U Thant the education-seer

Education is cultivation of knowledge. The outer world feels that world-information is enough for cultivation of knowledge. The inner world feels that there is only one kind of knowledge that can cure the ignorance-night which is humanity’s malady of millennia. The cure is called wisdom-light.

U Thant the education-seer illumines us about education, outer and inner: “In Asia, if I may say so, the traditional aim of education is to impress on the young the importance of the mind rather than the body, and even more basically, the importance of the spirit rather than the mind. Education thus becomes inward looking, and the aim of education is the discovery of one’s self rather than the discovery of things external to us.”

There are two aspects to reality: the body-reality and the soul-reality. The body-reality looks around for its satisfaction. The soul-reality looks within for its satisfaction. The Eastern approach or, let us say, the Asian approach to reality is to dive deep within and discover the soul and, thus, know everything and become everything. The other approach, which we may call the Western approach, instructs us to look inside the body-reality and around the body-reality to see what it really is and what it can contribute to world-success.