By manipulating effects we hope to bring about order and peace; but, unfortunately, it is not as simple as all that. Life is a total process, the inner as well as the outer; the outer definitely affects the inner, but the inner invariably overcomes the outer. What you are, you bring about outwardly. The outer and the inner cannot be separated and kept in watertight compartments, for they are constantly interacting upon each other; but the inner craving, the hidden pursuits and motives, are always more powerful.
—Krishnamurti, Ch 11, Commentaries on Living, Series 1
All those who are familiar with Krishnamurti’s teachings will know that one of his central concerns was the right education of children. In pursuance of this aim he established schools in India, England and the US. He also wrote, talked and discussed extensively with teachers, students and trustees of the Foundations he started, explaining his vision of right education. After he passed away, as part of the effort to keep his educational legacy alive, this Journal of the Krishnamurti Schools was started in 1997 as an annual publication. You are now reading its twenty-fifth volume. The contributors to the Journal have been mostly teachers of the Krishnamurti schools, as well as educationists and philosophers who are interested in Krishnamurti’s vision of education.
While the education of children was certainly one of K’s main concerns, the import and impact of his teachings were of course much wider. During the course of his ‘ministry’ of more than five decades, he gave hundreds of well-attended public talks spread over four continents and had dialogues with numerous persons from diverse backgrounds. Among his varied audiences there were many whose vision of life was fundamentally changed through having been in his presence or having knowing his teaching.
This year, 2020, being the 125th anniversary year of his birth, it was thought fitting that a special issue of the Journal be brought out and that contributions could be invited from persons whose lives and outlook had been deeply affected by K and his teachings. And that is how we have here a collection of eighteen articles from persons who are eminent in different fields of endeavour and have in their own unique ways engaged deeply with the teachings. Looking at the wide range of fields from which our eighteen authors come— education, academic philosophy, traditional religious teachings, management of organisations, concern with environment awareness and protection and so on—we may be led to ask whether there is any common theme with which they are all concerned.
On a close look at their writings, we find that there is such a common theme: all of them have seen that “the inner always overcomes the outer” and that “what you are within, you bring about outwardly.” This strand appears to run implicitly or explicitly through all the articles. Though the fields of endeavour of each of the authors in the outer world differ, their inner vision is the same: they all share the common insight that if we wish to bring about order in the outer world, it is of much greater and fundamental importance to establish order in the world of our inner experience, rather than simply aim to find solutions to ‘fix’ the problems in the outer world.
The essential difference between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ is that while the truths we arrive at about the outer world are conceptual, explanatory and representational, those discovered in the inner world are existential and transformational. Hence, inner transformation is primary while outer changes are secondary. It is with this inner existential transformation that all our authors, each in his or her own way, is concerned, as will be clear in going through the articles.
Keeping this in mind, we may look at the authors from the point of view of the backgrounds from which they come, without intending to tightly categorise or classify them. It is worth mentioning that we have among our authors those who come from the background of a traditional spiritual teaching—Chidananda Swami, Samdhong Rinpoche, Ravi Ravindra; there are those affected by the sheer presence of Krishnamurti—Friedrich Grohe, Gisèle Balleys; then there are those who write from the point of view of education—Satish Kumar, Tim Boyd and Meenakshi Thapan; there are some who bring in the rigour of academic philosophy—Hillary Rodriguez, Thomas Metzinger, Raymond Martin. Mark Edwards reflects a deep concern for humanity’s relationship with nature and the environment; there are some who have been concerned with nurturing and running organisations—Ananthapadmanabhan and Kiran Khalap. And finally there are the ‘unclassifiables’—David Skitt, Donal Creedon, Javier Gomez Rodrigues and Steve Smith.
