Natural acceptance, self exploration and assumptions

So far our ideas are all the product of preconditioning and socialization. Our conduct is determined by our assumptions which have physical and social roots. They are not based on right understanding of life. Through self exploration we can clearly distinguish between what is naturally acceptable to us and what has been assumed so far. JV stresses that the method of knowing what we really are or what we want to be is the method of reflection and natural acceptance. If we are not operating at the level of natural acceptance, then our Desires, Thoughts and Selections are only a function of our pre-conditioning or sensations. Thus today man is unhappy because he is not in his natural self. He had developed a fictitious image of himself based on prevailing social ideas. JV encourages people to ask, individually and in groups, what is naturally acceptable to them. In this sense JV is close to Buddha’s injunction: appa dipo bhava (i.e., be your own light). Initially, students face a great difficulty in understanding the concept of natural acceptance. The issue is: is there a way to separate natural from social and personal? Natural acceptance is one of the key concepts to understand JV. It will say that to understand natural acceptance you have to put yourself in the position of a human being uninfluenced by various social and cultural representations. Sit in a human group and ask: what do we all want as human being? You will get the answer. No one will say that he wants to be unhappy or he wants to make others unhappy. If no one says that he wants to be unhappy or wants to make others unhappy then it means that to be happy and to make others happy is naturally acceptable to all. Once this idea is well established in his mind, and he explores further, he finds that he may have made others unhappy sometimes but this was not his real intention. He wanted to do something else. There was something wrong somewhere because of which he made others unhappy. This means he lacked competence. He did not lack in intention. You must have seen that when something goes wrong in human relationships we always say: “There has been some misunderstanding.” We agree that we do not want to hurt others and we do not want to be hurt by others. There is natural acceptance for this. Natural acceptance is the co-construction of humanity.