Stop Trashing the Western Culture, Instead Learn From Them
Questioner: Namaste Sir. My name is Dev Ranjan. I am a third-year B.Tech student. As we all know, India recently celebrated its 75 years of independence. And as a citizen, I see developed countries of the U.S, U.K. and those of in Europe which are better developed and have a better income and this was driven through materialistic ways. How can India as a developing country use spirituality to become a developed country?
Acharya Prashant: You see, that which you are calling as the materialistic approach is nothing wrong, actually. It's just that it might not be complete. But there is a big difference between something being wrong and something being incomplete.
Vedanta is very clear about it. Education must necessarily consist of two components — the first component or the lower component is called avidya or aparavidya. It's to do with the world, the material world. The thinkers, the seers said very clearly — If you do not know the material world, you will be condemned to fall into a deep and dark place. It is extremely important that you understand what this world that you experience through your senses is all about. Therefore, Science as we know it, is very important and very useful. You cannot just brush it away by calling it materialism.
India suffered a lot because it did not pay adequate attention to material advancement. And the sages say both things. On one hand they say — If you ignore material education, you will suffer. And then they say — If you ignore inner education, again you will suffer.
But out of these two and this is coming from a spiritual book, therefore it becomes all the more significant.
They say, out of these two kinds of sufferers, the one who suffers due to the absence of material education and the one who is ignorant about the inner self, one who does not have inner education, who is the one who suffers more? What do the Upanishads say?
They say — the one who does not have material education, he suffers more. You will go to a bad place if you do not have inner education which you usually call as spiritual education. But if you do not have worldly knowledge, you will go to a worse place.
And then the Upanishads say — If you have both, then you will never be afraid; you will never be conquered; you will be such a winner that even death will not be able to terrify you. You must have both.
There is a lot that we need to learn from the West. We have paid a price already in our history. When the British came here with relatively small armies, they were able to defeat the various Indian armies. They fought a lot of battles here. In most of the battles, the British were outnumbered. Their armies were relatively smaller and still they could win. There were many reasons, obviously. But one of the reasons was that their technology was more advanced. And if you lose the various battles or various kinds of freedom, what is now left to save when freedom itself is lost?
And freedom has many aspects. Each of those aspects requires preservation, security, defense. A lot of that requires you to be materially strong. At the same time, we very well know that the West itself is suffering due to a lack of inner knowledge, spiritual education. And because the West did not pay adequate attention to that aspect, they themselves have landed in a big mess.
You look at the climate crisis today — ninety percent of the crisis is attributable to the developed western first world. It could be said that lack of inner education is one of the important reasons why the west has become such a threat. Not only to itself but to the whole world. Not only to mankind but to all the species that inhabit this planet.
It is very difficult really to say which one is a bigger problem — to not to have material knowledge or not to have knowledge of the self, knowledge of the mind, knowledge of who you really are from the inside?
If you do not have material knowledge, you will fall prey to all kinds of superstitions. If you do not have inner knowledge, you will start considering yourself as the only thing that exists and matters. And that your body and everything that arises from the body, like thoughts and emotions will be your masters then. It will be another kind of slavery.
Do you see what happens when you do not have knowledge of the world? Then somebody from the world will arise and enslave you. And if you do not have knowledge of yourself, then your own evil tendencies will enslave you. In either case, you will be condemned to be a slave.
Who wants to be a slave? Nobody.
And which slavery is worst? To be enslaved by somebody outside of you or to be your own slave? Both the slaveries are equally bad. Depending on the context, one could say, one is worst than the other. But we do not want to choose here. We want to dismiss both of these threats.
So, our educational institutions must have both. On one hand, obviously you must have the state of the art teaching facilities and laboratories. Our teaching institutions should be focusing equally on research and we should be generating papers and patents. At the same time, we should have humanities departments, very rich humanities departments, even in courses of professional education and basics of philosophy, psychology. When I say philosophy, I definitely wish to include the Indian philosophy, the various darshans that we had.
So, you all as students of professional courses must be exposed to that as well. However, by that, I do not in any way wish to take away the importance of professional, technical education. Science is extremely important. Mathematics, the various humanities, the arts, all of them are very very important.
Along with them, we must also have courses that deal with life. Courses that educate a young person in what it means to exist and what it means to relate — the very question of identity, the question of values, the question of the right relationship between the self and the world. There must be an entire department dedicated to this. If that is not there, there will be problems.
The West is already facing those problems. We do not want to follow the West in this respect. We want to take the best from everywhere. We do not want to repeat somebody's mistakes, do we?
