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You have a mind and you have a heart; you’re balanced. If you learn how to use both of them equally, not only will you be in peace, but you will prosper. Most people only know how to use one. The heart, they don’t understand.
I say “the heart,” and people go, “What are you talking about? What is this thing called the heart?” But let me tell you what it is. The heart is the place where the courage resides, the courage to move on, to go forward, to fulfill who you really are.
The heart is the place where your truest wisdom resides. The heart is the place where you will find your passion. The heart is the place where you will find your compassion. The heart is the place where you will find the quest, the thirst for being fulfilled.
All that is good in you—not from the perspective of the world, but that is good in you from the perspective of a human being—is the place where all these beautiful things reside. And that is the place referred to conveniently as being the most important, and thus called “the heart.”
That’s what a heart is. The courage. The courage to seek clarity in the midst of confusion. When everything is going wrong, the courage to say, “No! I want clarity; I want to be fulfilled.”
Have you experienced this courage? Have you felt this courage? Have you understood this courage? It’s your power to thrive in this world—to thrive, to shine, to be.
You don’t need fear; you need strength. And the strength that I am talking about is inside of you. Knowledge of the self, of you! So you can understand, so you can see, so you can feel, so you know.
To welcome every single day like you will not get another one—and that’s when every day starts to become a gift.
– Prem Rawat

You want a challenge in your life? You want to do something really challenging?
Forget about triathlons. Try this. Try to be conscious.
It takes exceptional courage to be conscious in your life. To be aware of what is happening. To be aware of what is going on.
- Prem Rawat

Don’t sit on your living room sofa while somebody’s knocking at the door going, “I wonder who that is. It could be Uncle Tom. It could be my friend Jerry. It could be my friend from India—no, and no, he wouldn’t do.... Hmmh, I wonder who it is? Let me call Prem Rawat! ‘Who is at my door?'"
So, go find out! This is what I’ve said. All along, people have said, “Oh, wha’, wha’, wha’...?” Go find out. Know for yourself. Know it for yourself. And that’s being victorious over the self. You make the rules. You make the rules.
Not just somebody’s.... And, do you know how many people there are in this world who have swallowed the idea of heaven, the heaven that you go to after you die, if you’ve done everything right? Swallowed it, “gulp!” How you could swallow such a big horse pill, I don’t know. But you swallowed it—without water.
Oh.... Heaven? There is a heaven—of course there is a heaven. It’s here. And you need to know it! And so, what is hell? Well, if you don’t know it—and you’re not in heaven—guess where you are! And do you get toasted? Yes, you get toasted. Raked over the fire, absolutely—again and again.
And there you are. One day you find yourself totally devastated and destroyed. And somehow you’re put back together again, to have the same experience two days later? Same exact thing: fried, toasted, not any flour, not any oil, just dry-toasted over the great barbecue that you light yourself, that you create yourself. And that’s what happens.
So, the victory over the self: most important, most important. And it’s not so complicated; it’s not sophisticated; it’s not like, “He’eeah-heeeaah, victory over myself."
No—because it’s very simple. First, you begin by knowing yourself. Now that you know yourself, easy to gain victory over yourself. This is not about swords and dragons. This is about, "very simple, very practical."
- Prem Rawat

Just stop for a minute and realize that you are not free unless you really have removed this box that you carry around you all the time.
There’s a box, and this box is full of a lot of noise, a lot of imagination that is not even your imagination—somebody else’s imagination, a lot of ideas. And in fact, this is who you think you are! This is “you!” And this box is the greatest hurdle possible in truly knowing yourself.
You need to know yourself. If you don’t know yourself, you don’t know anything, really! Because it is this being that processes what it knows, or what it thinks it knows. When it does not know itself, the processing is happening by information that has been put there by other people, not you!
The noise that you hear between your ears in perfect silence is the noise that other people have put between your ears. That includes your beloved parents.
We’re not talking about, “You have to hate your parents to get rid of the noise”—no, no. They did it for a very good reason, because that’s what happened to them. That was their reasoning. That’s the reasoning that they’ve always followed.
So, whatever happened to them, they did it to you. And their parents did it because their parents did it. So this is something of your great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great-great, great grandfather’s gift. And I would say grandmother too, but I forgot how many times I said great-great-great.
But that’s the noise. And wherever you go, this noise goes with you. And you can silence all the other noises but you can’t silence this noise—because it’s there. And it defines your good and it defines your bad. It defines your right and it defines your wrong.
It’s you, your life, your existence. You are the major player in this. And if you can understand that, that’s everything.
– Prem Rawat

