Shekhar Kapur: So, we’re talking about childhood, innocence and its relevance to us as adults.
Sadhguru: I don’t think a child is innocent. Oh, he can be very mean, okay? If he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll get very mean. The beauty of the child is he’s flexible. That’s all that needs to happen to the adult also. Not that he’s innocent, ignorant, this, that; that’s not the point, the point is that he’s flexible. That’s the most important aspect of the child. The same thing comes to the adult, he’s also fine. Generally, it’s become fashionable for people to say, ‘Like a child.’ Somewhere, they’re thinking adulthood is evil, childhood is a good thing… No. A child is just in the making. Adulthood is the real thing. Even so-called spiritual people go about saying, ‘I’m like a child.’ So I keep asking people, ‘Do you really want to be a child? Suppose, at the age of 6, your body and your mind stopped growing and you remained a child; is that a great thing? We’ll call you a retard. Isn’t it good you’ve grown out of your childhood? Because you made a mess out of your adulthood, you’re aspiring for your childhood. I think adulthood is great.
Shekhar Kapur: Do you think the children have that kind of perception that we then have to work towards? Do you think we need to uneducate ourselves? Do you think the normal processes of raising children that we go through in modern day life is actually lessening our ability to become greater human beings or more perceptive?
Sadhguru: No, Shekhar, the thing is, what you know is not the problem in your life. The more you know, the better it is, okay? That’s why you’re trying to know. But now you’re complaining knowing is a problem; I have to unlearn. No, I wouldn’t say that. Knowledge is not causing problem. You’re identified with what you know, that is what is causing the problem. If you learn to be not identified with what you know, all that you know, whether it is considered great knowledge or it’s considered filth on the street, both are useful actually to live a life, isn’t it? So, knowledge is not the problem. You get identified with every bit of information that you gather; that is the problem. Identity is the problem; knowledge is not the problem. So, somewhere when you say, ‘I want to be like a child,’ you are celebrating ignorance. And I am singing, ‘Asathoma Sadhgamaya’ and you are saying… No, knowledge is not the problem; knowledge is not the burden. Your identity is the burden. You get identified with limited things that you know. That is the problem.
I remember when I had a farm in Karnataka: at that time, in a village, there would be only one person who could read. Everybody would get their personal letters for him to read, you know. A wife wants to read a letter that her husband has written. A postcard comes. She goes to this man, and he has to read. So he reads and interprets it in a million ways that he knows. So, just literacy was a rare thing because the necessary infrastructure was not there. And it looked like a strange mystical thing, that somebody is able to look at the postcard and say all these things…it looked like a great, mystical thing.
Infrastructure for spirituality
It’s not difficult. Because we did not maintain that infrastructure of inward-looking in society, you did not cultivate that right from your childhood, now it looks like a faraway thing. Suppose you did not know how to read and write, if you look at a book and somebody looks at a book and saying all these things, would look like a mystical process, isn’t it?
We haven’t invested in that direction, so that’s exactly what we’re trying to build now – to a build an infrastructure of the spiritual process in the world; to give the necessary infrastructure because no society has invested enough towards the inner wellbeing of a human being. We have hospitals, we have schools, we have toilets, we have this, we have that, but we don’t have enough infrastructure for the actual wellbeing, the inner wellbeing of a human being. Because your wellbeing and whatever else you go through, your joy and misery happens within you, your pain and pleasure happens within you, agony and ecstasy happens within you. Everything that happens to a human being happens within you. So we have to create that infrastructure.