Schooling is not the same as education, even though they overlap at times. Schooling is about providing necessary facts that serve as a foundation, acquisition of learning tools and instilling desirable behaviour patterns. These are introduced into us from the outside. This gives the student little or no option what they learn.
However, as we grow we begin to seek answers to questions that arise within us. To seek answers to these questions is to get an education. In this case the entire responsibility lies with the student.
Modern schooling unfortunately has the effect of usually killing all desire to learn. That is why there are so many school dropouts. Many students whose only motive is to survive usually cram and get certificates which is an essential passport for a government or corporate job. Few school children become seekers.
The situation is the same with organised religions. Questioning and learning are forbidden, while cramming prayers, performing rituals and going on pilgrimage are demanded. Blind and total obedience is mandatory.
Man has travelled up and beyond the skies and sent probes to the end of our solar system and discovered no heaven, to the greatest depths of the earth and the oceans and discovered no hell.
Thus the potential for every child and individual to realise God or achieve self realisation and be divine becomes impossible. The human mind refuses to be still, questions of, why? Why not? Who? How? When? Where? continue to plague us.
Unlike in the past, education, technology, media, access to information on the internet etc. all make our thirst for answers so much greater.
The home is where a great difference can and must takes place. Families with both parents working, dysfunctional families, breakdown of joint families, all work to isolate children from the one potentially great and true source for learning and character building.
If the paths chosen by society and our elders fail to provide credible answers and guidance, we tend to go astray from the herd. We only pretend to follow the rules of society and organised religion. We are then torn by conflict, demonstrating one set of beliefs to show others and one set of beliefs for ourselves.
In reality every individual creates his or her own private religion, making their own path and following their own beliefs. Hence there exist, billions of religions. Some of them aligned to current organised religions, some of them a terrible mutation of the worst of humanity and sometimes a beautiful synthesis of all the goodness of humans.
As Baba Ishwar Singh ji taught me,
It does not matter what religion we follow or what path we take, we have to ask ourselves the most important question, Am I making spiritual progress towards realisation on the path I have chosen? If the answer is no, then we should reconsider the path. If yes, then that religion, as individual as it may be, is the right religion for us.
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by Gurvinder Singh
April 2018
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