Direct Truth: Uncompromising, non-prescriptive Truths to the enduring questions of life

by Kapil Gupta

That anger is not as reactionary as you think it to be. It is a weapon that you enjoy using in order to protect your ego and to bolster it.

Understand that you are the architect of this relationship. And, in many ways, the architect of your son’s fate. Become the person he would seek to embrace. Provide a place of peace that he is looking for in the wrong places. As he recognizes that you have transformed from a place of need, into a source of quiet comfort, he will come. And he will listen.

A relationship of peace is a relationship that is more parallel than perpendicular. It is two individuals that move side by side. Rather than two individuals that intersect. A maintenance of individuality and freedom results in the prevalence of peace.

Spirituality is a concoction of prescriptions and half-truths. It is a circus of orange robes, incense, and ineffective jargon such as love and mindfulness. It is a maze of silent retreats and men with pony tails and yoga pants spouting spiritual psychobabble to those who enjoy the psychobabble. It is the unserious leading the unserious in concentric circles that lead only to more circles. Q:

If a desire for the Truth is in someone’s bones, then he will not stop until he finds it. Not because he should. But because he has no choice.

That which one pursues as a goal never arrives. Any prescription that one pursues, he becomes imprisoned to.

It is far more fruitful to evaluate the desires for achievement, than it is to force discipline. If one’s desire for achievement is pure, he will be sufficiently motivated to do all that needs to be done in order to achieve. If it is not, he will play clever and ineffective games such as discipline. Q: So never force yourself to do anything? A: Forcing oneself is short-lived. As all things that are insincere are short-lived. If one is honest and sincere about his motivations, he will move with himself, instead of against himself.

Practice leads to meager and incremental improvement. It is essentially repetition. It becomes work. Over time, it saps one’s inspiration. It maintains more than it transforms. One must train in order to become who one seeks to be.

Because happiness cannot satisfy any human being. Q: Why not? A: Because it does not exist. Q: Happiness doesn’t exist? A: No. Q: Then what are those times when I feel, for lack of a better term, “happy?” A: A relative reduction in misery.

The world consists of nothing but anxiety and misery. The same way that a swimming pool contains only water. It has nothing else to offer you. This does not mean that one must physically leave the world. It means simply that one must see the world for what it is. And if one sees it for what it is, he or she has a true chance of living a life free of constant assault.

If what you say is true, then the entire self-help industry is a falsehood. A: There is no self to be improved. But you are welcome to carry on believing that there is. Q: I’d like to understand this. If I have anxieties, sorrows, disappointments, anger, and so forth . . . Can I not try to lessen these things? A: Where there is a fertile field, weeds will grow. One may choose to pull out the weeds if he so wishes. But he will be doing so for all his life. For each time he removes one, another will sprout in its place.