Message For the Youngsters

Acharya Prashant

13 min
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Message For the Youngsters
There has to be a love for freedom. Especially as a young person, one should remain young all his life. You see, but you know, at least when you are in your 20s or 30s, you need to have a burning desire to to live as a sovereign entity. And when that is there, then anything that comes your way would be rightfully utilized, including crutches. This summary has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation

Questioner: They're young people. They are probably facing a lot of challenges that your generation might not have seen because of the kind of things that they are going through. Digitalization is at its peak right now. Artificial intelligence is threatening their jobs. They have relationship issues. Their partners are not happy because they don't have a certain motorcycle. Right? All of that is a concern. A burden for the generation of today. What would be your advise so that they sit back and think about the things that matter in life?

Acharya Prashant: You have to live with yourself. You may have a great bike or a great wife or a great job. You live here, not out there. We all live here. Have you not experienced how miserable you might feel even in the most lavish of palaces. So outside you have riches sprawling and inwardly you are feeling extremely impoverished.

We live here and if there is a hollowness a void and poverty inside, it does not matter how rich you are out there and this is not just rhetoric. This is a fact.

Questioner: Yeah.

Acharya Prashant: We all have to live with ourselves. Right now, the two of us are in front of each other but there are not two of us. There are four of us. I am with myself. You too are with yourself.

Questioner: Yes.

Acharya Prashant: And that's the relationship that matters the most. How you are with yourself. How you are with yourself. So mind it, that more than anything that you have on the outside, what matters the most is how you live within. And if that matters the most, then that has to be the priority.

Questioner: Right. Does this mean that you take more effort in understanding what your mental health is?

Acharya Prashant: Obviously, obviously you have to give time to yourself. Anything that is important deserves time, doesn't it? So, how much time do we really give to ourselves? Be with yourself. See what the ones who knew, the sages, the seers, the philosophers, the wise ones, what they had to say about life.

And then with your own original observation, try to see how the world operates, how you operate, and how you relate to what's going on in the world and then with courage chart out your own course, figure out your own path. You have one life and it's a very, very personal life. Nobody's going to go die with you. You have to live with yourself. And if you have to live with yourself then you must in your solitude figure out who you are, what you must be and therefore how you must act.

Questioner: But isn't this why we take a lot of help from motivational books, self-help books, and learning from the experiences of people? Isn't this why we seek help?

Acharya Prashant: You see, the machine that we are has an engine of its own. The machine has an engine of its own. Nobody would appreciate a car that needs to be constantly pushed by five people. External help is useful only as long as it reduces the need to take external help like kickstarting a scooter.

Questioner: Right.

Acharya Prashant: So, you do not want to be kicking it all the time. After two or three attempts, the need for that external force has to disappear.

So when you listen to others, motivator, influencer, whosoever, you have to ask yourself, is this fellow really able to ignite my own engine or is he just, you know, for a moment giving me an external push.

Questioner: Right.

Acharya Prashant: For sure, there is an engine within and it's a great measure of freedom to be operating from your own inner engine. I do not discount that there are times when you require external help or push or support whatever. That is okay, that's a part of being human but if one becomes habituated to crutches then it's a tragedy.

Questioner: Right. I'm just thinking if it is advisable to start off with crutches and then ask yourself, do I need that crutch anymore or not?

Acharya Prashant: The intent has to be right. You see, the intent has to be right. Anything is okay. Starting with crutches is okay. Starting with ‘no crutches’ is okay. Not having the right intention is not okay.

The intent and that intent in a more poetic way would be called love.

There has to be a love for freedom. Especially as a young person, one should remain young all his life. You see, but you know, at least when you are in your 20s or 30s, you need to have a burning desire to to live as a sovereign entity. And when that is there, then anything that comes your way would be rightfully utilized, including crutches.

But if that love is not there, then even if the car is running, you would apply the brakes and turn the whole thing off. So the right intent and there is no sure or proven formula for invoking that intent.

Questioner: Right.

Acharya Prashant: But the right company helps, the right books help, the right teaching helps, the right environment helps. Conversely, you move to a bad environment and you have lost it all. You lose the company of the right books and you often lose it all. So one has to be careful. We just have the potential for great living but actualizing that potential is a different matter altogether.

Questioner: Right and what are your thoughts on the corporatization of love—the Tinders of the world, the Bumbles of the world.

Acharya Prashant: Not worth talking about. It sounds so coarse. The ‘corporatization of love’ grinds the ear. So what do I say? When I utter the word love…..

Questioner: But that's where the youth is going to seek support, help, and love. That's the ironic part probably in this amazingly connected digital world. You have to seek love from these places.

Acharya Prashant: Try it out. If that's what's going on, go get an experience. But you must have the intent to really test it for what it really is. You know, experience is one thing and realization is a totally different thing, is it not?

Questioner: Yeah.

Acharya Prashant: You can keep experiencing life for 70 years without ever realizing what life really is. On the other hand, as someone with the right intent, even two hours of an experience can suffice to enable you to see what is really going on. So if that's what is going on— the corporatization that you talked of—fine. See how it operates.

