How am I supposed to feel after your session? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Question: How am I supposed to feel after your sessions?
Speaker: If even this is to be told by someone else, then where is your freedom?
Listener: How do I know that I am rightly following everything that is being told to us in HIDP sessions?
Speaker: Let us first understand what is this thing about rightness?
You see when we understand the scope of this question, then we see how far his question goes. The question is, ‘How do I know that I am rightly implementing and understanding what is being told in these sessions?’
I will expand this question.
How will a young man know that whatsoever he does out of his intelligence is the right thing? Many of you say, ‘I am a slave of external influences, and I can see that. I have come to realize that freewill is not the one that I am functioning on and I am dependent upon external decisions. I can see that. But now when I want to reject all that and live my life on my own, on my freewill, a great fear arises’.
The fear is-
‘What if I am wrong? I have rejected all the support that was coming to me from the outside, I have rejected all the advice that was coming to me from the outside, and in my intelligence and freedom, I am acting, deciding, living. But what if I am wrong? How do I know that I am right?’
What is right, and what is wrong? And how do you know that certain things are right and wrong?
Listener 2: From past experiences.
Speaker: Yes! Database and program, past experiences. And mind also has the ways to deal with the past experiences.
Now this question of rightness that how do I know whether I am right, this question too becomes important. Since childhood, since you were a small kid, you were told what is right and what is wrong, that there exists something called ‘the right’ and there exists something called ‘the wrong’. So you have become highly accustomed to thinking that there are things called ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ in life, those ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ are universal, come from outside and are constantly right and wrong. Hence the question that arises is whether whatever I am doing is ‘the right thing’. Go into this. Be very sharp.
What is right today in one country, is not right in another country as per the laws. Even in one country, what is right as per the laws of one state, is not right as per the laws of the other state. What is right in one religion is wrong in the other religion. Even in the single religion, what was right yesterday is not right today. This right and wrong is a completely time and place dependent thing, that keeps on changing, that keeps changing from situation to situation.
Every society creates and imagines its own ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. It is a man made thing. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ do not exist in nature, in existence they are not there. Man’s mind produces them. It is an arbitrary classification, totally arbitrary classification, just to make life a little convenient.
Now, there is a man-made right and a man-made wrong. It must be obvious to us that whatever comes from a man’s mind is a product of conditioning. There can be nothing sacrosanct about it. There is no need to think that these ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ have anything sacred about them. But there is another right and another wrong which is totally sacred. What is that?
Whatever comes out of your intelligence is right. Even if the entire world says that it is wrong, it is your obligation that you remain with it. Don’t budge, stay there, that is the only right. Even if all the voices around you tell you that this is not right according to social convention, according to prevailing norms, you stay with it. Don’t run away! Don’t be a coward. Don’t depend on others to tell you what is right.
Whatsoever comes to you in the light of your intelligence, unbiased, unconditioned, clear, direct, Truth, not something that you have borrowed, not something that you have been influenced to believe, stick to it. That is the only right way of living life.
Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.
