How to Utilise One's Time During the Corona Lockdown Period?
Questioner: How do I utilise my time better during this self-isolation period so that my devotion in him is strengthened and what are the things that I need to keep a check upon during this free time?
Acharya Prashant: All right. Keep a check upon yourself. There’s nothing else to keep a check upon, even the virus is not to be checked, the virus has simply no intentions to invade you and destroy you.
You have to check your own tendency to go and touch the virus. The virus was residing happily, peacefully in some jungle, he was coexisting with the bats and there are thousands of such viruses that belong to the wild. They are nicely existing there since countless years. They are not malicious, they have no intention to harm human beings.
Human beings in their great smartness, in their progressiveness, industriousness, driven by their intellect, do all kinds of things to the wild and to the viruses.
Check yourself what is it that you do in your confident intellectual dimension that will turn out to be self-destructive. Watch out against yourself, that’s the number one job.
Number two, read as much spiritual literature as you can. These weeks or months will not come again. This is surely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There have not been many generations who have had this opportunity, where they have been forcibly given periods of isolation.
This isolation is something that the fools will resent and reject but this isolation is something that the wise men will all celebrate. They will take it as a blessing and already there are science you see. The air quality index has miraculously improved all over the world, all over this country including the place where I am. The air is far cleaner, the songs of the birds are now livelier and louder. You have friends from the wild, found roaming on the streets. Deers and gazelles and an occasional cheetah I suppose.
So it’s not as if existence is sending us all the wild things and signals, that which we are taking as a catastrophe has another face as well and that face might not be very ugly. So, do not just be caught up in the propaganda and in your nervousness. Try to look at the bigger picture and you might find beauty in the bigger picture. You might find that this catastrophe was probably one of the few possible ways in which mankind could have been reminded of its viciousness and its frailty.
The virus is a product of man’s arrogant, unguided, an authoritarian ego. Virus is a product of man’s inner violence and by that, I do not mean that man has created this virus, when I say the virus, what I mean is the meeting of the virus and a man. That which we are calling as the invasion of the virus.
These weeks, months are going to contain obvious suffering and there are going to be a large number of deaths as well. All that is very sad and very unfortunate but do try to see that we are the one who had been asking for it. We brought it upon ourselves.
We have nobody else to blame and it was in the making since decades and centuries. Godlessness, irreligiosity, unbridled industrialisation, utter and absolute cruelty towards animals, chilling rise in animal flesh consumption. You thought all this would go unpunished?
So there are lessons to be learnt and time has been made available to you, make the best use of that time. One, engage in self-observation. Let the isolation not be merely physical. Let the mind move into solitude.
And secondly, because now you have been distanced from the society, it is time to be intimate with the really deserving ones. You are lucky that for a few months, you will not be pestered by your colleagues and your bosses and your neighbours and your relatives and so many of these mediocre people.
It’s now time to beg for the company of the greats. Unfortunately, they might not be physically available to you. Go to their word, read their books, watch their videos. The internet is there, the books are there.
It’s time to make up for a lot of lost opportunities. Maybe you are 40 right now, it’s time to read stuff that should ideally have been read when you were 16. Never mind, never too late. Go to the Upanishads, go to a Rumi, Go to Hafeez, go to Acharya Shankar, go to Dhammapada, go to Kabir Sahab. It’s been a crime to have ignored them for so long, now is the time to compensate.
