Sadhguru, so much of your work has been about helping people blossom to their fullest potential,
to live a full-fledged life.
I remember visiting your amazing Isha School, which reflects many of the values that Sir Ken has described.
And I wonder if you can tell us in your view what makes for a perfect school
and how does Isha or any of your schools address the natural longing in a human being to know?
Sadhguru : I'm glad that is no perfect school anywhere because
this aspiration for perfection is very death oriented.
It's something that most people have missed.
The nature of life is never perfect. Only death is perfect.
Never has death happened imperfectly.
Never has life happened perfectly.
If school is about life, then there is no perfect school.
Having said that,
as someone said,
not him somebody,
from England, no I'm seeing, I'm seeing him as representation of England.
Someone said that education is a necessary evil.
It is a necessary evil because there is a resident evil in the world.
We have very convoluted aspirations.
In the sense, largely most part of the education is trying to
manufacture cogs with a larger machine that we have built.
Our children are the fuel unfortunately.
We have to put them into some slot where they'll function well.
And when we see the world, world is no more about people,
the world is about the economic engine that we are driving,
it's become bigger than us.
We have to keep the engine going, we are scared to stop it for a moment.
We have to keep going.
Now, the problem is this that we have created a world,
if our economies fail, we will be depressed.
If our economies succeed, we'll be damned for good.
I feel it's better you're depressed.
Now talking about a school as a way of manufacturing cogs for the machine,
there are many ways to do it.
Every nation has its own system.
If I have to shape you into a particular shape
that you must fit into a particular machine, it's a cruel process.
But now we can't let the machine fail, it needs spare parts.
Constantly it has to absorb and
humanity is the spare parts.
So our children are the fuel and the machine parts which go into this to run the larger machine.
That's one aspect.
So this is why I have addressed education in three different dimensions,
which people around me are still trying to grasp why these three different things?
There is one form of education which is called Isha Vidhya,
I think they might have showed something about that.
This is for the rural masses in India where the problem is
they are in a economic and social pit which they cannot get out by themselves.
The only ladder for them is education.
Employment generating education.
But there are reasonably well-to-do people
where they might have gone through that in the previous generation
but this generation need not think about how to earn my living.
They have to look at how to expand who they are.
So we have Isha Home School which caters to that.
Because this kind of education costs money.
So only people who can afford it can do that.
Costs money means not like how it costs here,
by Indian standards it costs money.
And there is another form of education,
where people are not interested in serving this machine or that machine,
they want individuals to blossom, so we have Isha Samskriti
where there is no academic education of any kind.
They only learn music,
dance, art,
sanskrit language,
Kalari, which is a very .. the mother of all martial arts
and classical dance, classical music, yoga,
english language as a passport of the world.
So these children are a treat to watch.
This is how children should have been.
Just to give you a glimpse of what it is,
At the age of fifteen, for three years, they go into monastic life.
Compulsorily they must go and compulsorily they must come out at eighteen.
They cannot continue.
They'll take monastic life for three years, but after three years, they cannot continue,
they have to discontinue that and get back to normal life.
This is for discipline and focus.
So I was to initiate this fifteen year olds and
You know these sixty days, they are going through,
from morning 3:30 to 9:00 in the evening,
they are going through almost eitght hours of meditation, varieties of sadhana
completely silent for sixty days, fifteen year old kids, totally silent.
So I want to .. just another five days left for the initiation,
I want to see how they are and I go there at 3:30 in the morning to see them.
All these kids are just sitting like this unmoving.
I just looked at them and they were literally glowing.
I sat there and wept because I have never seen children like this in my life.
Definitely I was not like this when I was fifteen.
I was nowhere near what they are today
but you can't make the entire world like that.
This is an ideal to work towards.
The idea of this kind of schooling is
just to develop human body and human brain without any intention.
Without any intention as to what they should become.
They can become whatever they want.
Only thing is human body and human mind should grow to its fullest capability and
attention is the main thing.
An indiscriminate and unprejudiced attention is what we're trying to evolve in the children,
that they learn to pay attention to everything the same way.
That you don't divide the world as something as good and something as bad,
something high, something low,
something divine, something devil,
something filthy, something sacred.
No, you learn to pay the same attention to everything.
This is the fundamental of this form of education.
What will they do, what will they do is the aspiration,
so I guaranteed them one thing.
Twelve years, if you enter the school, the commitment is for twelve years.
You have to.. six if you come, eighteen you can leave.
So they asked me what will the children do.
I said one thing I'll assure you, we will not give you a certificate at the end.
They said 'Sadhguru, what?'
I said, 'Did anybody ask me what is my certification?'
Only in the American embassy they asked me, you know
when I almost .. about.. twenty years ago, or eighteen years ago
when I went to apply for the visa to come to United States,
the counsel general wanted to meet me.
She was a lady. I went to meet her and she said
"Yes I know what you have done and all this but do you have a yoga certification
because in America, you will need this"
I said "If I had asked for a certification from my guru, he would have killed me, so I don't have"
So I said no certification because doors in the world may open little slowly for you,
but when they open, they stay open.
Because not because of qualification, but by competence you open doors.