Question & Answers with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Q:
What is Enlightenment?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
The book ‘Celebrating Silence’ contains little excerpts on many topics. You read that and then we will discuss about it.Q:
There is so many violence and natural disasters happening in the world. Why does God let this all happen? If God exists then why does all this happen?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
You chop off some leaves and branches of plants. Don’t you prune rose plant? Does it die by pruning? It grows up. Same way nature brings all this from a bigger picture.It is not always ripe fruits that fall from a coconut tree. Sometimes even small coconut drops off. Baby fishes are also swollen by big fishes in an ocean. So, these natural calamities are all part of the nature. If we exploit nature too much, more natural calamities occur. We are putting dynamites in the Earth. We are blasting it every day. Imbalance gets created and so Earth starts shaking. Sustainable development is what is needed today. We need to care for the planet.
Nature moves with the law. God means a rule, a law. Everything goes by that. This planet Earth has to be protected and cared for.
One is natural calamity. Another is man-made calamity. Man-made calamities can always be avoided. People are not valuing human life for a little piece of gold. Human values need to be brought back into society.
Q:
How can you find a purpose for living if you have lost your self-respect?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
The Self is not lost, so the self-respect is not lost. Come on, wake up. You are loved and accepted by many. You are a precious flower of this planet. Do something useful. Do not think only about yourself.Q:
Can I get married if I get enlightened. My parents are insisting me to get married. Will I be able to make my wife happy after enlightenment?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
It is better to get enlightened together!Q:
How does the end of this pencil erases? (Laughter from audience)
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
That is what every pencil is supposed to do. Life is that way. If every pencil i.e. every human being can erase whatever the mind writes, you become hollow and empty. If you can erase everything – Right-Wrong, good-bad, you become hollow and empty.Q:
How do you balance confidence with humility?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Confidence and arrogance do not go together. With true confidence, you are relaxed, you feel at home and you make others feel at home. When you are arrogant, you try to show people that you are better than them. There are two types of teachers. The first type makes you feel small or inadequate so that you learn to feel large or adequate. The second type of teachers will tell you that you are great, you wake up; you can do a lot. Both are essential in different circumstances.Q:
How to get rid of fatigue and headache?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Yoga and pranayama.Q:
Sometimes I don’t know whether I am doing the right thing. I lose courage. How do I handle such a situation?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
At those moments, just relax. The right thing will happen to you.Q:
What is your advice for people on planet Earth? How can we live such that after 50-100 years we would still have fresh air to breathe?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Care for nature, like native communities worship nature. Honor the environment. In a place in India if you cut one tree, you have to promise you will plant five of the same kind within the next forty days. There is a whole ritual in which one who is cutting the tree speaks to it, telling it that after cutting it will be useful to us. We must care for nature, not exploit it.Q:
Because I travel a lot to places where vegetarian food is hard to find, and I have to eat with office colleagues. I eat wrong foods and find energy is really low. What to do in such situations?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
You know when people have some allergies, they don’t eat those foods for which they have allergies just because of company. Suppose you have milk allergy, and because the company is all drinking tea and milk, you’ll not say, ‘Ok, I’ll also drink.’ Because you’ll suffer. Right?So similarly, you can choose your food in any company, you can say, ‘Ok. I am going to eat only chips, or vegetables, or bread..’ You are not compelled to eat non-veg if you don’t want to. Ok? Or unhealthy food. You don’t need to drink Pepsi or Coke if you don’t feel it’s good for you. Right? See, when people drink lots of Pepsi and Coke, it burns the lining of the stomach and the intestine.
Later on you develop so many problems. All these carbonated drinks should be avoided. Someone had demonstrated, in a cup of Pepsi they put a tooth, a tooth which had fallen, and it dissolves! If teeth can dissolve (which stay for a long time in nature) in Pepsi Cola then.. It is so corrosive. And that corrosive fluid can cause so much damage to our intestine, our brain, our nerve cells. So, we must keep healthy eating habits and propagate them.
Today is much better than 30 years ago. 30 years ago, when we started, people were very allergic to vegetarianism and spirituality. But today, it has become a fashion. Because we make a trend. And we create a trend and keep it moving.