The Influencers you follow on social media || Acharya Prashant, at IIT-Roorkee (2022)

Welcome: Namaskar Acharyaji, my colleagues, students, ladies and gentlemen. I was wondering how to welcome, but I forgot it all once I saw Acharyaji. I felt as if I have known him since centuries, such is his brilliance. Perhaps many people here do not know Sanskrit. Acharyaji has reached the three utmost points, be it from IIT Delhi, B.Tech, or from IIM Ahmedabad, which is the highest institute in management or the Civil Services. And after doing all this, we are obliged that he has come here in the question-answer session. You are very welcome Acharya ji.

I am glad that Acharyaji is here with us when IIT Roorkee is in its 175th year. I know that a lot of people are very eager and prepared to ask questions. I will not take much time here but would like to share that when Anil ji asked me to welcome Acharya ji here, many questions aroused in my mind.

What struck me the most was that although we have developed so much, our mind has developed so much that we have developed into a complete human being form from a single cell plasma, have we yet not won over fear? Has there been an evolution of fear also along with our evolution from single cell to this human form? May be it has happened.

As we know from Hindu mythology, from the avatars, it could be that there was fear of Earth being immersed in water or measuring ‘teen-lok’ or if we talk about Tretayug, there could be fear of oaths or of kingdoms. So, I believe that we have not been able to understand fear and I hope that we are guided by Acharyaji in the question-answer session today.

Since morning I have been thinking about the three types of fears, one is for the fear for kingdom, which was there in the era of Krishna ji. But that fear is no more now because we pay taxes for our forces, we are patriotic. And the other is fear of the society. There are people like Acharya ji who reform the society and we have our religious leaders too. And we have one more fear which is individual fear that we have in our minds.

It seems to me that today we will get the solutions to all these questions. The fears that we have are not there in the physical world and which are invisible to us. Yet we fear them.

So I welcome all of you. I request all of you that in the question-answer session, if you have any question in your mind and if someone else has already asked it then please don't repeat it because we have got very little time from Acharya ji. And I want that we should get maximum solutions for this. Now I need to move away and once again I welcome Acharyaji. Please give a big applause.

Questioner (Q): Sir, my question is: there are many influencers in today’s era and all are right at the conclusion, based on their rational thinking or based on their thought process. And as listeners, we just grasp the conclusion, but we don’t get behind the thought process and we all have our own thought process. Then how do we conclude that whatever we are absorbing from their conclusions, we are taking the right track rather than being simply influenced by them.

Acharya Prashant (AP): You are talking of influencers.

Q: Yes Sir.

AP: What kind of influences?

Q: Sir any, like motivational influences, for example we can take or life tracking influences just to those who show what things are right and what are wrong things.

AP: See, you have the benefit of critical thought, being students of an Institute of Technology, having been trained through the triggers of logical thinking. You already have the capability to get into the truth or fakeness of anything that is being told to you by any kind of influencer.

If there is a problem in in physics, mathematics or engineering in front of you and somebody offers you a particular solution, do you just go to the last step and accept the conclusion? Is that scientific or rational? Do we do that? No, we don’t do that. What do we do? If a conclusion has been offered to us, the conclusion is the last thing we focus on. What do we focus on? We focus on the process; we focus on the assumptions that the problem solver is making.

Have you started, for example, with a hypothesis? Have you made the hypothesis explicit or are you just hiding your assumptions? Then in the problem solving mechanism, there are let’s say 21 steps involved, assuming a simple kind of problem. Is each step of the problem logically related to the previous and next one? Or is it so that step number 12 is disconnected to step 11 and something totally unrelated comes up at step number 13 and we accept it?

How does one step follow from the preceding one? When we are solving problem in academics or wherever, this is the way we proceed. And if we don’t proceed this way, we know what happens. The problem does not really get solved, the solution won’t work. If you have written for example a computer program, it won’t compile, it won’t run. If you have tried to solve a problem in mathematics, the solution would be false or unattainable.

