Video Information: 20.08.2022
Context:
~ How to get power?
~ How to become a leader?
~ How to face challenges in life?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Context:
~ How to get power?
~ How to become a leader?
~ How to face challenges in life?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Hello everyone, good afternoon and welcome to the session. On behalf of Literary Club
00:09 of IIM Calcutta, I welcome Acharya Prashanth ji to this session. Today we are very lucky
00:16 to have him with us. I am sure he needs no introduction. From being an acclaimed Vedanta
00:22 exegete to a national bestselling author of over 80 books, he is a powerful voice of social
00:27 spiritual awakening in today's world. Today, more than tens of millions of people, especially
00:33 the youth, get inspired daily by Acharya Prashanth ji. Through his direct contact with
00:39 people and through his various internet-based channels, he continues to bring clarity to
00:45 all. Sir, it's an honour to have you with us and to have you address our institute.
00:52 On behalf of the Literary Club of IIM Calcutta, we thank you for accepting our invitation.
00:57 Thank you. Thank you. Before I hand it over to Dr Chatterjee to coordinate the session,
01:05 I have an initial question for you. Sure. Since we are the Literary Club here and since
01:13 you have long been into this genre, I have a question like, you know, have the classic
01:20 and traditional form of stories, you know, which are very slow paced, where the character
01:27 development was given enough time, have they lost its value in today's time? Because what
01:34 a general observation is that books or films which have a very shallow plot seem to gain
01:42 mass popularity amongst a lot of people. So what can we do to bring, you know, the traditional
01:48 forms? See, what you are seeing is the outcome of a certain philosophy of life. And the philosophy
02:04 is that everything in the world exists only in a utilitarian way. The thing that comes
02:17 to me must have a utility and that too, a very material utility. So if there is a book
02:28 that comes to me, it should very quickly tell me of the thing that it is trying to present
02:44 as useful. So the book then becomes nothing more than a medium, a road that is taking
02:55 you to some useful, pleasurable destination. Now, when it is only the destination that
03:05 matters, who wants the road to be long and convoluted, you know, you want to reach there
03:20 as early as possible, you want to take a flight. Therefore, character development and slow
03:29 pace of the narrative, they rather become a nuisance to the reader or the watcher. People
03:42 are not watching movies or reading books or doing anything in life for the sake of the
03:52 higher pleasure or the joy that reading itself, watching itself, the process itself gives
04:00 to you. Today, books are being written in the PPT format. So there are bullet points.
04:07 You do not want to enjoy the beauty of language. You do not want to have, let's say, an 800
04:19 page volume in your hands in which paragraphs run for four pages, six pages and sentences
04:28 run for 10 or 12 lines. Nobody wants to have that kind of patience and it is not really
04:37 then a crisis or shortage of patience in itself. It is a problem with the philosophy of this
04:44 age. The book has come to me and my central God is consumption. I want to hustle through
04:55 life. I want to reach some place very, very quickly where I can make fast bucks, where
05:03 I can get to consume all the goodies of life. And that's the only thing that matters to
05:11 me. The pleasure of reading does not matter. So now the book has to become subservient
05:20 to the lust for consumption. If the book has to exist, it has to cater to the same lust.
05:27 Otherwise it cannot exist because that lust today is God. So that's the reason why if
05:34 you visit bookstores, what you see is caricature in the name of literature. And if you look
05:44 at the best selling charts or racks, they are all full of caricatures. Self-help, somebody
05:52 is teaching you to make money, somebody is peddling you superstition, this, that. Even
05:57 the quality of language has fallen, not merely the quality of content. Let alone knowing
06:07 what life is, the writers and the actors and the script writers of today do not even know
06:19 what good language is. Good Hindi, good English, good Bengali, whatever. So it's an overall
06:26 crisis in which nothing matters. You might be beautiful at language and still you might
06:32 be found starving somewhere, starving both in the financial and in the psychological
06:42 sense. You might gain very little recognition. So that's what, to look at the world as something
06:54 to be consumed, that's the ideal of this age. You exist to eat as much as possible. That's
07:01 what is being taught to us in our education, in our upbringing and by our environment.
