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So in this existence, there's going to be—in your life, there's going to be many battles. But there is only going to be one war.

I don't know why, but as human beings, we are obsessed with winning the battles, and we are so obsessed with winning the battles that we forget everything about the war.

What is the objective? What is the final war? The final war, my friends, is to be content. That's the war. The battles you fight are your formulas of how you can be content. "I have to have this in my life; I want this in my life; it has to be this way in my life; this person should be this way; this person should be this way; this person should be this way; I want that to be there; I want that to be there; I want this to be this way; I want this person to talk to me like this." I mean all of these are battles. They are. And you are obsessed with them because you want to win the battle, win the battle, win the battle. And I'm here to tell you: don't care about the battles. If you win a few, good. If you lose a few, fine. Don't even think twice.

How many of you have witnessed, somebody said something wrong to somebody and that somebody got very upset? And that could be mother-father, husband-wife, daughter-mother, son-mother, son-father. Right? And they are not talking to each other, and they are mad at each other, and they're upset with each other and you are obsessed to make it right.

And when you obsess with the battles, you lose track of winning the war. Every day of your life you have to understand that you must win the war. Nothing in this world ultimately should be able to take away your serenity. Nobody should be able to take away your clarity. Nobody should be able to take away your peace. Nobody should be able to take away your understanding. Nobody should be able to take away your joy.

Regardless of what happens, then you are the victor and you have won the war. And to have won a few battles does not make you a victor. The war still goes on. You are the warrior. Do you know that? Do you know you are a warrior? And do you know, you have to fight? You have to. Because you have to claim what is rightfully yours. Do you know what is rightfully yours?

Peace is rightfully yours. Rightfully. Tranquility is rightfully yours; truth is rightfully yours; light is rightfully yours. Rightfully. Rightfully! Belongs to you! Rightfully. You are the heir, but you must fight.

Prem Rawat

We don’t pay attention to what needs attention. We don’t pay attention to the need of the heart. Because the inspiration to be in peace comes when you listen to your heart. The inspiration to be content comes from your being. The inspiration to be clear comes from here—and you need to listen; you need to hear.

We don’t hear ourselves. We don’t hear the needs that we have. We don’t hear the want, the wish of this heart to be content—simple—to have simplicity in this life, to have joy, to feel the gratitude every single day—to be inspired by the magic of all magics, by the miracle of all miracles, the coming and going of this breath.

You are alive! Best news! If—if you are incapable of hearing this news, and it sounds to you like a foreign language, then I suggest you learn that language. And it is called “the language of the heart.” That’s what I teach. That’s what I go and present to people so that they can learn the language of the heart.

- Prem Rawat

Every human being is a seed.

I’m not a philosopher, because a philosopher would talk about... the philosopher would talk about the potential of the seed. I talk about the realization of that potential.

I am not a philosopher. I’m much closer to a gardener. Prepare the field of your understanding and then take this existence that you have and sow it in this field.

Give it the water of knowing—not believing, knowing. Give it the light of clarity and watch this seed bloom. This blooming is called peace.

- Prem Rawat

Prem Rawat: First of all, see if you can identify the noise. Do you get hit by the noise? We all do. Now, let’s see who’s in charge. Tell the noise to shut up. If it does, congratulations; you’re in charge. If it doesn’t?! You’ve got problems. You are not in charge—regardless of how successful you are. Regardless of what you have accomplished, you’re not in charge.

Do you have problems sleeping? Noise! Noise won’t let you sleep. It causes big health problems. Make a decision? It won’t let you make a decision! “No, no, but-but what-what about this?! What about this?! What about this?!”

Why did you miss your flight? Because of the noise. And now who’s bothering you that you missed your flight? I mean, and look, it’s done! Right? The plane is gone. There is no way that plane is coming back to pick you up. If it does come back, you don’t want to be on it. It only came back because it’s broken, and so they’d have to return.

It’s not like the goodness of the captain’s heart, “And so, you know, we left somebody, but and let’s go back and get ‘em.” Nope. The airlines would fire the captain. “Who’s going to pay for that extra fuel?”

So, who is in charge? Now, what am I actually saying to you? And what I’m actually saying to you is you should be in charge. It’s your life; you should be in charge. But the problem is, you’re not. And that is the issue of the noise. It doesn’t let that peace manifest.

And we get so used to it. This is our problem; we get used to things; we get used to the noise, and we’re like, “Oh, it’s okay.” Then we’ve got a problem. Then we’ve got a real problem.

So, all of these things, you know, and these are the decisions that I think we have to make; that’s why we need to be proactive in our lives!

We go to someplace very nice, quiet, beautiful—and I have heard it more than one time, “Oh, look how peaceful it is.” Is peace a look? Is peace a sound; is peace an environment? Or is peace a feeling that emanates from inside a human being? A state of being. Being. Not thinking, being.

