IIT Delhi: The incomplete comes to completeness by dissolution

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

Questioner (Q): Sir, is there an absolute notion of what is right and what is wrong?

Acharya Prashant (AP): All rights and wrongs, everything in the universe, exists for you. So, all rightness is with respect to you; all wrongness is with respect to you. This is a bit delicate, you will need to be attentive.

You are someone who is not alright; that is our fundamental condition, that is what makes us move. Otherwise, no one would desire change or betterment. We are entities unfulfilled, dissatisfied — therefore, not alright. Is that not true? Both at the physical and the mental level, we are never okay. Sometimes we feel okay only in a relative sense: “I had a headache in the morning, I no more have the headache, so I am feeling okay. It is only relative to my condition in the morning.” Perfectly we are never okay.

Perfection has a unitary characteristic: it cannot change. Had you been perfectly okay, you would have never lapsed into imperfection again — but we do that, right? Even when you say, “Oh, all is well for me, life is great,” something happens the next hour and we start feeling miserable.