The Link #25 - Krishnamurti on Living and Education

For me, the most intriguing aspect of K’s educational approach is the prima facie contradiction between his assertion that ‘Truth is a pathless land’ and his firm belief in education which has lead to the establishment of the schools. In the following lines I would like to offer a contribution to the understanding of K’s education by sketching briefly what I understand to be his views concerning the ‘purpose’ of education and the unique role of the dialogue between teacher and student. This discussion is an attempt to reconcile K’s insistence on the pathless nature of truth and his emphasis on the importance of an alternative educational way.

K distinguishes between two modes of the mind: the totally conditioned and the absolutely free. He refers to the former as consciousness, to the latter as intelligence. According to him, consciousness is determined by thought, which is divisive, and hence cannot touch truth. Consciousness is further determined by time; it is a movement from past to future which derogates the present, treating it merely as complementary to these two notions. The future itself can be seen as a reflection or modified continuity of the past; if so, consciousness is a movement from the past to the past. Consciousness is further determined by desire; it is, as K puts it, “an agglomeration of desire”. It is also depicted by K as equivalent to the known. Consciousness is knowledge, since knowledge is also a product of the past. Consciousness is a movement from the known to the known. Knowledge or the known is ever limited, never complete; therefore, so is consciousness. K further suggests that consciousness is never ‘individual’; it is not ‘mine’, but rather the ‘heritage’ of humankind. It is the psychological content or ‘the story’ of humanity, perpetually self-centered, divisive, conflictual, lonely, confused, envious, violent, suffering, etc. Like a computer, consciousness has been (and still is) programmed according to religious, nationalistic and other cultural agendas. According to K, consciousness is also transient; there is nothing permanent or eternal in it. Yet, unable to bear its own impermanence, consciousness invents a ‘permanent entity’, called ‘the thinker’. Thought divides itself into ‘thought’ and ‘thinker’, whereas in reality there is no difference whatsoever between the two. The thinker is not an independent entity, but rather a projection of thought, as conditioned as thought itself. The artificial notion of a permanent thinker carries with it an equally false sense of security.

Totally different from consciousness is intelligence, synonymous in K’s terminology with ‘the unknown’, ‘the immeasurable’, ‘nothingness’, ‘what is’ and ‘truth’. We are so habitual, identified, and dependent on the known, on the measurable, on ‘things’, on past and future, on what K metaphorically refers to as ‘smoke’, that we have completely forgotten the ‘flame’. The unknown cannot be grasped by consciousness; all the same, thought constantly tries to capture it. In its efforts, consciousness merely strengthens itself by gathering more and more content, words and fear of losing the known, the already accumulated. The more it tries, the more thought is strengthened, hence moving further away from the immeasurable. Only when the known comes to an end, to rest, to suspension, might the unknown be revealed.

In view of the above, the purpose of education for K is to clear away the smoke of selfcentricity, fragmentation, fear, confusion, loneliness, possessiveness, envy, violence, etc. – all belonging to consciousness, to the past – to enable the revelation of the flame, of the immeasurable. Now, the question is how? How to extinguish jealousy and possessiveness, to enable the flow of love? How to renounce the disciplined, past-centered mind in favor of spontaneity? How to be free from the known? How to find truth? K replies: “One cannot find it. The effort to find truth brings about a self-centered end; and that end is not truth. A result is not truth; result is the continuation of thought, extended or projected. Only when thought ends, there is truth. There is no ending of thought through discipline, through any form of resistance. Listening to the story of what is brings its own liberation. It is truth that liberates, not effort.”

For K, intelligence cannot be a result or an outcome of any action. Furthermore, education is depicted by him as an invitation to listen to the story of what is. Thought is constantly telling us another story, namely the story of what should be. The story of what is can only be listened to when thought is not. Explains K: “Thought has created all the things in the world – great paintings, poetry, music, and so on. Thought has created everything except nature. The tiger has not been created by thought, nor that lake which you see.” Thought is limited, nature is not. This is the reason why nature is given such an important role in K’s life and teaching. He himself has lived in nature; the schools are in nature; every page of his diaries starts and ends with nature-experience. For him, the tiger and the river, the tamarind tree and the moon, are the only authentic reflections of our human nature, not as depicted by thought but as it is.

Furthermore, the story of what is cannot be found in books. For K, books are the past; they reflect hierarchy and authority; they are ‘warehouses’ of accumulated knowledge, of old values. Intelligence has nothing to do with information; therefore it does not belong to, nor is it found in or derived from books. But if the immeasurable is not to be found in books, how are we to find it? Or rather, how are we to find in ourselves receptivity and awareness without which we shall not be able to distinguish the flame from the smoke?

