Questioner: How do we say that a decision is right or wrong? What is right for one is wrong for the other. Nature has given everyone the right to decide, who are we to label someone as wrong?
Acharya Prashant: Right or wrong really are not decided in the context of others. You are right, nobody has the right to label a person or person’s decision-making as right or wrong. However, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing called a right decision or a wrong decision. Understand it simply, what is it that we all fundamentally want?
We want peace, we want relaxation, we don’t want to be tensed; we want contentment. Ever seen anyone who enjoys being dissatisfied or diminished or hurt or angry? So, what is it that we all want? What is it that is a common universal need among humans? Peace and contentment. Nobody wants to be sad. We want a subtle joyful state of consciousness and we all want that irrespective of the country we come from; our age, our gender, our religion, our ethnicity, doesn’t matter. Nobody wants to be sad; nobody wants to feel hurt. So, if that is our core need then you should know when to call a decision right, and when to call one wrong.
If your decisions lead to peace, joy, contentment for you then they are right otherwise they are wrong.
And this decision regarding a choice being right or wrong obviously is not coming from others. It is about your own inner self. What is the impact of your choices on your life? That is what you must look at. Are your choices making you more insecure, anxious, jealous, unsettled, restless? Then it would be dishonest to call these as the right choices for you. And it's not in a relative sense, it's not as if one choice that is right for this person will be definitely right for the other one also. However, as we cautioned earlier, it doesn’t mean that any choice is alright. There is definitely something called a right choice and there is definitely something called a wrong choice. And you have to be very careful because choices determine your life.
Next, you have mentioned that nature has given everyone the right to decide. Yes, nature has given everyone the right to decide and equally nature has given everyone the right to decide foolishly.
Remember it's just a right. A right is an option, you may choose to exercise it; you may choose not to exercise it. Unfortunately, most people do not choose to exercise this option wisely.
What is the option all about? The option is, you could choose either from your heartful intelligence or you could choose and decide from your conditioned self. Choosing, deciding, acting from your conditioned self is apparently easy because it hardly requires any effort. Therefore, most people allow their life, actions, thoughts, decisions, everything to come from their conditioned centers; it feels comfortable.
But then the option to operate from the center of heartful intelligence is available. That is what brings joy and contentment to you. That is what brings liberation to you. But that option is scarcely chosen because there is a price to pay and few people want to pay that price. We are lazy and stingy. We don’t want to work hard enough; we want to avoid exertion and we don’t want to pay the price. So, we don’t go for the right option. So, when you say nature has given everyone the right to choose, remember the right is often not exercised wisely. It is upon you to make good use of the right, the power vested in you.