Go meet a man or a woman that way. Experience. And dispassionately, then see what is happening. Look into yourself, look into the other, look into the relationship and be honest about it all. Don't lie to yourself.

Questioner: You know why I brought this point up is because calm or pleasure is something that we often are not taught. Whether it's school education, whether it's higher education, it's something that's always come up. It's always that is something...(pause.) Sorry. It's something that is always kept under the rugs and that's how we grow up as well. And it's unfortunate because we come from the lands of Kama Sutras. These very corporatization of love, apps or businesses that have kind of, you know, been there in the market or are doing great, probably, is pushing you towards it.

Acharya Prashant: I don't think that in an IIT or an IIM, students are naive about sex. In fact, there was just so much of porn available in the campus.

Questioner: Right.

Acharya Prashant: Who does not know what pleasure or calm or sex is? There were entire folders….

Questioner: No, but is it the right way of going about it? Watching porn and understanding about sex.

Acharya Prashant: It's not about the right way. It's about where you are coming from. When you are coming from a center of consumption, the female body or even the male body is just another thing to be consumed. You see that the center of ego, the normal prakritik center of ego is so hollow, so incomplete, so insecure that it cannot help looking at everything in the world as something to be consumed.

What is ego? A hungry beast within.

Questioner: Yes.

Acharya Prashant: A beast that is always and perpetually hungry irrespective of what you feed it.

So there is the woman. What does the woman mean to me? Food, flesh. I'll eat her literally. There is money. There is that car. There is my friend, there is that course. Am I enrolling into a course out of love for learning? No, not at all. I want to consume.

So the reason why I get into a relationship with the girl is much the same as why I enroll into that course or get into an IIM. I want to consume everything including the female body or if I am a woman then a male body. So from that center, obviously, you look at the world in a way of appropriation and equally you remain insecure because that is also the way everybody else is looking at you,

Questioner: Right.

Acharya Prashant: You want to feast upon the other one and the other one wants to prey upon you, right? So, you are both aggressive and insecure. So that's going to happen.

Real love is a purely spiritual thing. You cannot have real love without having paid the price to earn spiritual education. You have to be spiritually literate otherwise you will never know love. You can live your entire life without knowing even a moment of love. And you can equally have a very stable relationship.

You can say, you know, I have had a wife of 50 years standing and we have two kids and we have always been loyal to each other and the people look at us as an ideal couple and all those things will be there. Still the fact would remain that you are a very, very loveless couple. You are loveless because love is not about two persons relating to each other. Love is about the center you come from. And when there is love, the love will never remain limited to one person or one family. It is your very existence. You radiate it.

You'll be loving towards the dog on the street. You will be loving towards unknown people. You will be loving towards people who do not matter to you or even people who have harmed you or wronged you.

So love is not something natural. That's a gross fallacy. We think that you know love is something that can come to you just as you grow a beard in a natural way. With age, you know, men get a beard, women get breasts and then they fall in love with each other. That's not how it happens. That's not how it can ever happen.

And if one does not have a spiritual center, one can be at most lustful. Nothing beyond that. One can be politely lustful. One can be a lusty gentleman. All that is possible. But one can never be loving.

Love is a different planet altogether. You have to be there and you have to pay the price. Devoid of a spiritual context, love is not at all possible. Let me just very plainly put it. I know it would be not just disappointing but actively offensive to many people, but that's the way it is.

Questioner: All right. Then, what is discipline?

Acharya Prashant: Discipline in the real sense means challenging your own patterns. Challenging your own patterns. Related to the word disciple.

Who is a disciple? Someone who follows.

Questioner: Yeah.

Acharya Prashant: Who is to be followed?

Someone who is worthy of being followed. The truth is to be followed. Freedom is to be followed.

So if you are a disciple with discipline, then you challenge your own patterns which are your bondages because freedom beckons. So you say I'm not going to tolerate my bondages. I'll do everything to challenge my own inner structures. That's discipline. Discipline is not about obedience.

Discipline is not about obeying commandments from outside. Discipline is first of all realizing who you are. What is it that you have fallen in love with? What really calls you and therefore what is it within that you must conquer.

That's discipline.

Questioner: Correct and if I had to talk about the discipline in youth or young people today, what do you feel about it? Like I have a general sense of argument about it which I don't want to put forth in this particular platform. I want to hear from you, do you think this particular generation or the generation coming have the right things in place to be disciplined?

Acharya Prashant: If you are not coming from the right center, I'll always go back to that. You know, it starts getting boring. But no point.

If you are not coming from the right center, you can either be obedient or disobedient, but you can never be disciplined.

So you will have obedient youngsters and you'll have disobedient youngsters, but never disciplined ones. To be disciplined is a very different thing. Discipline and love go together and only love can induce discipline in you.

Obedience can come from fear. Disobedience can come from a sense of reprisal or indifference or whatever. Lack of fear, lack of incentive, lack of greed, all that can lead to disobedience. But discipline, ‘Ah! That's a beautiful word.’

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
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