Living in the middle of the storms, we seek the shelter.
Have you ever noticed when it begins to rain, all the birds go find little places where they can sit for a while and let the rain go by, because they cannot afford to have their wings wet. Who taught them that?
There are innate things about us that we have forgotten. That the quest for peace, the need for peace, is not expressed by this world, but it is expressed by individuals like you and me—that we can only look at ourselves and feel our need…our…my…my need that I have to be in peace.
And then comes the question, how do you search for it? This is a big question. Let me shed some light on this. How do you search for something you never lost? Where do you search? Where do you begin to search?
If all of a sudden I find that I have lost my jacket, I’m looking… Where would I look for my jacket? Should I fly to South Africa to look for my jacket? Should I go to India to look for a jacket that I never wore in India? Should I go to Malaysia to look for my jacket?
No! When you lose something, you look in the last place you were. You don’t go looking all over the place, where you even weren’t.
When the quest for peace begins from inside of us, why are we looking towards people who have maybe written this book, and this book, and this book, and this book, and this book. Why aren’t we starting from ourselves and finding that one person who says, “Peace begins with you”?
But if you start searching for something that you have not lost, this is going to create very big problems, because you are actually searching. And you are sincere. And you are looking, and you are looking, and you are looking, and you are not finding.
And people want to help you, and they are saying, “Where do you think it could be?” And you’re saying, “I don’t know!” “Well, then, let’s look over here. Then let’s look over here.” And what happens? The time gets wasted; a lifetime gets wasted, and before you know it, you neither found the jacket, nor understood the search, nor understood what this life is all about.
The paradox to me is that somebody has created a picture. (I don’t know his name.) This is my paradox; somebody has created a picture: “This is how you should be.” And I follow the picture to the T, but I don’t even know what I am, who I am.
And that is why, time and time again, there have been those who have pointed to you and said, “Look within you for the answers. Look within you and find your thirst. Look within you and find your quest. Look within you and find what it is that you want. Look within you and find the shelter from the storms. Look within you and find the unchanging.”
– Prem Rawat

So it is that when one speaks of that beauty that resides inside of you, there is no clue.
There’s nothing like—if somebody says to you, “By the way, there is the Divine inside of you,” then you go, “Oh yeah, I knew that; I saw that yesterday. When I was looking at the mirror, I just saw the Divine kind of just pulse out and then go back in.”
No. You have no idea. And just because you don’t have an idea doesn’t mean that that’s not what’s happening. It is. And to see that Divinity that resides within inside of you, you would have to come very, very close to yourself.
It is not necessarily in the clues that you will find the answer. But there is a reality. The reality? The answers are within you. Come closer! If you don’t know this, of what I am saying, the reason is, you are so far from yourself, you do not see it.
Do you know how that works? When you’re far, far away, you see a lot more, but with less resolution. When you get closer, you may not see as much, but you see with a higher resolution.
You can look at somebody far, far away, and you may know that there is a person. Then, when they come closer and closer and closer, you might be able to say, “Oh, I know who that person is.”
They come closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, and they—you can get them to a point where you can see the spinach on their teeth! That cannot happen a mile away. It only happens when you come closer and closer and closer and closer.
If you do not know about what is your potential, if you do not know that inside of you are the answers, if you do not know that inside of you is the Divine, if you do not know that inside of you is the miracle taking place all the time, you know why? Because you’re so far away. Come close to yourself.
– Prem Rawat