Is Your Mind Controlled by Society?
Questioner: Good evening sir. Sir, when we talk about the common consciousness and the way you were explaining it, is that also just the conditioning?
Acharya Prashant: See, material is conditioning. That which is a product of certain conditions is called material. Is there anything in prakiti that is not a product of its conditions? So what is conditioning? Conditioning is both a process and an output. Everything is conditioned. There is nothing that just shows up. Everything is a result of a process. That's called conditioning.
Questioner: So when we say that there is no difference between life and death in this way in prakriti. But can we still say that death is the end of the reaction?
Acharya Prashant: Change in reaction. But that reaction, that change is anyway always happening. You see, an iron piece experiences an attractive force towards a magnet. Right? The iron is at a distance of 1 m from the magnet. And the iron piece is drawn towards the magnet. And now it's at a distance of 0.5 m from the magnet. What happens to the attractive pull?
Questioner: It grows stronger.
Acharya Prashant: Right. So something has changed. Change, nothing else. That's not death. That's not ‘nothing else.’ That's just change. In one condition, you were behaving in one way. Now your condition has changed so you are behaving in another way.
Questioner: So, if I were to put it very, very, very summarily, can we just say that we are like animals?
Acharya Prashant: That's a lot of aggrandization. But yes, given that no animal ostensibly has enrolled in this course, we can say that and get away with that.
(both laughs.)
But once, you know, if you see people as people, ‘You'll be very angry at them.’ If you see people as animals, you'd still have some expectations. But if you can see people as processes, the first thing that you will lose is anger. The fellow is not a fellow. The fellow is a process. How can you get angry at a process? The fellow is not a fellow. The fellow is a mass of chemicals. How can you get angry at hydrogen peroxide? You are calling that fellow by some name.
Give me a name. Some fellow you get usually angry at.
Questioner: Tony.
Acharya Prashant: Tony. Tony is not a person. Tony is a perchloride. So, so are we all. Ahimsa is not about ‘not getting angry’ on people. Ahimsa is about seeing the pointlessness of anger. The fact is that the other fellow cannot help doing what he's doing because he is a process.
The iron piece cannot help doing what he does (correcting himself), what ‘it’ does. Just as you call animals not as ‘he’ but as ‘it’, start calling people not as ‘he’ but as ‘it’. And then you find that anger becomes untenable. There is no person. There is just iron and magnet and nitric acid and sand.
How do you get angry at sand? There is no person. But that is possible only if you, first of all, start seeing that ‘I am not a person.’ I, remaining a person, cannot call that one as a process. There is a process here, there is a process there. What is there to get angry about? He did what he could.
Therefore, I have been insisting continuously that consciousness, real consciousness is a choice. In a process, there is no choice. The fellow in front of you, how much of a choice does he have? If he has no choice, why get angry? And if he has choice, then the mark of having choice is that you will not choose wrongly. And then you will not get a reason to be angry at him.
Had he really had a choice, he would have chosen rightly. And had chosen rightly, you would have found no reason to get mad at him. Right? So, if you claim that he's choosing wrongly, actually he's not choosing at all. There is nothing called right choice and wrong choice. There is just called the presence, something called the presence and something called the absence of choice. Presence of choice is the right choice. Absence of choice is the wrong choice. When you find somebody making a wrong choice, please know that the fellow was helpless and choiceless. There was no fellow. There was just…
Questioner: Process
Acharya Prashant: A process. Therefore, there was a wrong choice. No process has the capacity to choose something beyond itself. You do not exist. How do I get angry at you? You do not exist. How do I get angry at you? You are a mass. A mass without a center. Who do I get angry at? One cannot get angry at an amorphous mass of things. There must be some point to get angry at. You don't have a point. You don't have a center.
So, what we call the wrong center is actually no center. There is either a center or just looseness. There is nothing called the wrong center really.
Questioner: This also kind of answers the question that I had. Ego is hellbent upon identification. That's what Arjuna is doing and that's what Shri Krishna is trying to make him acknowledge and recognize. What purpose does it serve for ego?
Acharya Prashant: Okay. Think of someone who's trying to gate crash into a party. What will he tell the doorkeeper? There is somebody inside, I know.
Questioner: Yeah.
Acharya Prashant: Right. So if you are to enter a party uninvited, you must continuously assert that you know the people inside. You must continuously be seen hands in hands with someone, otherwise the bouncer will throw you out. Are you getting it?
There is a hotel. You don't really have a room there. You don't really have a room there. Still you want to enter the hotel. What is it that you must continuously keep telling the hotel staff?
Questioner: I know one of the guests.
Acharya Prashant: One of the guests. And the fact is you don't know any of the guests. So what do you keep changing?
Questioner: The names.
Acharya Prashant: The room number that you quote and the names that you quote. Do the residents need to make up a story?
Questioner: No.
Acharya Prashant: But does the intruder need to make up a story?
Questioner: Yes.
Acharya Prashant: Always. The ego is the intruder. So the ego always needs somebody's company to roam around. If the ego is found roaming around the resort campus solo all by itself, what will happen?
Questioner: It'll be thrown out.
Acharya Prashant: It'll be thrown out. The only way it can survive inside the campus, the resort, the hotel campus is by being seen in somebody's company and then you know the ego will be respected because it is with someone. The ego will be allowed to exist because it is with someone. So that's the only way the ego can survive by being…
Questioner: With someone.
Acharya Prashant: With someone. And the ego always says in its own justification that the residents need me therefore I exist. The fact is even without the intruder the residents are…
Questioner: Completely adequate.
Acharya Prashant: Completely adequate. At rest, satisfied, balanced in harmony.
Questioner: Thank you.
