A school is a place where teachers and students ‘discover’ their own
conditioning and how it distorts their thinking. This conditioning is the
self to which such tremendous and cruel importance is given. Freedom
from this conditioning and its misery begins with this awareness.J Krishnamurti, Ojai, 1984
Many students come to Brockwood
Park School unaware that
they have a deep conditioning imposed
upon them by their culture and society
through schooling, advertising, music,
the media and sports. We ran a course
at Brockwood last year, primarily for
grades 11 and 12 students, with the
aim of uncovering this conditioning. Of
course the staff come with their own
conditioning, the depth of which is
not to be underestimated. The deepest
division that our conditioning takes for
granted is that the observer is separate
from the observed, and that the world is
a separate entity from us.
In this course we tried to show the
falseness of these divisions without wishing
to impose, overtly or inadvertently,
another type of conditioning. One thing
this meant was to not negatively label
‘conditioning’ as undesirable; this labelling
is already part of a conditioned
habit, and would also imply that we
understood the content and processes
of conditioning well enough to make
that judgment.
So the intention of the course was
just to look at the ‘what is’ of conditioning
and then, perhaps, any seeing of the
fact of it would have its own action.
However, at the end of the course we felt it was important to do an activity
(which is described later), the aim of
which was to go beyond conditioning.
The course did not involve much
discussion of conditioning as such, as
we wanted to engage the student in
activities that reveal its nature. The
difficulty with conditioning is that it
is like my glasses; it shapes my vision
but can’t be seen directly. Fortunately
conditioning acts in nearly all our
perceptions, reactions and behaviour,
so that there are many types of areas
where it could reveal its consequences.
I would like to sketch some of the
activities that challenged the students’
assumptions about the nature of everyday
perception and that also showed
how we construct our world.
One such activity involved optical
illusions. These are usually addressed
as amusing phenomena that, though
surprising, don’t have much significance.
I beg to differ. They show clearly and
directly how conditioning works in our
perception. They have a further significance
in that they remain as an illusion
even when we know they are illusions!
Related to optical illusions are ‘low
information’ pictures, where the students
have to construct an image from the
given data. Some see it directly, others
have difficulty until they have the
‘ah-ha’ moment. Also, the ‘gorilla in
the basketball court’ experiment (see www.theinvisiblegorilla.com) is available
online, where one is ‘blind’ to what one
doesn’t expect to see.
A very different area we then looked
at was Zeno’s paradoxes and Einstein’s
theory of relativity. The physicist
David Bohm has theorized, using the
psychologist Jean Piaget’s work, that these
space-time phenomena are surprising to
us because we have forgotten how our
conditioned concepts of space and time
were formed as young children. This
area often left the students in a healthy
state of bewilderment as to what the words
‘reality’, ‘truth’ and ‘actuality’ meant.
We also tried to get at the conditioned
assumptions that our students
had, by asking how they were thinking
about a ‘hot’ issue in the school, in
particular to do with, say, a decision to
ask a student to leave Brockwood due to
misbehaviour. We set the scene so that
this elicited strong responses not so
much to do with the decision but to do
with values and priorities.
My point here is to show that the
scope of resources is really quite large.
The intention of these activities was
to become aware of the processes
and depth of conditioning without the
distorting assumption that it needs to
be eliminated.
However, it seems clear that to
encounter life only with conditioned responses is an impoverished way to
live. An activity that tried to go beyond
conditioning involved asking students
to go out of the classroom and, firstly, to
look at an object in nature in such a way
that the object tells its own story, not to
project ‘naming’ and ‘judgements’ on it,
and perhaps to see it in some kind of
detail. A second activity was to close
one’s eyes for a moment and then look
again to see something of the object not
seen before. With other experiments like this, including experimenting with
looking at the ‘whole’, the aim was to
experience a perception where conditioning
was not needed, where it had
no place, and so was quiet. We said to
the students that it was not necessary to
verbally report their observations; it was
the doing that mattered and not the
words that described it. Whether or not
this activity achieved its aim, it seemed
the students were quieter and more
reflective at the end of it.
*This article follows on from the topics raised in the last issue of the Journal of Krishnamurti Schools
concerning conditioning.