Karma- Why Everything You Know About It Is Wrong

This book was spoken first and written later.

As a Vedanta philosopher and teacher, Acharya Prashant has been interacting with diverse audiences for over a decade. Though the questioners come from varying backgrounds, each of these interactions is usually in the form of a question that the teacher responds to. The length of each such interaction varies from ten minutes to as much as an hour. Every chapter of this book is essentially based on one such interaction. This means that each chapter, though coming from a single centre, exhibits the response of the speaker to very different people and their life-queries. The questioners are spaced apart across years, continents, genders, and everything else that makes a human being diverse from the other. This means that the readers get an enriching kaleidoscopic perspective as they go through the range of human conditions, confusions and questions - all related to the question of one's identity, which, as we shall learn in the book, is central to the question of the how to take the right action.

Karma is a word as common in the spiritual lexicon as in the popular parlance. However, its real meaning and implications stand obfuscated and distorted by centuries of misplaced expositions and self-appeasing translations. While commoners console themselves with the pedestrian notions attached to this word, it remains a disquieting enigma to those who refuse to resort to easy versions of the truth. This book is for the latter.

Moment by moment, life is synonymous with action. If to live rightly is to act rightly, then what is the right action? This has tormented human consciousness since ages.

The scriptures have tried to classically answer this question, but scriptures are infamous for being cryptic. They do not stoop to edify us with elaborations and examples, nor do they exactly advise how their ancient words apply to the current times. It is at this point that Acharya Prashant's exegesis and elucidations provide the missing link. In the ever-growing jungle of neo-spiritual illusions, the author provides clear-sighted guidance, addressing the most essential aspect of our life from a point of unified understanding and realization. The consequent decision-making leads directly to earnest and fearless action.

The book proceeds by demolishing the most prevalent myths regarding action, decision, and work by bringing the focus on the actor, rather than the action. From the darkness of confusion when we want to ask, 'What to do?' the book handholds us into the light of the question, 'Who is the doer? What does he want from the deed?' This transformation of investigation provides all the solutions, and finally the dissolution of the question itself.

The centuries-old widely prevalent myths related to Karma are peddled by ignorance or self-interest, or both. This book bombards the high palaces of dark and ubiquitous authority, and when they come crashing down, we discover they never had any scriptural foundations at all.

This is a work to be met not with the armours of our deep beliefs, but bare-chested, like a lover. If you are someone with the courage to challenge the tyrannies of tradition, authority and obscurantism, and the love to greet the naked truth, this book is for you, and only for you.

A word of caution: Because of the vast differences among seekers and their queries, the responses of the teacher too are customized and not standardized. At some places, therefore, the responses in one chapter may appear to be apparently contradictory to the responses in another chapter. We hope that our discrete readers will be able to appreciate the differences as the various roads leading to the same core.

Acharya Prashant is an emerging champion of socio-spiritual awakening in the world today. An alumnus of IIT-Delhi and IIM-Ahmedabad and a former Civil Services officer, Acharya Prashant is an acclaimed Vedanta Philosopher. Apart from that he wears various hats: a science activist, a campaigner against superstition, a veganism promoter, an environmental activist and a champion of essential human freedom.

**Contents and Sample Pages**