Day 35
That company which gets you lost, which doesn't let you learn from your own experience, is bad company. You can gallop on such a horse forever without being aware of anything in your life. That is how people commit the same mistake over and over again and get totally dejected and depressed their whole life - and they do not even know that they are miserable.
They are no doubt miserable and they make everyone around them miserable, isn’t that so? That is bad company. They forget all about themselves. There is no memory of them left, of who they are, what they are, what they want, where they are heading. They have no idea who they were, how they were.
All adults forget that they were teenagers once, and that they, too, had problems as teenagers. When they have teenage children, they think the children are not doing well. Every adult feels that the children don't listen - they forget that they, also, did not listen to their parents at a particular time.
When the delusion comes, the memory loss happens. You lose your memory, you lose the knowledge of who you are. The intellect becomes clouded. When the intellect is hazy, not clear, not sharp, everything appears wrong. It is the intellect, the buddhi, that says, “This is good, this is not good; this is right, this is not right.” That which is, that which brings short-term joy and long term misery is bad.
That which brings long term joy and short-term misery is good. This is the definition of good and bad. Good brings long-term joy and short-term challenges, problems, and bad is something that brings long-term problems and short-term joy. It is the intellect which decides whether this is good or not good, and when the intellect, itself, is gone, everything is lost.
When the discrimination power in you is lost, then you are totally lost. This is what you will find if you go and talk to prisoners in jail. At the spur of the moment they lost their intellect and they lost everything. All crimes can only happen when the intellect or the discrimination is lost, and most of them lose it through bad company. That is why mobs create more violence.
The individual person cannot do so much harm-in a mob they throw stones, put fire to buses and trucks and break things. The mob becomes more violent than a single individual person. It is the mob psychology-a mob is more violent because they lose their intellect, they lose their discrimination. That is why bad company is to be shunned.
Good company is that which cheers you up, which elevates you, which brings a pleasant attitude and feeling within you. In the beginning it may be just like a small wave, a ripple, but when you are associating yourself with bad company continuously, it will become like an ocean. Don't think, “Oh, it is just one party there, just one little thing that I’m doing.”
No, that one little thing can just rip you. That is how alcoholics who have recovered from being an alcoholic get sucked back into it. It is just one party, one peg-these sort of justification they give, they go for one little party once in a while and then that’s it, finished. And they end up again entering the rehabilitation centre.
