Questioner (Q): All the wisdom is available to us only after a certain age. But the dye is prepared early in the childhood. How does one change his dye at an advanced stage of his life?
Acharya Prashant (AP): The dye is no good. The dye does not help you. The dye is such a lousy dye. The dye is such a misfit. When you watch the dye you do not want to conform to the dye and that is freedom from the dye. Nothing else. You call it the dye, you call it your conditioning, you call it the various layers that you have covered yourself under. You call it your ideas, ideals, prejudices, whatever.
One thing is certain and common about them. None of them are any good, none of them really help you. And when you see that they don’t help you then the temptation and the tendency to cling to them disappears. Nothing else can give you freedom from the dye, or freedom from the world, or freedom from dyeing. Just see that that which you believe yourself to be is not helping you. It is keeping you restless. Otherwise all lectures, all knowledge is going to go to waste.
Only the uselessness of one’s position and one’s direction enables one to give up his means, methods, efforts; otherwise, one continues. So act in self-interest. See what the dye is doing to you. It will then be easier to give up what is not needed.
Q: Why society and teachers are not available to educate us in childhood? At that age, it is easier to be responsible because at that age one has not been burdened with responsibility, etc.
AP: Don’t ask why they are not available. They are not available, that’s all. Now you know that. Now act. Live with that understanding and act. Or do you want to cry over spilled milk?
Do you know why one wants to cry over spilled milk? So that one doesn’t have to do the right action then and there.
The right action probably then is to clean up that which has been spilled. You probably did not get exposure to wisdom literature as a child.
But what prevents you now? Ask yourself even today. Are you reading well? What is your alibi today?
Maybe you could justify your situation ten years or twenty years back by saying that you were just a helpless kid and nobody provided you the exposure. But today you probably are not a kid. Why are you not then giving yourself the fullest opportunity to learn, know, discover, uncover?
When you give yourself the opportunity, you also know how to bring the opportunity to others. Millions and billions of kids are waiting for wisdom education. But that wisdom education can be brought to them only by somebody wise. So you have to, first of all, ask yourself, “Have I been siding with wisdom? Am I committed to discovering my wise nature?” When you discover your wise nature you’ll be able to bring wisdom education to everybody; to kids, to adults, to the entire world.
