The parts of the Upanishads that do not deal with self-enquiry can be taken as outdated. They do not want to address things that change with time. Mankind today is more prosperous than it has ever been in its history — but internally, are you not still afraid? Are you still not greedy? That’s the problem of the self that the scriptures seek to address. The Upanishads are dealing with a very peculiar problem that time alone cannot address — and that is the problem of fundamental human suffering.
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Questioner: I'm Abhijeet, I'm also a PhD student. My question is that you've been putting a lot of emphasis on reading of Upanishads and Vedanta. In general, other people put a lot of emphasis on reading other holy scriptures and getting the true understanding — whatever true means.
But my question is that, why should my or anybody else's moral compass or somebody else's moral compass be set by something that was composed centuries, if not millennia ago? I mean, you know, the moral contours of society evolve. For example, a thousand years ago, if you said that, child of the monarch should not rule over the population, people would laugh at you, right? So the society has its own independent moral evolution, independent of whatever somebody wrote 5,000 years ago.
Acharya Prashant: Did we utter the word morality even once? Vedanta is totally immoral. It has nothing to do with your morality. It has to do with self-realization. What you do, what you do not do — it does not provide you with a list of do's and don’ts.
