Questioner: In the first five chapters of Śrīmadbhagavadgītā, I am seeing that Śrī Kṛṣṇa is repeatedly telling us of the state of the wise one, when I read such verses, all I see is a clear distance between the way the wise ones are and the way I live my life. How to bridge this distance?
Acharya Prashant: Your humble realization that you are not living wisely will be the bridge. Remember, why we do anything that we do. Look at any person and any activity that the person is doing. In his own eyes, the person is quite smart, quite wise, in his own frame of reference, he is doing the best thing that he can do.
Does anybody ever, on his own accord, choose a suboptimal option? Any life decision that you have to take, big or small; if you have five options, which one do you go for? The one that appears best to you, correct? So, if you look at the life of even the most wretched and most defeated person, what has he been doing? He has been making decisions that according to him are very right, great actually, wise and smart. Is that not so?
You may regret later on, but at the moment when you are taking a decision, do you ever deliberately take a wrong decision? At the instance of decision making, we go for the option that appears the best to us, correct? If you can now humbly see that you have not been deciding correctly, then it will be a great revolution in your life. Our false and misplaced self-confidence is at the root of all our troubles.
When the wise ones are put in front of us as standards, as great examples, then, if we have some sense, we are forced to confess how wrong we have been all our life, otherwise, we reserve the right to brag that, we too are somebody ‒ I did this, I did that fine, you did this, you did that. Let’s look at Buddha now. What did he do? Let’s look at some other wise man, what did he do?