07:12 The purpose of life is to stuff your stomach and your mind. And that's all. Poetry has
07:24 almost died, because it is useless. People want things to be useful. Look at the quality
07:34 of the songs, the lyrics that you have today. Not that we had particularly high quality
07:44 stuff two or three decades back, but even compared to the 90s or the 80s, songwriting
07:54 has plummeted to unimaginable depths. That's the philosophy of this age. That's not accidental.
08:05 That's what I want to point at. I would be glad, and that goes out to all, to converse,
08:21 to have interactions. So when I say something, if there is something that you want to say
08:28 in reply, I would be glad to have it. And that's why I also feel more engaged.
08:35 I don't have a follow up question. Just wanted to thank you for the response. If anyone else
08:43 has a question.
08:46 Greetings and Namaste Acharya. So my name is Arunika. I am a second year student here
08:51 at Amcanputam. I am a PhD student. And my follow up question is, how can we break the
08:57 cycle of consumption? How can we start thinking differently? Because as you rightly pointed
09:04 out, even our education system is structured in a way that even if we don't want to move
09:09 towards that philosophy, we are pushed towards that, we are forced towards that. So how can
09:14 we break that cycle?
09:17 Even the consumption ideal exists to please you. Human beings are pleasure loving. Right?
09:31 And it is not ordinary pleasure that succeeds in pleasing us. So no problem going for pleasure
09:41 or happiness or their various cousins. But question has to be asked whether the attempt
09:50 is yielding results. And when that question is asked, then there is immediate change of
10:03 course. Nobody eats for just for the sake of eating and I'm talking of eating in the
10:10 psychological sense. Nobody consumes just to consume. We want to ingratiate ourselves.
10:17 We want to feel fulfilled. There is a certain hollowness within each human being, a certain
10:24 loneliness, an incompleteness, a meaninglessness. That's what we want to address through consumption.
10:34 Now somebody needs to courageously and compassionately keep raising the question, is our inner void
10:46 really being filled by the methods we are adopting? We are seeking to fill our lives
10:59 with goods, gadgets, furniture, vacations, relationships, sex, power, information. That's
11:16 what is filling up our lives. We are doing that so that we may feel a little less discontented.
11:27 But are contentment levels really rising or is the man of today actually worse off than
11:40 his fathers and forefathers when it comes to inner fulfillment? If you look at the mental
11:50 disease epidemic, what does it suggest? We have so much today to consume. We are consuming
11:59 many many times of everything, electricity, materials, minerals, waters, animal flesh.
12:12 When we used to, let's say, three, four, five decades back, we have obliterated thousands
12:21 and thousands of species in our lust to stuff ourselves up and we are doing that every day.
