Marriage Under Parental Pressure

Acharya Prashant

6 min
17 reads
Marriage Under Parental Pressure
Nobody can prepare you for anything that is against the law of freedom. Especially when you are an adult irrespective of where the childhood was; irrespective of how the conditions back then, where one lives in this particular moment and there is no obligation to carry the load of the past. There is absolutely no need. When I say need, what I mean is something that you cannot dispense away with. If this thing is happening to you, there surely is choice involved in it. And if it is your choice, it can be reversed. This summary has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation

Questioner: Namaste Acharya Ji. I'm so grateful that I'm in front of you today. You have absolutely changed the way I used to survive. Changed the life of my sister, my friends. I'm very, very thankful for that.

Today I heard you saying that there is indignity in being dependent. And for girls born in India, my roots are from Uttar Pradesh, Banaras. I'm very much born in that sort of set wherein dependencies is how things work.

Today I'm doing a PhD in Scotland. I'm trying to research in simulation and modeling but it's not enough. It's not the real thing. I often get calls from my parents saying to do something real which basically is an underline for getting married or you know do that. So when you say that there is indignity in being dependent but we are being prepared for that. So can you please explain what is this indignity in being dependent when we are actually being prepared for that. Please sir, thank you.

Acharya Prashant: It is to see, first of all, that ‘choice reigns supreme.’ We are not pots being prepared by some potter. Who can prepare us? Who can mold us? Who can forge us? Who has the authority? Life is our own sovereign choice. If someone is appearing to carry a certain authority over us, surely we are vesting him with that authority. Surely that is our own choice to empower that person with that kind of authority. And remember if you are giving such an authority to that person that person is surely giving something to you in return.

The ego is a trader. So, nobody can prepare you for anything that is against the law of freedom. Especially when you are an adult irrespective of where the childhood was; irrespective of how the conditions back then, where one lives in this particular moment and there is no obligation to carry the load of the past.

Certain things belong to certain areas and certain epochs. That area has been thrown away, that epoch has been left behind. There is absolutely no need. There might be practice. There might be an exchange there. There might be some kind of a semi-considered barter. But there is no real need. When I say need, what I mean is something that you cannot dispense away with. If this thing is happening to you, there surely is choice involved in it. And if it is your choice, it can be reversed.

Questioner: So I believe it's more emotional, the emotional bonds that are created over the years when we were children. But sir, then why did you say that there is indignity in being dependent? Why is there?

Acharya Prashant: Vedanta is very, very precise and very scientifically clear on this. You are free. That is your nature. That is who you are. Anything short of freedom is an afront to your very existence and therefore indignified.

You cannot be unfree and if you decide to be unfree that decision will come with sorrow. Your very existence militates against lack of freedom. You can choose to have a lack of freedom. You can barter away your freedom. But that decision will be accompanied by sorrow. And that which you are calling as emotional bond or emotional training, please understand this and observe yourself. A lot of that is just residue of the body. A lot of that just happens because it has not been examined. A lot of that is just fantastic storytelling. We tell ourselves stories like Hindi movies do and then we believe in those stories.

We never bother to experiment, verify and examine those stories. We live in stories as if the stories have an absolute existence of their own. So a story, for example, says parents love their kids. Come on. Love is a sacred word. Just because one physically gives birth, one does not become capable of loving.

Not even one in a million parents love their kids. Love is not something that you can just so easily get by virtue of having a body. A lot of nonsense just passes in the name of very beautiful words: respect, love, sacredness, understanding. And just because somebody is saying something with great conviction does not mean that the fellow knows what he's talking of. That includes this speaker.

We have characters in the movies uttering absolutely stupid dialogues with great conviction and you get impressed by the sheer baritone and the gravitas. Amitabh Bachchan spewing continuous nonsense in some family blockbuster. That's the dream figure every North Indian patriarch wants to be. Somebody whose authority is unquestionable. He just gets up from the inherited family chair, five centuries old and declares the heavenly truth. And the wife and the kids and the daughter-in-laws especially, they roll at his feet because the oracle has spoken. Right? Don't you get impressed?

Questioner: So the saddest part is that these people, including my father who is very educated. He's also an IIT aluminous but I don't know where did that degree go. They have gone around the world, they have seen everything but like when we were children the western world was beautiful, they wanted to make us strong and have enrolled us into sports and everything. But now if we try to explain to him that this is not what it is then it's like you have learned this from the western world and that you are becoming too individualistic.

Acharya Prashant: Yeah. And without even knowing what the individual means, without even knowing what is the meaning of the word individual. This is what is meant by living without examining. Think of words like life, love, beauty, east, west. We utter these words as if they are our play things as if we are the originator of these words. So their definition is absolutely clear to us.

The thing is nobody knows what these words mean. But entire sentences, the whole foundation of life are these words.

Questioner: Thank you, sir. I just want to say thank you. That's it.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
Comments
LIVE Sessions
Experience Transformation Everyday from the Convenience of your Home
Live Bhagavad Gita Sessions with Acharya Prashant
Categories