Chaos inside is the catastrophe outside || Acharya Prashant, International Psychology Summit (2023)
Questioner (Q): Good evening, sir. Sir, because this conference is on Psychology and Technology, I would like to talk about something that’s very, very close to this. So, there’s a very famous quote by Carl Young, and I’ll use my phone so that I don’t get it wrong. It says, “The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order but psychic events. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.”
We see this on display around us, everywhere. The manifestations of the psyche in terms of man-made disasters, anthropogenic events, climate change, pollution, Chernobyl, oil spills on the ocean to name just few. So, they’re high-tech events, and they are events of manifestations of psyche—man’s psyche. So, can we fix this? What is the way out?
Acharya Prashant (AP): The way out is the way in. You have named the physical consequences of the psychic events that the Young’s quote is referring to. Those are the physical consequences, but even if those physical consequences, like wars, nuclear disasters, the climate catastrophe, even if they are not visible, the fact is that the inner disaster as a standalone happening in itself is quite catastrophic.
See, we are all messed up within—badly messed up within. The result of this inner chaos is sometimes visible externally as well, but that does not mean that the inner chaos is limited to the external consequence. Even if consequences are not visible, they still are there in a subtle form within. Because physical events, material events, gross events, first of all, they may involve a time lag. Secondly, you might not always be able to detect what is going on till something catastrophic just suddenly erupts.
