Question: To my knowledge, I haven't seen anybody from our IIM alumni becoming a mystic or an actor. What are your advice and thoughts on this? 

Sadhguru: I think our education system is a life-taking process right from kindergarten. We have made the education system into an industrial process of turning out certain kinds of products. This is a crime against humanity, if you ask me. Right from my childhood, I never understood why I should go to school. Every day when I was either cycling or walking to school, these questions came up and most of the time I did not reach the school because existential questions engaged me. 

 

Why does education not produce mystics or even actors for that matter? Because both of them need some versatility, not a set straightjacket. No one ever became a mystic in a straightjacket. And if you have a straightjacket, you cannot act. Maybe in India, you can still manage because certain types of actors do the same thing in every movie. But if you are in a straightjacket, you definitely cannot access other dimensions of life. 

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You will see all those people who are using their intellect and think they are doing great will become irrelevant in the next ten to fifteen years’ time because everything that you can do by gathering data and analyzing it is going to become irrelevant.

The general system right from early school is conditioning the mind to such a limited way of looking at life. Only the intellect is cultivated. You will see all those people who are using their intellect and think they are doing great will become irrelevant in the next ten to fifteen years’ time because everything that you can do by gathering data and analyzing it is going to become irrelevant. A simple gadget like your phone will do it. It is already beginning to happen.

Other Ways To Do Education

About ten or eleven years ago, the trustees of the school where I studied almost 45 years ago,  came to invite me for the school’s 125th anniversary. I said, “Why me? I was not just a not-good student, I was not even a student!” They said, “Sadhguru, you are the only mystic, you have to come.”

I just did not understand what they were trying to do in that school. Someone just read a damn book to me. They just had to teach me how to read but the same thing went on for 15-20 years. There are studies that show how in twenty years of formal education, seventy percent of your intelligence is irrevocably destroyed. That means you have come out as a knowledgeable idiot. And then people talk about unlearning. Why? It is simply unnecessary. 

There are other ways to do education. All you have to do for a human being is to develop their body and brain to the fullest possible extent. They will do the rest. But none of the schools are focused on this. They are only interested in how to cram something in that you don't like, so that you can puke it out on examination day. If you change this system, then places of learning definitely must create mystics and actors also. Why not? 

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