In responding to the primordial questions, “who or what am I in this universe; what is my destiny and what is the ultimate destiny of humankind, and indeed of the world itself ?”, the mind is drawn in two different directions—the outer and the inner. During the last three centuries, the most intellectually active part of the human spirit has explored deeply and travelled far in the outer dimension of human experience. This exploration that took place primarily in the West had two great periods of creativity, in the seventeenth and in the early twentieth century. The scientific revolution, and technologies based on Newtonian mechanics and electro-magnetism, totally transformed the lives of people in ways unimaginable in pre-modern times. It has electrified millions of homes and made running water available in them. It has produced all our modern means of transport, led to the invention of a great number of labour-saving devices and cures for diseases previously thought of as incurable. Life expectancy of human beings has been greatly prolonged.
The revolutionary science of quantum mechanics has enabled the production of computers, cell phones, laser technology, the internet and much else. These are the devices that actually govern our everyday globalized world. From the humblest plumber who depends on his cell phone to get a call for a job to be done, to the best trained biologist or engineer or physician, modelling a system on a powerful computer, all rely on the applications of quantum theories. The banking system, international trade and investments, travel, the so-called ‘social media’, all depend on the virtual space of the internet. The economies of nations and the global economy of trade and commerce would collapse if ever the trillions of bytes in e-space were to vanish. We cannot now envisage or imagine what human life and society would be like if this were to happen. The ‘outer’ that K refers to in the passage cited above consists of all this and more.
In short, both classical Newtonian theory and quantum theory have created an Aladdin’s lamp which has delivered undreamt of power into the hands of human beings in the outer world. But sadly, this power has proved to be a double-edged sword. It has ‘conquered’ the natural world in order to deliver many benefits, but it has also enabled humankind to assault itself (as well as nature) with death, destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale.
During the two World Wars, between 100 to 200 million people died or were maimed or displaced through the use of machine guns and battle tanks, poison gas, the carpet bombing of civilians, ethnic cleansing, all topped by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the post-World war period, the violence has continued in ideologically inspired wars, local national wars, civil wars and in recent years in religion-based terrorism within and against nations. There is also the endemic problem of racism which erupts into overt violence from time to time. We now live in a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons (and also of course conventional weapons). Modern technology has enabled all this. While it has enabled millions to live comfortably and some to live in great luxury, many more millions who support these comfortable and luxurious lives themselves live in great poverty and often lead migratory lives moving from city to city far from home in search of work.
All this relates to the violence that has been endemic in human society. But simultaneous to this form of violence is the violence done to the natural environment by our technology-driven forms of living. No enumeration is needed of the ways in which the environment is being rapidly degraded and destroyed. This has increasingly become part of the common consciousness of thinking people all over the world in recent decades.
What, we may ask, is the fundamental cause of this environmental crisis? Here we recall that at the very beginning of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes, one of its pioneers, had said that he sought knowledge so that mankind could benefit by becoming “masters and possessors of Nature”. Francis Bacon, another philosopher of the seventeenth century roundly declared “Knowledge is Power”. He wished “to put Nature on the rack” to make her yield her secrets. The three master craftsmen who made Nature yield her secrets were Descartes himself (a philosopher and mathematician, originator of our now ubiquitous Cartesian coordinate system), who said, “I have described this earth and indeed the whole visible universe as if it were a machine”; Galileo who said that the “book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics” and Isaac Newton who said, “It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles…”. This is the threefold grid of Mechanism, Mathematics and Materialism, through which we continue to view the outer world. Children are taught in schools all over the world, tacitly or overtly, that the physical world is a machine made of inert matter functioning on mathematical principles. This is basically a vision of a Universe drained of any meaning or purpose. As Jacques Monod, the Nobel laureate in Biology, put it, “The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man … . Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” As Stephen Smith says in his article, it is clear that the modern world has lost its moral compass.
Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics who was also a spiritual thinker said of the quest for power, “I believe that this proud will to dominate nature does in fact underlie modern science, and … the anxious question presents itself to us whether this power, our Western power over nature, is evil.” In other words, Pauli was pointing out that the problem lies in the human mind itself and its approach towards Nature, in the inner and not in the outer dimension of the mind.
