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~~~~~
Video Information: 23.01.23, DTU
Context:
~ Is life just a race towards something?
~ Is competition good?
~ Is this generation specifically competitive?
~ How to live peacefully in a competitive age?
~ Why are humans so competitive?
~ A blind rush is competitiveness
~ How to decide what to do?
~ How to excel in life?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Be a part of the Live Sessions: https://acharyaprashant.org/hi/enquir...
Want to read Acharya Prashant's Books?
Get Free Delivery: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/books?...
~~~~~
Video Information: 23.01.23, DTU
Context:
~ Is life just a race towards something?
~ Is competition good?
~ Is this generation specifically competitive?
~ How to live peacefully in a competitive age?
~ Why are humans so competitive?
~ A blind rush is competitiveness
~ How to decide what to do?
~ How to excel in life?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Good evening, sir. My name is Anvesha. Sir, I would like to ask like in this era of race
00:13of building up our careers and earning money, is it all worth it in like wasting all of
00:21our life after running behind all this?
00:27This is not something specific to this era. The constitution, it was always there, always.
00:35It's just that every generation feels something extraordinary is happening to it. Something
00:45that has never happened before in other times to other generations. Every generation feels
00:50that way. We too used to feel when we were there on that seat that the competition, oh
00:57my God, dog eat dog. It's never been like this. Not only that, if I meet people of my
01:08batch from IIM or IIT, you know, they would rather say that the competition has rather
01:16diminished now. The environment is not as competitive as it used to be. So, there's
01:26a thing about human perception. Every human being wants to feel special and therefore
01:33we want to believe that our own conditions are extraordinary. Competitiveness is there
01:42in our genes. We bring competitiveness to the corporate world, to the world of trade,
01:53business, governance, education from the jungle. If you go to the jungle, the place we all
02:03come from, what do you find there? Continuous competition. And if you listen to Darwin,
02:14he says evolution itself is a result of competition. Do you understand the word dialectics? At
02:26the core of dialectics is competition. You could also call it confrontation or resistance
02:36or opposition. Two things meet, they oppose each other and out of this opposition something
02:49apparently new emerges. This idea is at the core of Darwinian evolution. So, it's not
02:56as if the corporates have made us competitive. We have been competitive since we were an
03:05amoeba. It is because of competition against its surroundings and situations that the amoeba
03:17has finally become homo sapiens sapiens. So, what is this competitiveness all about?
03:27Mostly the competitiveness is about filling in an inner vacuum. I do not know how to rise
03:41in life because I do feel that I am internally quite lowly. So, I do see that I have to get
03:49better but I do not know because I have not been educated well. So, I do not know what
03:56it means really to get better. So, what do I do? I decide to get better than my neighbor.
04:10The urge is to get better because we feel, we experience that we are not okay. We are
04:17just not okay but we do not know what is not okay with us. We do not know what is not okay
04:24with us. We do not know our disease. How will we get better? We do not know what the internal
04:32condition is like and why do we not know that? Because our physical apparatus is not
04:40designed to look at itself. If you look at the physical apparatus, can the eyes look
04:46at what is going on inside the mind? Can you think about the origin of thought? When you
04:54feel something, do you realize where the feeling is coming from or the feeling just comes like
04:59a bolt and strikes you? Think of anger. Somebody comes and yells a cuss word at you. How long
05:10does it take you to get angry? And your face all just flushes up, you are all red. It is
05:17a very bad word. You abhor it. Do you even get time to see where that feeling, that excitement,
05:25that agitation is coming from? We are not designed that way. Prakriti has not designed
05:32us to be capable to look at ourselves. So we keep looking outwards. We do not know what
05:39really the problem is inside. But there is a problem inside and the problem troubles
05:44us. And when it troubles us, we see that we need to get better. So we decide to get
05:56better than ever. This stupid response to internal disease is called competitiveness
06:04and ambition. Unfortunately, this stupid world worships ambition. Because you do not know
06:13what you want, so you start gathering needless things. And you become a veritable God for
06:23those who are just like you and do not know what they want. And you showcase all the needless
06:31things that you have gathered for yourself and all the others get impressed. And nobody
06:38bothers to ask you, what did you get out of all this? You started out as an idiot. Now
06:50you are a rich idiot. But your central problem was idiocy and the idiocy still remains. And
07:01it's not always about money. It's sometimes also about knowledge. I don't know what to
07:09accumulate. So I accumulate a lot of knowledge. I read a lot of books. So I begin as a fool.
07:17And after 20 years, I am a knowledgeable fool. But foolish I still am. But I have been very
07:28competitive. I have written five papers more than the nearest competitor. I've been very
07:37ambitious. I intend to write 20 papers more. I want to do this. I want to do that. I've never
07:45been able to question why the hell do I want to do anything that I do. That is called self-knowledge.
07:52Knowing your own intentions, knowing your own deepest pain. Competitiveness is our
08:03compulsion. We will have to be competitive. You see, please understand. You are in a burning
08:11house. Can you visualize that? Please do. You're in a burning house. There's so much smoke all
08:19around. And the heat, intolerable. And the flames are leaping at you from all sides. You can see
08:32nothing. What will you do? Will you just keep standing where you are? Even if you cannot see
08:39anything, still you will run in some random direction. That's what we do throughout our life.