And is that state of being, in itself, real? Or is it when all the problems have been taken away, does it manifest? Critical question!

Because what do we do? We think our happiness is not something in itself; our happiness is a result of removing our problems: “If we remove our problems, we’ll be happy.” So, all day long we chase “trying to remove our problems, trying to remove our problems.”

But, no, it doesn’t matter how many problems you remove; if the state of happiness, the state of joy, is something in itself, unless you have brought that in...? Because some things are absences; just, that’s what they are!

You don’t have to bring in darkness, do you? Do you have to invite it? Do you have to go, “Darkness, here, your darkness....” You don’t have to carry a match. And you don’t have to have a candle. All you have to do is, whatever the source of the light is, put it out. And, ta-dah! And there it is!

A long time ago I went and saw a solar eclipse with my family. It was in Mexico, a long, long time ago. And it was bizarre. It was just, it was really, really bizarre.

And it started—and it was in the middle of the afternoon. Just before that, the sun had been shining.... Birds were going about it; it was quite warm; everything was what it was—a typical Mexican day.

And then the eclipse began. And slowly it just got darker, and darker, and darker, and darker, and darker. And all of a sudden it went completely silent; all the birds stopped singing—just went dead silent. And it got darker. And it was like, “Oooh-whoa.” And then, all of a sudden the temperature just started plummeting. It started getting colder, and colder, and colder, and colder.

And then it started getting brighter, and brighter, and brighter, and brighter. And then, everything was fine. It went to normal; the birds came out, “Ah-yab-che, che-che-che!” They were—they were like, “Whoo-whoa, what happened?”

So, when—but there are certain things that, it’s just an absence. That, and nobody had to turn on the air conditioning. Nobody had to dial a dial to make it colder. No, as soon as the sun was eclipsed, all that started to happen. Darkness started to come in.

So, the question becomes, “Do”—you know that when there is light, there’s no darkness! So, “Is the light there because you removed the darkness? And that’s why there is light?”

Now, be careful how you answer this. Because on the face of it, it’s a very simple question—“Is the light there because you removed all the darkness? Or is the light there because you turned on some source of light and the darkness automatically disappeared?” You know this!

So, surely you, if you know this, you must never get sad. You must never be un-, yeah, unhappy...? But on the contrary, even knowing this....

There are certain things, we act a certain way. And we act a certain way, not because of our wisdom, but because of our sheep behavior. Because, this is how we were told to act. This is what we have learnt—from the generations of our parents, of our friends, of our teachers, of our neighbors. There it is: “Get rid of your problems and you will be happy.”

People pay, (hah-hah), really, really good money to go sit down in these training sessions, where some guy gives you a whole schmiel for four days, five days, of how to get rid of your problems. The question is, “If you could remove the darkness by any means, what makes you think that guarantees there will be light?”

Removing the problems becomes a problem for the human being. Oh, by the way, this is nothing new. This is not a 2018 fad.

So many variables in life, but one constant, and that’s enough. Knowing that is futile to remove darkness; it cannot be—it is easy to bring in the light. It is futile to remove all your problems, because you won’t be—they just—because, you see, problems have always been there. And they are the same ones.

They’re the same ones, and they just hover, looking for a victim. Before you, they were plaguing your parents; before them, they were plaguing their parents; before them, they were plaguing their parents; before them, they were plaguing their parents—and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Same problems attacking people the same way. Before there were airplanes, people were missing their ships. Before the ships, they were missing their buses; before buses they were missing their stagecoaches. Before stagecoaches, they were in a sorry state of affairs when their horse ran away.

For me, I want enough grace in my life to hang onto the wisdom—enough grace in my life to hang onto what I know is right. But grace doesn’t come without effort. You create your future. Remember that—I’ve just told you your future, hundred percent! “You create your future.” Be conscious, be real, whatever you do.

Go forward with a heart full of gratitude every day. Understand—I know it’s difficult. Everything is difficult because of our concepts, of our ideas: “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, what’ll happen to me; what’ll happen to me; what’ll happen to me; what’ll happen? What I’ll...?” But, that’s what fear does.

What has happened to you? You probably wondered that: “What will happen to me,” the first day you were put in the school, in the kindergarten, isolated from your parents. And you wondered that, “What’s going to happen to me?” After that, so many days you have wondered, “What is going to happen to me?”

But you’re here. You’re still here! Now you look back at it, of course, and go, “Heh! That was nothing!” Well, now you can say it, “it was nothing.” But that was everything to you when it was happening, wasn’t it? It’s like, the biggest mountain. That’s how we are!

Don’t live in fear—but with the courage, wisdom! You have to garner these if you want stupidity to go away. Because if there is no wisdom, guess what it’ll be replaced by—that there’s a space for it...? And there are two things that can occupy that same space: either it’s wisdom or stupidity, that....

