How to Live and Not Just Survive?
Acharya Prashant: How to live and not just survive? Wow! What does it mean just to survive? It means to exist for the sake of the body. I am just trying to put in certain technical terms for the sake of clarity.
If most of your waking time is spent in pursuit of physical sustenance or physical pleasure, then you are just surviving. We sleep for six to eight hours, and another two hours are spent taking care of the body; that makes it eight to ten. You are left with fourteen and sixteen hours.
Of these fourteen-sixteen hours, three hours are spent commuting if you are in Bombay. So, you are left with what, ten-twelve something. Of these ten-twelve hours, if you are spending eighty-ninety percent just taking care of your livelihood or trying to maximize your physical pleasure, then you are just surviving.
What's common between just striving for livelihood and maximizing physical pleasures? Livelihood is the thing that you enter into so that you can maintain your physical sustenance. So, physicality is the common link.
You ask someone, why do you work so much? Is there joy in your work? Is it a mission you are working for? Do you want to bring about a substantial change within you or in the world? And if the answer is no, they say no, we work so that we can feed ourselves and our family, take care of our needs, and also provide for our desires and ambitions. Then that’s called as mere survival, just survival.
Most of my effort goes towards taking care of my stomach, my body, my clothes, and my accommodation, and the remaining part, the excess amount that I earn, I spend to care for my desires and pleasures. This is mere survival. Are you getting it?
A fellow earns, let's say, a hundred rupees a month. Sixty to seventy is spent on what he calls fixed expenses. Of the remaining amount, the fellow spends rupees twenty to please himself, and he keeps rupees ten in the bank for future use. This is mere survival, and this must have begun to sound horrible to you because this is how 99% of humanity lives, nearly for survival, just for survival.
What is real life, then? Real life is when the body, the physicality are not the end but the means. To live to feed the body is much the same as buying a car to keep refuelling it. What does the car do? It goes from the home to the fuel station and comes back to the home. The car moves so that the car can be fueled.
The fellow goes to the office so that his stomach can be fueled. He goes to the office so that he can earn enough for his stomach; both the stomachs, the physical stomach and the mental stomach. Why does the fellow go to his office? So that the stomach can be fueled, is much the same as buying a car so that it can be taken to the petrol pump to fuel it. The car goes nowhere else, it goes only till the petrol pump or it goes till the garage so that it can be serviced.
What's the point in buying and maintaining such a car? It takes you nowhere. There is no destination it can bring to you, similarly, what is the point in having this body if the entire life has to be spent just servicing this body and by body, I mean both the physical body and the mental body.
Just as the stomach is both the physical stomach and the mental stomach and the mental stomach, we all know is hungrier than the physical stomach. Are you getting it?
What is the point in having the body? By body, I mean the body and the mind. If the entire life you are working just to feed the body and the mind. How does the body demand to be fed? Through food, through clothes, and through shelter. These are the three things that the body wants.
How does the mind demand to be fed? Infinite appetite, unending desires. Both of these keep demanding, please feed us, please feed us. The body says give me a better house, give me better clothes. The mind says oh, that's what I want to have, that next thing remains to be achieved, I must have that and life is spent just servicing the body-mind complex.
It’s been ten years since you bought that car and it has never taken you anywhere else. And there is so much in the world, great and beautiful that you must go to. But your car takes you nowhere because all your time, you are just servicing the car. The car is of no use to you, instead you are being used by the car. You do not own the car, the car owns you. You are a slave to the car.
Similarly, we are mostly slaves to our car, this is our car (pointing towards the body). You have been gifted with this so that you can use this to reach somewhere in life. Instead, we act as slaves of the body. Don’t we usually?
The body decides what we will do and body means body-mind. The body and the mind decide what you ought to do and the mind is nothing but an outgrowth of the body. Our desires, our thoughts they arise from our physicality, don't they? Your hormones shift a little and your mood shifts, does it not happen? So, what you call as your mental emotions are nothing but physical things in motion.
So, of what use is life then if all you have to look for is physical-mental security and fulfilment of blind desire. You live when there is something beyond physicality to live for. Do you have that? As young people, this question should be very, very important to you.
I do not know whether we will ever meet again. I do not know whether my words will mean anything to anybody at all. But if even one person here finds some significance in what is being said right now, the very centre of life within, will experience a change.
I meet twenty five and thirty five year olds now and they say that it's probably too late. "Why couldn't we meet you when we were in college?" And every day there are hundreds and thousands of messages, emails saying, "Sir, what you are saying is perfectly right but it’s just too late for me now, I am thirty." Fortunately, you are not yet thirty, so you are just in the right place to decide what your life is for.
