Osho on Education

 

 

 

"This i call education: to make people more intelligent."

 

- Osho, "The Secret, #2"

 

 

 

“Nobody is inferior, and nobody is superior. One is just oneself, incomparable.“

 

- Osho, "The Golden Future, #23"

 

 

 

“Never compare. Each child has to be respected on his own. Each child has to be respected as unique.”

 

- Osho, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, #16"

 

 

 

“Don't be knowledgeable. Don't be a teacher -- be a friend. Befriend them and start looking for cues for innocence, for spontaneity, for intelligence. You will be helped tremendously and your meditation will go very deep.”

 

- Osho, "The Passion for the Impossible, #21"

 

 

 

“Never, even by your gestures, make the other person feel guilty. That is the greatest crim humanity has been committing: making people guilty. If the other feels guilty because of very deep rooted conceptions, help her to be free of the guilt”

 

- Osho, "The Golden Future, #33"

 

 

 

“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.”

 

- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"

 

 

 

“Education is a trust in yourself and in existence, allowing whatsoever is hidden in you unfoldment; bringing whatsoever is in, out.”

 

- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"

 

 

 

“Education is religious if it makes you courageous enough to accept yourself, and live your life, and become an offering to God in your own way, in your own unique way.”

 

- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"

 

 

 

“The natural man needs no morality. Easy is right. To be natural, to be spontaneous is right...and transcendence comes on its own. The people who are split against themselves -- that biology is something to be transcended, that body is something to be fought, that mind is something to be dropped -- anybody who is entangled in all these conflicts will never transcend. One should go more easy. It is not a war field. Your life is an autonomous growth. The first need is of a total acceptance with no reluctance, no unwillingness, no subtle condemnation anywhere in your mind.”

 

- Osho, "The Golden Future, #33"

 

 

 

“To me, authentic religiousness means a childlike innocence, playfulness, and a wholehearted capacity for laughter. Then each moment becomes so precious that you will not sing the song of freedom, you will live it. You will not talk about truth, you will know it. You will not worship God, you will find him wherever life is -- all over existence.”

 

- Osho, "The Golden Future, #34"

 

 

 

“Education is termed as the propagation of knowledge. It certainly should be the propagator of knowledge -- but if education is propagating bondages, it cannot be a propagator of knowledge. Knowledge is where the mind is free. Where the mind is in bondage, how can there be knowledge? Knowledge itself is liberation.

[....]

 

Education teaches fear. Education teaches greed. Education teaches jealousy and competition. Education initiates the fever of ambition. How can such education be the propagator of knowledge? How can such education be liberating? It is a propagator of deadly diseases. Friends, this is not the propagation of knowledge, but the propagation of ignorance.”

 

- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"

 

 

 

"Education should be free of the outside imposition of discipline; it should awaken the dormant intelligence of individuals. Such intelligence becomes self-discipline. In such a life there is neither suppression nor heaviness. Such a life is simple and natural like flowers. When life is progressing through the light of one's own intelligence, there is no possibility of chaos and licentiousness. Where there is no suppression, there is no possibility of an explosion of chaos and licentiousness."

 

- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"

 

 

 

"Education can definitely lay foundations which can make man free. We do not want a disciplined man any more, we want a man who is rooted in freedom and intelligence. In him there is hope and there is a future."

 

- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"

 

 

 

“My idea of education is very clear. All institutions should be free from politics, from religion. And religion should be allowed to have educational institutions, because they are destroying people’s minds. Educational systems should be free from any pressure — either from politics or from religion. They should have an autonomous, independent existence. They should decide themselves what has to be done so that every child who enters the world of education blossoms to his full potential. He is not to be molded, he is not to be ordered. He has to be awakened.”

 

- Osho, "From Death to Deathlessness, #28"

 

 

 

"My idea of education is that it should help you get rid of all beliefs, because all beliefs are hindrances in your journey towards truth. You should be freed from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. By the time you come out of the university you should be simply a human being, responsible to yourself and to the whole universe."

