Life is not a school examination where you go prepared. That’s why schools are so ugly – they don’t prepare you for life, they destroy all possibilities of life. Schools have to disappear from the world, and the colleges and the universities. They are anti-life. They believe in rehearsals. They believe in giving you fixed answers – as if there are fixed challenges! – the basic fallacy.

And one third of the life is wasted in the university. By the time you are ready with a PhD one third of the life has gone down the drain. And what are you ready for? You have simply bookish answers crammed into your head; you have become a computer. And now, with all that knowledge, whatsoever you do will be inappropriate!

A knowledgeable man has never been known to be appropriate – never. He always goes on missing the train; he is always late. He is never to the point – he cannot be. His arrows never reach the target – they cannot reach, because the target is moving! and his ideas of it are fixed.

Education no longer prepares you for life: it prepares you for death. Your universities are cemeteries where the past lives and goes on killing the present – and the future too. Education, as it is in the world now, is very reactionary. A totally different kind of education is needed – not that which simply goes on helping you to cram answers, but that which helps you to be open, which helps you to function from a state of not knowing.

Mm? – that’s what meditation is all about: a state of not knowing. Then whatsoever you do is going to be appropriate, because then you are no more the doer – then God is the doer. Then life itself is responding.

Just try to observe a few moments when you are spontaneous – they will give you such joy.

For example: somebody is drowning in the river, and you stand there and you think about it – “What should I do? What is appropriate?” If you are a Christian missionary, you will think this is a great opportunity to help and serve humanity – this is a way to reach heaven and be special there. And you repeat in your head all the quotes from the Bible, what Jesus has said – that service is the way to God…and you jump! You are not concerned with this poor human being who is drowning: you are concerned with your ego trip you call spirituality. You want to be virtuous.

This is so ugly! This spirituality, this religiousness, this service, is so ugly. It is not a spontaneous act, it is not out of your heart it is out of your head.