Servicing the stomach and the mind or for reaching a lovely destination. Life is not about eating, breathing, sleeping, walking. You cannot even be called as living if you just eat, breathe, sleep, walk, take a bath, and gossip. One cannot even be called alive.
You know technology is processing at such a rapid rate, we actually have robots today that can do most of what a normal human being does. Robots can even emote because emotions are just chemical; therefore, robots too can be made to emote. What's the problem in having a chemical arrangement that generates emotions, no issues.
Is there something in life beyond what a robot can do? You say, "You know, I am not dead, I am alive." Why? "You see, because, I walk". Even a robot can walk. "I speak." Even a robot can speak. “I see." Even a robot can see. "I love." But that’s simply chemical attraction even a robot can be made to experience that. Just google and you will find robots falling in love. They have been programmed to fall in love just as we have been physically programmed to fall in love.
There is no consciousness in our love. It's just material attraction and repulsion, like iron pieces to a magnet. Are you getting it? Can there be something in life beyond robotic? If you have a robot sitting here, it will register everything that I am saying, in fact, using machine learning, using artificial intelligence, the robot will actually be able to prepare a very intelligent map of what has been said.
It will be able to tell how one part of my response to one question mapped perfectly with another seemingly different part of response to a different question. You will find it difficult to do, the robot will do it better than you can. In some sense, if the robot sits here, it’s gathering my words better than you can.
What is it then about a human being that qualifies him or her to be called alive? What is that? What is that? And that something we need to have.
You are waiting for me to give the answer, that’s robotic.
A robot can never exceed its programming. A robot can never go beyond its programming. One thousand years from now when you will have unimaginably fast and smart supercomputers, the supercomputers of today will appear like an abacus in front of them.
That kind of computing ability you will have. Thousand years is too much, within fifty years. That’s the rate at which computer science is progressing. Even then, no computer will ever be able to go beyond what it has been created for. No machine therefore can ever be free and that's the only characteristic of living.
Can there be freedom? No machine is free. All machines are operated by some operator outside of them, they are designed by a designer outside of them, they are programmed by a programmer outside of them.
They therefore, cannot be free. Can you be free? And if you can be free then you have lived; otherwise, you have just existed and survived like a piece of flesh, like bacteria, fungi, insects, the whole lot of animals. They all exist, don’t they? And there is nothing wrong in their existence because they are not even supposed to be free. They don’t even want to be free.
But human beings, if we are not free, something within us keeps weeping. Does it not? You can very coolly have dogs as pets and kittens and if you feed them well, treat them well they’ll never go away. Even if you push them out of your house, you will find them returning, right?
And you take them out for a walk and there is a collar around their neck but no human being can ever be satisfied with such an arrangement provided he deserves to be called human.
No human being will ever say that if I get fed properly and if I am given enough money, and if I am given a cozy place to live in and a nice bed to sleep in, I am ready to live like a dog in your house.
No human being will say that because human beings are constituted to value freedom more than anything else. The dog will happily survive in its bondages; man cannot happily survive. We know of people who would rather die than be enslaved, right? I hope we all were like that. I prefer death over slavery or bondage. That's the defining and exclusive characteristic of a truly alive human being - Freedom.
Freedom from everything, freedom from your external masters, and, more importantly, freedom from your inner conditioning. Inwardly, we are badly conditioned; each strand of your hair, every particular cell in the body, is simply conditioned. There is nothing new in life; therefore, that which you are doing, that which you are experiencing, emotions, your thoughts, your instincts, your reactions, they are all pre-scripted in a sense, and on top of that script, there is another script imposed on you by the society.
First of all, we are all born conditioned, and then the social influences coming from family, the media, college, and the religious streams we belong to, they all burden us even more, and we become thoroughly mechanical.
The fellow loses all sense of freedom. What’s scary is that most of us lose even love for freedom. We resign, we surrender, we agree to live like slaves, and we start calling the master's orders as our own thoughts and desires.
Are your desires your own? Are your targets your own? No, they mostly come from a master outside who dictates terms to us. Sometimes, we know the masters, but most of the time, we do not even know that the stuff we are chasing is actually of no use to us. Some blind force has taught us to respect something, to chase something, to value something, to live for something, and we are blindly obeying the commands.
Like a clerk receiving dictation from an officer, like a master commanding the dog to fetch the newspaper, like a programmer asking the machine to fetch a certain result. That’s how most of us live.
