Acharya Prashant challenges the notion that one can come to see what life really is with the passage of time. He argues that, in fact, the opposite occurs. With the passage of time, layer after layer of conditioning deposits on the mind, making it increasingly impossible to know on your own. He uses the analogy of sleep, explaining that if you keep sleeping, the sleep only keeps getting intensified. You do not wake up on your own; you need someone to shake you and wake you up. To illustrate this, he explains that it is easier to convey these ideas to young people, around 18-20 years old, than to a gathering of 80-year-olds. The older individuals would likely say, "We already know," because their minds have become more and more rigid with accumulated knowledge. It is possible to wake up only when you are young; as you get older, it becomes more difficult. The mind keeps getting more rigid, and more knowledge keeps accumulating. The speaker asserts that when you say, "I will experience life on my own," you are mistaken because your experiences will not go beyond your conditioning. He uses the metaphor of a pre-written script: if the script has already been written for you, your experiences have also been pre-decided. You cannot experience what it means to be a mountaineer while sitting in an engineering classroom. Your experiences are a product of who you are as the experiencer. A wise man has said that the experience is the experiencer. What you are, so will be your experience. Your experience cannot go beyond yourself. He gives examples of food preferences, noting that one's experiences are limited by what they have been conditioned to like. He further challenges the idea of free choice by asking why a man doesn't wear a skirt, explaining that this is not a free choice but a result of being conditioned by society and family. Because you are so deeply conditioned, you will not experience anything new, and therefore, life cannot teach you. You are fast asleep and dreaming, and you need someone to wake you up.