And stupidity, in dimensions, is identical to wisdom. And it fits like a glove, into that same space as wisdom. So if you don’t have wisdom sitting there, guess what’s going to be sitting there? Stupidity. It doesn’t need any other shape. It’s like a coin. One side is one thing; one side is the other thing. It doesn’t need to be a different shape.

Externally, maybe it looks different on the stamp side, but.... And if you cut it? If you take a coin that has two sides and cut off one side, how many sides have you got left? “Yeah, two minus one is one, right?” No! It’ll still have two sides of it.

So, in life, darkness on one side light on the other. That’s wisdom. To just think it’s only darkness on both sides is stupidity. Wisdom is, “Okay, this is stupidity—and on the other side, has to be light.”

And in that light, you thrive—you thrive! Up till the last day that you are on this earth, you thrive.

- Prem Rawat

Jessica Zweig:

You are clearly very inspirational, Prem. You literally travel the world and inspire people for a living. I’m interested to know, who inspires you?

Prem Rawat:

Well, I am inspired by everybody that I inspire. And when I see people being inspired by a message, my question always is, "Why? What did I say that is so unique, so incredible?"

And yet I see that all of a sudden, they thought where they were, versus where they now see that they are, that they are not without the tools in their life; they’re not alone; they’re not abandoned; they’re not in these dire straits. They’re actually doing pretty good.

And to acknowledge that in their lives—and a beautiful light comes shining through them. And that’s what inspires me. That’s really what inspires me.

Jessica Zweig:

Yeah, me too. Watching people wake up to their own power and joy is....

Prem Rawat:

Yeah, that, absolutely, it’s the most, most stunning thing to see, to observe.

Jessica Zweig:

Absolutely. I really want, you know, those listening to look at themselves with that ability. It’s such a core central theme of my work. I help people find their message and help them to build their platforms and to create awareness of those platforms, that they can impact more people and impact their careers and impact their lives.

I think a lot of people have self-limiting beliefs that they are worthy of being that person. They’ll look at someone like you—or maybe even me, people who have platforms—and say to themselves, “I, I couldn’t do that. I’m not worthy of doing that; I don’t know how to do that.” What advice do you have for those people?

Prem Rawat:

Let me tell you a little story—and I gave this example. And somebody asked me a question a long time ago. They were actually wondering, you know—they were talking about, “Is this good; is this good; is this good?” And I said, “The value of all these things that you have described to me is zero—and you are a ‘one.’”

So, when they heard that, they were really very angry with me. And in fact, they walked out. Because they were like, “And how could you say what I am talking about has to be zero?”

And I said, “But”—I continued with my analogy, and my analogy was, “Everything you’re talking about is zero—and you are a ‘one.’ Place zero in front of a one and what do you have? One!—and a zero. No value, nothing. Nothing changes.

“Put that zero after a one and it’s a ten; it’s a hundred; it’s a thousand; it’s a hundred thousand; it’s a million; it’s....” All these things, placed after you, after you are worth a lot. Placed before you? And they mean nothing, absolutely nothing. That’s math; that’s math. Yeah, I mean, anybody can do that math.

And to me, that’s the way I see it. You know, it’s just, “First, find yourself; then take all these things that you want to do and put them after you.” And they will be ten, a hundred, thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a billion, trillion, whatever.

But keep placing them before you? They mean nothing! Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Jessica Zweig:

I love that. “Be your own ‘one.’” Be the “one.” Brilliant, brilliant!

Where can people find you, more about you?

Prem Rawat:

Well, I am reachable through PremRawat.com. PremRawat.com, yeah.

Jessica Zweig: [simult.]

It’s a beautiful site. Beautiful.

I have one final question for you, Prem. You’ve given us such beautiful wisdom today. I would love to know—as I ask every guest—what do the words “simply be” mean to you?

Prem Rawat:

To be that “one”—without the zeros in front, with all the zeros after. And now you’ve got everything. Simply be. Simply, simply, simply, simply, simply-simply-simply. Not thinking about this; not getting into—but just simply be.

Look at a child; look at a baby. That baby knows how to simply be. You are still that baby. Well, you were once a baby—and you’re still that baby. That baby never died; that baby never went away.

Tap into that resource that you have to be that baby, and you will simply be. Because simply being is it—is it, is the it.

Jessica Zweig:

I’m crying; I’m smiling; I’m nodding; I’m tearing up at the same time. That was so beautifully stated. Thank you so much for explaining it that way. It touched my heart. And this is something I speak about all the time. And to hear you say it in that way was just really meaningful.

Thank you so, so much for being on my show. It is just such an honor to speak to you and to learn from you. And thank you for the reminder—to simply be. Because I needed it today, especially.

Prem Rawat:

Thank you; thank you so much for letting me be on your show and—great, wonderful; thank you. Thank you.