What is the purpose of being alive? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Acharya Prashant (AP): What is the purpose of being alive? This question arises in different forms to many of us. Do we understand what is the purpose of being here? What is here? What is life? If you are sure that you are here and you are alive, first tell me, that what is here and what is life?
What do you mean by life? You are asking me that what is the purpose of life. I am asking you, ‘what is life?’ This eating, walking, sleeping, and dying, is this life? Before you ask that what is the purpose of life, you need to understand what is the meaning of being alive. You claim that you are alive. But what is meant by being alive? All the activities that we do from morning to evening, a good machine, a sufficiently advanced machine can replicate all of them. A good machine can walk, it can react in a particular situation in particular ways, it can talk, it can have all the senses that you have, it can breathe. Breath is nothing but the oxygen that goes in. What you call as ‘blood’ is nothing but the combination of a particular mixture of chemicals, even that too can be prepared. What is this ‘being alive’? Do you understand what is being alive? What do you mean when you say that, "I am alive"? How do you know that somebody’s alive?
Questioner (Q): It can move.
AP: That a machine can also do.
Q: To be happy.
AP: ‘Happiness’ means making a particular kind of face. A particular facial, bodily expression is what you call as ‘happiness’. A machine can be programmed to express all the expressions which you call as ‘happiness’. After all, what is happiness to you? A particular configuration of the face or few sounds which you call as laughter. A machine can be programmed to have all of that.
Q: Desires generated within you.
AP: When you say desires generate within you, is that ‘your desire’ which generates within you? You are saying that "My desires generate within me, and machines’ desires generate through programming." But do our desires generate from within us? What do you mean by ‘within us’? You are short of fuel, your system starts lacking by the nutrients, maybe oxygen, suddenly the pulses go to your brain and the brain sends the message, ‘ I desire oxygen.’ Your stomach is conveying a certain message to your brain, ‘I desire to have food’, that is what your desire is. You have a machine that can sense when it has low electricity, it can sense it, and we can program it to search the nearest power output source. It can go up to there, plug-in itself, and get charged, that’s what you call as eating, having lunch, dinner; getting charged. You can have a machine that can experience its desire and fulfill it. Even your desires are not coming from anywhere else but your programming. Where else the desires come from?
Q: Surroundings.
AP: Surroundings. And the surrounding is working upon you and programming you. There are chemicals inside your body which you call as ‘hormones’. They can get activated and you start desiring a particular girl or a woman. You can have these chemicals inside any machine also and they can get activated and start displaying this particular kind of behavior which you call as arousal. Even your desires are purely conditioned, mechanical. You can have machines that display all these desires, after all, does not iron display desires towards a magnet. What else is desire?
Q: Feelings.
AP: What do you mean by ‘feeling’? How do you know what is your feeling? A particular emotion. What is emotion? Nothing, only a particular expression which comes from thought. So, the thought of anger intensifies and your hands start shivering, your cheeks get red, and you say that he is feeling angry, he is getting emotional. Correct? You can have a programmed machine to display all this behaviour. You can tell the machine when to get angry. Just as you are programmed to get angry, you can program the machine also to get angry and display all the emotions. Then you can have different machines programmed differently, just as different human beings are programmed differently, you can also have Hindu machine or a Muslim machine. A Hindu machine can get emotional when it hears a bhajan, the Muslim machine can get emotional when it hears the Azaan. Different machines, different programming; different individuals, different programming.
Q: Sir, what about reproduction?
AP: What else is a factory? One machine producing another machine.
Q: Innovation.
AP: Innovation. What do you mean by innovation? Does that happen with us? Do you do any such thing which was never before in existence? Is there any thought in mind which is purely new, which is independent of everything else? What you call ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’ is nothing but pre-existed thoughts and emotions. You come with a revised version and you start calling it ‘innovation’. So much R&D in the world is automated. Even you can program a machine to do that. Getting it?
Q: Machine will do everything which is programmed but man will not do that always.
AP: You are saying that a machine will always act within its programming. So a man who is always acting within his programming is not alive, he is a machine. So we are saying that the difference between a man and a machine is that any man who is always acting within his programming is not alive. He is walking, sleeping, laughing, eating, but he is not alive. He is already dead.