Worst still, there is often an evaluator who will mark you zero on your solution. Why? Because he will be able to see through your thinking by looking at the various steps you are following. But when it comes to an influencer, often the medium of consumption is the video, is that true? And the pace at which the solution is delivered is quite fast. Often it is deliberately kept fast and we do not have time to pause and think over what has been said.

Equally, the video medium offers you an opportunity to simply press the pause button, does it not? Why do you allow the influencer to run away with whatever he wants to serve you? Make him halt, ask him, “So this is what you just said.” And it was a short sentence of let’s say just eight words. I want to question you here. He’ll want to simply hop over. He’ll want to quickly jump to the next thing. You shouldn’t allow him to go to the next sentence if the previous one itself has not been justified or established.

Can I go to the next step of solving a problem in differential calculus when the previous one itself is faulty? And forget about moving from one step to other, can I even start solving the problem if my assumptions are all wrong? Not only they might be totally wrong, more commonly they are not even explicitly stated. In statistics, for example, when you solve a problem, you often have to start with hypothesis.

And what do you do? You openly state your hypothesis, forget about statistics. When in Class 6 we were dealing with basic ideas of congruency etc. and there were problems, how did we start? Let there be a triangle ABC and then there is a similar triangle XYZ and this was stated right at the beginning of the solution. Is that not true? You are making your assumption obvious. Now the person who is coming to you, first of all, is he assuming something? Assumptions are dangerous.

Secondly, even if he’s assuming something, is he accepting that he is operating on assumptions? That does not often happen. And we lack both attention and time. So for example, a YouTube video comes to you and you start watching it and within 5 to 7 minutes, something just runs over you. We have not been trained in critical thinking when it comes to matters of life. We know how to think critically but all that skill, all that training, we have somehow reserved only for problems dealing with science and technology etc., not for problems that deal with life itself.

I find it very interesting and also saddening obviously, there are a lot of people who do very well in science and technology etc., in their personal spheres are often deeply superstitious. How are these two things possible? These are possible because the same education that told us to think sharply so as to clear the JEE for example, told us to keep all the thinking process aside when it comes to life issues like motivation, like purposefulness, like friendship, like time management, like values, like money, like love. When it comes to all these, we behave in the same primitive ways as any uneducated person would.

Believe me, as the trend is, if you are mostly B. Tech students here. How many B.Tech students here? Lots. A majority of us do not directly serve the field of our education. What then is the point in passing through all these years of rigorous training? There is a point. The point is that the mind should become accustomed to looking at anything in life with inquiry.

Even if you do not work as a mechanical engineer after having a degree or even PG in mechanical engineering, still if you can retain the faculty of critical thought, your education has not been wasted on you. But we do not retain that. In the classroom we are very inquisitive. In life, we are simply submissive and subordinate, we just accept anything.

There is a circuit diagram and there is a certain flow of current and you will want to know: Why there are certain fluctuations? Where is the impedance coming from? What is going on? And there is resistance and impedance within the mind that we take as just natural and normal and we do not go into it. Why?

And you will find it very interesting that the knowers who came up with the verses in Vedanta were actually taking a process that is very similar to the kind of process you take when you want to solve a scientific problem. Is that not highly liberating? You are so near yet so far. The sages were scientists in one sense, scientists who proceeded through the honest and rigor method of experimentation, observation, and independent verification. That’s exactly what you also do in your labs and workshops, don’t you?

You solve a problem and you start claiming, I have solved it. Will that work? No. It has to be independently verified. If there is no one else to verify it then you should be the verifier at some other point in time. Because the problem is internal and it might appear solved in one mood in one frame of mind, so return to the solution two days later and question yourself: Is it solved? Does it still stand solved as it appeared two days back? We don’t do that. And that’s the reason why very, very ordinary and mediocre people succeed in fooling us.

I appreciate the question. People with very little worth, very little understanding of life are able to preach even to distinguished audiences like the one here. How does that become possible? The fellow might be working as a scientist in ISRO or DRDO, or probably even in NASA. And he regularly bows down to some primitive peddler of local kind of superstition. Amazing! Now this is magic. How does it even become possible?

