THE PURPOSE OF
EDUCATION
What’s the purpose of studying in
a university? Is not it that one learns in a university about all that has
happened in the history of mankind? You’ll learn how humans have journeyed from
the beginning, through millennia and up to now. You’ll know how man has
struggled against nature and also against man. The history of man is a story of
struggle and wars. Man has never been free from wars in spite of education.
Education doesn’t seem to have helped man get rid of brute violence. It has
even helped him to be a more efficient killer and destroyer than previously he
had ever been. Both mankind and nature seem to be at the mercy of education.
Education has turned out to be an illusion, a danger for the mankind. It has
failed in training man to have peace, love and freedom. That’s why there’s been
so much suffering from all kinds of diseases, wars, political persecution,
religious torture, cultural domination etc in the world. Civilizations have
fought against civilizations to blot out each other. The last two world wars
are a testimony to this sad plight. Cultural clashes are more rampant now than
before. The educated man’s consciousness is full of violence, fear,
aggressiveness, cruelty, anxiety and discrimination. There’s no love and joy
and peace. Is that what education is meant for?
Today, every child is abused
right from its birth by the parents and then the society helps prepare it to
kill and to be killed in competition and in war. This has been done for
centuries from the beginning of the civilization. Each so-called organized
religion preaches for love, humanity and universal brotherhood but when you say
you’re a
Hindu Brahmin,
don’t you see a division, a wall between you and the rest of the world? To
understand all that intellectually is easy but when it comes for you, a
Brahmin, to marry a
Shudra, your subconscious will make you shrink. Your parents will
always look for a Brahmin youth for you. Our likes and dislikes are guided by our
social, cultural, national, religious and racial differences. We are never free
from these manacles and our behavior will always be predictable like that of a
machine’s. If your university education doesn’t help open your eyes to see and
understand who you are in essence, I think it’s worth very little. It must be
able to develop in you that intelligence or sensitivity which is integral, all
encompassing and total. It shouldn’t be the kind of intelligence that a
university gives to the scientists. Such intelligence is partial and
destructive. That’s not sensitivity but just refinement which is not integral
but partial.
Sensitivity is always total. That
means it is either in you or you’re devoid of it. When it is there in you, it
gives you clear seeing and understanding of facts. There is no pleasure in such
seeing and understanding. It is abstemious. Unlike refinement, sensitivity has
nothing to do with education, culture, environment and the like. Refinement has
pleasure and it’s the product of desire and will. It’s an endless torturing
activity that you get tied up to; you keep trying to remain fashionable and
up-to-date in dress, ideas, food, and living style all the time. Refinement and
image formation walk side by side. Education systems can help in refinement of
your mind but rarely increase your sensitivity.
There’s illusion in refinement. A
scientist’s intelligence is so near-sighted that no sooner have the scientists
solved one problem than a bigger problem is born out of it. It is as if the
size of man’s stupidity is trying to keep up with the size of the ever
expanding universe. This is sheer madness and no one seems to notice this
stupidity. How mediocre! This kind of knowledge seems to be more ignorance than
knowledge. For instance, somebody broke the atom, perhaps, thinking that it’d
solve the energy crisis; but today, that very information has become a menace
to all including the humanity. Was it any worth? As long as the mankind
continues to grow more and more neurotic day by day, it’ll be never safe from
its own knowledge. Our medicines help a leper get clean, healthy and strong and
he goes on a killing and raping spree and ends up in a jail. You may argue that
not everyone does that. But what else they do? What I’m saying is that our
knowledge is helping us to become more dangerous and it’s doing it to every one
of us. How? You know that more and more people are getting educated, skilled,
rich, powerful, healthy and strong at the present time than a couple of
centuries ago. But no one seems to be getting any more peaceful, loving and
wiser than the people of previous generations. They are as violent, aggressive,
and brutal as before and even more than that. With or without technology,
thoughts are reaching everyone from everyone and since we don’t have any
positive thoughts the situation is exacerbating. One must have intelligence to
see this danger which future mankind is going to face. How are we going to
face? How have we always faced problems?
Man has always used thinking
power as a problem solver and this method has never been able to eradicate
problems totally. We can’t depend any longer on any ideas of any scientist,
philosopher, economist, educationist, so-called religious leader or politician.
All have failed visibly and evidently. Is there a way out which is different
from the way we’ve always resorted to?
