Why do you think you have all the answers, Acharya Prashant? || IIM Ahmedabad session (2020)
Questioner (Q1): I just wanted to ask that I have always found the profession of an acharya or a wisdom teacher to be quite amusing because even Shakespeare himself said that a fool does think himself to be wise but a wise does think himself to be a fool. Being an acharya or a wisdom teacher requires you to be the smartest person in the room or else the people who come to listen to you or follow your advice would not appreciate that.
But if you are wise enough, you would appreciate that you might not be the smartest person in the room or you might not have answers to all the questions that may be posed at you. So how do you look at this profession in that manner, considering that you are a wisdom teacher?
Acharya Prashant (AP): You answer to the best of your capacity. It's not about proving to the other that you are the smartest person in the room. This language itself is quite juvenile. Spirituality is for adults. Who is smart, who is not smart, who is carrying away all the girls, who gets all the attention? - all that is for adolescents. So, such language does not apply to the spiritual domain.
Someone comes to you, someone wants to invest his time with you, that's a responsibility upon you. How do you respond? You respond to the best of your ability. Obviously, you never say or claim if you have any sincerity at all, that your answer is an Absolute. Even if you do claim, as some people do, that their answers are Godsent or absolutes, the person in the audience too, has his own intellect. He too knows a few things. He will assess, he will know. Ultimately the tyre has to meet the road.
It's easy to sit on a high chair, its easy to be placed on a podium and say all the great things but to be of genuine use to somebody, what you are saying must pass the test of life, and that's the right thing. Figure out whether your advice is really useful to someone or not and never attach any absoluteness to it.
Q1: Also just wanted to know that what is the importance of experience in becoming a wisdom teacher? For example if a person does not have much experience in his life and we see that people nowadays are moving into this profession quite early on. So, do you think that experience has a major factor to play as to you can enter into this profession only after you have had a certain amount of experience or you can go on early?
AP: Obviously, experience helps, obviously reading helps, knowledge helps. All these things help but unlike other walks of human life, here you cannot have very very certain determinants. You cannot say that someone who has twenty years of experience will surely deliver the goods or that someone who is only twenty-two will not realize what he is saying. Some of the greatest proponents of Vedanta, for example, Ashtavakra, Acharya Shankar, they are all quite young people. The famous debate that Ashtavakra had with King Janaka was when Ashtavakra was just fourteen years of age! Acharya Shankar died when he was hardly thirty. And before he died, he had composed literature that is considered the gold standard, even today.
Obviously, experience does matter, but we cannot be too insistent on imposing that constraint, it will become too tight a constraint. Ultimately, the only determinant is- does the advice make sense? Is the realization really adding value to the lives of others?
We say the Truth is that which is useful.
Ultimately it has to perform. Otherwise its all just verbiage and sophistry.
Q2: All these things which you are saying, like people in this room are high on intellect, they have this mental bandwidth to figure out what they need and all. It's just because most of these people are very well resourced. They are resourceful. In the case of my parents who have been struggling throughout their life so, during their time in that career, or be it a normal person who is striving to just survive in this world, do you think all this matters? I don't think all these things will mean a real sense to him because at the end he not that much resourceful that he can divert from his normal path of survival? Do you think that these teachings are for all or for only those who are resourceful?
AP: Even if you are leading your so-called normal, daily life in the usual middle-class way. Still, you have to make daily decisions, right? Still, every little thing calls for consideration, calls for the setting of criteria and ultimately calls for a decision to be taken. Spirituality or the field of wisdom is about making those daily decisions in the best way possible. It is not something separated from life and each of us is alive so we all do have a life. Therefore, we all need spirituality.
We all are walking, consider life a journey. Spirituality is not about changing the path that you are walking, it is about throwing some light on the same path that you are walking. Spirituality is not another path, you don't have to quit your daily life, you don't have to change tracks but won’t you want to move on an illuminated track.
Spirituality is illumination, it is light. You are living, why not make your decisions in an illuminated way? Otherwise, there would be obstacles and one would be stumbling at every point as the normal man does. When I said that most of us here are quite well placed to enquire about the world and to go into inner inquiry, I said that not so much on the basis of our resourcefulness but on the basis of our logical acumen. Going beyond reason first of all requires you to have the capacity to exercise reason soundly. That is one thing that you people are quite good at- exercising logic.
If you can exercise logic well, then you will find it relatively easier to come to the boundary of logic.
