Acharya Prashant: Most of that which human beings do today is still driven by man’s evolutionary instincts. Sex, greed, fear, attachment – all of these are evolutionary traits.
If you can see how you and the monkey are exactly the same as far as sex, fear, lust and attachment are concerned, you’ll probably not want to show down the monkey. The monkey is at least right in its place. Monkeys need all those things to survive. The monkey needs attachment, the monkey needs fear; and therefore all that is right if the monkey exhibits it. But, you do not need all those things and you’re still carrying them, so you are the real monkey.
The monkey needs to be afraid of the night, so if the monkey is afraid of the night, it is good for him. Man does not need to be afraid of the night, but man is still afraid of the night because the monkey within the man exists and is too slow to go away. You know how slow he is? Evolution causes changes at a very feeble pace, it takes millions of years. Are you prepared to wait millions of years? And millions of years will be needed only if your progress is stopped in its tracks where it is today.
The difference between your intellectual position and your evolutionary position is increasing day by day. So, technology is giving you great stuff, but you are responding to it in a chimpanzee way. So, here you have these cameras, wonderful things, but what do you do with this? What do you do with this technology? You do all the monkey stuff with this technology. What’s worse? A lot of this technology is created by nothing but the monkey instinct. Please understand this. Intellect is giving you this technology, right? So, what is obvious is that the monkey within is only doing monkey things with the technology, but what’s worse is that a lot of that technology is arising only from the monkeyness.
So, the issue of fear has to be rightly understood. Physical survival is necessary, but the kind of fears that we experience won’t even help us survive physically. The snake is inside its little box or cage, you know, zoo, and you are still shivering; how is that helping your survival? Is that? A little baby snake 8 inches long is surrounded by 30 people and they are killing it, how is that helping your survival?
Jealousy, for example, is very much something that evolution taught you and you needed it, especially jealousy in gender relations, the man-woman stuff. It was needed; it was a survival tool when man was a chimp. You go to chimpanzees, they have jealousy. In fact, you visit animals, and whatsoever it is that you find common between yourself and animals is the stuff that you should be very cautious of. Man must observe animals and whatever you see the animal exhibiting is something that you should be very cautious of. Animals have a lot of jealousy. Jealousy is a survival tool.
Animals have a lot of attachment, animals compete, animals are violent, animals even deceive each other. All these are survival tools. Animals monopolize areas, animals have escape and defense mechanisms. All these are needed for physical survival. My question to you Alok(questioner) is – Do you need these things really for your survival, even physical survival? I’m not talking of inner survival; even for your physical survival, do you really need all these things? If you don’t need all these things, why are you harboring them, nurturing them? Why?
The chimpanzee needs these things, let the chimpanzee have them; you don’t need these things, throw them away! As far as evading a physical danger is concerned, I don’t know whether the evolutionary tricks that you learnt in the jungle will help you in today’s metropolitan USA. In the jungle one evolutionary trick is sufficient – See danger, run away. In the jungle, what is the evolutionary trick that you have learnt? See danger, avoid danger. Will this trick help you in uptown America? You run away and you are mowed down by a car. You are running away from the robber, and what happens to you? You are mowed down by a car. That was a good trick in the jungle, not anymore. Why do you want to deploy that trick even today?
So, evolutionary tricks are useless as far as mental peace is concerned and I’m asserting that they are useless even in terms of ensuring physical survival. Your physical survival will not be facilitated by your conditioned bodily behavior. In fact, your conditioned evolutionary behavior is causing you heart disease. Where is all the cholesterol coming from? Your conditioned evolutionary behavior is not giving you even physical safety.
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