The Link #25 - Dear Friends

Never having felt the need to own a television, I sometimes listen to the radio. Recently there was a story about a city in the former Bosnia-Herzegovina where people of different origins and religions work peacefully together. They have kept the military out, though they lost 70 young people when a grenade exploded in the middle of a town festival. The mayor of the city was asked how he managed to get the citizens to work together. He replied, “With love.”

In April 2005, Brockwood Park was the venue for the International Trustees Meetings. Besides business meetings, there were many informal meetings, especially during mealtimes, when the conversations would become particularly lively and interesting. During one meal, Kabir Jaithirtha told me that Pandit Jagganath Upadhyaya, with whom K liked to speak, had asked K to put the teachings in one phrase. K replied: Where the self is, there is no love. Where there is love, there is no self.

Kabir and Alok Mathur run the Post-School Programme at The Valley School and the Centre for Teacher Learning, which should be taking its first candidates in June 2006 (see the article on page 54).

Another story I heard during the meetings involved a writer, Frank Waters, saying to K in 1972 that many of the people who had been listening to K’s talks, even for decades, seemed not to have changed. K’s reply began:

Krishnamurti: Yesterday, in the afternoon, I saw a group of people and one of them was quite young – she was probably in the first year of college – and she’s already caught and very conditioned in a peculiar self-satisfied, self-criticizing mode which gives her gratification, if you know what I mean, and it was very difficult to move her out of that little groove. And, perhaps that’s what happens with most people, don’t you think, that they start out wanting to find out, wanting to live differently, wanting to have a different kind of life, affection and all the rest, and suddenly find they are caught in a trap and can’t get out. And you are saying, are you, sir, that one needs a considerable preparation to understand what we’re talking about.

Walters: Yes.

K: I’m not at all sure. I know people in India, in Europe, and here who have set out deliberately “preparing themselves,” “studying,” “observing,” “meditating” – all these in quotation marks – and, somehow, though they think they have prepared themselves, it doesn’t seem to do a thing. I have friends whom I have known for forty years – if anything, they are far worse. Sir, is it a matter of preparation, or is it a quality of mind that has really gone through a great deal of trouble, a great deal of pain, and has not come to any conclusion nor put up any barrier, any resistances?

published in the Krishnamurti Foundation of America Bulletin No.76 © 2002 by Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

Regarding Brockwood Park, there was a very good article in the Financial Times (English edition) about The Krishnamurti Centre, ‘Rare Retreat without Restrictions’. Written by Harry Eyres, who visits the Centre out of his interest in K, it has brought some new guests to the Centre, mainly from the business world. If you would like a copy of the article, please write to Brockwood Park.

In my last Dear Friends letter, I mentioned visiting the ‘K class’ at Brockwood (see the article on page 40), where we were reading from The Beginnings of Learning. I found the following particularly significant:

You see, from an early age I have been living in other people’s houses and I have never had a place of which I could say, ‘This is my home.’ But there is a feeling that you are at home wherever you are because you are responsible, you are affectionate. Home is not a creation of sentimentality, it is a creation of fact – the fact that I feel at home. That is, I am free, I am responsible, I am affectionate. Total responsibility is the feeling of being at home.

Beginnings of Learning, pg.29
© 1975 by Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

The Saanen Gathering, which has been held in Schönried, Switzerland, for several years, this year took place in Chesières near Villars sur Ollon. K spent his holidays there in 1921, ’37 and ’57, staying at the Hotel Montesano. The building is still standing but has not been used for the past 10 years and is slowly decaying. Villars is surrounded by mountains and forests, with the town itself full of chalets and apartment buildings. It had a ski-lift by the 1930s, the first one in the Canton de Vaud, and a very early mountain-train. The view is wide open to the Dents du Midi and the Mont Blanc range.

The Gathering was as intense and interesting as ever, with Gisèle Balleys and her experienced, dedicated team running it with their usual quiet efficiency. Gisèle had invited several psychologists and psychiatrists with an interest in K, and the meetings were richer for their participation. In the end, of course, we were simply 80 people wondering about life together, seeing illusions, or not.

Jan Janda, a former Brockwood student, told me an interesting story over a meal one day. He was defending his thesis for a degree from the most liberal Czech university, all about creating a K school in the Czech Republic. He had researched and written not only about the educational core but also about the technicalities of government compliance. He went through every detail with his assessors, and felt rather good about his presentation, when the head assessor argued, “How can you be presenting this? Krishnamurti says that everything we’re doing is wrong!” His degree was denied.

