THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: One is everlastingly comparing oneself with another, with what one is, with what one should be, with someone who is more fortunate. This comparison really kills. Comparison is degrading, it perverts one’s outlook. And on comparison one is brought up. All our education is based on it and so is our culture. So there is everlasting struggle to be something other than what one is.
The understanding of what one is uncovers creativeness, but comparison breeds competitiveness, ruthlessness, ambition, which we think brings about progress. Progress has only led so far to more ruthless wars and misery than the world has ever known. To bring up children without comparison is true education.
Don’t you notice how little energy most of the people around you have? They are slowly dying, even when their bodies are not yet old. Why? Because they have been beaten into submission by society. You see, without understanding its fundamental purpose which is to free the extraordinary thing called mind, with its capacity to create atomic submarines and jet planes, which can write the most amazing poetry and prose, which can make the world son beautiful and also destroy the world - without understanding its fundamental purpose, which is to find truth or god, this energy becomes destructive; and then society says, “We must shape and control the energy of the individual.
So, it seems that the function of education is to bring about a release of energy in the pursuit of goodness, truth, or god, which in turn makes the individual a true human being and therefore the right kind of citizen. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing. Unless each one of you is so educated that, when you leave school and go out into the world, you are full of vitality and intelligence, full of abounding energy to find out what is true, you will merely be absorbed by society. You will be smothered, destroyed, miserably unhappy for the rest of your life.
You may be a sociologist, an anthropologist or a scientist, with your specialised mind working away at a fragment of the whole field of life. You are filled with knowledge and words, with capable explanations and rationalisations. And perhaps in the future the computer will be able to do all this infinitely better than you can. So education may have a different meaning altogether. It may mean opening the doors of perception on to the vast movement of life.
It may mean learning how to live happily, freely, without hate and confusion, but in beatitude. Modern education is blinding us; we learn to fight each other more and more, to compete, to struggle with each other. Right education is surely finding a different way of life, setting the mind free.