education and conformity

Question: What are your ideas about education?

Krishnamurti: I think mere ideas are no good at all,  because one idea is as good as another, depending on whether the mind accepts or rejects it.  But perhaps it would be worthwhile to find out what we mean by education.  Let us see if we can think out together the whole significance of education, and not merely think in terms of my idea, or your idea, or the idea of some specialist.

Why do we educate our children at all?  Is it to help the child to understand the whole significance of life, or merely to prepare him to earn a livelihood in a particular culture or society?  Which is it that we want?  Not what we should want, or what is desirable, but what is it that we as parents actually insist on?  We want the child to conform, to be a respectable citizen in a corrupt society, in a society that is at war both within itself and with other societies, that is brutal, acquisitive, violent, greedy, with occasional spots of affection, tolerance and kindliness.  That is what we actually want, is it not?  If the child does not fit into society – whether it be communist, socialist, or capitalist – we are afraid of what will happen to him, so we begin to educate him to conform to the pattern of our own making.  That is all we want where the child is concerned, and that is essentially what is taking place.  And any revolt of the child against society, against the pattern of conformity, we call delinquency.

We want the children to conform; we want to control their minds, to shape their conduct, their way of living, so that they will fit into the pattern of society,  That is what every parent wants, is it not?  And that is exactly what is happening, whether it be in America or in Europe, in Russia or in India.  The pattern may vary slightly, but they all want the child to conform.

Now, is that education?  Or does education mean that the parents and the teachers themselves see the significance of the whole pattern, and are helping the child from the very beginning to be alert to all its influences?  Seeing the full significance of the pattern, with its religious, social and economic influences, its influences of class, of family,  of tradition – seeing the significance of all this for oneself and helping the child to understand and not be caught in it – that may be education. To educate the child may be to help him to be outside of society, so that he creates his own society.  Since our society is not at all what it should be, why encourage the child to stay within its pattern?

At present we force the child to conform to a social pattern which we have established individually, as a family, and as the collective; and he unfortunately inherits, not only our property, but some of our psychological characteristics as well.  So from the very beginning he is a slave to the environment.

Seeing all this, if we really love our children and are therefore deeply concerned about education, we will contrive from the very beginning to bring about an atmosphere which will encourage them to be free.  A few real educators have thought about all this, but unfortunately very few parents ever think about it at all.  We leave it to the experts – religion to the priest, psychology to the psychologist, and our children to the so-called teachers.  Surely, the parent is also the educator; he is the teacher, and also the one who learns – not only the child.

So this is a very complex problem, and if we really wish to resolve it we must go into it most profoundly; and then, I think, we shall find out how to bring about the right kind of education.

~ Krishnamurti, from his second talk in Brussels (June 25th 1956)

though we strain

And yet, though we strain

against the deadening grip

of daily necessity,

I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?

Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers

interweaving their fragrances

or streets, as they wind through time?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(from: Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

one moral duty

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty:

 to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, 

more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. 

And the more peace there is in us, 

the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. 

~ Etty Hillesum

from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries

 with thanks to louie, louie

Hillesum suffers great inner turmoil during her young adulthood, but increasingly transforms into a woman of maturity and wisdom. She writes: "Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the same time. The two are in balance, everywhere and always. I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is. Every situation, however miserable, is complete in itself and contains the good as well as the bad." In touch with the equilibrium of a bigger picture she is aware of, she continuously draws from this place to find meaning in her current reality.

Her diaries record the increasing anti-Jewish measures imposed by the occupying German army, and the growing uncertainty about the fate of fellow Jews who had been deported by them. As well as forming a record of oppression her diaries describe her spiritual development and deepening faith in God.

On 7 September 1943, the family were deported to Auschwitz. Etty died there on 30 November 1943.

 ~ Wikipedia

part of each other

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated - in the main, abominably - because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks - though we are rarely what we appear to be.  We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment.

But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white.  We are a part of each other.  Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I.  But none of us can do anything about it.  

~ James Baldwin

from Freaks and American Ideal of Manhood

 

content to be lost

Desert and void. The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be "something." It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return "nowhere?" But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.

...

 The ALL is nothing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be ALL. This precisely is the liberty I have always sought: the freedom of being subject to nothing and therefore to live in All, through ALL, by Him who is ALL.  In Christian terms, this is to live "in Christ," for the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where He pleases, and He is the Spirit of Truth.  The "Truth shall make you free."

But if the truth is to make me free, I must also let go my hold upon myself, and not retain the semblance of a self which is an object of a "thing." I, too, must be no-thing. And when I'm no-thing I am in the ALL, and Christ lives in me.




~ Thomas Merton
from Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
sketch by the author

nowhere

They are to be admired those survivors

of solitude who have gone with no maps

into the room without features,

where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,

no path of danger to a cold summit

to look back on and feel exuberant,

no clarity of territories yet untouched

that tremble near the human breath,

no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores

to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,

no friendship of other explorers

drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship

of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior

space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,

where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human

and a poultice of silence pulls every sound

out of circulation down into the ground,

where in the panic of being each breath unravels

an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,

shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,

where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard

without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring

is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

love many things

Vincent had been in love with and proposed to several women, all of whom rejected him. 

After so many failed relationships, Vincent eventually came to accept his fate.

"I believe that certainly it’s better to bring up children than to expend all one’s nervous energy in making paintings, but what can you do, I myself am now, at least I feel I am, too old to retrace my steps or to desire something else. This desire has left me, although the moral pain of it remains."

 

Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of lasting romantic involvements, an expanded idea of the concept of love developed which seems to be revealed to us in several of Vincent's letters to his brother Theo.

"Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I love? No, no reckoning; one loves because one loves. Then we keep our heads clear, and do not cloud our minds, nor do we hide our feelings, nor smother the fire and light, but simply say: Thank God, I love."

"Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored."

"Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more."

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!"

"The best way to know God is to love many things."



 ~ Vincent Van Gogh
with thanks to Brain Pickings and www.vangoghmuseum



 
Vincent at age 19

 

the inner ground

The way to find the real "world" is not merely to measure 

and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground.  

For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self... 

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present 

at once to my own self and to freedoms of all other men,

 is not a visible, objective and determined structure 

with fixed laws and demands.  

It is a living and self-creating mystery 

of which I am myself a part, 

to which I am myself my own unique door.

~Thomas Merton

from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 
 by
James Finley

other nations

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

 Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, 

man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge 

and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. 

 

We patronize them for their incompleteness, 

for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.

 And therein we err, and greatly err. 

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

 In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, 

gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,

 living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, 

they are not underlings; they are other nations, 

caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, 

fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston
from The Outermost House

the still point

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity.
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.




~ T.S. Eliot
from Burnt Norton, #1 of  "Four Quartets"

the mind that frees us or enslaves

It is the mind that frees us or enslaves.

Driven by the senses we become bound;

Master of the senses we become free.

Those who seek freedom must master their senses.

When the mind is detached from the senses

One reaches the summit of consciousness.

Mastery of the mind leads to wisdom.

Practice meditation.  Stop all vain talk.

The highest state is beyond reach of thought,

For it lies beyond all duality.

~ The Amritabindu Upanishad

kind

I hadn't noticed

till a death took me outside

and left me there

that grass lifts so quietly

to catch everything

we drop and we drop 

everything.

~ Leonard Nathan

wild rose

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,


suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only a shade,


and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.




~ Wendell Berry
photo by Bryan Griffith