Is The Gita of Any Use?
Questioner: Acharyaji, you mention about Vedanta, at my age, should I start reading about it?
Acharya Prashant: You haven’t yet started?
Questioner: No sir.
Acharya Prashant: It’s too late.
Questioner: (laughing). Sir, how late? I wasn’t actually sure if I’ll be able to digest it or not.
Acharya Prashant: How did you decide on that without even trying Nandini (name of the questioner), please? Which all scriptures have you laid your hands on?
Questioner: Sir, almost none.
Acharya Prashant: And having tried on none, you concluded that it’s too early for you to start, or that it’s too difficult for you to start.
Questioner: Sir, in my family, they’ve taught me about Bhagavad-Gītā and all. But then initially I used to find it irrelevant and in the past six months, I felt like trying it once. But I wasn’t ready, that this is the time I should start reading it maybe.
Acharya Prashant: You know, if there’s a compulsory twenty-credit course on the Upanishads, you’ll not only read the Upanishads but even try to secure an A, right? The moment you know it carries twenty credits, you’ll forget all your hesitation. That’s how we are you know.
If it gives me placement, money, and CGPA, I’ll read. Poor Bhagvad-Gītā, it’s not there in the curriculum. The placements are not linked to it. No employer asks you, “Have you read Sāṅkhya-yoga ? What is the difference between Niṣkāma karma and Vairāgya ?”
Nobody asks you these things. Why don’t they ask these things? Because they themselves don’t know a thing. They themselves are in deep delusion, so they don’t know what to really look for in a candidate. And they also know, that if there’s a candidate who actually knows the answers to the right questions, then that candidate will never appear for their interview, let alone join their company.
So that’s the ecosystem you’re in. Why do you want to become another victim of that ecosystem? Your ecosystem is never going to drive you to the Gītā, or Upanishads, or anything of any worth. Isn’t it upon you now, as a mature adult to see that life is not just about the stuff that your courses contain?
I have all the respect for what is taught in our institutions. But I’ve greater respect for life and liberation from it. Technology and profession are a very small part of who you are. Life is a much bigger affair.
Life is not about dealing with machines. Life is first of all dealing with yourself and realizing that there’s a deep need within, waiting to be addressed. Resnick Halliday or Irodov are not going to address that need. (referring to the physics textbooks)
Are you getting it?
Questioner: Sir, but sometimes even if I’m reading a shloka or something, I feel that I’ll not be able to apply that to a greater extent because of a lack of my vision or maturity.
Acharya Prashant: Where do you think you can apply the Fourier series? Where all have you already applied Laplace transformation, please tell me. Please, please.
Ninety percent of the things I read at IIT, I could never apply anywhere, I still read them. But when it comes to the Gītā you say, “Oh, I don’t know where to apply them, therefore I’m not reading those things.”
Where in your life have you applied even complex numbers, please tell me. The square root of minus one (-1), what you have done so far with it? But you know all about complex numbers, right? In the first year, there would have been an entire course on complex numbers. And you went through it and probably secured an A, or A- and wow, well done.
Then you don’t ask, “Is it going to be of any practical use?” And you don’t ask. I’m not insinuating that this stuff that we’re taught at IIT is not of practical use. Obviously, it is. Obviously, everything has its use. Obviously, without the Fourier transformation, this laptop cannot exist.
My question is not whether those things are useful. My question is, “The question that you ask with respect to Gītā, why do you never ask it with respect to the other things that are taught to you?” How many students ask this question to their professor, “Sir, this that you’re teaching me right now, will it ever be useful in my real life, in my professional life?”
Computer science graduates are taught basic science courses in chemistry, are they not? How is it there? First year, you don’t have a chemistry course even for computer science graduates? Now why don’t the computer science graduates ask, “Sir, what will you do with Chemistry?”
I’m not saying that they’ll have nothing to do with chemistry or that knowledge won’t be useful. It would be useful. But you never ask. You take it on trust that if this is been given to me to study, it surely must be having some use somewhere.
But when it comes to spirituality, there’s a great distrust. And that great distrust has been implanted in you by your ecosystem. By the media, by the education, by everything that comes to our mind and affects it. They tell you, “If you read mathematics, it’ll give you happiness, by giving you some success, money. If you read economics, it’ll be of some use to you. Even if you read current affairs, you’ll gain knowledge. Even if you read erotica, you will at least gain some pleasure.”
“But Bhagavad-Gītā and Upanishads, they give you nothing. Neither success nor pleasure. So who wants to read them? We might worship them, but we don’t want to read them.”
At least try. And when you’ll try, you’ll find that they are not giving you knowledge, they are addressing the very person you are. They are addressing everything that you relate yourself to. Your name, your desires, your feelings, your choices, your livelihood, your relationships, your family, your very existence.
Now your very existence obviously is much more important than the technologies you know of, No? What is of most important to you? The fact that you exist, or the fact that you have knowledge about a certain technology? Gītā, Vedanta, and all texts of wisdom address who you are.
We don’t know who we are. Our very existence is hazy. One thing is certain, you’re not what you think you are. You’re not what you operate as. You are not what you’re so confident about. Therefore all of us are very dangerously placed. We don’t know who we are, yet we continue to operate as if we know. It’s an extremely precarious position.
If you don’t know where you are standing if you don’t know a thing about what's going on, do you want to choose, decide, and move ahead? Makes no sense, right?
Before you do anything, before you think anything, before you allow yourself to feel anything, must you not know something about yourself? But that’s the vacuum we operate in. Without knowing the very facts of our existence, we continue to live, eat, walk, choose, and decide, that too confidently.
What does all that result in? Just total waste of this special life.
Questioner: Sir, what I feel is that our self-image is greatly influenced by what others think who we are, and what this ecosystem thinks.
Acharya Prashant: Exactly, what others think who you are and what your body wants you to believe in. Others will tell you, “You are a smart girl”…..
Questioner: And I’ll start believing it, more and more people will start telling it
Acharya Prashant: Your body tells you, “You are a girl”. Both of these are not necessarily true. By that, I don’t mean that you’re not smart, or that you’re a boy. Others tell you things about yourself, the body gives you in a very deceitful way, your basic identity as a body. And we continue to trust these two cheaters, and operate as per the education, the advice received from them.
That’s like writing an examination in somebody else’s name. If you write your examination as Rekha, what will you get? So if you live your life as your body, what will you get? You went to write the JEE, right? You wrote it in somebody else’s name, what do you get?
Questioner: Nothing
Acharya Prashant: Right! That’s who we all live, we live as the body. The body might be getting some pleasure or something, but I don’t know what it gets, ultimately it turns to ashes. But for sure, you don’t get anything.
Questioner: Sir, by that do you mean our soul doesn’t get anything out of it?
Acharya Prashant: You’re not your soul. You’re not your body.
Questioner: Then who we are?
Acharya Prashant: Go to the Gītā, it’s already too late I said. If you’re talking to me, one of the options is to go to my website and put in your name. We have initiated a program to send the Upanishads to whosoever enrolls with us. Within a month or two, you’ll receive a copy of the Sarvasar Upanishad. It might answer some of your questions. It’s a free copy, you may just go there and enter your details, and you’ll receive it.
And if you don’t want to wait for a few months, then you may enroll in some of the Gītā courses that we have, that might help. Or you may decide to begin with your own copy of Gītā. Whatever you decide, just begin.
Questioner: Thank you so much Acharyaji.
