Questioner (Q): Does Vedanta, or wisdom literature in general, offer any fundamental solutions to the problems that we face as normal individuals in our personal and professional lives?
Acharya Prashant (AP): Vedanta doesn’t go at all into the specifics of the problems we face. If it does that, it would become very limited, temporal, and even regimentary. That is because the problems faced by people in one age vary greatly from the problems in another age; problems faced by one community, or one gender, or one economic class are not the same as faced by others. So, if we try template-based solutions, they would never suffice.
Vedanta goes directly into the one who is facing the problem. Problems are multifarious, problems are so diverse, but the one who is facing the problem has remained much the same since the advent of time. Man’s insides have not changed.
The exteriors have changed majestically. If you look at the way we live today, our civilization, and the technology available to us, it is very different from the exteriors we had, the resources we had, the technology that we had at our disposal, let’s say, five thousand years back. Everything has changed. If someone were to videograph a place, let’s say a university campus like Nalanda, several years back and were to compare it with a video clip of, let’s say, our campus (IIT Delhi) today, he will hardly find anything in common. There has been so much change.
But there is one thing that has not changed at all: that is the self, the one we fundamentally are. And I am talking here about the ego, I am talking here of man’s mind; that has not changed. When I say ‘man’ I mean humans; that includes both the genders. We were insecure then, we are insecure today; we were ignorant then, we are ignorant today; we wanted to be better then, we want to be better today; we were never satisfied then, we aren’t satisfied today either. Greed, fear, jealousy, possessiveness ruled the day then; they abound equally today as well.
