How do we know ANYTHING about life? Where do our thoughts come from?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: It’s well known that simple living and high thinking is what we should aim at, but how do we know what is simple living and high thinking?

Acharya Prashant: You talked of simple living and high thinking, and you said that it’s well known that simple living and high thinking are necessary, they are important ideals, we have heard them being emphasized so many times. Right? So we take this as some kind of a proven truth, a universal axiom that one must have high thinking or sometimes that one must have a simple living. The question is how do we know what is high thinking? How do we know what is simple living? What is the place from where we are obtaining our definitions?

There is nobody who would want to happily say that his thinking is low or lowly, there is nobody who would willingly embrace distorted or narrow or ugly thinking and thoughts. So in his own opinion, all and everybody are going for their version of the right thought.

Nobody who is thinking of anything in his own mind is thinking wrongly. In fact, we all think so much because somewhere we are confident of our thoughts and our conclusions, that our thoughts would give us. A fundamental question…