to be the goal. It becomes a means to an end of recognition, proving something to somebody, protecting the image, and avoiding failure.

This is when the pressure arises. The body can be trained to respond to stimuli, to hit the ball at the right moment, to utilise the perfect technique, to dodge the opponent’s tackles, but one wrong thought can spoil everything. The concentration shifts from the game to the mind, where the self-talk makes one wonder if the game is even worth playing if the outcome is not going to be satisfactory.

According to Acharya Prashant’s philosophy, it is not the competition, training, the spirit of sports, or even the desire to win that disturbs an athlete. It is the self-generated ego that needs the competition to answer the question, “Who am I?” Thus, winning affirms the self, and losing threatens the sense of existence.

Self-awareness, therefore, should make the sportsman recognise the following patterns:

The fear of losing

The desire to prove something to oneself or others

The comparisons with others, actual or perceived

The need to justify one’s worth through competitions

The thought process that states that one’s value depends on the result of a game

However, it does not mean that such thoughts should not arise. It only means that one should not become absorbed in them. A player has to utilise the mind’s energy in what he does best, concentrating on the game.

A player’s best performance is when his mind is in “flow,” meaning he is experiencing the sheer pleasure of playing the game. In this state, he is absorbed in whatever he is doing, hitting the ball, dodging, running, or jumping. The game and the surroundings cease to exist, except for the ball and the opponent.

Acharya Prashant advises that one should not seek to become indifferent to the pressures of a game but rather realise that most often, they are self-induced. The nervousness and the pressure are due to the fact that a person wants to achieve something (win) and, at the same time, wants to prove something (capability, worth, etc.). The game demands the athlete’s undivided attention; spectators, applause, criticism, medals, and even the outcome should remain outside once the play has begun.

The video talks about how, in a movie, there are individual frames, but when enough frames are put together, we experience them as continuous motion. We do something similar in life. We project a continuous “me” into the experiences that are actually changing moment by moment. AP connects this with quantum mechanics too, the fact that an electron does not have a definite position before measurement, and that physical phenomena are not simply the continuous, fixed objects we ordinarily imagine them to be. This is not meant as a literal scientific explanation of the self, but as a metaphor: our experience of reality is also shaped by who we are, by our own limits.

This video speaks it all. It talks about the nature of reality itself, the process of narrative construction, how we build up a story about ourselves, and what that story actually means.

How much of what I call “myself” is actually something I know, and how much of it is simply a story I have repeated enough times to believe?

“I am this way, that way. I like this, not that. I am the know it all. I am heart of parties. I am a person who doesn’t speak too much.” etc..

I wonder whether the story comes first or the experience itself that tells me I am a certain way. Maybe one simply did not naturally behave a certain way, but the superimpositions were so limiting, and I received so many reinforcements and clues that I slowly started believing I was that way. These stories themselves are what limit our being. Because if “I am” is defined, then it is finite, limited, bound.

Conditioning has its role, but is there any way one can be free of these heavy masks? How much free will or choice does one have when it comes to undoing the person one is? I have been exploring this question ever since I started listening to Acharya Prashant. It is also a question that always felt somewhat bitter, and I willfully avoided it for as long as I could. Perhaps that was also why I resisted his words so much in the beginning because it asks us to take responsibility to live a truthful life

I don’t even think I would call it the past carrying itself out in the present. The past is something that actually did exist at some point, but this egoic superimposition, was it ever real in the first place?

I found out that there is no problem except these limiting stories, and the choice to remove them was my own too. But the one who believes herself to be the main character: why would she want to remove herself? All the stories belong to her, and she herself has to remove them too.

There is this universe we are thrown into with basically a half-working brain. I call it half-working not because we have no knowledge or because our intellect is incapable. I have no complaints regarding our intellectual abilities. But we are by default not built to know ourselves. As Acharya Prashant says, the mechanism is largely built to look outward. To turn inward is unusual.

