The higher learning

Education must result in purifying one’s perceptions. It has to develop and co ordinate moral and spiritual urges and ensure good character. While discriminating between “good” and “bad”, the educated person must apply the criterion of service to humanity.

Along with worldly knowledge and experimental knowledge, man must also acquire experiential knowledge. Knowledge gathered from books is but second hand. But, for persons involved in the problems of living, first-hand knowledge alone is helpful, and this has to come from the urge for love and light. Unfortunately, education today has as its aim the earning of wealth, attaining a comfortable life of leisure and pleasure.

Education can be both material-oriented and spiritual-oriented. It can have as its aim the achievement of a high level of living for oneself, one’s family and relatives. But living involves more than flesh and bone, food and shelter, more than even sensual satisfactions. Man has certain intangible equipment like the mind, the intellect and the consciousness in various levels. These have to be clarified, cleansed, strengthened and directed along beneficial lines. This is done by spirit-oriented training. Now material education has grown too high.

SPIRITUAL EDUCATION DISAPPEARED

Spiritual education has lagged behind and even disappeared. So there is no integration in the personality of the educated person. He lacks conviction and completeness of understanding. Doubts and distractions are bothering him all the while. The process of education has become too mechanical; it is not vitalised by the consciousness of ideals or elevated by a high purpose. Ask any student; he replies that he is pursuing education for the sake of earning a living. But what of the very goal of human life? To understand it and struggle to reach it, is even more important.

Man earns riches; riches attract relatives, who attach themselves to the person until the riches get dried up. Respect is offered to the rich by kinsmen and by the world so long as they are in possession of wealth. But respect should be offered to the aged, especially those who have gathered wisdom through time. A highly spiritual person must be revered, irrespective of his age. The wise should be respected, regardless of any other consideration.

Karma (activity) has to be revered even more than the wisdom of elders. That is to say, activities that develop humanity in man, that raise the level of one’s character, that have loving service to others as the motive, that uplift the society in which one lives, these have to be adored and adhered to.

Higher than these is illuminative knowledge which makes man aware of the Truth of the outer and inner worlds, which fulfils the very destiny of man. Without self-knowledge, scholarship is a beautiful flower with a stinking odour, a charming fruit with worms inside it.

n Courtesy Sai Institute of Education West Indies, St Michael, Barbados. Visit them at www.siewi.org or https://www.sathyasai.org/about-us/education or email siewibb@saibarbados.org.