 

- Osho, "From Death to Deathlessness, #28"

 

 

 

“The new education, the true education, has not only to teach you mathematics, history, geography, science; it also has to teach you the real morality: aesthetics. I call aesthetics the real morality: sensitivity to feel the beautiful, because God comes as beauty. In a roseflower or in a lotus, in the sunrise or in the sunset, in the stars, the birds singing in the early morning, or the dewdrops, a bird on the wing…. True education has to bring you closer and closer to nature because only by coming closer and closer to nature will you be coming closer and closer to God."

 

- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #10"

 

 

 

“My love tells me only this, that all those who are born in the world after me should surpass me in every way; that they should build such a new world that we could not have even imagined; that their souls should be brighter and their thinking purer; that their eyes may encounter those truths which we could not, and their feet travel on unknown paths which were not known to us even in our dreams. Love can wish and pray for only this. I would not like to bind my children by my knowledge or by my experiences; I would like to make them free. Love always frees. Love that binds is not love, but violence. Education should be future-oriented, not past-oriented. Then only is development possible. Any creative process can only be future-oriented.“

 

- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"

 

 

 

“Religions teach fear – fear of hell, fear of sins and fear of punishment. Society teaches fear – fear of dishonor. Education teaches fear – fear of failure. Simutaneously there is greed attached greed for heaven, greed for fruits of virtue. and greed for respect, position, reputation, success and rewards, All greed is the other side of the coin of fear. In the present system the consciousness of a person becomes full of fear and greed. The fire of jealousy and competition is aroused. The fever of ambition is created. It is no wonder if, in all these circular motions, life is wasted.

Such education is dangerous. Such religions are dangerous. Education is that which teaches fearlessness, stalilizes one in non-greed, gives energy to rebel, gives courage to accept the challenge of the unknown. Education should not teach jealousy and competition. but love; it should not encourage the insane drive of ambition, but natural and self-inspired growth. But this can happen only if we accept the uniqueness of everyone’s individuality.”

 

- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"

 

 

 

“Our whole education is rotten. It certainly makes you clerks, stationmasters, postmen, police commissioners. It gives you a livelihood, but it does not give you life, and it does not give you love.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #21"

 

 

 

“One-third of our education should be concerned with livelihood; one-third of our education should be concerned with our well-being — body, health, ways to stay younger and live longer. And one-third — the last and the most important — should be concerned with love, with death, and the secrets of life itself. Only then will we have a wholesome education. And through that education, we can create a man and a society which will be healthy, youthful, loving, soulful, overflowing with joy, always ready to share with anyone — because nobody is a stranger on the earth; the whole earth is one family.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #21"

 

 

 

“Even a man who is well educated... but all education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer, and it is now well known that computers also can go crazy."

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #23"

 

 

 

"The society’s whole interest is in how to exploit you, how to enslave you, how to use you in a more efficient way, almost like a machine. It gives you all the education just for these hidden, secret aims. It prevents you from knowing anything about meditation.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #23"

 

 

 

“This is what our education goes on teaching… our education is immensely destructive. In the name of education, it is mis-education. It needs to be completely changed and transformed. Things like ambition, success, comparison, have to be completely taken out of the human mind — and it is possible. Rather than teaching these ugly things, education should give people better ways of life, how to live more totally and more intensely; better ways of loving, better ways of beautifying existence — without any comparison with others — just for your sheer contentment.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #25"

 

 

 

“Your education teaches you to imitate, your religions teach you to imitate. Nobody says to you: “Just be yourself — that’s where your paradise lies.” They go on saying to you, “Follow this, imitate that.” They give you ideals: “Become a Gautam Buddha, or a Jesus Christ.” But never, even by mistake, do they say to you, “Just be yourself; relax and enjoy your being, and bring your potential to its maximum unfoldment.””

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #25"

 

 

 

“A sannyasin has to be both: the peace, the silence, the light, the qualities of his inner being, and a rebel against all injustice, against all inhumanity. But for a creative purpose, to materialize a dream of an authentic human society which will be able to give equal opportunity to all, freedom to all, education which is nonviolent, education which is not only informative but also transformative, an education that will make you more of an individual and bring the best in you to its flowering.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebel, #31"

 

 

 

“Education is not bringing peace and silence and blissfulness to people. There is something missing in it; it is only education in subjects which do not touch your interior being at all. They may make you doctors, engineers, professors, but they do not give you the insight that can create a Gautam Buddha in you. The true meaning of the word “education” is “to draw out.” But all that your so-called education does is to force in. From outside, borrowed knowledge is being forced into the minds of innocent children.

