Is Vastu or Kundali Misleading Your Life Decisions?
Questioner: Hello Acharya Prashanji, I'm Adash. I'm a first year B.Tech student. I wanted to ask about the issue of pseudoscience like its impact in our daily life because it's in everyone's life. Everyone faces it in one’s day-to-day life like Vastu, kundli and we make major decisions in our lives based on it. Like which college to go, who to marry, where and when we should inaugurate anything or like, those kinds of things.
And when we question it, we are just told, ‘It is being followed. You just follow it. Why do you have to question it.’ And it sometimes frustrates us and we can't even question it back. So how do we challenge it because we don't have that much liberty to question the elders this precisely.
Acharya Prashant: Am I not an elder?
Questioner: You are…
Acharya Prashant: How are all of you then raising so many questions to me? Liberty is not something that somebody gives you some kota of. Liberty is who you are. Liberty is not even your birthright. Liberty is your inner inseparable nature. You always have that liberty.
The question should be, the more honest expression should be: ‘I do not exercise my liberty.’ Instead you are saying, ‘I do not have that liberty. You have that liberty. You don't exercise it.’ You don't exercise it out of fear or greed. If you exercise your liberty, there would be consequences. That would be a hit on your interests. You don't want to run that risk, right?
Otherwise, if the mic is not there, the mouth is always there. Get up and speak. Who can stop you? Or someone has said, ‘If you want to expose a fraud, participate fully in it. If you want to expose a fraud, participate fully in it.’
They tell you, ‘Come beta, lunch kar lo.’ (Come son, have lunch.) Say, ‘Muhurat nikal kar batao.’ (Tell me the auspicious time.)
(Everybody laughs.)
Participate fully. For everything, there has to be the kundali, the muhurat and whatever, whatever those things are.
Why should all the astro antics and the horoscope thing be related only to marriages? It should apply to everything. You want to hire a driver, a maid, you want to accept someone as a friend, ‘Ask for their horoscopes.’
If it's supposed to affect your life, then it would affect your life in the form of a friend as well, no? Or is it only the spouse that affects your life? Anybody that you are related to will affect your life, no?
Get it embossed right on your door. The main gate. Don't enter without a horoscope. And there should be some astrochap available sitting right at the main gate to check the horoscope and then see whether or not to allow entry. Even pet dogs must not be adopted without looking at their horoscopes. Why? They affect our lives so much, don't they? Are they not living beings? All that you need is the time and place of birth that even a pup has.
We can have a kundli there also. Participate fully.
This was more towards the trivial side. The real thing is when you say, ‘You don't have the liberty for something, the provision for something, then you must look into yourself and ask, ‘Come on. Who can take it away from me?’ I'm not insulting you. I'm just enquiring. Yes, you are elder to me. And that itself entitles me to ask a question.
If I won't ask a question to my elders, to whom should I go? It is because you say that you are the elder, hence, I'm asking the question to you. And what kind of elder would it be who would disallow a question? Either admit my question and respond to it or don't impose yourself on me. Simple.
When you will see that you actually have the freedom, the choice to enquire, ask, investigate, then you will see what really stops you. It is not the fear of authority. It is the fear of losing privileges. Authority does not rule you just because it is authority. It rules you by tempting you with privileges.
The lover of truth must be ready to let go of privileges. If these privileges are coming to me on this condition, then it's too heavy a price to pay. I refuse the deal. I'll not take the steel.
Never be afraid of age or experience or labels or authority. Never.
In fact, you should go more daringly and more selectively to them. So you say that you are the knower, therefore it is all the more important that you answer my questions. No? Because you are declaring that you are the knower. So, you say that you are an elder or the teacher, therefore, I'm coming to you because I want to learn.
What else is a teacher supposed to do? Teach me. And if you can't teach me, why do you call yourself the teacher? That won't do. Knowing is your nature. Therefore, enquiry is always the right action. If you don't enquire, you are no longer a human being.
This auditorium, this setting here is a product of human enquiry, not somebody's authority. No god commanded, let there be an auditorium. And an auditorium emerged straight from the earth.
Is that how this auditorium came into being? Some authority commanded, ‘Let there be an auditorium.’ This auditorium has been found on the basis of centuries of human exploration, enquiry and experiments.
Think of the things here. They might appear familiar to you now, but they take a long time to come. Think of these instruments, these equipments. Think of the chairs, the architecture. There's no pillar here.
How is this thing, roof hanging on our head? Run away. It'll fall. How did all this happen? Because somebody said, ‘Follow me.’ See, see, they're already kicking the pick. Okay, fine. I'll pause. Follow me. Is this how great things happen?
Somebody stands like God, Almighty and says, ‘I command.’ Is this how things happen? No. A lot of people, a lot of young enquirers like you; they sit down, they work in the labs. There are certain theses and then sometimes they are accepted, sometimes they are rejected, theories come, theories go.
From there, you look at this video camera, it's a product of human ingenuity. It is not a product of rituals or beliefs. Horoscopes don't give birth to this video camera, do they? And we should be grateful. Even the astrologers are using the latest technology without being grateful at all.
Latest technology that astrology didn't give birth to. And yet astrology is exploiting the technology for its own furtherance. I can say that because I'm right now standing in a temple of learning, right?
And it has been extremely conclusively proved, demonstrated that astrology is not a science at all. It's a conjecture. It's a belief system. Belief system with no material basis at all.
