What does it mean to be yourself? || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Questioner(Q): Do I need asking myself the permission of someone else in order to be myself?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You see when we are social beings, when everything about us is so obviously and distinctively just social, then whatever we do is social. Even the most intimate about us becomes public, social and hence vulgar.

Now we were in a café this morning and we were watching a group of people. Now the head of the group was playing the guitar. There was a girl, a woman, who was composing something, writing something in her book. One of her arms was stretched out. A man, probably her boyfriend, was scribbling something on her arm. And three other friends were playing carrom board. And it looked such a perfect picture of contentment and happiness.

I asked myself- Is the picture coming out of happiness or is the happiness coming out of the picture? We’ll go deeper into this. I asked- does the picture come first or does the happiness come first?

Don’t we already know which images are to be associated with happiness? For example, the moment you see somebody’s face, somebody’s lips in a particular configuration, which we have named as smile, we immediately say that the person is probably happy or at least in a good mood. Are you getting it? It is the symptoms that we associate with the actuality?

Now if we have been fully convinced that such and such are the images of happiness then we will be keep chasing those images. And where do those images come from? They come from the society, they come from the others.