Pursuit of pleasure has become so
important that it’s our main pre-occupation. We have forgotten the fragrance of
love. There’s no joy in our life. Will you have found the basic meaning of what
love is by the time you’ll have finished your university education? What we
call love is sensation, sexual pleasure, living together for exploitation and
selfishness. That cannot be love, can it? There’s no beauty in such
relationship and we call that love. Don’t you think love in its basic meaning
can be an alternative to solve the problems of life?
The greatest teaching one can
ever have is to attain freedom. Will your education be capable of pointing at the
door to freedom? It may or may not, but whatever it is, you yourselves have to
try to attain freedom. External freedom is no freedom at all. It’s inner
freedom, the freedom from ideas and thoughts that counts. You must be able to
attain it but you’ll never have it as long as you are rooted in your past. You
have to learn to be free from your thoughts and even if it becomes difficult,
you must know and be able at least to know what to do to be free so that at
times you can slip into thoughtlessness for a while. This will enable you to
get rid of your mechanical life in order to have spontaneity.
Thirdly, this education should be
able to tell you what a human life is for. As you know, life in any form is a
journey of consciousness. It’s been on a journey called
evolution and man is at
the summit of that endless journey. So, human life is different in at least one
way from all other forms of life. We’re the most conscious of all and we’re
endowed with thinking capacity. Therefore, we have the freedom to choose either
to go up or to go down. The danger is that we can easily go down. But there’s
also the possibility that we unlike other creatures can also do something to
increase our consciousness and become super conscious human beings on our own.
So to live a meaningful human life is to do something to increase consciousness
or sensitivity.
Talking with the students, one
can observe how afraid they are. They seem to be talking and doing things in
sleep and also as if they are machines. It’s so sad. Don’t you see their inward
poverty which they are trying to camouflage in their latest dress, hairstyle,
words, knowledge and such outward appearance?
They’re studying today to become slaves of money, fame and such trifles.
Most of them will be using their education and so-called knowledge to buy vegetables
and foodstuff like that someday. Is that what this university education is for? I
hope you’ll see the mediocrity of all this. Why study in a university at all
for such trifles? Even people who never have any formal education are doing
that so well. The university students are as they are because they’re more
interested in papers than in quality education. They don’t have enough energy
to employ in understanding things. They’re happy to follow what their
professors tell them because that’s easy. So they take down all the things told
by others or written in books and think they know. That’s not real learning.
This doesn’t give you insight. Someone’s knowledge is not your knowledge. It
must come from you; and that’s what is really hard. That’s one reason why
students take interest in politics. They fail to grow up mentally let alone
spiritually and must depend on somebody in power to give them a living. If you
are going to be a slave, a follower, like the majority, then I don’t see any vital purpose
in this university education for you. I expect, students' behavior, dress, food,
speech, appearance, thinking, relationships with people, things, ideas and all
else will be scientific, natural and conscious but not imitative at all. Their
response to life will be based on intelligence and wisdom of integral order.
They’ll try to see the truth themselves and not just accept everything mechanically
from their professors, from me, from one and many. In short, they’ll be true
human beings making good use of their
neocortex. Their responses to every
challenge will be spontaneous, sane and rational. It’ll not be competitive,
ideal, prejudiced, mechanical and neurotic. They’ll be a light unto themselves.
Whatever it is, the ultimate purpose of their education should be attainment of
truth, joy, love and freedom.
Keep off politics. Students going
into politics kill the entire purpose of being a student. It’s only the least
intelligent who get into politics. In the scale of intelligence ranging from 1
to 7, most politicians are stuck at 2 because they’ve left the sex center and have
the next center
svadhisthan as their
main place of activity. Dominating others is the per-occupation at this center.
Some politicians move ahead to the next center and become famous as writers,
painters, poets etc. too. It’s just a step ahead of thumb-sucking infantile
stage of masturbatory period and there are no less than five more steps to go
ahead. But politics seems to have engulfed all these mediocre university going
people. You don’t have to do anything to serve anybody or anything as long as
you have no knowledge of yourselves first. Without the knack of self knowing,
you’re a blind person. How can you ever know whether you are helping or not if
you are unconscious yourselves in the first place? Let the darkness of illusion
or ill vision go first so that you’ll be able to see the truth. Then and only
then, anything is possible or else you’ll swim in the mire along with other
political leaders, social workers, educationists, religious leaders etc who
wrongly think they are doing a great service to others. Fully conscious, anything
even murder you commit will be right; without being conscious everything that’s
accepted as good and right by the majority will be wrong.
Education should
teach you how to think and also not to think.
