This brief article is the product of a perspective that incorporates a number of streams through which I have experienced Krishnamurti’s message—as a beneficiary of Krishnamurti’s life and teachings, a member, now President, of the Theosophical Society, and one who has recently participated in the founding of an educational institution (The Adyar Theosophical Academy) motivated by the Ageless Wisdom teachings. All of these found a powerful contemporary voice in J. Krishnamurti. Unless one counts his many videos, audio recordings, and books, I was never in his presence. However, I have had a sense of being with him through stories and conversations with many people who worked closely with him, sat with him and discussed, shared ideas, and recited with him his beloved mantras.
The importance to me of this blended perspective is that it places K in a continuum of unfoldment. From childhood to the completion of his life, there is a dramatic unfoldment of his message and capacity to share. Being a member of the Theosophical Society roots K in a context that adds a certain richness to his message. K’s first little book, widely read, was written at the age of fourteen—At the Feet of the Master (AFM). Although many would say that the book was the product of a ‘highly evolved’ young man, there is no doubt that it is the product of youth with all its advantages and limitations.
The book is a summary of things that were told to K by someone he regarded as a teacher. The teaching presented in it was not new, having been expounded by Sankaracharya in a different language more than a thousand years earlier. Krishnamurti’s addition to the material was the simplicity and unelaborated expression of a young mind which gave it clarity and immediacy. Essentially, it was a repetition of someone else’s thought, thoughts which profoundly resonated with him, but which could not be called original. AFM was a description of a path leading ‘from the Unreal to the Real’ involving four specific ‘qualifications’ of mind and behaviour—Discrimination, Desirelessness, Good Conduct (also known as Satsampatti), and Love.
It was at this initial stage of K’s unfoldment process that many members of the TS, others around the world, and I first encountered him. And it was from these youthful beginnings that an attempt has been made to follow the increasingly original and demanding nature of his message. Although later in life his sense of connection to his previous line of thought diminished, even losing the memories of that other time, the central core around which his lifetime of teaching revolved was always the movement from ‘the Unreal to the Real’.
To teach is to communicate in a manner that effects change. K focussed on nothing less than liberation, an ‘unconditional freedom’ that is only possible as one becomes free from obscuring emotion and thought—what the Buddhists describe as ‘afflictive emotion’. Freedom is not teachable, neither is liberation. But the cultivation of the observant mind that explores, questions, and is comfortable with stillness is something that can be communicated. The problem for developing educational models capable of this type of teaching is that a different approach to teaching and learning is required—one that involves both teacher and student in a common dynamic.
In the language of Maria Montessori we, “educate the human potential”. The Theosophical Society was founded with three main objects, of which the most important was, in the language of 1875, ‘Brotherhood’, or ‘Unity’ and ‘Oneness of life’. One of the other objects relates to the investigation of ‘powers’ latent in human beings. Frequently these powers have been interpreted as psychic in nature, an idea which, while true at a certain level, diminishes a deeper understanding. What might be thought of as paranormal becomes completely normal for anyone who attains a certain level of insight.
Krishnamurti, though endowed with such abilities, rightly rejected the desire to place any focus on them, seeing them as yet another binding, personal distraction from a genuine understanding. The real powers, the powers worthy of an educational effort are utterly different in nature. Compassion, truthfulness, kindness, meditation, courage are the powers latent within us— powers which our relentless conditioning has relegated to the realm of ‘potential’, ‘latent’, and inactive. But what can we do about it?
The question which K asked, and which we are asking as we begin our educational attempt, is ‘What is education?’, and the corollary question of ‘How do we educate?’ A literal sense of what it means to educate is the direction of our effort. Most of us who have had the experience of formal education share a common background of experience. From its earliest stages the process involves a separative approach of teacher and student in which it is the student who is to be acted upon. He is lacking in knowledge and must be filled. She is unacquainted with proper behaviour and must be shaped. They must be periodically tested to ensure that their conditioning is effective. They are compared and rewarded according to the degree of their demonstrated embrace of this conditioning. Furthermore, they are trained to fear the consequences of inadequate acceptance, or ‘inappropriate’ questioning of this teaching process.
By the time we arrive at the higher levels of institutional education we have not only become fully adapted to this process, but find we have developed a certain dependence, a vested interest in furthering this approach. Our career, acceptance in the community, even our sense of self-worth become so intimately linked to the conditioned view of who we are and what is of value, that any movement in an alternative direction can be fearful. Although it is a problem faced at different stages of life, often in middle age one starts to feel with an increasing severity that neither the training of a lifetime, nor the path on which it has placed us, has led to happiness. One starts to feel that, throughout the process, no guidelines or instruction have been directed toward the most fundamental desire of every person, the attainment of happiness, and the search for meaning.
Krishnamurti once commented that “It is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. The educational process from its inception should not be about pouring facts, information, and behaviours into students, but should be focused on the root meaning of the word ‘educate’, which is ‘to draw out’. We have to draw out the hidden potentials of life and love. It is these that ennoble facts with meaning.
At a certain point one looks at the world one inhabits and becomes acutely aware of its problems. For some it results in despair, for others the problems—personal, societal, environmental—can seem so overwhelming, and one feels so ill-equipped, that denial is the preferred response. Others willingly embark on a process of ‘unlearning’—identifying and removing the obscuring imprints of a lifetime of misdirected education, so that the freshness, openness, and clear seeing of an unfettered mind can reveal itself.
Modern day education necessarily involves more than unfoldment of character, self-confidence, and movement toward happiness. Academic excellence is a requirement, as is the need to prepare students to function in today’s world—motor skills development, conceptual awareness across disciplines, in-depth exposure to arts, sciences, and sports. Most important is the need to prepare students to meet and redirect the rapidly mounting consequences of our prevailing educational approach which has pitted people against each other and against the natural world.
What is unlearning? Krishnamurti 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. Those who found their way to his teaching normally did so long after the world and its ways had laid its heavy hand on them, requiring a tremendous effort in order to become effortless—to simply observe the flight of a bird, the smell of the rain, the movement of thought. On one occasion in Saanen, Switzerland, after seeing the same faces in the audience year after year, K asked, “Why are you still here?” After hearing his message repeatedly, the question he was asking was, “Why haven’t you understood it yet?” This is the dilemma of unlearning.