The fellow leads a state of the art research lab in Europe, Zurich but cannot begin his day without looking at one particular direction in the sky, eating one particular kind of dairy product. And some brainwashed kind of fellow visits his home and he will organize a great function to welcome and felicitate him. Why have you compartmentalized the mind in two halves? Why do you say that mathematics has to be applied only to numbers? Mathematics is not necessarily numerical. You get what I’m trying to say.

Why can’t the same spirit of inquiry be present to everything in life? When that same inquiry… I will not accept without verification? I will not take anything just because it seems to be coming from a particular authority or high seat or respectable position, I will not take it. The first freedom is to be free to question, to question others and to question yourself. I feel like doing this, but why? Why should I be a dictator unto myself?

So if you have a book written by those influencers, pause at every sentence. Though most of them don’t write books. We don’t have anything worth writing. Pause at every sentence, analyze, just refuse to move to the next sentence till you are contented with the current one and the previous ones. And if they are saying something in video or audio form, we said, the pause button is always there.

Don’t let them, as they say in English, pull a fast one. You understand what it means to pull a fast one? Haath ki safai (hand tricks). The magician on the stage does it just so cleanly and so swiftly that the audience is unable to catch the trick. Don’t let them get away with this. Don’t let him pull a fast one, I repeat.

And then people sometimes ask me and they seem a bit irritated. They say, “Sir why do you give so many gaps when you are speaking? Sometimes you seem to pause even for a minute, 60 entire seconds. Why do you do that?” And I ask him, what is your problem if I give you thinking space, if I give you breathing space?

You know what the problem is? We are accustomed to being steamrolled. Just come and run me over. Don’t give me time and opportunity to think because I’ve lost the capacity to think. And if you’ll give me the opportunity to think, I will feel irritated. I can imagine, I can waste myself in worries, fancies and dreams I like, but critical thinking I abhor.

Why must that be the case please? And remember, the world throws so many things at you continuously. If you will not have the filter of thought and inquiry, you will be enslaved and exploited. You live in a world full of ignorant beings, and when you are ignorant, you are violent and exploitative. That’s a rule. When you are ignorant, you do not know yourself.

When you do not know yourself, how do you take care of your anxiety and lack of fulfillment? You try to do that by exploiting another human being or animal or whatsoever is there in the world. You have too many desperate people around you and they do not know what they’re desperate for. But they feel the unease, they feel the internal pain and anger, so they will do anything to somehow get rid of their suffering. And how do they want to get rid of their suffering? By exploiting others. Why do you want to become the fodder for somebody’s ignorance? And this information explosion has in some way made things worse. You see, take the example of your campus. All the right kind of knowledge that a young person really requires was available in this campus even thirty or eight years back, was it not? You had a well equipped library always. No? So if you wanted the right knowledge, it was always there.

You would be having a central library, you would be having departmental libraries, you would be having libraries even in hostels. So right knowledge was always there, even before, even much before the information revolution, right? So what has the information revolution given you? The right thing that you wanted was anyway always available. I’m taking the limited example of this campus. What has the information revolution given you? It has given you all kinds of junk knowledge.

And when this limited mind space is crowded with junk knowledge, you are left with no space for right knowledge. It would be interesting to see whether in the campus, attendance in the libraries has really increased over the last two decades. Or if you have an online library system, the access has really multiplied over the last two decades.

There is nothing called ignorance. There is nothing called absence of knowledge. There is just rubbish knowledge crowding out the right kind of knowledge. And that is what we are seeing today. Floods of influencers and motivators and what not. And what are they giving you? They are giving you the inability to go to the right places that can illuminate you.

You have only 24 hours in a day. You have only so much of first (inaudible 28:03) attention span and you have only eighty years in your life, max. If a lot of that is taken away by rubbish, what are you left with to devote to the right things in life? Please tell me. Nobody will tell you, do not go to the right things. If they openly start telling this to you, the matter will become too explicit and you’ll rebel. No? You will rebel.

