Osho on Education

On Guru Poornima, a 1000 Pranams to our Guru, the Master of Masters Bhagwan Rajneesh or as he is popularly known, Osho. The following excerpt is an answer to the question “Does Education Lead to Meditation?”. Who better than Osho to explain what Education is!! 🙏🏿.

To read the full transcript click here – Go On Moving. This is discourse number 6 from volume 4 of the series of talks given by Osho on the 42 sutras of Buddha. They have been compiled under the title Discipline of Transcendence.

What is Education

“….Ordinarily that which is called education is almost against meditation. It should not be so but it is so. The original meaning of the word ‘education’ is not against meditation. The original meaning is: to draw out.

To educate means to draw out; whatsoever is hidden in the individual has to be drawn out. The individual has to flower – that is the original meaning of education.

That is what meditation is too: you have to flower in your own being. You don’t know what you are going to be, you don’t know what flowers will come to you, what will be their color and what will be their perfume – you don’t know. You move into the unknown. You simply trust life-energy. It has given birth to you, it is your foundation, it is your being. You trust it. You know that you are a child of this universe, and this universe, if it has given birth to you, will take care too.”

“…..But that is not true of the so-called education that goes on in the world. Rather than bringing out, it forces things in. It simply pours in information. Again that word’information’ is wrong; it should not be used – it is’out- formation’.’Information’ means: formation inside you. Something should grow in you – then it is information. But nobody is bothered about you. The society is bothered about its own ideas, ideologies, prejudices, technology; they go on forcing you. Your head is used as a hollow place, so they have to provide the furniture.

Ordinarily education, or whatsoever is available in the name of education, is nothing but stuffing your mind with knowledge – because knowledge has some utility. Nobody is bothered about you, nobody is bothered about your destiny They need more doctors, they need more engineers, they need more generals, they need more technicians, plumbers, electricians. So they need them; they force you to become a plumber, or they force you to become a doctor, or they force you to become an engineer.

I am not saying there is something wrong with being an engineer or a doctor, but there is certainly something wrong if it is forced from the outside. If somebody flowers into a doctor, then you will see a great healing happening around him.

Then he will be a born healer. He will really be a physician, his touch will be golden. He is born to be that.

But when it is forced from the outside and one takes it as a profession, because one has to live and one has to learn and earn one’s living, one takes it over. Then one is crippled and crushed under the weight. One simply goes on dragging and dragging, and one day, dies. There has never been a moment of celebration in that life. 

Of course, he will leave much money for his children to become doctors in their own turn, to go to university, to the same university where he was destroyed. And his children will do the same to their children, and this is how things go on being transferred from one generation to another. No, I don’t call this education. It is crime. It is really a miracle that in spite of this education sometimes a Buddha flowers in the world. It is a miracle. It is simply unbelievable how somebody can escape out of it: it is a methodology to kill you, it is arranged in such a way. And small children are caught in the mechanism of it, not knowing where they are going, not knowing what is being made of them.

By the time they become aware, they are completely corrupted, destroyed. By the time they can think about what to do with their lives, they are almost incapable of moving in any other direction.

By the time you are twenty-five or thirty, half the life is gone. Now to change seems to be too risky. You have become a doctor, your practice is going well; suddenly one day you realize that this is not the thing you were meant to be.

This is not for you – but now what to do? So go on pretending that you are a doctor. And if the doctor is not happy in being a doctor, he is not going to help any patient. He may drug the patient, he may give medicine, but he is not going to really be a healing force. When a doctor is really a doctor, a born doctor… and everybody is a born something. You may miss it, you may not even know it.

Somebody is a born poet; and you cannot make a poet. There is no way to manufacture poets. Somebody is a born painter; you cannot manufacture painters.

But things are very wrongly placed: the painter is working as a doctor, the doctor is working as a painter. The politician is there: maybe he could have been a good plumber but he has become a prime minister or a president. And the person who could have been a prime minister is a plumber.

This is why in the world there is so much chaos: everybody is wrongly placed, nobody is exactly where he should be. Right education will exactly be a path to meditation. Wrong education is a barrier to meditation because wrong education teaches you things which don’t fit with you. And unless something fits with you and you fit with it, you can never be healthy and whole. You will suffer.”

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Makes one wonder whether we are really educated !! Well, this excerpt of Osho’s hits home. Ask any child in India, they want to be a doctor or an engineer. It has become a basic choice …. no one wants to nor has the time to find out what they really want to be.

Look at children and young adults committing suicide, just because they didn’t score well in a certain subject. Are marks the only way to evaluate an individual ? Many parents become disappointed when their child chooses History or Literature or some Language as their graduation course…. we need good historians, good book writers and linguists too.

As a part of our travels for ShikshaDaan we keep meeting undergrad students and sometimes school students … when we ask them why they chose a particular line of study, very often the answer is “my friend chose this and got a job with Infosys”. So a Mechanical engineer, or a Civil engineer or an Electronics engineer …. all want a job with Infosys or TCS or Wipro. A clear case of education gone wrong.

On Guru Poornima day, lets pause and reflect on what we really want to do and start getting re-educated, the right way !

Do read – Guru – defined by Osho.