Every-Minute Zen

Your Potential

Maybe your child will come up with this question – I still study in school and I want to know: what is the secret of education?

Up to now, man has been living an accidental life.

No one knows what your potential is, what you are supposed by nature to be. And the question – the secret of education – cannot be decided without knowing what your potential is.

Are you going to become a musician? A poet? An engineer? A doctor? Without knowing anything about your possibilities, almost groping in the dark, we go on deciding people’s destiny for strange reasons.

The very word education, in its roots, means to draw out. It has the very secret in its root-meaning. Whatever is within you as a seed has to be drawn out, given full opportunity, so that it can blossom. But no one knows what is hidden within you, what kind of soil you need and what kind of gardener, what is the right climate and the right season and the right time for you to be sown.

Parents decide about their children according to their own ambitions. Somebody wanted to be very rich and could not be: he is hoping through his children that his ambitions should be fulfilled. Although he could not manage it, he will manage through his children. Naturally he would not like his children to move in directions where possibilities of becoming rich are scarce. As a musician you cannot earn much; as a flute-player you cannot compete with engineers, with doctors, with politicians, with industrialists.

Naturally the parents who have been interested in money would like to send their children into a certain pattern of education which brings them the right qualification to be rich. The decision is arbitrary. The person about whom it is being decided, his potential has not even been taken into consideration. He may have the potential of becoming a great dancer, or a great painter, he may not have any greed for money, but you are forcing him into a direction where greed for money is an essential to be successful.

Even if he succeeds…of which there is not much chance, because unless you have an inner urge, an instinct for money, the chances of your success are rare. You will be a failure, and your life will become a long, drawn-out misery. But if by chance you succeed and you become rich, still your misery will not be dropped, because you never wanted to be rich in the first place. This was not your destiny. You are living somebody else’s life – how can you be happy? You are trying to fulfill somebody else’s ambition and you are not in a position to fulfill your own nature.

Hence the immense misery in the world: the person who could have been a great musician has become just a pigmy industrialist. A person who could have been a great mystic has been forced to become a mathematician. Almost everybody is in the wrong place. And to be in the wrong place is very painful. You yourself are not aware of why you are suffering, because you yourself are not aware that you have missed your target. You are following somebody else’s idea of what you should be.

So the first thing, according to me, begins with genetic engineering. There lies the secret of all education.