Can a man and a woman be just friends? || Acharya Prashant, with Delhi University (2023)
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00:00But can a boy and girl just be friends?
00:16A friend is someone in the truest sense.
00:24You can relate to in a way that uplifts your life, your mind, your thought process, gives
00:34some clarity, some insight to you.
00:38That's who a friend is, right?
00:41Being with the friend turns you into someone better.
00:46That's who a friend is, simply put.
00:50So why can't you be with a girl and find that her presence, her company, gives sharpness
01:00to your consciousness, to your mind.
01:06You are able to understand life better.
01:14How is it not possible?
01:17And vice versa, how is it not possible that let's say there is a girl who is somehow either
01:29too afraid or too egoistic or superstitious, and she comes in contact with a boy, and in
01:38the company of the boy, she realizes the filth within and is able to clear the cobwebs and
01:46emerge as bold, inquisitive, and a better individual.
01:54Why is that not possible?
01:56Sir, but the biological instincts are always there, like whenever we are talking to the
02:04opposite gender, and there is a subconscious urges and instincts.
02:13What if you are with a person who is able to point that out to you?
02:18Yes, sir.
02:22Because the moment to catch the snake or the rat is when it emerges from its hole, right?
02:36Yes, sir.
02:38So you are with a girl, an intelligent girl, and she is able to point out to you in real
02:47time.
02:48What's her name, please?
02:51Sir, Virchus.
02:52Virchus.
02:53She is able to point to you in real time, Virchus, you are not listening to me, you
02:59are just staring at me, and I am telling you of something very important, and yet your
03:07mind is elsewhere.
03:11Is she not a friend?
03:14And this kind of a thing, no boy, no male will be able to tell you because the kind
03:22of reaction you give to a girl, you will anyway not give to a boy.
03:27The girl will know the animal in your eyes, that animal keeps hiding when you are with
03:32your boyfriends, in a group of the same gender, a very important part of your personality
03:44simply remains hidden, but when you are with a girl, that part gets activated, and if the
03:55girl is wise enough, she will be able to point that out and tell you that here, here
04:06is your animal, here is where you are not even a human being, maybe you will not like
04:12her for that, but she will be able to potentially at least help you out in a big way, you might
04:24not accept that help, that's okay.
04:29So it's not whether boys and girls or men and women can be friends.
04:40Let me extend it to say something beyond the question.
04:47You know, I love to say, I love to quote rather, someone else has said and I quote
04:56that often, that some part of your humanness remains unawakened till you befriend an animal.
05:10If you have never been friends with a rabbit or a dog or a cat or a cow, it's difficult
05:21to be friends with a tiger or a python practically, but you can be friends with a deer or a bird
05:27or a monkey.
05:30These are the animals that you find in your vicinity, not deers really, but some.
05:37So if you cannot be friends with an animal, some part of your humanness remains unawakened.
05:46Now extend that and I will say, if you cannot be friends with a person of the opposite sex,
05:57an important part of yourself will remain unnourished, unawakened, uneducated, unaddressed.
06:08That's what happens to people who may move only in same sex groups.
06:15They remain boorish, you understand boorish, uncultured, unsophisticated, undeveloped.
06:27So six dudes are hanging about.
06:35Chances are that this group lacks in something quite important.
06:48I have nothing against same sex groups, please.
06:52I want to point out something, so I am taking an example.
06:59So six of them are just hanging about and doing what boys do.
07:04Actually six girls coming from a girls only school and girls only college.
07:16They have never known what it means to be in vicinity of a boy.
07:22An important part of their personality will remain underdeveloped.
07:31That does not mean that you have to forcefully intrude into girl gangs.
07:39Do not construct my thing to mean that.
07:46You find six girls going and then you barge in and you say something is missing here and
07:51I have come to take care of that, don't do that.
07:59There is life, there is the world and your consciousness will not rest in peace till
08:09it understands the entirety of it, the wholeness of existence.
08:17Women constitute 50% of the world's population.
08:22How will you understand life if you do not understand women?
08:27How will you understand yourself if you do not understand women and vice versa?
08:32Because the questioner is a man, so I am addressing him in this regard.
