Is clarity momentary?

Acharya Prashant
3 min readJun 17, 2021

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

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, it sometimes seems that I have clarity, but the actions taken in that clarity are proven wrong later on. Is clarity momentary? How to deal with this?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Yes it is possible for time to again cloud the clear sky.

There is clarity, right? Look, look skywards (addressing the audience to look at the open sky).

And you also see that there are clouds eager to obfuscate the clarity. So, there must be two types of clarities. Those who have known have called them Sabīja and Nirbīja. Sabīja clarity is there when the seeds of the deep inner tendencies have not yet been burnt down, so even if you clear the landscape, time will ensure that it again gets covered with weeds. The surface has been cleared, but beneath the surface, there are seeds, potent seeds, fertile seeds. So, you will be able to enjoy the clear surface for a while, and then it is again weeded, like the clear sky of the morning that gets clouded by the evening.

And then there is ‘Nirbīja’ clarity when you have made the efforts to actually do the spadework as well. The earth has been moved, the surface has been turned upside down. Somebody has tilled the whole thing. It requires much deeper effort, you know.

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