Another former Brockwood student, Michael Rogers, has written a booklet, ‘The Undisciple’, about his time at Brockwood. He was the first student to pay his own school fees, with money earned playing music. His father – a military man, and Catholic – was skeptical about the school and made inquiries through his friends at the CIA and FBI. They told him not to worry: “People at Brockwood Park do nothing but talk.” When K heard this story, he laughed and laughed. Michael also writes:

... when it was time to purchase a place for the school in the late 60s, K’s associates got into a bidding war with none other than John Lennon, who was looking for a secluded mansion an hour from London. John easily outbid K’s people until one of K’s friends explained to him what K wanted to do with the land. Out of respect and admiration for K, John backed out and with the graceful guidance of Dorothy Simmons, Brockwood Park Krishnamurti Educational Centre was born.

Brockwood Park School recently underwent its most intensive government inspection ever, as all schools must do. The staff were nervous, as these officials could close the school down. However, after four inspectors scrutinized the place for four days, all was well. They called Brockwood “distinctive” and wrote, among other things, that it offers “high quality education ... with a strong and effective emphasis on environmental awareness. ... The daily routine provides frequent opportunities for pupils to contemplate, reflect and discuss. Acquisition of knowledge is accompanied by opportunities for pupils to develop their learning and thinking skills independently. ... Pastoral care is of a very high standard. Pupils conduct themselves with grace and courtesy around the school, are welcoming to visitors and convey a strong awareness of their responsibility to others.” The report can be read at http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/reports/ manreports/2838.htm. The school, after struggling for a few years, now has a full complement of students. Many of these delightful young people need scholarships, however, so any help with scholarship funds would be very much appreciated.

The same increase in interest has occurred at Oak Grove School in Ojai, California, where there is now a waiting list for the high school. Ellen Hall, the principal, and Paul Herder, head of teacher development, are working with teachers and interacting with students and parents to put greater emphasis within the school on Krishnamurti’s educational insights. Paul once worked with us on the Link team, helping students in London who had ‘dropped out’ to find their place again.

I recently came across a simple but fundamental statement on right education, from K’s third talk in Hamburg in 1956.

But through right education we could perhaps bring about a different understanding by helping to free the mind from all conditioning – that is, by encouraging the young to be aware of the many influences which condition the mind and make it conform.

So, is it possible to educate the mind to be aware of all the influences that now surround us, religious, economic, and social, and not be caught in any of them? I think it is, and when once we realize it, we shall approach this problem entirely differently.

The Collected Works, Vol. X, pg.83
© 1991 by Krishnamurti Foundation of America

Mark Lee, the executive director of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, told me that when they first opened Oak Grove School they put a big sign out front saying Krishnamurti Educational Centre. When K saw it, he was aghast and told them: Take it down! If I were a student or grandparent, I would be afraid. With some amusement, the sign was taken down.

Every year since 1993, Oak Grove School’s 8th graders have visited Baja California in Mexico. They go for nature studies and especially to see the grey whale migration. They camp on Magdalena Island, where they’re the only humans for 100 miles. Every year, a mother whale brings her new offspring to their boat and not only allows the students to touch it but actually lifts it up and pushes it towards them. At one point the boat almost capsized when the students all rushed to one side, and the mother whale, being right next to the boat, went under it and stabilized it.

I heard these stories when I was in Ojai in February 2005. I went there after having spent seven weeks in India and then a few days at Brockwood, similar to K’s travelling schedule. When K would come to Brockwood at these times, he would immediately call meetings with staff and students. I once met him then, when it was especially cold, with ice and snow all around, and he was almost blue after a walk. I asked Mary Zimbalist if he ever had jetlag, but she thought the cold was worse for him and that he wasn’t affected by jetlag as we are. She remembered one arrival at Malibu, after he had been awake for about 20 hours, travelling from Brockwood after India, and he immediately wanted to tell her everything that had happened in the three months he had been in India.

For me as a European, travelling in India is rather stressful. But, once I’m in a place, I enjoy it very much, seeing old friends and those wonderful people who work so loyally as servants – they seem to be the most permanent people at the K schools and centres. One of them, Gopalu, who worked for K and then Narayan (a former Rishi Valley principal), and who now looks after the new guesthouse at Rishi Valley, gave me a wonderful yoga mat to use. After some time I found out that it had been K’s, though it looked almost new.

Radhika Herzberger, Director of Rishi Valley, told us about the Madanapalle Communist party being interested in K and coming to meetings at Rishi Valley. This put me in mind of Donald Ingram Smith’s book The Transparent Mind – a Journey with Krishnamurti, where he describes a public discussion that K had with a communist leader in Sri Lanka. Called ‘I Am That Man’, it appears on page 20 of this issue of The Link.