 

In my vision, education is nothing but another form of meditation. All that usually goes on in the name of education is secondary. The priority should be given to meditation — education of the inner. Unless you become acquainted with yourself, all your knowledge is useless.

 

So before education I would put meditation. Education is trivia: geography, history, arithmetic. It is good as far as the mundane world is concerned, but it is not good as far as your interiority is concerned. You go on accumulating degrees and inside you remain empty. Your degrees can befool people, may even befool yourself, but you cannot have the joy, the blissfulness, the peace, the silence, the compassion of a Gautam Buddha. And unless education has two wings, it cannot fly in the sky in total freedom. Right now it has only one wing; the other wing is missing. Why is it missing? Because the priests don’t want you to become meditators.

 

[....]

 

To me, charity first means the education of the inner; and only secondarily, it means education of other things. “Know thyself” must be the most precious education, and then you can become acquainted with everything else. A man who knows himself will never misuse his education in the outer world. Otherwise, when you don’t know yourself, you are going to use your education to exploit people, to create poverty.“

 

- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"

 

 

 

“Education is certainly needed; but before education, meditation is needed. Anybody who becomes a graduate — either an engineer or a doctor or a professor — should not be able to have his degree unless he also passes his examinations in meditation. Each university and each college should have classes for meditation for the students — and for people from outside also; they may not have been able in their youth to learn meditation, but now they can learn.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"

 

 

 

“We just have to create people who are evidence of right education. An education is complete when it is inner and outer both. And we have to create people who can change this whole exploitative structure with love and compassion in a democratic way. There is no need for any violence. The poor just have to be made aware: It is time for you to wake up; everything belongs to you.”

 

- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"

 

 

 

“We have to find a human kind of education in the world; the education that exists is very inhuman. We have to find ways so that children can play in the sun and still learn a little arithmetic. That can be done — once we know that arithmetic is not so important as playing in the sun, once that thing has been decided, then we can find ways. A little arithmetic can be taught, and a little is needed. Everybody is not going to become an Albert Einstein. And those who are going to become Albert Einsteins, they won’t bother playing in the sun — their joy is arithmetic, that is their poetry. Then it is different, then it is totally different; then the growth is not hindered and guilt is not created.”

 

- Osho, "The Revolution, #6"

 

 

 

“Our whole education system is based on giving ready-made answers. Because of those ready-made answers you never develop your intelligence; there is no need. You ask the question and a computer teacher answers them.”

 

- Osho, "Satyam Shivam Sundram, #21"

 

 

 

“Education is a bridge between the potentiality and the actuality. Education is to help you to become that which you are only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing here; this is a place of education. The thing that is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a good job, a good earning; it is not real education. It does not give you life. Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but the better standard of living is not a better standard of life; they are not synonymous.

 

The so-called education that goes on in the world prepares you only to earn bread. And Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” And that’s what your universities have been doing — they prepare you to earn bread in a better way, in an easier way, in a more comfortable way, with less effort, with less hardship. But all that they do is prepare you to earn your bread and butter. It is a very, very primitive kind of education: it does not prepare you for life.“

 

[....]

 

My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival; life should be taken as a celebration. Life should not be only competition, life should be joy too. Singing and dancing and poetry and music and painting, and all that is available in the world — education should prepare you to fall in tune with it — with the trees, with the birds, with the sky, with the sun and the moon.

 

And education should prepare you to be yourself. Right now it prepares you to be an imitator; it teaches you how to be like others. This is miseducation. Right education will teach you how to be yourself, authentically yourself. You are unique. There is nobody like you, has never been, will never be. This is a great respect that God has showered on you. This is your glory, that you are unique. Don’t become imitative, don’t become carbon copies. But that’s what your so-called education goes on doing: it makes carbon copies; it destroys your original face. The word “education” has two meanings, both are beautiful. One meaning is very well known, although not practiced at all, that is: to draw something out of you. “Education” means: to draw out that which is within you, to make your potential actual, like you draw water from a well.