That's why human beings are somewhat of a tragedy. We don’t actually know ourselves, and still we foster so many stories and assumptions. We are thrown onto this earth naked; we have no idea who we are, yet somehow we claim to naturally know “I am this,” “I am that,” and experience reality through these divisions. This has become an important part of how I am beginning to understand the ego.

A line from Baba Bulleh Shah suddenly struck me in the context:

“Bulla ki jaana main kaun?”

Rough Translation : Bulla does not know who he is!

Maybe this can be one interpretation of his words too.

Society has spent generations telling women how to behave, how to dress, speak, adjust, sacrifice, marry, and what a “good woman” should be. But when women begin questioning these very conditions, we often step back.

Women have been suppressed physically, socially, and materially for a long time. That conditioning can shape behaviour and psychological patterns. Yet women are not fundamentally a different kind of human being; the basic structure of the brain is remarkably similar, even though there are average differences in hormones, brain development, and some neural characteristics.

At the same time, women are often treated as objects of possession, someone’s wife, daughter, or mother. A man may feel deeply hurt when “his woman” or his children go against him, while control or even maltreatment can somehow be tolerated within that same relationship. It reveals a strange contradiction: sometimes a woman is valued not as a free human being, but as someone who belongs to me.

In the video, Acharya Prashant talks about wanting to help women, while also recognising that they may not want to be helped. And I think there is something important here.

He is not hurting women by pointing out these things. He is trying to show us a way out so that we don't waste the one life we have. He is kind precisely because he doesn't want us to remain blind. That, to me, is compassion.

I usually see so much of what looks like kindness in daily relationships, but is actually filled with obligation, fear, and image-protection. We feel the need to be careful not to hurt anyone's sentiments. But sometimes that isn't compassion. It is us protecting our own image of being nice, agreeable, or a people-pleaser. And this is where his work becomes difficult.

His work is like bursting our bubbles. And there will inevitably be resistance, because that bubble was our whole world. It contained our identities, relationships, beliefs, fears, and all the bondages we had slowly collected and started wearing like accessories. Even I have been extremely resistant at start.

But perhaps that is the nature of truth: it removes the falseness. The problem is that the falseness doesn't feel false to us anymore. It feels like our identity. So when someone challenges it, it can feel as though we are being attacked.

Maybe this is why telling women how to behave is so much easier than actually helping them become free. The first preserves the existing structure. The second asks us to question the whole thing, including the parts of ourselves we have become attached to.

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🌀 THE TWO CONSTITUTIVE DRIVES:

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1) Self-preservation

One of the ego's two constitutive drives. The ego's primary instinct is to continue existing, to maintain its current form, and to defend its claims and identities against dissolution.

This is not a moral failing; it is the ego's structural constitution, the inevitable consequence of the ego being what it is.

2) Self-dissolution

The second of the ego's two constitutive drives, and the one this framework seeks to activate. The ego, at some level, wants its own freedom from itself.

This drive is always present alongside self-preservation. The question is whether it is given precedence.

Love, in this framework, is the name for the continuous choice of self-dissolution over self-preservation.

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Sovereignty

The ego's absolute authority over its own direction.

No external agency, teacher, tradition, circumstance, grace, can choose for the ego whether it moves toward dissolution or consolidation.

This is simultaneously the source of the problem (the ego can always choose to remain as it is) and the source of the solution (the ego can always choose to thin).

Nothing except intent can come only from the ego itself.

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Personal Reflection: Many times I find preserving my self image, I get embarassed very easily, I try not to speak because I may be wrong if I speak, so I choose not to speak too much, it's a pattern I have been repeating since a while now, it's one kind of self preservation I think. Though I like to take up things that challenges my current way of being but perhaps not very often.

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If self-preservation and self-dissolution are both constitutive drives of the ego, what determines which direction the ego ultimately chooses?

The latest edition of the Living Planet Report, which measures the average change in population sizes of more than 5,000 vertebrate species, shows a decline of 73% between 1970 and 2020

The current rate of species extinction is estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural baseline or pre-human background rates, with some estimates going even higher.

Nearly 28% of all assessed species on the IUCN Red List are currently threatened with extinction.

