Let them not tell you that you are right, or wrong || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Question: How do I know whether I am right or wrong?’ Against what benchmarks and standards do I determine whether I am right or wrong? I am confused.

Speaker: How does anybody know whether he is right or wrong? After all, you are of a particular age, you are grown up. Till this date, how have you known whether you are right or wrong? Often you have declared yourself to be ‘right’ and often you have felt that you are ‘wrong’. How have you known that? How?

Go into it and you will find that you have been told what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. It’s a funny thing. Our benchmarks are all borrowed ones, our sense of right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unethical, all comes from the outside.

Is there anything that is absolutely right and absolutely wrong, and you have known it for yourself? Do you see firstly, that what you even call as ‘your own’ judgment or the voice of ‘your’ conscious, even that is a borrowed entity? You stick to it and you stand by it as if it is something sacred. “This is my own judgment, my heart tells me this.” But if you go closely into the matter, you will find out that this is not yours, this has come to you from somebody else.

That is the reason why, what is right in one culture is wrong in another culture. People of one culture think that it is absolutely right. They do not even know that it is because of the conditioning of this culture that they are taking this to be right. Had they been born in another culture, they would have not considered this to be right.