Your Family Size Is NOT Your Personal Matter. Sorry! || AP Neem Candies
Acharya Prashant: A fellow reproducing blindly is a threat to the entire humanity. How is his family his personal matter? Tell me, please. Somebody sets a time bomb in his home, a huge time bomb that will bring down the entire community—will you say it’s his private matter because he is doing it within his home? Tell me, please. Somebody sets a bomb inside his home, and the bomb is powerful enough to bring down the entire building, not merely his apartment. Will you say, “It is his private matter; how can I interfere? These are personal choices. We have to respect personal choices”? These are not personal choices anymore. If you are reproducing, you are bringing down entire humanity.
So, you have to be more than gentle now. And that does not mean cruelty; that means more compassion, more energetic action coming from deeper compassion and deeper sense of responsibility. You will have to give up the notion that these are, first of all, personal choices. No, they are not personal choices. What you are doing has an effect on me. How is it your personal matter?
Questioner: When I see people begging on the streets with their children, I feel very strongly about it. Even though I understand that we are born into different situations with different kinds of resources, it still angers me when I see that very poor people who are not even able to fend for themselves are having kids and using them as tools to beg even further. So, how to approach such things?
Acharya Prashant: No, you are not looking in exactly the right direction. That kid that you see begging on the street will have a far smaller carbon footprint throughout his life, even if there are five such kids in that beggar family. Obviously, that beggar family must not have five such kids, but the reasons for not having kids must be social and economic. By having five kids, the beggar family is not really causing much harm to the climate because their consumption levels are extremely low; their numbers do not matter.
India has 1.4 billion people; India’s carbon footprint is very small compared to that of the US. So, numbers right now don’t matter that much. Compared to this, the one or two kids that an affluent family has are a far bigger problem; think of their carbon footprint. And having a kid is not merely about having a kid; it is a geometric progression: you have a kid, the kid will have kids, and then they will have kids. It’s not one person you have given birth to; you have given birth to a hundred persons.
There is an estimate that says that a woman can do all sorts of climate activism all her life and save a few tonnes of carbon emissions, but if she just decides to have one less child, she can save six times more carbon emissions without doing anything else. Either she can go out four hours every day of her life and indulge in tree plantation and this and that—every single day of her life she can indulge in climate activism, and that will result in the lessening of the global climate load by x tonnes. The other option is, don’t do anything; there is no need for any climate activism, just have one less child. And by having one less child, you will save 6x tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Questioner: This information is not available.
Acharya Prashant: It is available. It is very much available. It is just not being shared and broadcasted. Where else am I getting it from? I didn’t meditate and get this knowledge. I am getting it from public sources.
Questioner: It’s just that people become too emotional if you tell them to have one less kid. I have tried with a couple of my friends but they say, “No, my kid needs company.”
Acharya Prashant: To hell with their emotions! Who are you? When somebody is being dragged to the jail, he obviously feels emotional. So what? You’ll have to pay for your follies. When somebody doesn’t get selected in an entrance exam, he or she does feel emotional. So what? Just because you are emotional, you cannot be granted a pardon or a favor.
Now you see why lack of spirituality is the biggest problem? Because when you do not operate from a spiritual center then you operate from an emotional center. These emotions are what are causing this climate change. And I am really surprised that so many people who are highly emotional are into climate activism when the entire problem is of emotions. You are so emotional about that next foreign holiday, right? That is carbon intensive. You are so emotional about having a good, nice nest of your own; that is carbon. You are so emotional about having two nice kids; that is emotion, and that is carbon. Emotion equals carbon in a big way, and the solution to this emotional center is nothing but spirituality. Think of it. Whenever you go emotional, you start releasing carbon dioxide, don’t you? When you go emotional, you either drink—and that is carbon—or you go and have a party—and that is also carbon.
This entire model we have based our lives on, this center around which we are living is flawed, and that is what is leading to this climate catastrophe. We are not addressing the central problem, we are just dabbling on the periphery, and that will not help; that will just help boost our ego. We will say, “I did my bit. I am a climate warrior. I will have nice photos to put on Facebook, and I will now have the right to tell the others, ‘You are morally inferior to me!’”
So, if there is one action that you must take to fight this menace, what is that? We said it is not merely important to identify the problem; you also need to identify the most effective way to fight that problem. What is that most effective way? It is not tree plantation. The most effective way is spiritual awareness. That is what you have to do, and that is difficult. That is far more difficult than planting trees, so we would rather plant trees. That’s how the whole thing goes.
Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/dont-blindly-rush-into-good-deeds-1_6a3958c
