When personal life interferes with professional life

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

Question: Sir, what should be done when our personal life interferes with our educational life?

Acharya Prashant (AP): These are no different lives. Life is one. There is nothing called an educational life. All life is one. You do not become a different human being when you step out of the campus. The distinction that you are talking of is largely mind-made, artificial. There is just one life.

If you can be distracted outside the campus, chances are you can be distracted even within the campus, because it is the same mind. So, do not say that your personal life is disturbed, hence, your academic life is being disturbed.

A mind that is prone to being disturbed will get disturbed anywhere; and the mind which is centered, still and calm, will not get easily disturbed anywhere.

Are you getting it?

We too easily attribute things that are basically internal, to external sources. The external is fundamentally nothing. The external can at best be a stimulus that provokes something which is already present in your mind. Neither is fear external nor is greed external. Nothing is external. So, do not say that the external has disturbed you.

The disturbance is within. The external situations appear in a way that disturbance seems to happen.

Let’s say the mind has an inherent tendency to be violent. He will easily find a lot of enemies and then you can claim that the world is full of enemies. And then you can coach yourself, motivate yourself that the world is full of enemies and I must resist them.

What do you mean by an enemy?

Is there is really an objective entity called an enemy? The person you call an enemy, the same person is a friend to many others. Is he not?

Listeners (L): Yes, Sir.

AP: So, is there anything really called an enemy? But you will say that the world is full of enemies and I must do something to defend myself. You say that your personal life is disturbed. You are probably talking about some person who is disturbing you. Am I right? Either a person or a situation…