Your goals come from your borrowed self-concept || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Question : You said that we all have either same or similar kind of goals. But we are deciding our goals on our own. How can they be similar?
Speaker : How is it possible that two-hundred students sitting here, two hundred individuals sitting here, have the same goal in life?
On one hand you say, that we are all unique. Right? On one hand, you take pride in saying that we are all unique, and on the other hand all of you are running after the same kind of goals. Not only you, the students, but the entire world.
What does the entire world want? Similar things: money, respect, security. How is it possible that all these so-called unique individuals have the same goals? Surely they are not ‘my own’ goals. Surely, they are being dictated to all of us from an external agency. It is just that, the external agency has been doing it for such a long time and has been doing it so powerfully that we have internalized these goals, that we internalized these desires. But, you want these desires.
When you say, “my desires,” do you really want them? Did you say, “I want to be a software engineer,” the day you were born? Surely, the desire came from somewhere else. You were not born with it. Nobody was born with it. But all of you today have the same desires. They have come to you from an outside source that is commanding your mind, that has become the master of your mind. And this master has enslaved us so much that we have started believing these imposed desires to be our ‘own’ desires. And we do not bother to investigate that what is the source of this desire.