Most thinking persons across the world would agree that there is now an unprecedented crisis in human affairs. Many would also say that the resolution of the crisis has to be sought in more intelligent use of natural resources, better international laws and controls to prevent wars between nations, better legislation to prevent racial and religious conflicts in societies and so on.
Enter Krishnamurti. For him, the crisis is a more fundamental one. It is a crisis in human consciousness itself (as Pauli the scientist too suggested) and unless it is resolved at that level, there will be no end to the conflict among human beings and to the destruction of Nature in which all life forms live, move and have their being: “the inner always overcomes the outer.” As Donal Creedon puts it dramatically and beautifully in his article, “Before the axe has cut the tree down, it is already destroyed by the eye.” Hence the seeing eye and the ‘seer’ have to change for any fundamental change to take place. The authors in this volume describe how seeing this truth has affected their outlooks and changed their ways of living and working.
Swami Chidananda comes from a background of long study of the Advaitic (non-dualistic) teachings of Vedanta, which teach how the ego process obscures the seeing of ‘things as they are’, (the ‘what is’ in Krishnamurti’s language), and how the obscuration can be removed by the process of negation (Neti-Neti). Chidanada sees in K’s teachings this process of negation expressed in profound and timeless insights couched in contemporary terms. At the core of K’s teachings is the concern with dissolving the separative self which is also the concern of the teachings of Advaita.
For Samdhong Rinpoche, who comes from a lineage of respected Tibetan Rinpoches the significance of K’s teachings lies in his mission to awaken the humane in our intelligence, which is buried beneath many layers of conditioning. Our task is to uncover these layers of conditioning and discover our inner nature which can be done by paying close attention to what K was saying. He finds that there is an essential similarity between the teachings of K and of the Buddha, in that they both stand for free enquiry into the nature of the self without holding on to any fixed position.
Ravi Ravindra in his article refers to the general impression that K was against all traditional religious teachings. However, during many conversations he had with him, it became clear to him that K was not against the essential core of these traditions but was against the betrayal of this core by the official keepers of traditions, who adhered to the words of the tradition but forgot the essence which was beyond words. This article points to many parallels between K’s teachings and those adumbrated in the Upanishads and other non-dualistic traditional teachings.
Friedrich Grohe had been strongly drawn to the teachings of K even before he met him; but when the meeting happened, something else also happened. For the first time someone could convey to him “a sense of the sacred—the holiness of life.” He describes how this realisation totally changed the course of his life. He became a vegetarian and gave up whatever interest he had in running the family business. He became a trustee of the Indian and English K Foundations, and has been totally involved in supporting the Krishnamurti Schools and Centres and in efforts to make K’s teachings better known worldwide.
Gisèle Balleys’ article is a piece of poetic writing. Listening to Krishnamurti’s talks in Saanen, Switzerland, proved to be a turning point in her life. For in his presence she became aware, as she puts it “that something completely new was arising in me, something very ancient, something which did not even seem to be related to Krishnamurti but was within me.” After this her life changed radically. After six years in the K school at Brockwood in England she was drawn into the work of organising the annual Saanen gatherings. She continues to take the main responsibility for this even after K passed away.
Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk and founder of Schumacher College in the UK, finds that modern education has become a matter of training the brain function alone so that the recipient of this training could fit into the market economy, “serving the needs of machines, markets and money.” This leaves the other faculties of the child—emotion, moral judgement and bodily health—starved of nourishment. From meeting K and questioning him about his vision of education, he learnt of a ‘new pedagogy of freedom’, in contrast to the prevailing ‘pedagogy of fear’ which produces millions of young people who feel “inadequate, incompetent and fearful” in today’s world.
Tim Boyd, the current International President of the Theosophical Society, too has been involved in the founding of an educational institution—The Adyar Theosophical Academy. In asking the question ‘What is education?’ and ‘How do we educate?’, he finds inspiration in K, who “envisioned a world of psychologically free individuals—people capable of responding to life in an effortless manner, beyond the laboured, thought-laden processes of a thoroughly conditioned mind.” He discovers that “true education…[is] a process of unlearning”.
