Repeated slips in the spiritual path

Acharya Prashant
6 min readJan 24, 2020

The tendency of the mind is to fall back. It doesn’t matter how many times you pick it up, it is designed to slip again. Therefore spiritual practice lies not in regretting the various falls, but in ensuring that no fall is permanent, that no fall is final.

Fall you will and there should be no surprise in that.

You are designed, constituted to fall. And you don’t need to go into the details for that, just look at your body.

Look into that mirror. Look at your nose, your eyes, your skin. Does your skin ever experience anything from the inside? And your entire body is skin, is it not?

When you say, “My body,” what you really mean is the skin. Is there any part of your body not covered by skin? Look at the eyes, look at the ears, look at these fingers. Are they manufactured to hold the Truth? Are they?

Your body is designed to hold the teacup, not the Truth.

If stuff were to be designed, it could have been designed otherwise as well. But look at the damn design. The design itself is incapable of performing beyond itself. These eyes cannot even look at the physical heart unless you get into an operation theatre or something. How will they look at the spiritual heart? Or would they?

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