Your Interests Are Not Yours
Questioner: My question was regarding Vastavik Ruchi (real interest), okay, which means relevant interest. Now, I find it very abstract to put it in my head — what does Vastavik Ruchi mean? More so, you’ve also explained that ruchi stems from the ego, and you should choose something that you know is beneficial to all of mankind or this world. How do you submit yourself to a task that is beneficial to all of mankind or something that is indifferent to your interests? Thank you.
Acharya Prashant: See, we’ll have to get the framework right. What we call as our interests, or the usual quick, unconscious choices, where do they come from? In a macro sense, they come from our bodily composition, right? In a very macro sense.
For example, you can choose to have this kind of food or that kind of food, or that kind of food. In that, you can have a choice, but you will never choose to have five-hundred kilograms of food. You can choose whichever type of food you want, but you will never choose five-hundred kilograms of it. Would you? Because that’s not something that your body will allow.
Getting it?
Similarly, you can choose red, blue, yellow, orange, any color from the spectrum, but you will never, if I ask you here, “What’s your favorite color please?” You will never respond with a color that stands at two-thousand angstrom or twenty-thousand angstrom. Would you? You would always respond with some color that stands between four-thousand and eight-thousand angstrom, the visible spectrum. Correct? Now, within this very, very narrow spectrum lies the infinite diversity of human choice. Does it not? So, we keep saying, “You know, I like that, I like that, I like that, you know, I like that. No, no, no, I don’t like that, oh I hate him because he likes that, I hate him because he likes that, oh, I love him because his likes are similar to mine.” But the point remains that all these likes and dislikes are between four-thousand and eight-thousand angstrom. We have never had a human being who likes a color that stands at two-thousand angstroms of wave-length. So, at a very macro level, our choices are confined by our physical constitution itself, that we rarely see.
If I ask you, you know, all right, “which finger do you like? Which finger do you like?” Someone will say, this one, this one, this one, being students a lot of us will like the middle finger but there would be hardly anybody who would say that, I like the twenty-second finger. Why? Because your body itself does not support that. So, it sounds, in fact, so absurd, twenty-second finger, what does he mean by that? Nobody’s going to choose that, right? The twenty-second finger.
So, in the macro sense, choices are delimited by the body itself. What I said about the visible spectrum is also true about the aural spectrum, right? 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. If you’re hearing something, you’re listening to something very, very attentively, what I can immediately know is that the frequency would be between 20 to 20,000 Hz. No choice of yours will take you beyond these two boundaries. Or would it?
Then you come to the social impact on choices. First of all, as you are born, the body has already decided that from zero till infinity, you will choose only between four-thousand and eight-thousand. Do you see what kind of constriction it is of choices? Four-thousand to eight-thousand, what percentage is it of the total electromagnetic spectrum? Please tell me, please tell me. 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Not even that.
But you see that you are born into limits? Even as you are born, the birth itself has dictated your choices, and we keep jumping and shouting, “Oh no! I need to have free choice, free choice!” What free choice? All freedom is between four-thousand and eight-thousand. All freedom lies only between four-thousand and eight-thousand. The very event of birth has taken away choice, so to say.
Do you get this?
Now, having taken birth, if you are a Hindu, if you are a Muslim, if you come from an urban background, if you come from a rural place, if you come from India, if you come from China, if you come from Africa — again, even within this small spectrum that is given to you, four-thousand to eight-thousand, boundaries are set for you. Are they not? Are they not?
Now, whatever you choose is now narrowed down to a smaller domain, and yet we talk of choices as if choices were something so fundamental, so great, and so liberating. Are our choices liberating us or rather confining us? Please tell me.
You have been taught, for example, to some of us, let’s say, some of us, the sound of the azan, the tolling of the temple bell, and they are different frequencies. Are they not? Different amplitudes, everything, the whole waveform is different, and you say, “That’s my choice, that’s the sound of my choice.” Very difficult, if you are born in Germany, that you would know of Tansen. Difficult, you would have heard of Megh Malhar, and not too many Indians would know of Beethoven and Mozart. Maybe the names are heard, but there would not be a taste into them. Think of choice. As a German, what do you say? “I love, I love Mozart.” You say, “That’s my choice.” Is that a choice, or is that a fallout of your being a German? Please tell me.
You are born in India — hardly anyone does not play cricket and what if you go to Brazil or Argentina? So, is cricket a choice, or is it rather an imposition of the circumstances? I’m asking you. You say you love cricket. Do you really love cricket? Love involves a very, very conscious choice. If cricket has come to you only because you are born in a particular country, how is cricket a choice? Now, cricket is some kind of helplessness, choice-lessness. What do I do, being born in India, I’ll have to love cricket. Is it a choice then?
Are you getting me?
So, the first thing is not about asking, “What do I choose?” It’s about seeing that all our choices are very conditioned things. That what we call as choices come right from our conditioning, they are not indicators of our freedom at all. In general, you say, “I need to have the freedom to choose.” The fact might be totally different. The fact might be that your choices do not indicate your freedom; rather, they indicate your lack of freedom.
When you choose cricket, for example, in India, does it indicate freedom or lack of freedom? Please tell me. Lack of freedom. You couldn’t have chosen otherwise. You had no option.
Are you getting me?
