Acharya Prashant

The Vedas are the oldest religious documents known to man. And Vedanta is the crown jewel, the absolute peak, of the Vedic essence.

The world today finds itself grappling with problems unseen in history. The problems of the past were mostly related to poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, lack of knowledge and lack of technology. In short, the challenge was external, the enemy—whether in the form of a microbe or lack of resources—was outside. It was about man struggling against the tyranny of his external circumstances.

The last hundred years, however, have been different. The spectre of man’s conflicts has risen to a very different and difficult theatre in this century. The secrets of the atom and the universe have more or less yielded to man’s relentless investigation. Poverty, illiteracy and disease are no more the invincible monsters they used to be. Today, matter is at man’s beck and call, and there is ambition to colonize the universe, and even beat death.

It should then sound like the best of times. The current period should be the best one in the history of our species. Far from that, we find ourselves staring at, as we said, a very different dimension of challenge in the inner theatre. Having conquered almost everything in the external world, man finds he is a bigger slave to himself today than he ever was. And it’s an ignominious slavery—to rule all, only to find that inwardly one is a huge slave of an unknown oppressor.

Man has immense power over his environment today, but is himself controlled by his inner destructive centre he has very little knowledge about. Together, these two mean that man’s tendency and ability to wreak havoc over his ecosystem is unlimited and unquestioned. Man has only one inner ruler—desire, the ever-sprawling desire to consume and experience more and more happiness. Happiness, that is experienced only to find that it evades all experience.

In this context, Vedanta, as the pure essence of spirituality, becomes more important today than it probably ever was. Vedanta asks the questions: Who is the inner one? What is his nature? What does he desire? Will fulfilment of his desires give him contentment?

As a response to the situations mankind today finds itself in, Acharya Prashant has taken on the solemn project of bringing the essence of Vedanta to the world today. His calling is to bring the pure essence of Vedantic spirituality to all, and apply it to solve today’s problems. These problems of today are borne out of man’s ignorance towards himself, and therefore they can be solved only by sincere self-knowledge.

Acharya Prashant has approached the matter of bringing Vedanta to the public in a two-pronged way. One, he has spoken on scores of Upanishads and Gitas and his comprehensive commentaries are available in the form of video courses and books. (solutions.acharyaprashant.org). Two, he addresses the daily mundane problems of people and demonstrates how to solve them in the light of Vedanta. His social media channels are dedicated to hosting tens of thousands of such open QnA sessions.

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Prashant Tripathi was born on the auspicious day of MahaShivRatri in 1978, at Agra, India. Eldest of three siblings, his father was a bureaucrat and mother a homemaker. His childhood was spent mostly in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Parents and teachers found him to be a child who could often be quite mischievous, on occasions, and then suddenly, deeply contemplative. Friends too recall him as having an unfathomable temperament, often not really sure whether he was joking or serious. A brilliant student, he consistently topped his class and received the highest commendations and prizes possible to a student. His mother fondly remembers how she was honoured several times as ‘Mother Queen’ for the academic performance of her child. Teachers would say that never before had they seen a student who was as brilliant in Science as in Humanities, as adept in Mathematics as in languages, and as proficient in English as in Hindi. The then Governor of the state felicitated him in a public function for setting a new benchmark in the Board examinations, and for being an NTSE scholar.

The prodigal student was a voracious reader since he was five years old. His father’s extensive home library consisted of some of the world’s best literature, including spiritual texts like the Upanishads. For long hours, the child would be tucked away in the most silent corners of the house, immersed in stuff that was meant to be understood only by men of advanced age and maturity. Lost in reading, he would skip meals and sleep. Before he had turned ten, Prashant had read almost everything in the father’s collection and was asking for more. The first signs of the mystical appeared when he started composing poetry at the age of eleven. His poems were imbued with shades of the mysterious and were asking questions that most grown-ups could not grasp.

At the age of fifteen, after being in the city of Lucknow for many years, he found himself in Ghaziabad near Delhi, owing to his father’s transferable job. The particular age and the change of city accelerated the process that had already taken deep roots. He took to waking at night, and besides studying, would often be staring silently at the night sky. His poems grew in depth, a lot of them devoted to the night and the moon. Rather than academics, his attention started flowing increasingly towards the mystical.

He nevertheless continued to do well academically and gained admission to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. His years at IIT were full of exploration of the world, deep involvement in student politics, and shining as a debater and an actor in nationwide events and competitions. He was a vibrant figure on the campus, a dependable student leader, and a soulful performer on the stage. He would consistently win debate and extempore speech competitions in which participants from across the country would compete, and would also win prizes for directing and acting in meaningful plays. In one of the plays, he got the ‘Best Actor Award’ for a performance in which he did not utter a word and moved not a single step.

