Bhagavagd Gita - Session 12- Track 1203

A yogic system of education must actually ultimately lead to a harmony of both knowledge and action, in which the knowledge of the Eternal must be the foundation: a true educational system is one in which the children naturally grow into a knowledge of the Eternal. If you can provide to the children the idea of the Eternal, and then, the perception of the Eternal, then you have done the foundational education. But this is not an easy system of education because the children may not yet be ripe to understand the Eternal, so you do not impose upon the children. You have to provide such a system for every individual, a method of education, that ultimately, spontaneously, the child grows into the perception of the Eternal: that should be the aim. By what method? How long? What duration? All will depend upon every child.

In fact in the time of the Upanishads, the system of education was such that every child was told in the very beginning: “Meditate upon the Brahman, meditate upon the supreme Eternal”. This was the real reason that ultimately, the basic knowledge that you require in life, is of the Eternal. Once you are settled there, everything else flows very harmoniously.

When you start on the line of Karma, then, the way in which knowledge will be intertwined with action will depend upon each individual’s inclinations and activities, which are appropriate to the individual. There are some individuals who are not active, and sometimes you are mistaken even, when you have three, four children.

If a child is not active, this child is not smart, and you may even deprecate the child who is not smart, without realising that the child who is not smart may be very contemplative, and may be reflecting deeply; or he may be very affective, not contemplative but full of emotion. He is filled with goodwill, he is filled with love for everything in the world; he has no interest in doing this or doing that; he is not interested in fashions of life, but he is interested in loving and being loved: it is like a chocolate, the very consciousness is full of sweetness in the being, and very often we tell the child, “Now love is enough, but now study”; and we spoil the whole thing for the child; we do not realise that this child requires eating of chocolate all the time, and quite a lot, allow the child that sweetness; we don’t give enough sweetness. But that child’s development will be quite on different lines.

The important point is that we must know the inter-relationship between Knowledge, Action, and Love: Love is a crown of Knowledge and Action. Even if you start with Love, remember that it is really speaking, a crown of Knowledge and Action: even if it is the starting point, it means that the other two elements have already to some extent achieved some kind of union.

A child who is very sweet, realise that that child has already attained some kind of unity of Knowledge and Action, and therefore his heart is full of love and sweetness. Therefore, if you want to make child active that also is necessary: then love should be the motive of action. The springboard of action will be the love. If you simply put action arbitrarily, it will be an imposition upon the child: so, do not impose the action upon the child, but whatever love he wants to manifest, through that love the activities can proceed.