To be alive means to go beyond your programming.
Do you go beyond that programming? How many seconds in a day? Rest of the seconds we are dead. For the rest of the time, we are dead.
To be within one’s programming is to be dead.
(Pointing at the camera) This camera is a machine. The same sound waves that are coming to you are coming to this camera as well. But there is something happening to you that cannot happen to any camera. That intelligence, that ability to understand, that is the characteristic of being alive; the ability to understand. And the one who does not understand is actually dead. He may appear to be laughing, he may appear to be thinking, but these actions are something that a machine can also do. If you do not understand, then you are not alive, you are a walking corpse.
The first question was: what is the purpose of life? First of all, we understood that what is life. Life is intelligence. Machines have their purpose but whatever is alive cannot have a purpose. This machine will have a purpose because somebody has designed it to have a purpose. Intelligence has no purpose, intelligence has no targets, it just understands, it knows. Just knows, complete knowing. To ask for a purpose of life is a self-defeating question because only mechanical systems are programmed for purposes.
Anybody who has a purpose in life is actually not living, because to live is to really live in constant intelligence.
Remember this camera cannot decide its own purpose. Can this camera write an application that this should have a purpose? Does the design of this camera come from within it? Did the camera design itself? Did the camera decide its own purpose? No. All purposes come from the external master. To ask for a purpose is to ask for a life of slavery. Life has no purpose, machines have their purposes and those purposes of machines are the purposes of their masters. All purposes come from outside. All purposes are thoughts, conditioning, they come from outside. Were you born with a purpose? No. Were you always thinking of the idea of the purpose? No. That means that the thought of purpose is coming from somebody, it is not your own, just like the purpose of this camera is coming from somebody else.
To take a purpose in life is to remain a slave, purpose is always in the future, to be obtained, to achieve. ‘There is a purpose and I can achieve it’, whereas life is right now. Anybody here who can breathe in the future? You are right now. Life is right now. All purposes are in the future. Whenever you say that there is the goal, the target, the purpose in the future, it means you are condemning yourself. I am in the present and life is in the present, hence to have a purpose is to kill life. You keep on saying that there is the purpose, that is the real thing and you are here. But if that is the real thing then what will be the quality of your life? Frustrated, bored, anxious. A perpetual waiting, waiting for the purpose in life, waiting for the goal, for the target to be achieved. How does it feel to wait and keep waiting? Because if life has a purpose, surely that purpose can be realized only in future.
To have a purpose and to achieve that purpose means that there is a full stop right now. ‘I have achieved the purpose, that’s it. I have reached my destination. Now I can get out of the train.’ Do you continuously sit in the train? No. After the station comes you get off the train. So purpose means full stop. Do you wonder why you are always bored? Why do you always need entertainment? You are always looking for entertainment because your mind is always dull and bored, because you have kept a purpose, and you require fun. But these things are a disease because you have kept some targets and goals in mind. You are saying that the real thing will happen some time in the future. That is the real event, the fantastic thing which is worth living for. And if that is the real thing, then what is the value of this? And that is why when you come in the room you always occupy the last benches because the real thing is the result. What is the value of the lecture, there is no value of the lecture, the real thing, the purpose is the result. So the whole day in college you are frustrated, bored and that’s why there is the attendance compulsion. Now if you are told that there is no purpose, there is no degree even after the four years, then you will stop coming to the college. Right now if it is announced that no university degree will be given, no jobs will be provided, then you will stop learning.
You are not to be blamed. That is what your education and your upbringing has taught you, that the real thing is the result. If the real thing is the result, then what is the worth of studying? That is the reason that if the result can be manipulated, manipulate it, because that is the real thing, there is no worth in the book. So whenever you come to the book, you come with a purpose in the mind and that purpose is to get marks. Hence, there is no love between you and the book, hence the book remains just a medium for you. And forget about the book, you come to even the individuals with a purpose. You do not approach anybody purposelessly. When you go to somebody, you always have a purpose in mind; that this is what I will get from him, that this is what I expect from him, and there is the exploitation.
Life is right now. The understanding, the fact that we are awake; this is life. Life needs no purpose, it is complete.