Radhika also handed me a statement from the 1984 International Trustees Meetings, held at Brockwood Park that year, where K put the question to himself: If I were the Head of Rishi Valley School, what would I do? Part of his reply was: First of all, I would get all the villagers together, and explain to them that we’re going to have schools for their children. This was embraced over the years, and in 2004 Rishi Valley won the Global Development Award – a Japanese acknowledgement of “most innovative development project”. This was the first time that the award had been won by an educational institution, given in recognition of Rishi Valley’s contribution to rural schooling, including its teacher training programmes and the multi-grade, multi-level approach that they have developed for meeting the needs of the rural poor. Regenerating landscapes and conserving bio-diversity and local cultures are also built into the approach, which places children at the centre of classroom activities and works toward community ownership of the schools.

While in south India, I visited the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in the hills of Kerala. Suprabha Seshan, whom I got to know as a Brockwood student, has been working there for 12 years (see her article on page 27). In the 1970s, a ‘drop-out’ from Germany, Wolfgang Theuerkauf, settled there, and at that time it was an untouched part of the jungle. He lived there for seven years virtually as a hermit, without any means. During this time the farmers were moving farther and farther into the hills and Wolfgang witnessed that many of the plant and animal species were vanishing. From direct experience he learned about the plants – developing a special liking for the main species of orchids – and he collected them and re-planted them in what became, step by slow step, a new botanical garden. He created a large water reservoir for the garden, that also benefited the farmers, and now ten local women take care of the thousands of different plants. The Sanctuary has become one of the most important botanical sanctuaries and research stations in India. They now have courses for school students that last one or more weeks, “opening youngsters to the multiple dimensions of living through exposure to nature, natural history, the body and the senses, community life, enquiry, being on one’s own and reflection.” The Sanctuary, which is not involved in the trading of its rare plants and therefore has no income of its own, is supported by donations. Most of these are raised by Suprabha, and by Maryan Klomp in The Netherlands. I have helped the Sanctuary to purchase some of the surrounding land that had been in tea production, which was polluting the groundwater. The jungle is slowly re-growing.

Looking at it, it is fascinating how this project began. It started with Wolfgang’s decision not to live in the usual way. Yet neither did he try to translate an ideal into practice, nor did he have an ambition to do something ‘important’. He was no ‘achiever’. But we in our society, and it has been so for a long time, have made ambition and aggressive behaviour into a virtue, seeing them as necessary for realising any project. And the final consequence of such a point of view is conflict, is war.

The fourth edition of my memories of K, The Beauty of the Mountain, came out in 2005. I offered it to the K schools for their teachers, older students, and parents, and a fifth edition will be printed in order to meet the requests. There will be a few changes, including the addition of a Letter to Readers, part of which follows:

... I wrote The Beauty of the Mountain originally because K asked the people who were working with him, the trustees for example, if we could convey the perfume of what it was like to be around him. Of course, at the same time, he didn’t want us to be occupied with his personality but rather to use our energies to find out about ourselves. I also wanted to make sure that two of K’s important statements about the schools could always be found – ‘Brockwood Today and in the Future’ and ‘The Intent of Oak Grove School’.

A little while ago, a friend asked me what had touched me most about the teachings. After some reflection, I realized that it was something K had said during a talk and also in one of the discussions with David Bohm (that came to be part of The Ending of Time): Love has no cause.

When people now ask me what Krishnamurti was like as a person, the first thing I reply is that he was full of love and affection. I hope that in some way The Beauty of the Mountain is able to communicate this.

Harry Eyres, the Financial Times journalist who wrote the article about the Centre at Brockwood (see above), sent the following about The Beauty of the Mountain:

I think your memoir conveys the human side of K better than anything else I have read ... The sense of humour, the spontaneity, the practical and observant sides of his character ... and his gift for friendship and affection, all come through to make him less of the daunting impersonal “Speaker” and more of a flesh and blood man. I love the anecdotes about K’s relationships with animals and birds – his great and singular love of them – which I find especially affecting. I am glad you included the two statements about the Schools, which are so clear and inspiring.

In closing, the previous issue of The Link was beautifully printed in India (it used to be printed in Germany) and sent out from there slow mail in December 2004. It wasn’t clear how slow this slow mail would be, however, and if you ended up receiving the previous issue at the same time as this current one, please don’t be too surprised!

Friedrich Grohe, September 2005

New Photo Website

An updated catalogue of photographs by Friedrich Grohe, including those printed in The Link, can now be viewed online at www.fgrohephotos.com.

The website features slideshow viewing, a facility to order prints and posters and to send greeting cards, and links to the Krishnamurti Foundations and Schools.