 

[....]

 

Real education will be to bring out what is hidden in you — what God has put in you as a treasure — to discover it, to reveal it, to make you luminous.”

[....] 

 

Education is to bring you from darkness to light. That’s what I am doing here. Parmar has asked this question because the Indian government is not ready to accept my work as education. It is natural. They cannot accept it as education, because I don’t create clerks and stationmasters and deputy collectors. I am creating new human beings. For them that is dangerous. If this is education, then they cannot allow it to happen. It is rebellion. I am teaching you to be yourself. I am teaching you to be fearless; I am teaching you not to yield to the social pressure; I am teaching you not to be a conformist. I am teaching you not to hanker for comfort and convenience, because if you hanker for comfort and convenience, the society will give them to you, but at a cost. And the cost is great: you get convenience, but you lose your consciousness. You get comfort, but you lose your soul.

You can have respectability, but then you are not true to yourself; you are a pseudo human being; you have betrayed your God and yourself. But the society wants that, that you should betray yourself. The society wants to use you as a machine, the society Wants you to be obedient. The society does not need you to function as an intelligent being, because an intelligent being will behave in an intelligent way and there may be moments when he will say, "No, I cannot do this.

[....]

 

 

This I call education: to make people more intelligent. And that’s what I am doing here. If this fire spreads, then this old, rotten society cannot survive. It survives on your unconsciousness, it lives on your unconsciousness. So it is natural, Parmar, that the government will not recognize this place as a place of education. For them, it is one of the most dangerous places.

But as far as I am concerned, this is education. tamaso ma jyotirgamaya -- Lord, lead me from darkness to light.”

 

- Osho, "The Secret, #2"

 

 

 

“Our whole system of education is stupid. It prepares you for a world which is no more in existence and it does not prepare you for a world which is coming, arising, which is dawning — so you will remain a misfit. You will never be able to live rightly. If you follow your education you will feel yourself out of date. If you follow the new world that is happening, then your education will not be of any help in it. You will be almost uneducated, and that hurts the ego.”

 

- Osho, "The Secret, #5"

 

 

 

“In a better world children will be thrown upon themselves as fast as possible; the whole effort of the parents should be to make the child use his intelligence. And the whole effort, if education is right — if it is education and not MISeducation — will be to throw the child again and again to his own intelligence, so that he can function, so that he can use his intelligence. He may not be so efficient in the beginning, that is true — the teacher may have the right answer, and if the student has to work out his own answer the answer may not be so right — but that is not the point at all. The answer may not be so right, it may not correspond to the answers given in the books, but it will be intelligent. And that is the real crux of the matter.”

 

- Osho, "The Secret, #10"

 

 

 

“Remember this: your whole education prepares you, makes you ready to fight. It does not prepare you for friendship and love, it prepares you for conflict, enmity, war.”

 

- Osho, "The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2, #1"

 

 

 

“My vision of a right education is to teach people how to grow the ego and how to be able to drop it; how to become great minds and yet be ready any moment to put the mind aside. You should be able to just put your personality, your ego, your mind, on and off, because these are good things if you can use them. But you should know the mechanism, how to put them off. Right now you know only how to put them on.”

 

- Osho, "Be Still and Know, #3"

 

 

 

“Give your children your love, but don’t give your ideologies. Don’t make them Catholics and communists; that is poisoning them. Don’t make them Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists; that is very destructive. Give your love, give your loving nourishment, and give them strength enough to inquire who they are, what this reality is all about. Give them every support so they can go on in life with an adventurous spirit. Then you are helping them; then you are really educating them. Ordinarily, whatsoever exists in the name of education is nothing but mis-education. Real education is helping the person to be himself. It is possible only if you love the person for his own sake, for no other motive. If there is a motive, your love is contaminated. Then you are not a real father or a real mother.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9,  #7"

 

 

 

“Education means drawing your inner being into expression in your living, your day-to-day life. Your honesty, your love, your compassion, should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures, not from rabbis and bishops and shankaracharyas and Ayatollah Khomeini.”