Human activities have significantly altered 75% of Earth's land surface and 66% of the ocean area.

Reason is clear: the deforestation under the name of growth.

Interestingly there is a type of animal whose population is actually spiking ie livestock animals. This population is the contributor of deforestation

Every human being is born with a feeling of incompleteness, it's the false self aka ego, it needs an object, achievement, identity to feel complete. That's what's the massive destruction is about. It drives us insensitive, confined in a small sphere we call the world or life with limited perception of what things actually are.

Another argument we give ourselves is that if we don't have the desire to achieve no progress will be made, that's just a false dilemma! Because we have not even explored living without ego genuinely at all!

What do you think is the solution self knowledge or ....??

For the past few days, I’ve also been noticing a trend going viral on social media, using AI to turn your own photo into a 1980s-style look.

Seeing all this, I was quite enjoying it too.

But if you really look at it, we’re being dishonest in a way. We’ve gone 45 years back, but what if we try to think exactly 45 years ahead from today?

We feel happy giving our photo a 45-year-old look, but if, on the basis of scientific facts, a picture of us 45 years from now were created, what would we see?

Extreme heat, an intensifying water crisis, and climate change at its peak.

No one is making a picture of what things will look like 45 years from today go viral, and perhaps no one is even thinking about it.

To be honest, I too was unaware of this earlier. When I read the Vidya-avidya post, then I understood this point. Before that, I too was just feeling happy seeing this new trend and looking only at the look from 45 years ago, not at the one 45 years from now.

If we really saw the picture 45 years ahead from today, we would have to change our “today.” The way we are living, we would have to change our lives.

But this is exactly where the ego gets scared; that’s why the ego enjoys looking at pictures from the past, but does not like to look at the picture exactly 45 years into the future.

It is easy to look back 45 years, but have we ever thought about what the world will be like 45 years from now? 🌍

Today, climate change is not a warning about a distant future, but a reality of the present. Rising heat, more intense and longer heatwaves, water scarcity, changing rainfall patterns, and increasing pressure on agriculture and health are its serious consequences.

According to the World Bank, by 2070, around 520 million people in South Asia could face at least one month of dangerous levels of heat every year, while today this number is around 120 million.

The 2070 shown in the picture is an imagined scene, not a definite prediction. But the warning about the direction in which conditions are progressing is real.

We often ask : what will the future be like?

Perhaps the more important question is, what are we doing today to ensure that the future remains liveable?....

Because the picture of 2070 cannot be drawn today, but the story of that picture is being written today itself.

~ Posted by a Gita student

Reference: World Bank (2026), A Livable Future: Protecting Jobs and Growth from Extreme Heat in South Asia’s Cities.

Permafrost is ground that has remained frozen for at least two consecutive years. Across the Arctic, it contains an enormous amount of carbon stored in frozen organic matter for thousands of years. When permafrost thaws, microbes can break down that material and release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. That creates a climate feedback: warming causes thaw, thaw releases greenhouse gases, and those gases add further warming.

What surprised me even more is that permafrost is not only an Arctic soil problem. It also exists in high mountain regions, including inside rock and beneath mountain slopes. As it thaws, mountain slopes can become less stable. The IPCC says there is high confidence that degrading permafrost has increased rockfall in some high-mountain regions, and that continued permafrost thaw is expected to increase slope instability, landslides and other hazards.

So it isn't accurate to say that “the mountains are going to collapse.” The more precise concern is that warming can weaken some frozen mountain slopes and increase the risk of sudden rockfalls, landslides and rock avalanches.

And this is already happening. NASA reports that permafrost thaw is already causing ground subsidence, sinkholes and damage to infrastructure in parts of the Arctic, while thawing permafrost is creating new methane-emitting lakes in some regions.

NASA says the northern permafrost region stores roughly twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. That does not mean all of that carbon will be released, but it shows why permafrost thaw matters so much.

We know what is going on, but still we are not ready to cut emission, the government and the private companies keep on producing

According to AP Framework:

The ego is the false and borrowed sense of self, which takes itself to be separate and incomplete. Out of this incompleteness comes the constant chase for objects. More money. More comfort. More possessions. More consumption. The assumption is: “If I get this, I'll finally be complete.”

