Mental health epidemic - what's behind it?
Questioner: One of the things that really comes to mind even in one's spiritual progress, right? Where we see, I'm trying to relate it to a youth of today, where one of the things we see sort of two things that come hand in hand here, at least in my perspective.
There's one where we are heavy on mental health these days, right? The importance of taking care of oneself, whether that be in emotional well-being, whether that be in a spiritual sense. And on the other side, there's ambition. Youthfulness means ambition in itself, the amount of energy. But at the same time, there's "go get it," start your own business, start this own new idea, take it and launch it, put all your mind and heart into it.
When you're a seeker, how does one balance detachment, Vairagya, and ambition?
Aacharya Prashant: No, you must be detached to nonsense, and you must be greatly ambitious towards that which matters. Simple. So, you cannot have detachment from a thing without firstly seeing its uselessness, its futility. Otherwise, your detachment would just be an exercise in internal suppression.
I do not yet know that this (pointing towards the mug) is not only useless but actually harmful. I do not know, but I want to be detached. I want to renounce it. How will I do that? I'll do that by putting a heavy load on my heart, and my heart would be yearning all the time. I'll become a thief unto myself. Maybe I'll consume this thing in my dreams then, no?
So, detachment and right ambition are just two names for deep insight and clear realization
Now I realize that the next thing in this mug is life-giving. I'll have it at any cost. Now this is ambition. The spiritual mind is a deeply ambitious mind. It's just that the desire is for the real thing. The saints were far more ambitious than the CEOs and the unicorns of today. They said, "We want nothing short of the ultimate. Just a billion-dollar market cap tag won't satisfy us. That's too small a thing. We are shooting at something way higher than that."
So, that requires insight. That first of all requires that you know what is valuable and worthy in life. What is it worth obtaining in the first place?
Similarly, renunciation requires that you clearly know that a certain thing is toxic for you, and that's the moment when you just drop it. You can't help dropping it. Even if you want to tell yourself to continue holding it, it won't happen.
You are asleep and a snake is crawling over your body, and you do nothing. The moment you wake up, you can't help putting the snake aside, can you?
Your hand has been numbed in some way using some drug, let's say, so you cannot feel anything, and there's hot burning coal in your palm. Slowly, the sensation is now returning to your hand. You can't help throwing the coal away. That's renunciation.
Are you getting it?
To be ambitious is to realize true beauty in a way that it overpowers you. To be ambitious is to surrender to the truly lovely, beautiful thing and say, "Now what else is there to life than to pursue that one thing? Nothing but that one thing." And that's spirituality: to pursue nothing but that one which is not really a thing.
Questioner: Right. So, ambition and surrender, in a sense, are very...
Acharya Prashant: They are exactly the same thing. Exactly the same thing. To be ambitious and to be surrendered are two sides of the same coin.
Questioner: Right. As a follow-up, said that especially right where we're talking about surrender, and we're talking about ambition being very similar in that, I'd love to understand, even in your own life journey, even in your own spiritual journey, what was the biggest surrendering that you had to take? What was the biggest decision that you had to take where all the marbles in, I'm going in? What was that for you?
Acharya Prashant: See, again, this is in some ways akin to the first question, but I'll be able to point at a few things. First of all, the surrendering is continuous. It is not as if one makes a decision to give up something at one point in time and that's it, that's your redemption or enlightenment. It does not happen that way. One has to continue giving up or rejecting the false at all times.
Every two months, let's say, just to make it sound more practical, If I go back to my college days, well, maybe 90% of my batch settled abroad, and it was just a few years back from today that I got my passport made. So, if I go back to '99, when I passed out of IIT, that was one thing that everybody was into: writing the GRE or taking up a job involving overseas posting. And I don't think it mattered much.
You see, real surrender involves giving up something that you know anyway to be valueless. So no surrender then can be really big. You are anyway giving up something small. So how can the surrender be called something big?
So, I knew it didn't mean much, and it was 12 years after passing out from IIM that I got my passport made, and that too for reasons relating to the mission. I had to visit Europe for a lecture tour. So, that was one thing.
Then there was the lure of the civil services, and the Laal bati, the government bungalow, the prestige, the power that comes with it, and all those things. And so that was given up again. Not a very big thing, not something that involved a lot of pain.
Yes, it involved a lot of examinations, definitely. I didn't want to rush into resigning, so I took a good two, more than two years, and a sabbatical before I finally put in my papers. But when I did it, it was nothing very significant. It's not as if I remember that day or I become nostalgic and reminisce. Nothing.
Then the day when I quit my corporate job for good, that is, knowing fully well that I'm not going to return, and went into my own little apology of an office. It was actually a residential place, an apartment, a room of which I turned into my little office and started from there.
Then there were moments when, as an entrepreneur, I would struggle, and somebody would come and say, "You know, you could have had so much power today. You would have been a bureaucrat of eight years' standing, and see, for every small thing you are still struggling today. Why did you have to choose this?"
So yeah. And what else? See, I have to remember because it's not something that actively speaks to me. It's not something that I am particularly missing out on.
Questioner: Right. I think, I mean, if I were to interject there, I think it also has to do with the fact of what you were saying, or you kind of touched on, surrendering, when it becomes sort of natural.
Acharya Prashant: It is natural.
Questioner: That is nature.
Acharya Prashant: You become choiceless. You see that seems like the only right thing to do. So then it's not really a big deal or a massive challenge.
You could talk of a happy married householder's life, and there are youngsters who come to me, and the moment in the conversation the possibility of not marrying opens up, I often see the fear on their faces.
You could say that's something I have surrendered: the prospects of being a householder, having a lovely, loyal, surrendered, sexy wife, and cute kids, and all that that comes along with it, you know.
But it's hard for me to even call that as something I have surrendered. You know, there's dirt on your body, you go and take a bath. You don't say you have surrendered the dirt. You have given up something that was never anyway worth carrying on with. You have not entered something that was anyway going to prove a disastrous trap. So how is this renunciation or surrender or tyag? It's not.
But at the same time, when one starts off, there are times when one would miss all these things. There are times when there would be that inner ache. But one has to just let that last. One has to just let those moments pass.
Those things come. We all are human beings, and we all are subject to inner and outer circumstances. So there are times when you even feel like regretting, but those moments should just be absorbed, and then those moments keep getting less and less frequent.