 

- Osho, "Christianity: The Deadliest Poison and Zen: The Antidote to All Poisons, #5"

 

 

 

“A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can't be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time you become the first.

[....]

 

A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician….

 

You can paint in two ways. You can paint to compete with other painters; you want to be the greatest painter in the world, you want to be a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Then your painting will be second-rate, because your mind is not interested in painting itself; it is interested in being the first, the greatest painter in the world. You are not going deep into the art of painting. You are not enjoying it, you are only using it as a stepping-stone. You are on an ego trip.

And the problem is: to really be a painter, you have to drop the ego completely. To really be a painter, the ego has to be put aside. Only then can God flow through you. Only then can he use your hands and your fingers and your brush. Only then something of superb beauty can be born.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #5"

 

 

 

“In fact, the moment a child is perfectly conditioned by you, you are very happy; you call it “religious education.” You are very happy that the child has been initiated into the religion of his parents. All that you have done is you have destroyed his capacity to know on his own. You have destroyed his authenticity. You have destroyed his very precious innocence. You have closed his doors and windows. Now he will live an encapsulated existence. He will live in his inner darkness, surrounded by all kinds of stupid theories, systems of thought, philosophies, ideologies. He will be lost in a jungle of words and he will not be able to come out of it easily.“

 

- Osho, "Ah, This!,  #8"

 

 

 

“You will be surprised to know that your education is against intelligence. Society needs imitators. It wants you to be good in memorizing, not in becoming intelligent. It wants you to become good machines, not beautiful people; efficient machines, but machines all the same. It needs you to function well, but it does not want you to be more conscious. Then you would start saying no to many things; you will not be so obedient.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9,  #5"

 

 

 

“If this goes on for as long as it does — in schools children are sitting for five or six hours — by and by they are dulled, their intelligence is lost. Every child is born intelligent and almost ninety-nine per cent of people die stupid. The whole education dulls the mind.”

 

- Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #7"

 

 

 

“There is nothing like education. All your education simply makes you capable of worrying about situations everywhere in the world, about everyone except you — about all the troubles that are in the world. They have always been there, they will always be there. It is not because you are here that troubles are there. You were not and they were there; you will not be soon and they will remain there. They change their colors but they remain. The very scheme of the universe is such that it seems that through trouble and misery something IS growing. It seems to be a step, it seems to be a necessary schooling, a discipline.”

 

- Osho, "And The Flowers Showered, #9"

 

 

 

“The education that exists in the world is not true education. True education will be a help towards enlightenment because it will make you more meditative, more silent, more aware, more inward-looking. The education that exists in the world makes you more ambitious, outward-looking, more egoistic, more superficial. It gives you all kinds of wrong values. It is a kind of poisoning. It does not help you, in any way, to be yourself. It is destructive. It helps you to be somebody else, and that’s its very destructive foundation. It is a poisoning, but so slow that you never become aware. It begins the day you are born and it goes on slowly slowly destroying you, distracting you from your nature.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, #12"

 

 

 

“In the coming century the whole education system is going to be totally transformed and changed because of the computer. It will be stupid to teach children history, geography — unnecessary, there is no need. All that can be done by a computer; the child can carry the computer. And my own observation is: the less you depend on memory, the more intelligent you become. That’s why it happens that in the universities you will not find very intelligent people. Professors, chancellors, vice-chancellors — I have seen many, but it is very difficult to find some intelligent person there. You can find more intelligent people in the farmers, in the gardeners, in the villagers. And the reason is clear: because they are not knowledgeable they cannot depend on the memory. They have to respond to reality, they have to respond to challenges, they have to bring their consciousness to respond — their consciousness remains more sharp. A farmer, a villager, is far more wise than a professor in the university. The professor can depend on the memory, the farmer cannot depend on the memory.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #4"

 

 

 

“The basic education is missing. The first thing to be taught is meditation, the art of going in, because only out of that arises a discipline.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #3"

