Acharya Prashant: The world overpowers us in a thousand ways, and don’t we agree to that? You go to the markets and the markets attract you; that’s kind of an attack, an invasion. And don’t you agree to that? Or do you just say that “This is an invasion upon my being and I cannot allow it to happen; I cannot enter this shopping mall”? And the shopping mall is attacking you in a thousand ways. All that glitter and all those sounds and all those smells, they are an attack. And every shopkeeper knows how to attack. His business depends upon attacking you and dominating you. And the more he can make a slave out of you, the more he will sell.
Even your roadside street food vendor, he too knows how to attack you. When you pass by, what does he do? He creates some sound to attract you—he is attacking. He will put some oil on his pan so that the smell reaches your nose, and you will say, “I want to eat.” You won’t even realize that you have been attacked. And you agree to that. It’s not that you disagree.
You agree to everything that makes you a slave. There is hardly any resistance and hardly any rebellion. You are listening attentively and your neighbor just strokes you, and you look at your neighbor and he says something. He has disturbed you, and you have agreed to be disturbed. Do you just turn around and say, “How dare you disturb my peace?” That doesn’t happen. We agree. We agree to be disturbed, we agree to be enslaved, we agree to be conditioned.
This agreement too is actually not ours. This agreement is just a property of being asleep. Whosoever is asleep will agree to whatever is happening with him. When you are asleep, somebody can come and paint your face with mud. What can you do? You will have to agree to it. You are allowing it to happen in the sense that you cannot resist it. When you don’t know what is happening, then anything can happen and you will be alright with it.