Meenakshi Thapan, who as a young student had the opportunity to spend some days in K’s presence, learnt the vital truth that the transcendental sacred dimension does not just lie ‘out there’, but is immanent in the everyday world of our relationships with others and with Nature. The task for us is to live in the light of this vision, expanding the boundaries of the self, outward towards the whole of humanity, and developing a global outlook. She finds that schools and teachers need to develop an ethos which, in spite of the seemingly all-powerful separative pull of the individual self, nurtures the innate goodness of the child and “engenders empathy, compassion and humanism.”
Hillary Rodrigues, a professor of Religious Studies, discovered K early in his life. Disenchanted with the inadequacy of science to point to any meaning in life, he serendipitously came across a book by K which spoke to his need for meaning. He found K speaking in clear language to his own condition, pointing to the need for a profound transformation at the centre of one’s being. As a researcher and professor, he now shares through his books, reflections on the teachings from various perspectives and remains committed to deeply exploring K’s teachings.
Thomas Metzinger, a cutting-edge philosopher of consciousness, is convinced that K was the greatest mind he has ever met, a conviction that rests on a feeling that K’s ‘presence’ itself ‘conveyed something’ non-verbally. He draws our attention to “the dawning insight that ‘observing without an observer’ might actually be something that already happens all the time.” Metzinger explores the many ways in which we block such pure observation by creating all kinds of self models which “fragment the ever-present space of the observation-without-an-observer into an individual first person perspective.”
Raymond Martin, who has edited the book of talks and writings by K, titled Reflections on the Self, sees a similarity between Socrates and Krishnamurti, in that both were questioners of all received wisdom and authority. However, while Socrates’ questioning was by means of ‘critical thinking’, K’s has to do with what Martin calls ‘critical looking’. The difference lies in the fact that in such looking we look beyond the thinking mind into the very way we think, into the content of our consciousness. Martin states that K’s “intention was to engage with people who are passionately interested in understanding themselves and the world in which they live” and in his opinion he “succeeds in this as few others have.”
Mark Edwards, listening to K as a young person, was struck by his assertion that there is no such thing as ‘psychological evolution’. An examination of the entire gradualist approach to so-called human ‘progress’ and its consequences shows that the material progress of the Industrial Revolution has not led to any fundamental enrichment of human life. It has on the other hand come at a terrible cost to humanity, evidenced by its “headlong collision with nature” and the “gathering collapse of our life support systems.” A celebrated photographer, Mark has been a single-minded crusader, bringing to attention the outward as well as inward dimensions of this crisis. His involvement with K and with physicist, David Bohm, leads him to affirm that the amelioration of this crisis needs both ‘going upstream’ to observe how thought is working in a fragmented way, as well ‘coming downstream’ to find practical solutions to immediate problems
Ananthapadmanabhan (Ananth) took serious heed of K’s contention that “the outer and the inner cannot be separated and kept in watertight compartments, for they are constantly interacting upon each other.” In the ‘outer’ field he has been an ardent activist, having headed several organizations—the Indian branches of Greenpeace and of Amnesty International and Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives. Every work context he has been in has been the ground in which to explore K’s teachings. His special concern has been that of discovering the proper functioning and use of thought and feeling in building and nurturing organizations that seek to change the world.
Kiran Khalap’s chance discovery, while still a college student, of a book by K created a storm in his mind. He decided to become a teacher and gave himself up totally to teaching and living with young students at the K school in Varanasi. Life circumstances compelled him to return to his father’s profession as a commercial artist and copy writer. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the advertising world, eventually founding his own brand management company. Kiran recounts his journey, and his deep concern for running an organization on principles he had learnt from Krishnamurti’s teachings: of working together with responsibility and without rigid hierarchical controls.
