Teaching Self-Knowledge and Worldly Knowledge Simultaneously

So we are asking: what is the relationship between the two, self-knowledge and education? We know what education more or less is, except there are exceptional schools. I don't know any but there are, let's hope for humanity's sake, there are exceptional schools. When do we ask this question, that is, 'I want to know myself'? When do we ever ask, if we are at all thoughtful, when do we ask it, do we ever ask it? Do we say, I must know myself, otherwise there is no education. When do we ask it? Q: When we suffer. K: When you suffer, no, do you ask? When do you ask? When you suffer. Then what takes place when you suffer? Do you say, why am I suffering? What is the root of suffering? Or do you say – please, I am just asking, I am not laying down law – or do you say, I want to escape from it, I want comfort, I am lonely, desperately lonely, I have lost everything, I have lost the person I thought I loved, I am left completely lonely in this world? Right? Then there is the suffering, and that suffering makes you seek comfort, rely on somebody, come to a conclusion, and so on and so on, turn to God, or whatever you prefer. So you really never ask yourself – actually, if you are truthful to yourself – never ask oneself, what am I, what is this? Right? Now we are saying, let us examine both and see their relationship, if there is such a thing as separate education and self-knowledge as something separate. I don't know if you see. Are the two things separate? You understand? We have divided it as education and self-knowledge. Then we try to find a relationship between the two. But I question very seriously whether the two are separate. Q: (Italian) K: You yourself – our friend says – you yourself have separated the physical, the psychological and so on. So, this leads to somewhere else, that is, is the psychological enquiry, does it affect psychosomatically? That is, if there is psychologically perfect health, psychologically perfect health in the sense: no conflict, sanity, no me and you, psychologically there is no division, that does surely affect the physical, one is much more healthy, vigorous, etc. So we are now asking, please: what is the relationship between the two, and is there a division at all between the self enquiring into what is the 'me' and education? Are you meeting this question? Right. How am I, as a teacher – not sitting on the platform, I don't mean that – in a school, how am I to convey to the student both the acquisition of physiological facts: knowledge, mathematics, history, geography and all the rest of it, and also in the very teaching of those subjects cultivate the enquiry to look at himself as the representative of all that. I wonder if I am making myself clear. If I am a teacher of history, how am I to help the student not only to know the meaning of history, which is the story of man, but also help him to understand himself who is the man. Are you catching what I am saying? Does this interest you? Or you say, for God's sake let's talk not about education because I have no children – just a minute sir – drop that subject, let's talk about personal problems? Which is it? Are you interested in this? Q: Yes. K: Be sure, because this is not entertainment. So how am I, a teacher in a school, to help him to understand himself through the subject which I am teaching, which is history? Right? We have talked a great deal about this in various schools so I'm rather good at it. Sorry, I didn't mean that. History is the story of man: the wars, the kings, the tyrannies, the so-called cultural evolution of man from the Stone Age, etc. How am I to teach him history so that through history he is understanding himself, which is the total development of man? Right? Now how am I to do it? If you are the teacher, put yourself in the position of a teacher, and how are you to teach history that way? Mathematics, or physics, anything? That's the only way to cultivate self-knowledge and at the same time acquire knowledge of various subjects, so that they are not separate, they are always moving together, flowing together.