~~~~~
Video Information: 19.10.2022, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
Context:
~ What is real feminism?
~ When should we express our emotions?
~ What is the worst enemy of women?
~ When should one talk back to their parents?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant #feminism #womenempowerment
Video Information: 19.10.2022, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
Context:
~ What is real feminism?
~ When should we express our emotions?
~ What is the worst enemy of women?
~ When should one talk back to their parents?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant #feminism #womenempowerment
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00 Thank you.
00:27 Hi sir, my name is Vaishnavi Gaikwad and I am an FYBSA student.
00:52 I would like to ask, like when sometimes I do some things and my parents don't like it,
00:58 of course they will scold me.
01:00 So sometimes the matter goes too far and they hurt me.
01:07 And then I don't talk back to them.
01:11 I have never done that till yet.
01:12 So I feel like if I talk back now, it will hurt them.
01:16 So what should I do?
01:17 Like if I talk back and if I don't talk back, it's like bottling up my feelings.
01:28 You must talk back, but not from an emotional center.
01:34 Right?
01:36 You must be 18, 20, 22 something, an adult now.
01:40 You have all the rights to engage anybody in a conversation.
01:47 But engaging in a conversation is not the same as reacting emotionally.
01:55 The chances are that because they hurt you, so you will react.
02:03 Now don't do that.
02:06 It's very difficult to say which of these is worse.
02:13 The two options that we usually exercise are, one, we suppress our feelings, we block our
02:20 expression.
02:22 That's the option very frequently chosen.
02:24 And that's also the one you seem to be choosing.
02:29 And following this particular option, there is the other one in which there is an explosion
02:35 due to continued suppression.
02:38 When you suppress your feelings and your instincts for too long, one day they will explode.
02:47 And when that explosion comes, you know how the sight of an explosion looks.
02:55 You only have debris all around.
02:59 Things shattered and scattered.
03:03 Sometimes not all the scattered things are visible to the eyes.
03:07 They are all within the mind.
03:09 And there is so much tooth-toot.
03:12 What has happened?
03:14 Look at the faces.
03:16 And you can know just by looking at the faces of the members of the family.
03:22 There has been a civil war just an hour back.
03:29 So we all must, you all must rather, as young people, learn to engage your parents and your
03:39 seniors and your teachers.
03:43 In India somehow the culture has been of authority and silence.
03:53 Authority from the senior side and silence from the junior side.
03:58 And the direct blowback has been that a lot of the current generation is now becoming
04:06 extremely disrespectful and disregardful.
04:10 Precisely because they have not been engaged, instead been asked to just shut up.
04:17 And you cannot have a person shut up till eternity.
04:23 So now you have people look at the kind of manners and etiquette that they display.
04:30 And then the parents are horrified.
04:32 So are the teachers.
04:34 The kids of this generation, they just know no respect.
04:40 Look at how they misbehave with their elders.
04:43 But then it was the responsibility of the elders to teach their kids or their students
04:50 where behavior must come from.
04:55 Not how they should behave, but from where they should behave.
05:01 So I started my response by saying that you should not behave from your reactive emotional
05:07 center.
05:09 If you feel strongly like bursting out in a particular moment, that is just not the
05:18 moment to open your mouth, withdraw.
05:22 Equally you cannot stay withdrawn forever.
05:26 When you know that it's the right time, then speak up.
05:36 At a time and place of your choice, respond.
05:42 That's what they say in the military.
05:45 When somebody attacks you, obviously he would be attacking you at a time and at a place
05:50 where you are weak.
05:52 That is not the time to engage the enemy.
05:54 Of course I am not saying that parents or teachers are enemies.
05:57 Just raising a very broad and loose analogy.
06:06 So you do not just react then and there, though you will be feeling very angry.
06:12 An army truck was going and it has been ambushed.
06:15 But hey, this is not the point to engage them.
06:18 Engage them as little as possible and just save your response for a better time.
06:27 Because at that moment you will be afraid, you will be angry, you will be hurt from your
06:33 feeling of being offended.
06:35 Very hurtful words will arise.
06:39 And the mind is a strange thing.
06:42 It remembers all the nonsense.
06:47 Two hours of a hurtful conversation will be remembered over two decades of a relationship.
06:59 That's how the ego operates.
07:01 Two decades of mother-daughter relationship, the ego will choose to just keep aside.
07:09 And it will repeat, repeat, repeat to itself those two hours, not even two hours, it does
07:15 not last that long usually, twenty minutes.
07:19 Those twenty minutes of bombardment and every single word, hurt, abuse will be not only
07:30 remembered but magnified.
07:33 Your mother said something in two words, the memory will remember it as two sentences.
07:42 Even casual glances will be remembered as weapons in sarcasm.
07:48 You know, she was not just looking at me.
07:52 She was using her eyes as weapons.
07:55 There was so much sarcasm and taunt in the way she glanced at me.
08:00 And that's all the work of the ego.
08:05 So do engage your parents.
08:09 Figure out what is really happening and then talk to them.
08:13 It's an art.
08:15 When you read the old wisdom stories belonging to the sages or the gurus or the Buddha, often
08:25 you come across something very curious.
