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Are you smart, or just shallow, young man? || Acharya Prashant
11.4K views
2 years ago
Corruption
Spirituality
Freedom
Society
Self-awareness
Patience
Reformation
Happiness
Description

Acharya Prashant addresses the concern that even authentic movements against societal issues like corruption can lose their meaning and become mainstreamed into the very system they oppose, driven by lust for power and vindictiveness. He agrees this can happen and explains that this is why there must not be just one movement, but a series of them. He uses the analogy of needing an entire nursery to sprout and flower, not just a single seed. He points out that society places very tight constraints on the forces of goodness, while allowing the forces of evil to do as they please, accepting their corruption as a rule of nature. We forgive them because they are supposed to be corrupt, it's in their DNA. However, when it comes to a person or institution that starts as something better or cleaner, we raise our expectations too high, which can be self-defeating. Acharya Prashant elaborates that any urge to clean up arises from the same filthy society, so the cleanup process itself is bound to contain some impurities, which should be understood and accommodated. He emphasizes that the filth has accumulated over a long period, so cleaning it up will also be a long process, not an instantaneous event. He cites the example of India's colonization, which resulted from a long period of neglect of basics in religious, cultural, scientific, and educational domains. Consequently, the freedom struggle was also a long, multi-generational process. Similarly, the fight against corruption will take time. He advises being patient but with a desperate vigor, putting in one's own bit to accelerate the process. He states that bad politics essentially arises from a bad collective mind; the politician is corrupt because the population is corrupt. All corruption, he asserts, is fundamentally spiritual, stemming from a lack of a proper spiritual foundation in common life. Therefore, a true reformation must be a fundamental change in who we are as a people, affecting not just politics but also education, literature, movies, and relationships. He urges individuals to be more loving and selfish in the right way, by being aware of what they are consuming—be it medicine, literature, or relationships—and its effect on them. One must constantly ask, "What am I getting out of this?" He concludes that we don't get happiness because we have never really reflected on its nature. The lower levels of happiness are easy to get but do not fulfill, while the highest level, which truly fulfills, is what we are all hungry for.