He had been sensing since long that there was something fundamentally amiss in the way most people perceive the world, the way our minds are conditioned to operate, and hence something is distorted in the way the relationships between people are, the way the worldly institutions are designed, the way our societies function—basically the very way we live. He had started seeing that incomplete perception was at the root of human suffering. He was deeply disturbed by man’s ignorance and cultivated inferiority, the evils of poverty, the evils of consumption, violence towards man, animals, and environment, and exploitation based on narrow ideology and self-interest. His entire being was raring to challenge the all-pervasive suffering, and as a young man, he guessed that the Indian Civil Services or the Management route might be an apt one to take.

He gained admission to the Indian Civil Services and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad in the same year. However, because the service allotted to him based on his rank was not the Indian Administrative Services – the service that he had wanted, and because he could already see that the government was not the best place where revolutionary changes could be brought about, he opted to go to IIM.

The two years at IIM were obviously rich in the academic content he absorbed. But he was not the one who would confine himself to slogging for grades and placements, as is the norm in these coveted institutions. He would regularly spend time teaching kids at an NGO that operated in a slum close to Gandhi Ashram, and would also teach Mathematics to graduates to earn to spend at the NGO. Besides, his angst at human ignorance expressed itself through theatre. He took up plays like ‘Khamosh, adalat jaari hai’, ‘Rhinoceros’, ‘Pagla Ghoda’, and ‘The Night of January 16^th’ and directed them, besides acting in them. At one point, he was directing two parallel plays. The plays were performed in the IIM auditorium to packed audiences from within and outside the city. In the profit-centered and self-interest driven atmosphere of the campus, he had found himself an outsider. These existentialist and rebellious plays helped him vent out his anguish, and also prepared him for the bigger stage ahead.

The next few years were spent, as he puts it, in the wilderness. He describes this period as one of particular sorrow, longing and search. Looking for a piece of sanity in the corporate world, he kept switching jobs and industries. To gain composure, he would take time off and be away from the city and work. It was increasingly becoming clear to him that what he wanted to do, and what was crying out to be expressed through him, could not happen through any traditional route. His reading and resolve intensified, and he designed a leadership course for post-graduates and experienced professionals, based on wisdom and spiritual literature. The course was floated at some reputed institutions, and he would sometimes be teaching students elder than himself in age. The course was a success, and the way started becoming clearer to him.

At the age of twenty-eight, he bid goodbye to corporate life and founded Advait Life-Education for ‘Creation of a new humanity through Intelligent Spirituality’. The method was to bring a deep transformation in human consciousness. The initial audience chosen was college students who were offered self-development courses. Wisdom from ancient literature was taken to students in the form of simplified texts and engaging activities.

While the work of Advait was great and gained appreciation from all and sundry, there were great challenges as well. The social and academic system had conditioned students to study to just clear examinations and to have a degree to secure jobs. The self-development education, the education of the Beyond, the life-education that Advait was attempting to bring to the students was so new and so different from everything that they had ever read or experienced that it would often lead to indifference towards Advait’s courses, and sometimes even hostility from the system. Often, even the management body of the colleges and the parents of the students would totally fail to grasp the utter importance and immensity of what Advait was courageously trying to do. However, amidst all these difficulties, Advait continued to do well. The mission continued to expand and is touching and transforming thousands of students.

Around the age of 30, Acharya Prashant started speaking in his Samvaad, or clarity sessions. These were in the form of open discussions on critical life-issues. Soon it started becoming clear that these sessions were deeply meditative, brought the mind to a strange peace, and had a miraculously curative effect upon the psyche. Acharya Prashant’s voice and videos would be recorded and uploaded on the internet. And soon a website too was developed to publish his writings and the transcriptions of his talks.

Around the same time, he started organizing Self-awareness camps. He would take true seekers with him to the Himalayas, in groups of around 30 each, for periods of around a week. These camps turned out to be deeply transformational events and the frequency of the camps increased. Hundreds of camps have been organized so far, providing immense clarity and peace in relatively short spans of time.

Acharya Prashant’s unique spiritual literature is at par with the highest words that mankind has ever known. His genius is founded on Vedanta. With his broad Vedantic foundation, he is seen as the coming together of the various spiritual streams of the past, yet is someone not confined by any tradition. He attacks the mind vigorously and simultaneously calms it with love and compassion. There is a clarity that radiates from his presence and a soothing effect from his being. His style is forthright, clear, mystical and compassionate. The ego and the falseness of the mind do not find a place to hide while facing his innocent and simple questions. He plays with his audiences—taking them to the very depths of meditative silence, laughing, joking, attacking and explaining. On one hand, he appears to be somebody very close and approachable, and on the other hand, it is obvious that the words coming through him are from somewhere beyond.

Over 10,000 videos and articles uploaded by him on the Internet are freely available to all and make the world’s single biggest repository of spiritual content on the internet, of which more than 5 million minutes are watched daily. He has been regular speaker at IITs, IIMs, many other prestigious institutions, as well as platforms like TED. In print media, his articles get regularly published in national dailies. His discourses and interviews have been broadcasted via national TV channels too. Today, his movement has touched the lives of tens of millions of individuals. Through his direct contact with people, and through various internet-based channels, he continues to bring clarity to all.