How important is education of the self? || Acharya Prashant, with students (2014)

Acharya Prashant (AP): Over the last fifteen years or so of your education, what have you studied? You have studied languages, Hindi and English. You have studied history, politics, and geography. Then you got into maths, physics, chemistry, and now you are students of technology. This is what you have studied. This is what you mean by results.

Are you Hindi, English, or Sanskrit? Are you the laws of physics? Are you the formula in chemistry? Are you the theorems of mathematics?

Questioner (Q): No, sir.

AP: Too bad! Are you the rivers, mountains, and glaciers that you read of in geography? Are you the wars that the kings fought and their respective domains? Are you Akbar or Ashoka? Are you a software? Are you a hardware? Are you a motorcycle engine? Are you an electrical circuit?

This is what you have studied so far. Don’t you see that all these are things outside of yourself?

Somebody wrote the constitution and you are reading the constitution. You are studying how this tubelight works, but are you this tubelight? This is what your normal education has given you so far: knowledge about other things, objects. But are you other things? You are not other things.