With youth: Your morality is your bondage

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

Acharya Prashant (AP): The question is, ‘How do we decide the right thing to do?’ What is right and what is wrong? How do you know what is right, and how do you know what is wrong?

(Waits for an answer, silence).

Let us see. Someone told you what is right, and someone told you what is wrong, and not only that, someone also told you there is something called a ‘right’ and something called a ‘wrong’, and you have started believing in it so deeply. What do you mean by right and what do you mean by wrong? All our sense of right and wrong is a borrowed sense of right and wrong. All these ethics, morality, all these are coming from the outside, we never found them on our own.

You were so small and somebody said that don’t hurt others, respect elders, speak the truth, be a loving person, this is right and that is wrong. But if you happen to be a smart kid, and you turn around and ask, ‘Why should I always speak the truth?’, there is a problem. If you further ask, ‘What IS the truth?’, there is a yet bigger problem. Papa may try to tell, but he cannot tell. He cannot tell because he herself doesn’t know. He himself doesn’t know because his own Papa told him, and his own Papa was told by his Papa, and so on and so forth…