If I ask you for example here, “How many of you have read Kahlil Gibran or Jiddu Krishnamurti or Lao Tzu? If I ask you how many of you have read even two Upanishads?” The answer will not be very encouraging. What is the reason? Are these texts not really available? Is that the reason? Are we living in some primitive ancient tribal village?

No, that is not the reason. In fact, those texts too are more easily accessible today than they were thirty years back, right? But if you go to book shops today, you’ll not find a single book by J.Krishnamurti. That was not the situation even ten years back. What has happened? What has happened? Or you go to The Krishnamurti YouTube channel, the stats there will surprise you. What has happened?

What is the information revolution giving you then? It is just taking you away from the right things. Probably as a proportion of population, more people were reading Krishnamurti thirty years back than they do today. Probably more youngsters were reading the Upanishads thirty years back than they do today, even as the Upanishads have become more easily available.

Don’t you see what is happening? They will not tell you openly that they are taking you away from Vedanta. They will not say don’t read Vedanta. They’ll simply say, ‘Oh, please watch my new motivation video.’ Now you had only one hour and that one hour has been taken away by that junk video.

How will you now read Rumi’s poetry? And also, after watching that one hour, that motivation video, you are mentally degraded to such a level that Rumi’s poetry will become incomprehensible to you. If you are a fan of most of the popular influencers in social media, it is very difficult that you will be able to appreciate anything that is subtle, valuable, rich or high. It won’t happen. These two things can’t go together. You cannot simultaneously be a fan of some abusive roaster and Ramana Maharishi, impossible. So, that’s the way you are being blocked from going to a Ramana Maharshi. This inundation, this very flood of social media influencers and not only social media, from all fields. Even sportspersons have become social media personalities. Even politicians are now social media personalities. And from my personal experience, not just theoretically, let me tell you─ you enter the campus as a kid and you are in risk of even walking out as a kid 4 or 6 years later, if you do not develop from here (pointing to the head).

And you cannot develop from here if you have not had the company of the greats, full stop. You cannot become a well-developed young person with wisdom, with courage, with the steel to pass through fire if you have not read the greatest literature that the world and its history have had to offer.

Youth is not biological. Youth is not something that an animal can attain. Youth is something to be developed with determination, with practice, with patience. Otherwise you can become sixty years of age and still be a kid. You will never become youthful. Adulthood is something that is not attained by most people.

We become physically adults, yes. Physically, we look like adults in terms of height etc., we’ll marry, we’ll have kids and people will think, oh these are adults walking. No, you are still a kid and will continue to remain a kid if you continue to remain vulnerable to these motivators, influencers and whatever is there on social media. They themselves are kids. No grown up will ever subscribe to them. So their interest lies in ensuring that you remain a kid. If you start growing up, you become a threat to them. Don't you see that? If you start growing up, you will outgrow them. You will go beyond them. They do not want you to grow up. They want you to remain juvenile, imbecile.

They are not entertaining you. They’re stunting your growth. Don’t you see that? They are not your friends. They are not doing any good to you. They have any agenda and they are pursuing that at your cost. Not only are they taking away your time, they are taking away your capability to think critically. How big a loss is that, please tell me on a scale of 10 ?

If somebody takes away your very ability to enquire and think critically, how big a loss is that? How big? One is left an animal or a vegetable, with the mental sharpness gone. What is left in life? You cannot even love now. And I’m talking of love because I’m talking to young people and love is something very important in your lives. With the sharpness gone, with the ability to really understand, gone. You’ll be depriving yourself of this thing called love. You want that to happen? Please be very cautious, very cautious and question them at every step. And questioning is not the same as blind negation. When I say question them, I’m not asking you to keep alleging.

Questioning is always from a detached and neutral point. I want to know, that’s why I’m asking a question. What’s wrong with that? And is there something that should not be questioned, please tell me? Is there something so important, so unknowable or so holy that it just cannot be questioned? No, there is not.

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