What it means to get schooled?
06 Aug 2020Should life flow seamlessly or happen in bits and pieces, like accidents?
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, “That is an oak tree”, or “that is a banyan tree”, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it. – Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Image Source: g-stockstudio/Shutterstock
Life happens in phases for most. Especially for those who get schooled. Schooled not only by schools, but on daily and constant basis, by parents and people in the family, by neighbors, by society, by friends and their families, by news and media opinions, by ancient and current “authoritative” texts, the so called realized beings, etc.
For these, life happens in phases. They begin with a phase where they only enjoy but not work at all. This is their early childhood times. This is the period when they begin to go through the process of getting conditioned, polished, programmed, disciplined, and so on and on. They get to see the world suddenly in duality — light vs dark, morning vs night, sun vs moon, mom vs dad, human vs animal, empty stomach vs filled one, etc. and finally reaching up to good vs bad as well as slowly but in smaller doses, ethics and morals. And a special mention for the echoing instruction from parents, “Behave!”
They are then slowly introduced to enjoy more and work less in their early school days. These are the times they simple enjoy a smile, a rainy day for no reason. Well, that’s important, for no reason. They enjoy playing in a water tank large enough to hold two small kids. They enjoy watching touch-me-not plants. They enjoy nights through star gazing and sleeping on the terrace or in the open sky. They enjoy watching other animals with no expectations. They enjoy creating things with clay kind of simple and natural things.
They don’t need anything extraordinary, any sophisticated items made with supreme technology, to walk in pursuit of happiness. Because they do not know they need to pursue it, they think being happy is all that there is to be. Their inherent happiness instead brings ample opportunities for them to just be in the moment.
Eventually, they reach up to balancing their work and enjoyment. These are higher school and college days. Now career becomes a topic of discussion wherever they go, mostly initiated by the person they ended up meeting. Now they are told to work more and enjoy less.
The moment they are introduced to another human, the first thing that happens to them is, they get advised!
This goes on until their early marriage days. Once the life partner is not a novelty in their life anymore, stability and security take the dominant part of their life. They only work in this phase, but not enjoy. They usually find occasional opportunities to have their time out, maybe trips, long holidays, family outings, movies, social media, streaming platforms or other entertainment. It’s their effort to balance work and enjoyment, with a clarity already in their minds that they will anyway fail at it utterly — balancing. So, they fail to enjoy because their minds are now filled vessels. They always carry a baggage without noticing that they could actually take a break and keep the baggage aside for awhile. And this is the dullest and perhaps longest phase of life.
What you do to suppress the effects of your work is not enjoying.
And then the last phase of life is obviously, fully, and wholly dependent on how life is spent so far. Here they are rightful to go back to times when they only enjoy but no work. But rights don’t guarantee anything. Their physical bodies should support. And many other such dependencies…. How their children settled in life, how much they saved for their last phase, how many more responsibilities they feel they fulfilled and how many are left incomplete, etc. They still struggle to figure out, where freedom is, and when their time is to be free. They keep needing it but hardly find it. It starts becoming hard to exist.
To be or not to be.
Unfortunately even at this stage, most people prefer to imagine the next life fully based on the life they lived so far. Instead, why can’t they simply think they are going back to where they came from. But their schooled minds won’t give them that space for keeping things and thoughts simple anymore.
Finally, the judgement day comes. And all shall pass.
Doesn’t this sound a very pessimistic and tragic depiction of circle of life? I feel so but can’t find a better way.
Now, relax your muscles and think of a rare class of humans. They are not schooled. These are the ones whose parents chose and strive towards staying away from programmed thinking. They may not be able to achieve it themselves. But they decide to create an ambiance for their kids to remain untouched by society’s programming. To the best possible extent, that is! They are taught to learn and apply things on their own on daily basis. They are taught not to enjoy what they get to do. But to do only what they truly enjoy.
Have you ever seen their faces? There’s usually a shine on their faces. Their smiles feel like coming from their hearts, but not from their lips. Even their eyes seem like smiling. They don’t worry about failing. Because the clarity of thought that they develop by doing only what they like to do always keeps them positive about failing. These are the ones who become artists, musicians, dancers, etc. Even if they do mathematics, they still behave like artists. They learn their subjects as part of the nature, rather than from teaching staff who are decentralized based on their teaching subjects. These are the ones who enjoy the journey more than the destination. I believe every human enjoys this but gets to take a different approach in serious parts of life.
What happens in a violin or a rhyming poem has something to do with mathematics. They get to see that connection. What’s a language used for has something to do with their biology and geography. They get see that. What happens in the whole cosmos has a deep “rooted” connection with all that happens in our minds and bodies. Some of them arrive here one day.
For these, life happens like one full ride. A seamless stream of happily flowing water.
I’m saying this not because I lived both these lives. I obviously lived one of them and it’s easy to see which one it is. Perhaps that’s what makes people like me qualified to talk about the other. When I speak on these lines, people usually bracket you into a bunch of idealists. They know there are these ideal people living around them. But they hate to accept them as normal and natural.
I’m saying all this with the confidence that, whether you subject a kid to a result-oriented, schooled, controlled and phase-wise life or to the process-oriented, untamed and unconditional life experience, both seem equally experimental, because life throws challenges at both with equal intensity. End of the day, it’s an individual, not owned by anyone, even parents. But one of these two experiment types seems worthier than the other. Which one is it depends on which side one takes.
One of the film directors was on a TV shore recently. He was asked — how he became the star director with his very first film almost 30 years ago and how he got to become a proficient film director without having to use the usual ladder of hierarchy or any apprenticeship or formal training or godfathers and career-makers. He said his first film [and almost every film he made ever since] became a trendsetter because even he wasn’t aware he was creating something like that.
Since I wasn’t schooled about film making, I just did what I genuinely felt like doing and it turned to be different from what anybody did in the past.
The intensity of our involvement into a task is inversely proportional to the amount of formal education we receive. This is something people cannot argue on. Because it is still not a system where metrics/KPIs have been established … luckily.