Every-Minute Zen

Life And Death

A few things about education.

My suggestion is education to be divided in two parts: the first part should be given in the beginning and the second part should be given at the time a person retires.

The first part of education should be for attaining the highest possible standard of livelihood. It should consist of the art of living and love. It should teach people how to be total in their acts, how to use the opportunity of life without losing anything, to squeeze every drop of juice that existence provides. The first part will be for the young people – training for life and training for love, training for intensity, training for totality.

The second part will be after retirement, which will depend on how long we can allow men to live. It may be according to the present average lifespan, sixty years, seventy years – but as the person retires.

So it will depend…. If genetic engineering succeeds in destroying the superstitions of humankind, then the second part will come very late. The second part will be preparation for death. Just as the first part was preparation for life, the second part will be preparation for death – how to die meditatively, silently, peacefully; how to meet death with a song and a dance and a welcome.

The second part will be basically religious, just as the first part was basically scientific. The education will be complete, but it has to be at both the ends – the beginning and the end. Each university should have a double structure: one for the young people who are going to enter into life, and the other for the old people who are going to enter into the unknown world of death.

The first part of education will be of many dimensions – all sciences, all arts, all kinds of crafts.

Somebody is a great carpenter, somebody is a great shoemaker, somebody is a great scientist, somebody is a great money-maker – they are all contributing whatever their potential allows them to life, with totality, not holding anything back. Naturally they should have equal opportunity to grow, and they should have equal respect. Just because a man is a president of a country does not mean that he should have respect and the man who makes perfect shoes should not. Both are fulfilling certain needs of the society; both should have the same honor and the same dignity.

Education can become so colorful, so actual, so real that you will not need to say to the students, “Be attentive!” They will be attentive automatically.

And the same for the second part of education.

All scientific technology can be used to give you experiences very close to death. You can be taught meditations, you can be taught relaxation, you can be taught how to go deeper in your sleep. Hypnotism will play a great role in the second part of education, because you can be hypnotized so deeply that you can almost touch the territory of death.

If you have passed that area many times death will not be anything to be feared. On the contrary, you will be tremendously excited. You have lived, you have lived so fully, you are content with life; you would love to know what death is…a new challenge, a new beginning, entering into the universal, getting out of the imprisonment of the body, becoming just pure consciousness.

Unless education can teach you both life and death it is not complete education. Unless education can make everybody dignified, self-respectful, neither inferior to anybody nor superior to anybody, it is not education.

So I begin with genetic engineering. I end up with meditation, enlightenment.

Before death you must realize what tremendous beauty and splendor is contained within your consciousness. Then education covers your whole life, and gives you the most perfect possibility of your growth.