Why we act the way we act? – Chaitanya Charan

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So I was born and brought up in India. And I was a very, India is a very education conscious country. And many people believe immensely in the transformational power of education.
So I, in my school college days, I was a part of the social service organization where we would go to the slums, the poor areas akin to the ghettos. And I would take free tuition classes as a part of the social service organization’s initiative. And as I was, I got befriended these kids.
Many of them were nice kids. And I was teaching English, History, Mathematics. And I noticed, I came to know that most of their families were in a big mess.
Most of the, many of the fathers over there were alcoholics. And there was domestic violence at home. And now when I talk with the parents, even the fathers, they were nice people.
And they were grateful that I was coming and teaching them, their kids. And the sons, the children, as well as their mothers told me that they are nice people now, but when they drink, it’s like they become a different person. So at that time, our social service organization, we decided to diversify into anti-alcohol campaigning.
And we started taking talks on that and trying to provide support systems for people. There’s one small village near the city Pune where I was staying, which actually became dry. We managed to free everyone from alcoholism over there.
And that was a big success for us at that time. But then, one of my friends, after one evening, I had gone to the nearby slums, he had gone to that village. When he came back, he looked shattered.
And I asked him, what happened? He said that recently we had the elections over there, the local municipality elections. And one of the local candidates, in order to get people to vote for him, brought three truckloads of free alcohol for everyone. And not only the fathers, even their kids got drunk.
So, till that time, my understanding was that education will open doors for people. And I started thinking that, okay, here, we need to help people, not just open doors for them, but also help them to walk through those doors. Parallel to this, something else happened.
The college in which I was studying, one student was absolutely most brilliant student I had seen in my whole life. He was first, not just in the college, the whole university, for all eight semesters of engineering study that he was there. And I admired him, but he was also a chain smoker.
And he said, the more I smoke, the more I can think clearly. I couldn’t make sense of it at that time. And when he passed out from college, at that time, he got the highest paying job in the history of our college at that time.
But unfortunately, in the first six months of his working in that company, he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. And he died. So this, I could see that there are poor people who are succumbing to something evil within them.
Now, neither the alcoholic parents, nor the chain smoker student, were what we would normally call as bad people. They’re good people. And the student was, of course, not just good, he was brilliant.
But I could see there’s something within that works against us. And that hostile force within us is not corrected simply by providing education, or rather by providing the education that is provided in the educational institutes today. Because the student was the best among the students in the educational institutes.
So what was it that was lacking? So we, education will open doors for us to walk to brighter places, better places. But what is it that stops us from walking through those doors? What is it that makes us take decisions or choose courses of action that make us hurt ourselves and hurt others? And it was not that I was on a high moral pedestal, looking down at others. I could see similar forces at work within me.
Since my teenage, I was a very short-tempered person. And many times I would regret why I would get so angry. But somehow, at that time, anger would come, and I would speak and do things which would unnecessarily create trouble for myself.
So I could see that everyone has something within them that works against them. So then I started reading non-academic books, apart from what I was taught in my engineering studies, to try to make sense of why we act the way we act. It was at that time that I was introduced to the yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita.
And the Bhagavad Gita offered what I found was an extremely satisfactory and extremely empowering understanding of the self. So it talks about our self as a three-dimensional entity. If I have a computer system, in that there is the hardware, the software, and the user.
So similarly, within us, there is the body, there is the mind, and there is the soul. So the body is like the hardware, the mind is like the software, and the soul is the user. Now, if the software is contaminated by viruses, then even if I have the best hardware, I have a very good RAM, a very good memory, a very high-resolution screen, none of that will be of much use, because the software is corrupted.
We see today that many people, even when they’re physically healthy, physically good-looking, financially well-to-do, still they suffer from depression, they sometimes become suicidal. They are overwhelmed by negativity. So this is not a problem at the level of the body.
It is a problem at the level of the mind. So it is like the software of the mind is corrupted by negativity. And most of modern scientific progress, we have made tremendous technological progress in the last few centuries.
However, most of that progress has focused on improving the hardware. But very little attention has been paid on improving the software. Physically, we have far, far more facilities, comforts, and abilities than what people in a few decades could imagine also.
Just by pressing a few buttons, we can talk with anyone in any part of the world. So at the physical level, our capacities are tremendously enhanced. But at a mental level, our anxieties, our insecurities, our negativities have increased enormously.
So it’s like the software is getting contaminated by viruses.