Acharya Prashant questions the audience about the source of their mental content, asking what proportion comes from books of wisdom or university teachings. He suggests this amount is very small, perhaps 5%, and even that might be an exaggeration. He then reveals that the remaining 95% of our mental content comes from the worst possible place: gossip, the TV screen, movies, and all that we consume in the name of entertainment and culture. He points out that although this is nonsense, we are forced to call it knowledge because that is how we treat it. The speaker explains that all our values come from these wrong places. If the value system itself is coming from the wrong places, it becomes impossible to value the right thing. He compares this to a person with weak eyesight; you cannot chide them for not walking straight. Similarly, you cannot admonish someone for not valuing the right thing because their very tool for valuation is flawed. He uses the analogy of a tailor with a wrongly calibrated measuring tape; the problem is not a single wrong measurement but the faulty tool itself. This, he says, is the utter danger of having a wrong value system. Consequently, we do not know what is truly valuable, and all the wrong things have been fed to us as valuable. To varying extents, each person has internalized these wrong values. As a result, things that are absolutely rubbish and have zero value occupy important places in our minds and lives. Stuff that one would never value if not for heavy conditioning becomes the center of one's life. When questioned about the importance of these things, the only answer one can provide is, "But that's how it is," or "That's the way the world runs." This response indicates that the person is heavily conditioned and doesn't even want to acknowledge it.