In Donal Creedon’s short poetic piece, the young hero in the old Irish tale has lost sight of “a silver branch of seeing” revealed to him in a dream which will lead him to the source of the living waters. He does not know where or how to look for it, but nevertheless he has somehow to find it. We too do not know how or where to look to find the living waters. We have forgotten the art of right looking and have been looking in a wrong way, the way of looking of Descartes, which looks upon the world as made up of pieces of dead inert matter. The world thus becomes just grist for the gigantic world industrial-economic mill which serves the insatiable greed of the consumer society. No outward actions such as ecological movements, climate change protests, feminism and so on can save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. A fundamental change can take place only when we look into ourselves and undertake the solitary journey of selfknowledge, and through that cleanse the doors of our perception and learn to look anew. Then perhaps the divine face of the world will reveal itself to us.
David Skitt, as the editor of several volumes of K’s talks and dialogues, has engaged with a vast volume of his works. In his article he distils his learnings from the challenges posed by K—the challenge of going beyond the animal survival instinct in the face of life situations; the challenge of going beyond the image-making process in relationships; the challenge of realizing human predicaments as being common to all; and finally, the challenge of seeing through the illusions created by the separative self. In trying to meet these challenges to the best of our abilities, our feelings of alienation in an indifferent universe can perhaps end, so that we start to feel at home in it.
Javier Rodrigues’ article is a cogent rendition of the major themes in K’s teachings, which he sees as an ‘education for mankind’. One major theme in the teachings is that ‘where there is division there must be conflict’. No amount of environmental manipulation will solve the conflicts caused by our identifications with collectivities, ideologies, traditions and so on, for as K has pointed out, the inner invariably overcomes the outer. This leads to the realization that only the deepening of self -knowledge has the potential to resolve these conflicts. Towards the end of his article he says that K’s “grand vision of freedom and wholeness is characterized by the greatest simplicity and immediacy, for it is founded on pure perception”. For him, this restores the true meaning of religion, and helps in discovering the inward or spiritual dimension which K called the religious mind.
To Stephen Smith it is clear that the modern world had lost its moral compass. The march of Science had resulted in a value-free world which has turned into a value-less and meaningless world. In the history of mankind, we have now reached a moment of existential crisis, a do-or-die moment and it has been Krishnamurti’s role to awaken mankind to the dire nature of this crisis. The message of universal compassion of the Buddha and Jesus Christ had elevated mankind to a certain extent but now it is the time to take another existential leap. The courage to take this leap comes when, taught by Krishnamurti, our intelligence awakens and in act of immediate perception we grasp the whole in which the part which includes thought, naturally finds its place. Everything depends on this clarity. No outward action is adequate. With this immediate perception we recover our moral compass and discover the Dharma, the moral foundation of the Universe and our Svadharma, our own place and role in it. We can now respond to Krishnamurti’s call to “incarnate now!”.
At the conclusion of these reflections can we “look at things as they are”, at “what is?” When we do that, we find ourselves staring at the face of the Covid crisis. Do the origins of this crisis lie in ‘the outer’ or in ‘the inner’ or in the interaction of the two? Did the virus jump from an animal species to the human spontaneously, or was the jump caused by a deep inner imbalance between human beings and the rest of the natural world? It seems that these questions cannot be answered with full certainty at the present moment. However, it is clear that action in the ‘outer’ sphere is urgently needed by way of a cure for the disease and for preventing its further spread. While all attention now is focussed on finding the outward cure, the need for looking inward forces itself on our attention. For the first time in recent history millions of people worldwide have been brought to realize that death is a real and immediate possibility on which we need to meditate. Death can no longer be looked at as something which is the end point of life that can be put off indefinitely by the miracles of modern medicine. Will this realization make us feel deeply the beauty and precariousness of life, so that we pay more attention inwardly, gain a little more clarity of mind and develop a little more charity in our dealings with others?
*Krishnamurti, Ch 36, The Whole Movement of Life is Learning