Education is a Process of Enlightenment - 1. Swami Krishnananda

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Thursday, February 04, 2021. 07:15. AM.
(Spoken on July 26, 1976.)
Post-1.

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Many a time we are told that there is a spirit different from the body, and therefore, the pursuit of the objectives physical are different from the pursuit spiritual. There are people who are moving exclusively in the spiritual line as separated from the path of physical life in the phenomenal world. The life spiritual and the life temporal have always been separated. We have also been wrongly told that the West is mostly temporal in its pursuits and the East is spiritual. It is not possible to pursue only one aspect of truth because truth is inclusive of all the aspects. The spiritual pursuit is not something exclusive of the life physical, nor is it possible to live a successful physical life minus the spirit.

The human personality is not exclusively physical, spiritual, emotional or intellectual. These are like facets of a crystal which cannot be separated one from the other. From every facet we can look through the whole of the crystal, and so it is wisdom on the part of any sincere seeker to look to the whole of life and not merely at a part of it. It is true that most people who are wedded to merely sensory perception and physical living may go for comfort. This comfort is generally pursued without the knowledge necessary for the acquisition of it. Comfort can be mistaken for indulgence, but it is not. We cannot have comfort without the knowledge that is at the back of it. We do not want comfort which will lead to disease or discomfort later on. As a matter of fact, comfort is nothing but adjustment with nature, and we cannot harness nature artificially for our personal comforts. It is always said that we have to conquer nature, subdue nature, etc., as if nature is our enemy. We cannot conquer nature, and there no necessity to do that because we are not outside nature.

Now, as I mentioned, we are not outside nature, and therefore, it follows that we are a part of nature. Hence, whatever is permissible under the law of nature would be conducive to our comforts. Education is the development of the human personality according to the law of nature, and we rise higher and higher in the level of education as we rise higher and higher in the knowledge of the internal secrets of nature.

In the beginning, education is purely extraneous in the sense that man thinks he is outside nature. This is what is called modern scientific education, where the objects of nature are regarded as things which are to be seen externally. Observation and experiment are regarded as the means of scientific knowledge. The inadequacy of scientific knowledge will come to relief from the fact that you cannot observe or experiment with that of which you are also a part. How can you observe that to which you yourself belong? There is a kind of artificiality involved in all scientific knowledge. The artificiality lies in the fact that you have wrongly separated the object, which is nature, from yourself, while it is really not an object of your observation.

To be continued ...

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