 

 

 

“The society is very much afraid of your reality. The church is afraid, the state is afraid, everybody is afraid of your essential person, your essential being, because the essential being is rebellious, intelligent. It cannot be easily reduced to slavery. It cannot be exploited. Nobody can use your essential being as a means; your essential being is an end unto itself. Hence the whole society tries in every possible way to disconnect you from your essential core, and it creates a false, plastic personality around you and it forces you to become identified with it. That’s what it calls education. It is not education; it is mis-education. It is destructive, it is violent. This whole society, up to now, has been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs soldiers. It does not need human beings.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #13"

 

 

 

“Society teaches you, “Become this, become that.” It teaches you becoming. Its whole education system is based on the idea of becoming. And what I am telling you here is just the opposite of it. I am talking about BEING, not about becoming. Becoming is an invention of the crafty politicians and the priests — and these are the people who have poisoned the whole humanity. They go on giving you goals. If you become tired of the worldly things — money, power, prestige — they are there to tell you about paradise, God, samadhi, truth. Again the whole process starts.“

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9, #10"

 

 

 

“The word ‘education’ is beautiful. It means “drawing something out”: drawing out that which is within you. In fact, we should not use it for the ordinary education. It is wrong to use a beautiful word like ‘education’ for this rotten system of schools, colleges and universities. It is not education in the literal sense even, because instead of drawing out what is within you it forces things from the outside upon you. It is an imposition. Real education is like drawing water from a well, not pouring something into the well. Real education is drawing out your being so that your inner luminosity starts filtering through your body, through your behavior.“

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, #12"

 

 

 

“D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love.

 

And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon.

 

To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.”

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5, #6" 

 

 

 

"The true education has to teach you the ways of the heart too. And the true education has also to teach you the transcendental. Mind is for science, heart for art, poetry, music, and the transcendental for religion. Unless an education serves all these things, it is not true. And no educational system has yet done it. It is not surprising that many young people are dropping out of your colleges, your universities - because they can see it is all crap, they can see it is all stupid.

 

No other institution can do it, only education can do it: universities should sow the seeds of revolution. They should sow the seeds of mutation - because a NEW man has to arrive on the earth. The first rays have already reached. The new man is arriving every day and we have to prepare the earth to receive him - and with the new man, a new humanity and a new world. And there is no other possibility except education to receive the new man, to prepare the ground for him. And if we cannot prepare the ground for him, we are doomed."

 

- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #10"

 

 

 

The child when he is born functions from the center; we teach him how to function from the circumference. That is our whole educational system all over the world: teaching the child how to function from the circumference. We pull him away from his center, we make him more and more accustomed to the circumference, to living on the circumference... twenty-five years of conditioning, education: good names we have given to ugly things. We call it education -- it is not education, nothing can be a greater mis-education.

 

The very word 'education' means drawing something out, to draw something out. When you draw water out of the well it is education. Just like that, when something is drawn outwards from your center it is education. But this is not what is going on in the name of education; it is forcing things upon you. It is not bringing your center to function. It is not sharpening your center; it is dulling it, making it more and more sleepy, dozy. The society succeeds the day your center goes into a coma and your circumference remains functioning. Then you are a robot, a machine, no more a man.

 

- Osho, "Be Still and Know, #10"

 

 

 

In the future, education will have that dimension. My own vision is that each student should be given an opportunity to teach too. The students who are reading and studying for their master's degree should be allowed to go to lower classes to teach; those who are working for their bachelor's degree, they should be allowed to teach the lower classes. Every student should be a teacher also, and vice versa. Every teacher once in a while should sit with the students and start learning again. Each teacher once in a while should be a student, and each student once in a while should be a teacher too. This difference between the teacher and the taught has to be dissolved; the teacher and the taught are part of one process.

 

- Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #24"

 

 

 

Twenty-five years of education -- almost one third of your life you are being trained to be ambitious. How can you avoid politics? The only way to avoid politics is to get out of your mind; that means that unless mind is dropped totally, politics will go on clinging to you. You can even be antipolitical but then that will become politics.

 

- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #6"