So, we are very interested in asking, “What to choose next?” But is the question arising in a vacuum? Are we not constantly, every moment, already choosing a lot? Is not the whole thing of choice a process? And if you’re already choosing and choosing from a particular centre, using particular criteria, from a particular state of consciousness, is it not more important to ask, “Why am I choosing this, that I am choosing right now,” or must I ask, “What do I choose next?”
See, if I stand still here, please understand, if I stand still here, probably it makes sense to ask which way to go. Probably it makes sense to ask which way to go. But who am I? I am the mover, I’m the runner, I’m all the time not just running, actually sprinting towards my desires, my goals and my goals are ostensibly my choices. No” I chose my goal, I choose that thing, I want that thing. I’m already running towards something, and that which I’m running towards, I’m quite convinced of it. Am I not?
I want that thing. I want that trophy, I want those marks, I want that job, I want him to respect me, I want that boy or girl. I’m already very confident of the direction in which I’m running, and then this speaker comes in, and you ask, “Sir, what should I move towards?” My answer will be, “But, but you aren’t standing still!”
What should I move towards is a question that behooves someone who is standing still. Only he can ask, “I do not know, since I do not know, so I’m standing still, so please tell me which way to go.” If you do not know which way to go, what do you do first thing? You stop. Don’t you? Now it is the time of the GPS, but let’s say you are in the year 2000 and you needed to stop for instructions. Students won’t know; they are not born then, but the elder ones would. So, what do I do?
If I’m rushing towards a particular direction on a road, how do I ask anybody for instructions or help? And if I want to know the way, what is the first thing I do? I stop, and I say, “Jaipur jana hai, kaise jaun?” Or, yaa kahin ko bhi jana hai, “Bhaiya, idhar koi restaurant hai?” You stop and ask, right?
The first thing is to stop. Without stopping, you are just a slave of the unconscious choices that you are pursuing, and if you don’t stop and you ask that fellow, “Bhaiya, kahaan jana hai?” He won’t respond, or would he? Even if he responds, would you get his response? You would be gone by the time his response comes. Is that not so?
So, we are not sitting at the origin (0,0). We are not standing still. In a great unconscious momentum, we are flowing. The first thing is to stop flowing, the first thing is to drop out of the flow. A great stream is carrying you along. The first thing is to somehow manage to come ashore, and then you sit there for a while, let your mind be settled, and then ask yourself, “Here, this is me, this is life, what do I do with it?” But that question cannot be asked when you are already hurrying towards a particular direction. Are we not already hurrying? Please tell me.
So, when you are already hurrying, how to get an answer? Forget about an answer. How even to ask a question? The first thing is to have the courage to stop and if you cannot stop permanently, stop at least for a while. It’s called taking stock — just to take stock, stop, and then say, “Okay, this is what I have been doing, I’m eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five, whatever, what is going on? What is really going on?”
It is very difficult to think on the go. It is very difficult to see clearly when the mind is clouded with desires and ambitions. The more you are desirous, the more you are goal-oriented, the more ambitious you are, the less you will know what you are actually doing. Desire will simply obfuscate your vision.
Is that making sense?
The thing is, we stick to our choices; we hold on to them like dear life, like the monkey does to her little one, you know, and sometimes the little one is dead, and yet the mother monkey is holding it to her chest thinking that there is some danger out there somewhere, and she is looking suspiciously. She’s not even looking at herself to see that the baby is already gone.
I invite you to look impartially at your choices. This impartial looking is at the foundation, at the centre of all wisdom. Otherwise, life is just about being blindly attracted to something and then investing all your time, money, energy into chasing that thing. Is that not how it happens? Please tell me.
You get attracted by something, and then you just run after it, you just run after it. Money goes into it, time goes into it, energy goes into it, life goes into it, and if you get that thing, you rarely find it satisfactory enough, and what next? The next thing. And life is limited. Soon enough, you find that you have no energy, no time to chase things anymore.
What is already going on must be reviewed, but we are more interested in asking, “What next to do?” Dump that question. What next to do is not important at all. What is important is, what am I currently doing? What next to do is not important at all. What is much more important is, what am I currently doing, what exactly is going on right now, what is it that I’m busy with, day beginning till day end. That’s the important question and if you can go into that question what next to do emerges on its own. You don’t have to answer that. You don’t have to plan that out. It happens, happens on its own. If you can understand what is going on right now, the future will organically spring from this. You won’t have to plan out a future.
Questioner: So, following up with that, as you’ve said that what next is to be done will organically start spring up from whatever we are doing now. So, again, the interest of the collective people, right, is it automatically going to happen, is it going to happen on its own? Okay, that was my question.
Acharya Prashant: See, it’s like this this question, where is this particular question coming from? It’s coming from the previous one. Were this question possible, had the questioner not attended to the response to the previous question? So, where is this question coming from? Had you planned it out?
Questioner: Kind of came.
Acharya Prashant: It just came. It just came. It just came out of attention. He paid attention to what was happening to the previous question, and from there came the next question and this particular question has a certain authenticity.
A planned, well-thought-out, cultivated question would never have had this authenticity. It happens spontaneously. Trust it. Your job is not to plan out a future. Your job is to lovingly attend to the present. Attend to it. The future will take care of itself.
