How to Work Without Becoming a Slave to the System?
Questioner: Acharya Ji, Good evening. I just need a signature, that’s it, on this page particularly. Please ask me why I’m asking for this one.
(Chapter 55: Entrepreneurship as a Sacred Calling; Truth Without Apology)
Acharya Prashant: Yeah, planning?
Questioner: I have no clue, and you have to answer me that you are a teacher and you have taught all around the world. Does entrepreneurship mean enterprising? Can I be enterprising even having a job? Is it possible for me?
Acharya Prashant: It’s possible.
Questioner: Because you’ve never rejected this.
Acharya Prashant: Entrepreneurship may mean coming up with a new body corporate that you own, right? A private limited or something, or something you hold the stakes in. That’s one form. It could have several other forms. Several. Principally, the way I have come to see it, it is about giving expression to your truest self.
Questioner: I work, I teach literature, I read what you suggest, and even when I’m reading Rumi, if I take that to my students, am I being entrepreneurial? If I analyze the text every year with an evolved understanding.
Acharya Prashant: Yes.
Questioner: Do I have to start up something on my own for the sake of starting, or can I be entrepreneurial even when I’m working but I’m part of a system but the system is exploitative? I don’t have complaints though.
Acharya Prashant: It’s not about whether you have complaints or not. It’s about whether your presence is furthering the exploitative potential of the system.
Questioner: How? I may be?
Acharya Prashant: I have to get into the details then. See, I might be doing great things personally at a micro level within the system.
But, if the system as a bigger machine is able to use me as a cog to further its own interests in a much bigger way, in a macro way, then there might be a problem.
Questioner: But if that system is also, let’s say, working in a direction of betterment, then it’s fine?
Acharya Prashant: Definitely.
Questioner: With minor flaws, of course? This is a two years’ burning question, sir.
Acharya Prashant: Minor flaws will remain even in the best system that you construct on your own. Right?
Perfection is not possible in this material world. Perfection is an idea. And if Truth is perfection, then Truth is intangible.
Questioner: True.
Acharya Prashant: So, in this tangible world where we have systems, people, machines, this, that. Things would always be imperfect. That’s fine. The question is: where is the heart placed? Is the system intended to do good, or is the intention to exploit, to make profit in the usual way, and then splurge that profit on various kinds of interests and addictions of the stakeholders, right?
Somebody sitting at the top, he’s accumulating much of the value addition. And then, the money that the fellow at the top has accumulated. What does he do with it? He burns it in ways, for example, that worsen the climate spectre.
Questioner: True.
Acharya Prashant: We very well know that more than half of the global carbon emissions come from the top 1%, 5% rich people of the world. And if I’m working in a machine that helps accumulate money for one person or a group of persons, and then that money is used for the ugliest kind of consumption, then there is a problem.
Questioner:Then, I’m also a contributor. Even if I’m at the micro level doing my best, I still become a contributor. Otherwise, I can function well in a system with minor flaws.
Acharya Prashant: With minor flaws, provided the heart is at the right place.
Questioner: The heart is at the right place.
Acahrya Prashant: Heart of the system.
Questioner: Yes. Acharya Ji, thank you very much, and thank you for being in Hyderabad. This was long in the waiting. I had really waited for you to come. Thank you very much for being here.
