Sadhguru: Educating yourself fundamentally means to broaden your horizons. From being in limitedness you want to enlarge yourself. Unfortunately, the form of education that is imparted to people today, despite broadening their information capabilities, makes them very narrow in terms of their perception and inclusion of life around them.

A couple of generations ago, everywhere, but especially in Indian culture, people lived in large families. Even today, there are a few families like this with 200 to 300 people living together. If 200 to 300 people have to live in one house where every moment you are close to each other in so many ways, an enormous sense of inclusion is needed. Without that, you cannot live with people harmoniously.

Slowly, as the western form of education came, people became more individualistic and no longer inclusive. We dropped all those uncles, aunts and grandmothers and said, “Family means me, my wife and my children. My parents are okay but my wife’s parents are not, they must go to the side.” Then we thought parents are too old and stand in the way of everything, so we thought family means only “me, my wife, and my children.”

Slowly, as this education is coming to play a huge role in people’s lives, in western societies and now slowly in large cities in India, it is beginning to happen that even just two people cannot live together. They have to have separate homes. They can meet during weekends, but if they are together for more than that it is finished – there will be war. We are becoming so exclusive that loneliness has become the biggest problem in the world today.

Unfortunately, the more educated societies become the more unbelievable their wants are turning out to be.

The level of want that people are creating is such that everybody needs a separate planet for himself to dig up the resources. All of us cannot live on one planet. This has been the result of education. Not because there is something wrong with the content of education, but there is something absolutely wrong with the way it is delivered.

It is not information which damages people, it is the way it is given, and with what context.

Right now, the whole education process is just about survival. Education should not be about survival. It should be about broadening your horizons. Because people have become so mad about their economic status, we have twisted education into a way of milking money from the world. This has to change. If one keeps his intelligence uncluttered, wherever you put him he will survive. We want to produce not just loving, wonderful adults, but very resilient adults. Even if you put him in hell, he should slowly convert it into heaven.