08:46We are so troubled by the burning house. And the burning house, when it comes to the human being,
08:55is not outside of him, but within. The burning house is within. And the smoke has simply reduced
09:07your sight to zero. You can see nothing. We are not trained to see anything within. But you cannot
09:16keep standing where you are. It's hurting you so much. You're panicking. So what do you do? You
09:24start running around. And if you find five people rushing one particular direction, you obviously
09:29follow them. Though you do not know whether anything would come out of following them,
09:34right? But that's what you would do. Those five are going in that direction. I too will rush in
09:39that direction. I have no option. That's competitiveness. Just run. Just rush without
09:45knowing what you are going to get out of it. Because the house within is burning. That's
09:50competitiveness. You come to your university first semester. You do not know what you are
09:59supposed to do as a 17 year old. You do not know what life means and what education means. So what
10:06do you do? Some of you decide to compete with others in loafing. I'll be the number one loafer.
10:15We are competing all the time. Some of you decide to compete with others in snoring. I'll sleep for
10:24an average of 8.8 hours a day. Some compete with others in bunking classes. Some compete for CGPA.
10:32You have CGPA system? Some compete for CGPA. Some compete for placement packages.
10:40Do you see everybody is competing in some way or the other? Somebody gets into sports.
10:47Somebody gets into some cultural stuff. Don't you see we all are competing in our own ways?
10:54So there is something common within each of us, all of us. And that commonness is called
11:02our fundamental discontentment, which is continuously begging to be taken care of.
11:11It is saying please, please, please, I am you. Take care of me. But we do not listen to it
11:18because we cannot look at it because it is within and your eyes cannot look within.
11:22So we start running hither thither in some random direction.
11:25Let's compete. Let me be the best in something. Let me be the best in that. Okay,
11:34I am the best when it comes to girlfriends. I have five of them.
11:40Somebody else who has not been lucky in any measure comes up and says I am the best in
11:47not having girlfriends. I am absolutely zero. I too am a topper. The dimension is different.
12:00We want to be the best in something. The thing is the thing within says you have to be the best.
12:06We do not realize what it means to be the absolutely best. So we decide to be the best in
12:12something. Something, anything. That best I'll have to return to the world is called the self.
12:22Self, the one who really are. That's what the inner dissatisfaction is crying out for.
12:30And because you do not address it, it manifests in all kinds of stupidities,
12:36including ambition and competitiveness and whatnot. Man was always competitive. Do not
12:41think it is a disease specific to your age. What was Napoleon doing? What were all the kings doing?
12:48What were the world wars about? What do you think? Why was Hitler bombing London?
12:56Why? They were competing over Africa and India.
13:02They were competing who would have more colonies and bigger and juicier colonies to exploit.
13:08Everything is just competition. What was the Mahabharata war all about?
13:16What do the chimpanzees in the wild do all the time? Please tell me. They compete.
13:25Competition is everywhere because ignorance is everywhere. What happens when the ignorance is
13:35gone? Are you no more competitive, which means you are no more in the race? What happens?
13:40So you are a loser? No. Now you know the right race to run.
13:50Once I said addressing, there was more than a decade back, addressing a
13:55group of bright students like you. The race was won by the one. Anybody remembers that one?
14:05The race was won by the one who did not run. Who did not run the wrong race.
14:14Victory lies not in winning but in first of all not running the wrong race.
14:21What's the point in winning the wrong race?
14:26What's the point? You need medicine.
14:30And you have been racing all the way to the swimming pool and you win the race. What do you
14:38get there? What do you get there? Just a whole lot of water but what you needed was medicine and you
14:47won the race to the swimming pool. That's what we all are doing. That's what is called competitiveness.
14:54Running to the beach when you actually need to run to the hospital.
15:02Are you getting it? Are you getting it? Please, please do compete. But before that realize who
15:10the competitor is. Competitor not the external one but the internal one. Who is the one who is
15:15going to compete? For what purpose? For what end? If I say I want to be better than you in what
15:22respect? In what respect?
15:31The man of wisdom, the intelligent person
15:37decides not to participate in most of the available and trending races. He opts out.
15:47He chooses very something specific for himself and in that something specific he is unbeatable.
15:57Unbeatable in his own game.
16:01Unbeatable in the thing that he really wants and really loves.
16:06And that's a word that should be very significant to you as young guys.
16:11Love. Should it not be? Do you want to live loveless lives?
16:17Running behind something you never loved at all?
16:24Even if you succeed there, what do you get?
16:29You are wooing a girl or a boy you have no passion for. You succeed. What do you get?
16:36What do you get? A life of boredom. What else? The thing is now yours and that's your punishment.
16:43Handle it. Handle it.
16:53Are you getting it? Spend a lot of time just deciding
16:58the right thing to do and if you want to decide on what to do,
17:03you have to first of all know who you are.
17:07If you do not know your own interiors, you will never know what your life must be about.
17:14Then you will be just obliged in a compulsive way to run behind crowds.
17:22I have seen that happening so much, so obviously, so inevitably.
17:33There are hardly any exceptions. I do not want that to happen to you as well.
17:41Very bright people, gifted by Prakriti, great intellect,
17:47but no self-knowledge. What's the point in having a great car if you do not know where you are and
17:56where you must go? All this braininess that you have, the IQs that you might be proud of are just
18:05a car, a vehicle that has been given to you. What of no use is the vehicle if you do not know
18:11where you are and where your love lies. The vehicle is there so that you can drive your way
18:21to your goal. That goal is called love. If there is no love, what kind of goal is there and what's
18:29the point in living your life for any goal? Therefore, the knowers have said that love
18:36itself is the goal. Let your love decide your goal and obviously, the meaning of love here
18:45is very different. It's a technical term. We are not talking of love of the man,
18:50womankind necessarily. We are talking of something that would
18:56bring your inner discontentment to an end. That's called love.
19:15you