12:29 But are we reaching somewhere? Look at the levels of anxiety in the common person on
12:37 the road. Look at the instances of depression and other kinds of mental issues. Neurosis
12:49 is at an all time high, isn't it? So if consumption is there to appease the mind or bring peace
13:00 to the mind, is consumption really succeeding? That's the question to be asked. And when
13:06 you ask the question, then at least a few people who can think, who like to reflect
13:14 and go into the depths of matters would say, "No, this route is not working for us and
13:23 if it is not working, let's try something else. Let's see what else in life can serve
13:29 as delight. How about sitting peacefully a little more? How about the delight that poetry
13:39 gives you? How about love? How about creativity? How about the various art forms? How about
13:50 purposeless movement, let's say, just for a period of 10 or 20 days? How about giving
13:58 selflessly? Maybe these are the things that would succeed more when it comes to addressing
14:07 the inner incompleteness. How about wisdom literature? How about Vedanta? How about the
14:15 songs of the sages? Why not try these out rather? So the moment this experiment is done
14:27 and the moment there is a comparison, the scales will tilt. But for a comparison to
14:35 be made, first of all, somebody has to serve an alternative. So we require a few courageous
14:44 young men and women to come forward and serve us a few alternatives. And if those alternatives
14:52 are not present, then mankind has no option but to keep hurtling down that same slippery
15:02 slope of consumption where you consume and you do not feel fulfilled. So you consume
15:07 even more, hoping that maybe more consumption can succeed in fulfilling you. It's a slippery
15:14 slope and it simply destroys your life. You try to give a meaning, a purpose to your life
15:22 by way of accumulation and consumption and this way cannot succeed. So we require people
15:32 to come up with something else and believe me, the ground is ready, the soil is fertile,
15:40 the time is ripe. People are waiting. Come up with a heartful, authentic, credible alternative
15:51 and people will join you. Because deep within somewhere we all are fed up of this nonsense
16:02 called life we are being forced to live. The methods, the institutions, the structures,
16:09 the ways, the culture, all this is just so nauseating. We want an alternative. But somebody
16:16 has to make a start. Thank you Acharya for that answer. I just
16:25 have two follow up questions on that. First is when you say that we should look at our
16:31 ancestors, they were more content. My question is to what extent should we use the frame
16:38 of past in order to judge our present? What is the extent to which we should use that?
16:44 Is it correct to use that point of reference in the past to judge the present? And the
16:49 second question is related to how you said that we need somebody to take the leadership
16:55 to bring the change. The problem is that often people have the right substance in mind but
17:02 they fall prey to the processes. Just to give a very random example, we had the anti-corruption
17:09 movement a few years ago and that converted into a large political party that we see today.
17:17 The substance was right, the intention was right but somehow all of that got lost in
17:22 the process. So, how do we make sure that doesn't happen?
17:27 Okay, one by one. The first one said to what extent should we use the past as a metric,
17:36 as a benchmark for comparison? See, the purpose of life is betterment, improvement. You want
17:44 to learn and grow each passing day and ultimately be liberated of everything that's not worth
17:51 keeping. That's how life is and that's how life ought to be spent in learning and
17:59 freeing oneself of bondages. And life is time. Life as we know it is a series of moments.
18:11 So obviously a comparison with the past has to be made. How do you know that you are better
18:16 off today? How do you know you are moving in the right direction? So, you need to look
18:21 at yourself as you were a while back and ask yourself am I any better off? So, in that
18:26 sense comparison with the past is not only useful but actually necessary. Because if
18:32 you do not look at the past, if you do not draw the right lessons from there, the punishment
18:40 might be that you will repeat your past and the past will become the future. For life
18:49 to be new and fresh, for something creative and groundbreaking to happen, you must learn
18:59 from your mistakes and be better than your former self. That's the only way one can
19:07 improve. Or you could alternately say that one can look at herself as one is right now
19:13 and say this is what I do not want to be, there are things in my personality, in my
19:19 mind, in my beliefs, value system that I want to expunge and I therefore move ahead in a
19:27 way that drops and renounces. You could say that. But even if you put it that way, then
19:35 the stuff that you have today that you want to drop tomorrow is the stuff that you have
19:43 carried over to today from yesterday. Have you not? So, even looking at the self as it
19:53 is in this moment is much the same as liberating yourself of the past. Because that which you
20:01 call as your present self, as your current self is nothing but residue from the past.
20:10 The stream of time has carried it ahead from yesteryears to today. So, you could either
20:19 say I want to liberate myself of the past or you could say I want to liberate myself
20:24 of my follies, limitations, weaknesses, bondages as they are today. It's much the same thing.
20:31 So the past is indeed useful. Now, the next thing you said, you said that even if we are
20:38 well-meaning citizens who want to fight against, let's say, issues like corruption and somebody
20:49 does start an authentic movement, still over time there is a possibility that it can lose
20:58 its meaning and get mainstreamed into the same flow of corruption and vindictiveness
21:08 and lust for power and other things. Yes, that can happen. So, that's the reason why
21:13 there must not only be one movement but series of several movements. We require not just
21:27 one seed to sprout and flower, we require an entire nursery. You see, you cannot place
21:40 very tight constraints on the forces of goodness. We allow the forces of evil to do whatever
21:51 they please and they get away precisely because they are forces of evil. They are supposed
22:00 to be evil, so they are supposed to make mistakes. If they are corrupted, that's in their DNA.
