How Valuable is Our Education If We Never Discover a Higher and Wider Significance to Life?

Jiddu Krishnamurti is one of my biggest intellectual influences of all time — and that’s coming from someone who’s read more than 1,000 great books. Seriously, every sentence he uttered in one of his public talks that he gave all the world in the 50s and 60s was like a bomb that shattered the edifice of everything I was clinging to.

Krishnamurti was ruthless about conveying the importance of not having any beliefs (if you have beliefs, you’re just filtering everything new through what you already believe, and thus never actually learn anything), and all over the place in his writings you get bombs like these:

“Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.”

And this one:

“Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it?”

They’re simple sentences to understand, but they have massive, far-ranging implications, and really thinking through them could keep you busy for a very long time, profitably engaged in the process of becoming a fully alive and awake and aware human being.