08:31 The student comes up and asks a question and the teacher does not respond at all.
08:40 Sometimes the teacher responds after an entire year.
08:43 He waits for the right conditions to develop.
08:47 He knows that any explanation at this moment will be futile.
08:53 And then after one year he says, now this is the answer to the question you had then
08:57 asked.
09:00 The teacher is hardly ever seen in a hurry to provide explanations because if you are
09:08 a real teacher, a teacher of life, it is not your job merely to give explanations.
09:13 You want to take the student to a solution, not merely explain it but actually solve it.
09:21 And that requires the right time and the right conditions.
09:25 The student must be ready to listen.
09:29 If the listening is closed, what's the point in speaking so much?
09:33 And when two people are engaged in heated arguments, a de facto quarreling, believe
09:41 me neither of them is listening.
09:44 And if that fellow is not listening, why are you speaking so much to him?
09:48 You are speaking so much, you are speaking beyond what is needed to be spoken.
09:53 And not a word is reaching that fellow and even if something is reaching that fellow,
09:59 his receptors are totally distorting it.
10:05 Because he is receiving it through his internal filters.
10:09 And the memory is selectively magnifying and selectively deleting the chosen parts.
10:16 Some part is blown up and some part is chosen not to be remembered at all.
10:22 I'll give you an example.
10:24 I would have spoken here for 15-20 minutes now.
10:28 If all of us are asked to pull out a sheet of paper and write down what I have just spoken,
10:35 just the salient points let's say, sum up what has been said in 10 points, 10 points
10:42 each, everyone, you will find quite a lot of divergence.
10:50 Your 10 points will be at a significant variance from what she writes or from what he writes.
10:57 How is it possible?
10:59 The speaker is one.
11:01 He has not said 10 different things to 10 different people and yet we have heard the
11:06 speaker differently, all of us.
11:09 There would be obviously some overlap but also a lot of variance.
11:15 That's how we are.
11:17 So wait for the other person to be in the right frame of mind before you can say something.
11:30 These two things if you can get rid of and that applies to everybody.
11:38 Not just to you as a person.
11:39 I am not, it's a general answer.
11:45 Reactiveness and emotionality and I am stressing more on that seeing that I am speaking to
11:52 a girl, to a woman.
11:56 The way prakriti, physical nature has made the two genders and then later on the way
12:05 we are conditioned by the society and the education and the various influences, girls
12:13 turn out to be more emotional and more reactive and that's a serious handicap they face in
12:21 life.
12:25 The problem that I face when I address this issue is that many women take their emotionality
12:31 as their strength whereas it is not.
12:36 It is something very untamed that arises from the body, the physicality, the chemicals,
12:43 the hormones and one ought to understand it and stay at a safe distance from it.
12:49 I am not saying you must suppress your emotions.
12:51 I am saying you must understand your emotions and to understand your emotions there has
12:55 to be a certain detachment.
12:57 You must be able to see where your thoughts, your emotions and your reactions are coming
13:01 from.
13:03 If you will not be able to see that, in spite of all the liberalism and all feminism, life
13:10 can still be very hard on one particular gender.
13:19 Unfortunately we have come far from days of open and socially accepted oppression but
13:33 still the scales are not even.
13:40 They are tilted in favour of one gender and against one particular gender.
13:47 I do not want girls to suffer and the one who causes them to suffer is both outside
13:58 of them and inside them.
14:01 Outside of them are the blind forces of patriarchy and body identification and materialism and
14:09 all that.
14:11 And inside of the woman, the forces of her physicality, they are the ones that cause
14:19 her to suffer.
14:22 Those forces are present within men as well.
14:24 When I speak to men, I address that.
14:29 But right now since I am speaking to a woman, it becomes very important.
14:34 Do not locate your enemy just outside of yourself.
14:39 Actually a bigger enemy is lurking within and that enemy is your own emotions, your
14:48 own tendency to quickly react and a lot of that has to do with insecurity as well.
14:55 Because we do not educate and raise our girls well and wisely enough, so they are left feeling
15:04 helpless, powerless and therefore insecure.
15:09 And when you are insecure, then you will be even more emotional and even aggressive.
15:18 When you are afraid within, then you become violent in many ways, explicit and implicit.
15:24 Do not let all that happen to you.
15:26 Life is too valuable to be wasted away in periods of emotional trauma and neurosis and
15:41 fragmented mind.
15:43 Something is saying this is right, one part is saying I love my parents, one part is saying
15:47 no, they offend me, I have to do something about it.
15:50 One part is saying family is important, the other one says career is important and all
15:55 that is quite a lot of torture to handle.
15:59 Do not let that happen.
16:01 That's the reason why wisdom literature is essential and more important for women than
16:07 for men.
16:10 Because they are the ones who stand to lose more, who are more often than not the targets
16:21 of aggression.
16:24 So they are the ones who must have more centered minds.
16:30 Make sure you do not get lost in the material and consumerist forces and that you pay adequate
16:37 attention to setting you might write.
16:44 Point it out and keep it centered.
16:56 [Music]