Sexual Predators Within the Family
Questioner: Pranaam Acharya Ji. So my first question is that, it is a personal question like I had a very bad childhood trauma. It was related to sexual assault and I'm still suffering from that, vibes come to me again and again and that person is very close to me and my family and I'm not able to tell that to anyone. Still nobody knows that except me. So yeah, he is coming in front of me again and again and I feel that pain every time I see him or I think about that.
So my question is that I have a nephew, my sister's 4-year-old son. So I'm seeing that he is facing the same problem. He's going to face that he will have nobody to share his problems with which I faced which led to this assault and he's going to face that problem because his parents are the same, not that much understanding how my parents are. So I just wanted to ask how to get the strength to bear this and how to help him and other kids also to not face this problem.
Acharya Prashant: See it is good that in the beginning itself you realize that it is not something limited or particular to you. You can immediately see that such a thing afflicts many others and very immediately it is probably going to affect your nephew. Now broaden the scope of this understanding a little more. It is going to affect millions of other kids and children and teens and pre-teens. There are so many who are going to be affected by it. And once you realize that two things happen.
One, your sense of having been personally assaulted diminishes greatly. We realize it is a phenomena, not a personal event. It is a general thing not something specific to you. So that feeling of hurt within diminishes greatly. Secondly, there arises a solid sense of responsibility. It happened with you. It is happening with so many others. And with your personal experience, you realize it should not happen. Something has to be done about it. And because it is not something unique to you or particular to you, therefore the action has to be general in nature. If the action has to be general in nature, you need to first of all put your finger on what the general problem is. The general problem, not the problem in your family or in the family, in the neighborhood or in one particular family in some other city. It's not about unique instances. It's about the general problem.
What is it that makes a human being do such a thing to another human being? What is it that makes such a thing a possibility in every second household? We know the numbers, they are very staggering. We also know that the reported numbers are way below the actual ones and we also know that progress in science, technology and education is not really leading to any kind of reduction in this tendency and such happenings. In fact, it is possible that such happenings might actually be increasing over the years even as human beings become more prosperous, more educated and more technologically equipped. Right? So that is what is happening.
On the external front, you realize that we are more powerful than ever. Human beings today are taller than ever. The average weight is probably more than it ever was in our history. The prosperity levels are higher than they ever were. The average lifespan is longer than it ever was. In the developed world almost 100% of the population is literate. Even in India, literacy levels are exceeding 80% now and there is so much power that all of us have at our hands and yet we find that internally we are exploitative. We are slaves to our animal instincts. We find occasions to exploit others in all kinds of ways- sexual, economic, emotional, and the moment there is an opportunity, we jump at it.
All we need to have is uh someone who is vulnerable and we don't let go of the chance. So what is really happening and can these things be looked at in isolation? Are they not part of a general pattern related to the human consciousness? Look at flesh consumption, for example, the number of animals being butchered every day today for human consumption now runs into billions. Can you even come to terms with that? Billions of living beings being butchered to satisfy our taste buds every day. And is it too much to see how that is part of the same pattern that leads to exploitation of little human beings within the family or in the school or at some other place? Isn't the tendency to exploit just the same?
You have a small thing at your home, four-year old. That small thing could be your son, your daughter, your nephew, your niece. Huh? A small living being. A small helpless, vulnerable living being and you exploit her and you have a small animal. It could be a hen, a duck, a lamb and you slaughter it to feed your senses. Are these two events really dimensionally different from each other? They belong to the same level. They are part of the same pattern and the same problem. Are you getting it?
And with human beings becoming more powerful technologically, economically, the little being at home is even more staggeringly at the mercy of the grown-ups. Because it is the grown-ups that have all the power. The little one does not know technology. The little one has no idea of his or her rights. The little one is absolutely at the mercy of everybody else. And these grown-ups, they have so much today. They never had so much in history. They can do anything. Don't you see how human consciousness and the corruption within it is manifesting itself in a 100 ways and sexual exploitation of vulnerable sections is just one way this corruption is manifesting itself. And that you cannot take care of the problem of childhood sexual trauma unless you take care of the problem of consciousness itself.
Obviously, we can have more stringent laws. We can educate our populations better and deeper. We can do a lot of things to try to curb this menace, right? You could have CCTVs in schools. And there are so many other things you can do. You can start teaching good touch and bad touch even to three year old's, you can do all these things but even as I speak of it I'm sure you are sensing that this won't work to a great extent, right? Because to what extent can you monitor the life of a 3-year-old or a 6-7 year old?
It's not humanly possible so while all those things surely must be done. Laws must be more stringent. The execution has to be rapid and objective and as much care as is possible must be taken. But we must also know that this problem does not arise from lack of laws. This problem arises from as we said the corruption of human consciousness.
Around eight years back, I was talking to college students like you and I said, ‘rapists we all are.’ If you search for that video or that article on the net, you will find it- ‘Rapists we all are.’ So it's the same thing. Said we don't understand that these things are not about a particular kind of conduct against a particular individual. The way our civilization is progressing or deteriorating, the way we are being conditioned or cultured, the problem lies there.
We have been told and we are continuously being told that the purpose of life is pleasure and happiness. If that is the highest that you can have in life, why must you not be prepared to pay any price for it? Tell me please. If your culture, your conditioning, your education, your media, your family, your school, your entire environment is telling you that you exist to be happy, then why must you not do things that make you happy?