But the objects never resolve that incompleteness, so the chase continues. And nature becomes something to extract from to sustain that chase. More resources. More animals. More land. More energy. More consumption.

Meanwhile, permafrost is thawing, biodiversity is declining and ecosystems are being pushed beyond their limits.

If I see myself as separate from nature, why would I care about what happens beyond “me”?

Please share what you think about climate change, it's causes, why is humanity trying to turn its eyes away from the issue?

Sources : NASA & IPCC

Growing up in a heavily lokadharmic environment, this is what Janmashtami often looked like to me.

People would gather at night, waiting for Krishna to be “born” at midnight. There would be offerings, bhajans, sweets, a small Krishna idol placed on a swing, people touching his feet and swinging the cradle.

As a child, honestly, the candies were probably the most exciting part.

But it struck me after listening to Acharya Prashant

Where is the Gita in all this? People celebrate Krishna's birth, but how many actually study what Krishna says?

Gita 4.9 says:

“One who knows the transcendental nature of My appearance and activities... does not take birth again in this material world.”

Acharya Prashant's poetic rendition puts the verse in a very simple manner:

वो बाहर नहीं जन्मेंगे कहीं

आस ये अवरुद्ध करो

हरि भीतर ही प्रकटेंगे अभी

यदि स्वयं से तुम युद्ध करो

Rough Translation:

He will not be born outside anywhere

Leave that hope.

Krishna will manifest within you

If you fight yourself.”

Perhaps the point is not to sit and wait for Krishna to appear somewhere outside.

Acharya Prashant in his Gita sessions urges us to ask:

Who is Krishna?

And before that:

For whom does Krishna exist?

In his Framework, Krishna is understood not as an external object of worship, but as a principle pointing towards the dissolution of the false and borrowed self, the ego.

The ego is the sense of a false and borrowed self that has no option but to identify with something or the other, even something as subtle as an ideology.

So if I turn Krishna into another object of identification...

“My Krishna.”

“My religion.”

“My tradition.”

“I am a Krishna devotee.”

Have I really understood Krishna?

Or have I simply given the ego another identity to hold?

Janmashtami is not only about celebrating Krishna's birth.

It is worth asking:

WHAT HAS TO DIE FOR KRISHNA TO BE BORN?

And perhaps that is the real celebration.

Acharya Prashant's interpretation makes this even more interesting.

In the AP Framework, Krishna can be understood as a principle pointing towards the dissolution of the false and borrowed self.

But dissolution cannot simply be done to you.

It has to become YOUR OWN CHOICE.

The ego, understood here as the sense of a false and borrowed self, keeps identifying with something or the other. It wants to preserve itself through identities, beliefs, relationships, achievements and even ideologies.

So the question becomes:

What if Krishna's birth means choosing, again and again, not to protect this false self?

Not waiting for something outside to appear.

Not collecting another identity called “Krishna devotee.”

But choosing to let identification become thinner.

Perhaps that is why the poetic rendition says:

“Krishna will manifest within you

if you fight yourself.”

The real battle may not be between me and someone outside.

It is between self-preservation and self-dissolution within me.

And this Janmashtami it's worth asking:

Am I celebrating Krishna as an object outside myself, or am I willing to choose the dissolution of the one who wants to possess even Krishna?

Listen without the me. I think this may mean that when we are free of our own biases, assumption, conclusions that we are attached to. (Ego, the false self) let's go of itself then we can really connect with someone, or understand them. Attention is free of ego.

Participants of HIDP event held on 29th August in Goa, can be seen implementing their takeaways, in real time, through a play!

Acharya Prashant teaches philosophy which you can actually implement in your life.

They smell so good.....

You must know what they are called!

Vibrant auroras shimmer beneath the Milky Way’s radiant core, while the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—two neighboring dwarf galaxies—glow above, revealing a rare and awe-inspiring view of the vast, interconnected beauty of the universe.