Spiritual Education

Secular education lacks a depth that makes a person whole. It gives us information for our minds and trains us to analyze, make associations between ideas, and explore new concepts so that we can think for ourselves. But until we adopt a spiritual education, whatever form that might be, we remain more or less something akin to computers. We can compute, compare, and make decisions according to the information we have. We can give prudent advice in areas where we have a lot of knowledge. We may create new ideas from a combination of ideas that we’ve obtained from somewhere else. But as to whether we can tap into something deeper in our core as human beings, that is uncertain.

 I am still surprised by people who are impressed by someone’s level of higher education. I guess they are impressed by the person’s supposed intelligence that the prestige of certain schools seems to imply. But being able to retain a lot of information or solve problems on a test does not tell me what this person values, how they cope in distress, or how they treat their relationships. A whole picture of a person contains these aspects of life. We are not born to simply write in the correct answers or develop mental acuity that can be used to produce something in society. Being a whole person requires tapping into a strength that arises in us when we struggle, when we are forced to let go of what we cannot control, when we realize that our drive for more is an attempt to avoid confronting the emptiness of a life without spirit. 

A spiritual education is the refinement of our spirit. It differs vastly for each person but one thing is the same. It maintains, as a pillar in our life, not what we can get out of this world to protect the self or to impress others, but a recognition that there is beauty and resilience in all that is going on. After this recognition, we make choices, hopefully with the help of the sound mental capacity that we developed through our secular education, but also understanding that what our ego thinks or the world thinks has the last word on the value or the state of life in which we find ourselves.