08:37Had the questioner been a woman, the answer would have been a bit to the other side.
08:46As a woman, how will you understand the world if you have never been with men or if you
08:53have been only sporadically with men?
08:58So it's not whether a man and a woman can be friends.
09:05I am saying if a man and a woman cannot be friends, then they will be missing out on
09:13the wholeness of life.
09:17In your circle of friends, there must be women.
09:24And if you are a woman, then in your circle of friends, there must be a few men at least.
09:36And you must have a few animals.
09:40And by animals, I do not mean men.
09:44Not men who are like animals.
09:53You look quite pleased by what I am saying.
09:57He was frozen temporarily, now he is back.
10:03So there can be no logic really in depriving yourself of company of the other gender.
10:16I do not know how that can be useful.
10:20That only breeds desperation and then perversion.
10:29In my batch at IIT, there were 350 of us and that included only 13 girls.
10:41And you cannot even imagine what kind of desperation it fostered.
10:50337 of us boys and 13 girls.
11:04And we used to sympathize with our seniors.
11:08One of the senior batches had just six.
11:15It's not just something of a joke.
11:23It can have potentially serious repercussions, this gender imbalance.
11:33When you do not see girls around you, the mind imagines girls.
11:40And it imagines them in the worst way possible, the way of lust, the way of unreal juvenile
11:57imagination.
12:03And same applies to girls as well.
12:06No gender discrimination here.
12:11And then these two get married and this man who gets married at 28 has never been in the
12:18company of women and he has become a de facto lusty gorilla.
12:34How do you think his relationship with his wife would pan out?
12:41How do you think he will choose the life partner in the first place?
12:48He has never been in the company of women so by the age of 28 he is so starved of the
12:55very sight of a female figure that he will choose, he will make the worst kind of choice
13:02when it comes to having a wife or a partner or girlfriend, something.
13:09And that's a very important choice you make.
13:12And that choice will go all wrong because you do not know the thing called woman.
13:21You have been starved all your life.
13:26You make a wrong choice and that wrong choice then becomes your life.
13:31You breed kids.
13:33Kids have come from a wrong choice.
13:34What will you do now?
13:37Kids are irreversible.
13:41All this because you never had any female friends.
13:48When you don't have female friends then you have female fancies.
14:00Avoid living in fancies.
14:03Make friends with a few worthy girls.
14:07And that's not exactly the same as having a girlfriend.
14:15Making friends with girls is not the same thing as having five girlfriends.
14:22I do not mean to say that there is something wrong with having a girlfriend.
14:27Go ahead and have girlfriends if that pleases you.
14:32But that's a separate matter.
14:34Right now the point we are discussing is whether men and women can be friends.
14:38Yes, they must be friends.
14:41Not just can be, they must be friends.
14:47Do not become one of those macho characters who hangs about in his guy circle and scoffs
14:59at women.
15:06Six hunks drinking all night and doing all boy stuff.
15:15That turns you into some kind of a caricature.
15:20There is no special glory in that.
15:26Let that not be set as an example.
15:43As long as men and women will be treated as two separate universes that will amount
15:54to a lot of misery in the world, that will amount to a lot of over-sexualization.
16:05You keep a man very distant from women and he gets over-sexualized.
16:14You keep a woman far away from men and she gets hyper-sexualized.
16:25And that's what religions have traditionally done.
16:30That's what conservative cultures have done.
16:34You create such a chasm between the genders that they both start burning in illusion and
16:45in lust and there can be no great lustfulness without illusion.
16:57You cannot become crazy after women if you really know women.
17:09If you start knowing women, your desperation will reduce because there is nothing very
17:13special in them.
17:15When you do not know women, then you go totally bonkers.
17:24Fancies, imaginations, stories, dreams, and then rapes.
17:32It is the mark of a liberal and an awakened society, a spiritual society, that men and
17:58women will be freely mingling with each other.
18:07The more you are body-identified, the more you are gender-identified.
18:18The more you are kept away from the other gender, the more identified you become with
18:23your own gender and therefore you become more body-identified.
18:29And body-identification is the root cause of all problems, personal or global.