22:12 So we kind of forgive them or we accept that as a rule of nature. Let's say there are several
22:21 corrupt political parties, several corrupt political parties and you know very well of
22:27 their corrupt deeds and transactions and it is almost every day that news regarding their
22:39 venal dealings keep surfacing and even as those news articles surface, it does not bother
22:50 us too much because they are supposed to be corrupt. That's a mainstream political party.
22:57 Obviously it's going to be corrupt. But when it comes to a person or an institution that
23:10 started off as something better, something higher or cleaner, then we raise our expectations
23:17 just too high. Now that might be self-defeating because ultimately even an urge to clean up
23:31 is arising from the same filthy society. So even the cleanup process is bound to contain
23:44 some impurities. They ought to be understood and probably even accommodated. Also one need
24:00 not give up hope too soon. Filth has accumulated over a large period of time. Cleaning up won't
24:13 happen in an instant. That too is going to be a long process. It was not in 1757 or 1857
24:29 that India lost her independence. It was due to a long period of neglect of basics that
24:43 we got colonized. That period extended for several centuries. A lot of things were happening
24:53 in the religious domain, cultural domain, scientific domain, educational domain that
25:00 ultimately led to the fall of this huge subcontinent to much smaller nations from Europe. But once
25:12 the fall happened, it was unrealistic to expect that now freedom can dawn in the blink of
25:21 an eye. So then you required something like 200 years of incessant political and revolutionary
25:32 activity to bring just political freedom to India and other kinds of freedoms have still
25:41 not come to us in the way they must. Why? Because the process of slavery itself extended
25:50 over several centuries. So freedom too will take time. We are right now in the middle
25:58 of the process of freedom and in this process the political freedom has come to us and other
26:04 freedoms are still pending. Similarly, the corruption thing that you are talking of,
26:12 when you are talking of cleaning up, you have to ask yourself how exactly did you, do you
26:18 find yourself drenched in so much of filth and think of the centuries that have brought
26:30 us to this kind of weary state. So, if one political party fails in transforming the
26:42 political landscape, then another one must come up and you have to look at the whole
26:49 thing in perspective. It's not a matter of months or two years, four years. It will take
26:55 time and if you are hungry for change as you must be, if you want to reduce the time that
27:04 the process will take, then you must with all zeal and energy put in your own bit. Only
27:14 then the process can be accelerated. But let there be no false hopes. Bad politics is essentially
27:29 arising from a bad collective mind. The politician is corrupt because the population is corrupt
27:43 and all corruption is fundamentally spiritual. It is a lack of proper spiritual foundation
27:56 to common life that is causing corruption in all spheres of human activity. So, when
28:06 a reformation indeed does come, it will be a reformation not only in our politics, but
28:12 also in our education, also in our movies, our literature, our politics, our everything,
28:22 our relationships. It will be a fundamental change in who we are as a people. And if this
28:34 kind of a cataclysmic change is to be brought about, let's be patient. Let's be patient
28:40 with a desperate vigor. When it comes to action, we must act vigorously. When it comes to results,
28:49 we must want them desperately. But equally we must know that what we are asking for is
28:56 something very big and therefore it's definitely going to take time.
29:00 Thank you Acharya. That's all from my side.
29:07 Thank you. Thank you.
29:10 Hello Acharya ji. I am Amal Suledar. So, my question is that I think more and more people
29:17 nowadays are realizing the current predicament that Tarina ji was describing. And I think
29:23 they realize that they need more in life than what their current life offers. But there
29:28 are also many false sources out there that claim to offer enlightenment to people. So,
29:35 how does a common person or a common possibly gullible mind seeking a change in life differentiate
29:43 from the good channels, differentiate the good channels from the bad?