Nature, as we have seen, is a ‘supportive environment’ for such a task. As supportive as the nature-experience is direct communication between teacher and student taking place at the present moment. As we all know, K has not merely spoken of immediate communication between teacher and student, but rather converted his belief in this unique encounter into action by offering numerous talks, meetings, question and answer sessions, all through his life and all over the world.

At the opening of many of his talks, K used to say: “The speaker is not giving a lecture; you are not being talked at, or being instructed. This is a conversation between two friends, two friends who have a certain affection for each other, a certain care for each other, who will not betray each other and have certain deep common interests. So they are conversing amicably, with a sense of deep communication with each other, sitting under a tree on a lovely cool morning with the dew on the grass, talking over together the complexities of life.”

K depicts both participants in the educational process as two friends (thus excluding any type of authority), sitting or walking together in nature, attentive to the world around them as well as to themselves. They are equal partners in their exploration. Both require the same qualities: openness, receptivity, sincere curiosity and willingness to meet life with all its complexity, to discover rather than repeat, to be creative rather than imitate, to change rather than renounce the world. They also require a great deal of seriousness, courage and, above all, eagerness to question, inquire, experiment. The first step in their mutual inquiry would be to find out what inquiry is all about. What does it really mean to question? What does it mean to inquire without being told what to inquire about? To observe without being told what to observe? This existential rather than theoretical or abstract inquiry, as already said, is about life and living in the world. “To understand life”, K maintains, “is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education”.

For K, as we have already seen, intelligence is not to be achieved or gained, but rather to be revealed, as it is always here and now. Therefore he says that it is “the beginning and the end of education”. The teacher-student communication is undertaken to awaken that which is already there, which is the very essence of each of them. Both are made from the same ‘material’; both start from a conditioned mind and have the capacity to transcend it, to find in themselves a ‘place’ (or rather ‘no-place’) which is free. The teacher’s task is to invite the student to ask questions, to provide an open environment and to be willing to engage in true inquiry. She or he invites and facilitates, but the inquiry is mutual. The student’s role is as active (in asking, listening, discovering) as the teacher’s. Regarding the difference between teacher and student, K ironically remarks that the teacher is already conditioned, while the student is still being conditioned. In a sense, the student stands in an ‘advantageous position’, as her or his ‘programming’ is not yet completed. On rare occasions, the teacher is completely free from conditioning (K being an illustration of the possibility); in other cases, the seeds of freedom are already there, to be nourished by the immediate communication of the participants in the process of education.

The teacher’s role and the nature of the teacher-student communication are further clarified by K in his response to a questioner in a talk at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 1984: “ The speaker says there is no suggestion. He is not offering you a thing; he is not telling you what to do.” Elsewhere K adds: “Clarity cannot be given by another. Confusion is in us; we have brought it about and we have to clear it away.” For K, the process of education is not based on exchange. He rejects the conventional model of teaching, according to which the teacher knows, the student does not know and the former conveys knowledge to the latter. The teacher – to use K’s own words – does not give the student a ‘thing’, but rather invites him or her to observe. The teacher cannot but persistently point out the problem. She or he wakes the student up, thus putting him or her in a position to face life with all its intricacies; then it is up to the student to deal with what is, arriving at her or his own solutions and way of action. By offering a solution, the teacher would take away rather than facilitate the student’s freedom.

Whether it was the more intriguing ‘confidence without the self’, or its better-known relation, it is hard to say, but by the second term Andy had begun to speak in the class. His contributions were generally short and perfunctory, but they were freely offered and were listened to with interest and respect by all present. As time passed he contributed more and more and began to engage with the text and the group in a manner that we could hardly have dreamt of in the first term. Other areas of his life in the School were also going better since his new programme came into effect. In the Krishnamurti Class the selfreflective, discursive format seemed to be growing on Andy and making him feel more at ease with himself and with the overall ethos of the School.

Finally, I would like to make an attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable, the ‘pathless land’ and the ‘path of education’. For K, as I read him, education is a ‘pathless path’. It is created spontaneously, at every step, by teacher and student alike. It is created every moment anew, thus leading from the present to the present. It is nothing less than an existential, even experiential, not at all theoretical way of living. The ‘pathless path teacher’ encourages the student to follow his own path, rather than providing him with any ‘answers’. His task is to invite the student to embark on the journey, hence equipping him with a chisel to craft his way through. He is always available, co-traveler on his own path, ever willing to sit under a tree, share a cup of tea and openly discuss the difficulties of the journey. But all the same, the student is alone, always alone, necessarily alone. Not lonely, but rather alone. His aloneness is his freedom. He is a light to himself!

(Quotations and references are from Commentaries on Living, First and Second Series; The First and Last Freedom; Tradition and Revolution; Why are you being educated?; Education and the Significance of Life; The Flame of Attention; On Education.)

Daniel Raveh, March 2005