About Happy For No Good Reason

Introduction: My Second Education

Aim for heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither. — C.S. Lewis

"We are the most educated and affluent people in human history, the most literate, the most technologically proficient. We can replace one person's heart with another's we can fly people to other planets, and we can send tiny cameras into people's organs to inspect them from within. We are able, or will be able, to do almost anything in the physical world. However, we find this world stressful and demanding. We have trouble motivating our teenagers and keeping them away from negative influences. We find it difficult to control anger, fear, or depression. We are confused by the world within ourselves.

Our situation becomes intelligible if we recognise that we actually live in two different worlds simultaneously. One is the outer world of people and objects and the other is the inner world of thoughts and feelings. Each has its own laws and each has its own form of education. We have explored the outer world in detail, however we have neglected the inner world.

In my early life I was an academic, deeply involved in Western education. I call this form of conventional education, First Education or the 'knowledge' tradition. The focus of First Education is the outer world, on science and technology, facts, events and history. This knowledge education embellishes us but does not transform us. We can acquire more and more information and still have the emotional sulks and tantrums of a child.

Over the past 30 years I have been involved with what I call Second Education, or the 'wisdom' tradition. Second Education says that true happiness lies not in the outer world but within each of us. Not only that, it can be realised. The process of awakening to Second Education is called inner work. In all my years involved with institutions of higher learning, both as a student and a teacher, no one had ever spoken about conquering depression, overcoming fear and anger and attaining happiness and self-mastery. I learned so much about history and the stuff of the external world, but almost nothing about myself.

By contrast Second Education works on "being." It does not give much information in the usual sense, but it empowers us. It turns a weak person into a strong one, an unhappy person into a happy one, a confused person into a person of clarity and wisdom. Only through work on our being can such alchemy take place. Meditation is the bedrock of such change."

Swami Shankarananda