29:50 Channels in which domain? Do you have something particular in mind?
29:55 I don't have a particular. It can be I think anything. It can be in terms of be it medicine
30:02 or literature or just anything general about their lives. Everyone has different things
30:10 they want to improve about themselves and they seek different channels. I think nowadays
30:16 the options are plenty. So, how does one go about recognizing what is right for them?
30:28 I think we ought to be a little more loving towards ourselves. We need the right kind
30:41 of selfishness. You said medicine. Somebody is offering you medicine. Obviously, you must
30:52 be in the best position to judge whether the medicine is working, whether it's worth anything.
31:02 How is it possible that somebody gets away selling you trash in the name of treatment?
31:17 The results are on you. The impact is upon you. So, you know what is happening. You know
31:28 what you experienced, what you became, and how much you had to pay up in the entire process.
31:42 You know what you gave and what you got. So, how is it possible that people are being conned
31:53 so easily? Somebody tells you I have made a great movie. Come and watch it. You go there.
32:03 You are the recipient of the visuals and the sounds and the entire experience. Who but
32:11 you can for sure declare what the movie is worth for? How is it possible that you emerge
32:29 from a third-rate movie and you do not know how you felt about it?
32:39 But we do see all kinds of stupid movies succeeding at the box office, 300 crores, 600 crores,
32:48 1000 crores. We see all kinds of rubbish succeeding in the name of literature, national bestseller,
33:00 international bestseller, lakh copies sold, 2 lakh copies sold, 10 lakh copies sold and
33:05 that fellow is peddling nonsense of the worst kind. Trash in the name of philosophy, superstition
33:20 in the name of spirituality and still the fellow is succeeding. Do we care for ourselves
33:32 when I am reading something? Am I asking myself what is the impact this is having on me? Am
33:37 I any better off by consuming this literature or this person or this medicine or whatever
33:45 it is? There is so much that the world serves up for our consumption and extracts a price
33:52 from us. Nobody gives us anything for free. When you take that in, are you asking yourself
34:00 what did I get out of it? Or are we so unthinking and so insensitive towards ourselves that
34:09 we just don't bother? Let's say you have been called to a party. You went to the party,
34:17 you spent a fair amount dressing up and doing all the stuff that is needed. And for 6 hours
34:26 you were there consuming the loud blaring music and the booze and the inebriating visuals,
34:40 the entire atmosphere was designed to pull you down in terms of your consciousness. Is
34:59 it not important that when you return you ask yourself what was the whole thing about?
35:05 What did I get out of it? Do we take stock? Do we pause to reflect? Or next morning when
35:14 you get up with a heavy hangover, you just carry on as if nothing has happened, as if
35:23 those 6 or 8 hours never existed in your life in the first place. You invested 6 hours there,
35:30 you invested your money there. Must you now not ask yourself what did I get out of that?
35:35 And if you do not ask that question, then you will repeat that experience because that
35:40 experience is mainstream. That experience is being sold very aggressively by the culture
35:50 and the market. Are you getting it? You are enrolled in a course, you are enrolled in
35:59 a relationship, you set out for a pilgrimage, you say I am hanging out somewhere with my
36:10 buddies. Must there not be a certain self-awareness? What am I doing to myself? What is this experience
36:21 giving to me? And I am talking of a certain selfishness and calculativeness. You have
36:29 one life and you have a limited number of moments. Must you not calculate where those
36:35 limited number of moments are disappearing into? And time can just fly away. You will
36:46 think you are doing something worthwhile and meanwhile the clock is ticking. The clock
36:51 has no special consideration for you. Take an example. I hope we are together till this
36:58 point. Take an example. Let us say there is an elevator and you have to go from the first
37:10 floor till the eighth and instead you take the stairs and your friend takes the lift.
