Does anything outside of thought really exist?

Acharya Prashant
7 min readMay 1, 2020

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: You have said in one of your videos, “In matters of Truth, thought is not useful. It is even a handicap.” But thought is all I know, and have ever known. If I close my eyes, everything is a thought. My family is a thought, my children are a thought, even God is a thought. And the Teacher is a thought.

If everything that I have ever known, is a thought, then why should I believe that something outside of thoughts, and space and time dimensions exists? Every thing that tells me, that something ‘beyond’ exists, is thought. And if thoughts are not to be believed, or taken seriously, then I am screwed, because I have been on a wrong quest.

Why should I belittle my thoughts and term them frivolous and false? Outside these thoughts, there is nothing that I can know of. So why to condemn them?

Acharya Prashant: You will have to answer it, looking at your own life.

How will you explain ‘love’? Thoughts have reasons. Thoughts have causal linkages — backward and forward. Each thought comes from somewhere, and leads to something. How do you explain ‘love’? Where does ‘love’ come from? Do you have to think to ‘love’?

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