If the entire World economy is running on the back of forced consumption. Then why must you not internally become a consumer and nothing else? Who am I? I'm a consumer. Whatever I can lay my hands on, I'll consume it. And consumption is happiness. Happiness is the purpose of life. And consumption is the way to get happiness. So I spot a vulnerable 4-year-old in my home and I'll go and consume her because that gives me happiness. The only morality is to be happy. That's what we are being told. Are you getting it? Of course. Of course. Of course. I mean there would be people who will say no, no one has all the right to be happy but we must also respect the rights of others and such things. So do you respect the rights of other living beings when you exploit them and kill them?
Look at the forest cover of the earth. How much of it remains? Look at all these climate change conferences. Look at the shad there. Look at how we fool ourselves. Are we really concerned at all about the very disappearance of species? Biodiversity is all but gone. So many species are either extinct or critically endangered. Are we worried about them? And we choose leaders who choose to be silent on these issues. So the common man cares for nothing but his or her consumption and that includes both men and women. All we want is consumption. Let the planet go to hell. Let all the species disappear. If entire species can be condemned to be extinct, why will somebody spare your nephew? We are talking of entire species. They would be gone forever. Your nephew is just one little person, why would somebody care for him when we haven't been taught to care for anything?
When a very very wrong kind of philosophy has been fed into us, when spirituality has been purposefully kept away from our lives, what else do you expect, please, tell me. So there would be a thousand muted sobs at every place at every corner. A thousand sobs. But I said all muted once because we are supposed to be externally happy because happiness is the purpose of life. Please be happy. Please be well made up. Please put up a smiling face. You're not supposed to look unhappy. Irrespective of whether you have been brutalized, exploited. Irrespective of whether you have been subject to the grossest kind of abuse. Even if you are depressed, your depression has to be a fascinating, glamorous story worth selling.
*Questioner:** Yes Sir. As you have covered, my follow-up question was that only. As you talk about veganism and you converted me to vegan. I was also non-vegetarian before I met you. It has been one year since I've started watching your videos and now I've turned vegan so hard and I'm trying to convert other people also. But I have as you also said that we don't care about others. So I also read a news far away that a 9month old girl was raped. So I was just astonished like, how can somebody do that like a 9-month old baby, she would be so cute and so lovable. So we don't even understand the feelings of humans. How would we be understanding the feelings of animals? So it is really difficult for me to make people understand that animals also have some feelings. They don't even understand our feelings. So that was also my one question.
Acharya Prashant: It goes hand in hand. If you look at YouTube or other forms of social media, you'll find thousands of very popular videos relating to recipes coming from tender lamb or tender goat, right? So you take a kid that's 2 months 4 or 6 months old and its flesh is supposed to be especially luscious and tender and you want to sever it. Now do you see how it is not impossible for us to rape a 9-month old girl? Do you see this? Flesh is flesh. Flesh is flesh. We don't realize that. We think that it is possible to operate in fragments. We think that it is possible to be cruel towards a 3-month-old lamb and be compassionate towards a 9-month-old girl. No, it is not possible because the human psyche does not work like that. Once cruel, always cruel. Cruel towards one person, cruel towards entire humanity and cruel towards yourself.
If you are being taught exploitation and cunningness in one dimension of your life. You will exercise that in all areas, all dimensions of your life. If you are corrupt in office, you will be corrupt even at home. Even though you may not want to admit it or you may not want to be consciously corrupt, you will find that you are corrupt anyway, irrespective of what you think about it. So, that's the fundamental problem and if that is the fundamental problem, we also know the fundamental solution. We'll have to be made human. We are born animals and the way to be human is to be educated in a spiritual way. I very well know that sounds very old-fashioned to you young people, but there is no other way. You require wisdom literature. You require Vedanta. You require Upanishads. Else we'll be a people of these thousand muted sobs. We are already that.
It has to have a bearing on the way our economy is, our social structures are, our education is or politics is all of this is just devoid of any spiritual base. If your economics is not founded on spirituality, it will be an economics that will involve selling of not goods or materials but trade in human beings themselves. You'll be able to, you'll be ready to sell anything for your greed and for your happiness. You'll be prepared to sell others off and you'll be prepared to auction your own life.
Questioner: And I also wanted to say that I'm a very emotional type of person. So before one year I didn't know this all that much. I had left some kind of knowledge but I was eating eggs type of thing like that you know so but then I would not exposed to these cruelties and all these but when I came in contact with you then I started watching and I also watched some videos where very cruel to that slaughter houses and all and that then now when I whenever I see like anyone eating even egg my because my family members are all non-vegetarian and they always they even try to force me to eat but I don't but then I lose my strength after seeing I start crying and then they mock on me so I wanted to ask that I know you are also very sensitive person I have seen many of your videos so how to strengthen yourself when when you're exposed to these kinds of things, you're always seeing this all going on to the world. So how can I strengthen myself?
Acharya Prashant: Every act of cruelty and ignorance that you see should tell you how urgent your task is and how quickly time is running out. The more you are exposed to such happenings, the deeper your inner sense of urgency. Work harder and be more ferocious in your battle. Don't hold anything back. What are you saving yourself for? Time is running out. So when I am exposed to things that involve cruelty, exploitation, ignorance, it hardens my resolve. It quickens me up, makes me work harder.
Questioner: Thank you so much. Thank you.