37:25 All the time when you are climbing up the stairs, how do you feel? Do you feel unemployed,
37:34 free, doing nothing, purposeless? No. When you are going up the stairs, you feel very
37:43 purposeful. You feel as if you are doing something important. Not only are you doing something
37:47 important, you are also investing a lot of energy in it. You can even start to pat yourself
37:55 on the back for taking up a daunting challenge. I have to climb my way up to the eighth floor.
38:08 And you will feel very engaged. You will feel as if something important is happening in
38:12 life and indeed something that saps your energy and takes away your entire attention is definitely
38:22 happening. It is not easy to quickly go up to the eighth floor. And when you do reach
38:30 there, what do you find? You find that your friend is already there and has been waiting
38:39 since a few minutes now. Right? That s the worth of all your effort. Somebody who didn
38:50 t take the wrong route reached there way before you and with far less effort. But we keep
39:05 just struggling through life thinking that the staircase is the only way to rise. Why?
39:15 Because the staircase is probably the thing that everybody is taking. There are lots of
39:24 people there. It s a hypothetical example. I know very well that if there is an elevator
39:30 and a staircase, nobody would take the staircase. But just consider the example for what it
39:37 points towards. But won t we as people, won t we also look
39:44 for something that makes our journey meaningful? In terms of if we want to get somewhere, we
39:51 want to do it in a way that we believe that the means also justify the ends. And we want
39:58 to have What is the end first thing? I get what you
40:03 are saying. Very valid thing. But what is the end? Where do you want to reach? The means
40:11 come later. First of all, one must know the ends, the purpose, the destination. What is
40:19 it that you want? Do we know that? I think on a general scale, like everyone s looking
40:26 for happiness and fulfillment. But then nobody is just one second old right
40:36 now. You know, we are 20, 25, 40, 45. We have already tried so many means for happiness.
40:47 And had we succeeded, we wouldn t still be trying. The means that we have now taken up,
40:54 are they really any different from the means that we have already tried out? Dimensionally,
41:04 the means are just the same as the ones already experimented with. We are just recycling the
41:17 means in other names, in other forms, in other faces. If those means didn t succeed then
41:24 how will they succeed today? Wishful thinking does not take anyone anywhere. I ask, will
41:34 you reach a new destination traveling down the same road again and again in more expensive
41:41 vehicles maybe, with new shoppers, with new companions, in new clothes, on other days.
41:51 The previous journey was made in the noon and this time you travel in the midnight hoping
41:57 that you will reach somewhere else. The road is the same. You will not reach anywhere else.
42:06 Another disappointment lies in store. Do we know what we want? Happiness is a very vague
42:16 word. What does that mean? We do not get happiness because we have never really reflected on
42:24 happiness. If you reflect on happiness, you realize its nature and that realization enables
42:34 you to then get what we all are really hungry for. You are perfectly right, we all want
42:43 happiness but what kind of happiness? Happiness has many grades, many levels. It is only the
42:53 highest level that would fulfill us. But the lower levels are easier to get. You don t
43:01 have to pay up a heavy price. Secondly, we do not know that the lower levels are actually
43:08 lower because all the lower levels of happiness sell themselves in the market masquerading
43:16 as the highest. Anybody who wants to sell something to you, does he not overstate the
43:25 product or the service? That is how all the sellers of happiness survive in the market.
43:37 Man needs to be much more careful about his or her life. It is my one life. Shouldn t
43:44 I be very cautious what my energy is going into, what my time is going into or can I
43:56 just let life drift? If you just let life drift, then there is hardly any difference
44:02 between man and animal. Animals have no purpose in life. The only happiness that an animal
44:11 is looking for is grass, food, shelter, basic security, sex, procreation. If the happiness
44:24 that we demand for life is much the same as what an animal demands, then we will remain
44:30 unfulfilled. The animal has no need for fulfillment. We will have no scope for fulfillment. We
44:38 will suffer. The animal does not. Thank you. Thank you so much for your answer.
44:46 I think the point about reflection really struck out to me. Thank you.
44:53 [Music]