I first encountered Krishnamurti when I was eighteen years old, studying Psychology at Delhi University. I was a young undergraduate, in search of another way of life, filled with confusion and yearning to be part of ‘something else’ which might help me understand what life is all about. I was clueless as to how I might go about this and wrapped myself up in traditional ways of approaching what to my young mind appeared as the sacred. The pursuit of religion in an organized form was all that was available to me in my limited world of comprehending the sacred. An encounter with Krishnamurti and several weeks spent in his presence revealed that the sacred does not lie out there, to pursue which we need to abandon our lives; it is in fact present in the everyday, in our relationships, and understanding ourselves is the first step in this journey.
Over the next few years, listening to Krishnamurti at Chennai, Rajghat, Delhi and Rishi Valley, I began to see for myself that the sacred is not something ‘set apart’, in another realm that we must relentlessly pursue. The sacred may be viewed as unique and indeed transcendent; but it is present in our ordinary lives, in social relationships, and in the tumult and chaos of our present. At the same time, it is undoubtedly transcendent because it has a quality that connects us to a realm of virtuosity, morality, and well-being. It is in this sense that we may view the sacred as a secular space empty of religious content.
The sacred in our lives
The sacred in the here and now, in our present, in our turbulent experience of the everyday, is suffused not only with our feelings of achievement and success but also with our pain, suffering and alienation. In other words, we are fragmented beings and as Krishnamurti puts it, “our relationship is a process of selfisolation; each one is building a wall of self-enclosure, which excludes love, only breeding ill-will and misery”. This self-enclosure may be individual, or a collective self-enclosure, and it results in the formation of walls of othering and exclusion in terms of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, caste, and other intersecting categories.
To overcome our restlessness and sense of alienation, we spend our time in search of the sacred by looking for salvation, ‘selfrealisation’, seeking out a guru or self-improvement classes, in the hope of attaining individual enlightenment. Krishnamurti rejects this process as striving towards the attainment of value as it were. Krishnamurti invites us to explore the question, what does it mean ‘to be’, not ‘to become’ through a kind of spiritual striving, but simply ‘to be’.
This is possible if we understand that our life is connected with others, whether these include other humans, nature, objects, or ideas. We are not distinct individuals separated by caste, class, race, gender, ethnicity, region or religion but are more importantly, connected to one another as humans. The idea of the transcendent as being present in the everyday world, in relationships of interconnectedness, and interdependence, is the one that bestows on us the ability to view our relationship with the world as extending outwards from our small, petty selves. Krishnamurti has asserted time and again, “we are the world and the world is us” (1973: 66). We need to understand this and experience this viscerally, emotionally. “To feel that, to be totally committed to it, and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary but whole” (1973:66).
To nurture the ability to extend the boundaries of the self, outward to humanity, especially those ‘others’ who appear so different from ourselves, becomes imperative. In developing empathy, compassion, at a visceral, emotional as well as at social, political levels, it is possible to transform lives in society. Such an understanding of the self in relationship in the everyday is an expression of the experience of the transcendent in everyday life. This understanding will not however be without struggle—as there are exigencies shaped by the intersecting categories of race, gender, religion, and caste. This struggle, and the contradictions it gives rise to, will undoubtedly influence the shaping of a truly global outlook.
Education as a transformative process
For Krishnamurti, the major means of developing a global outlook, and a spirit of connectedness in the everyday, is through education that focuses on not only the development of cognitive abilities but also on a process of self-inquiry and observation, on developing an understanding of our psychological processes as educators and as students.
The question this raises is, what kind of education does such a perspective envisage? The American educator Howard Gardner, as part of his work on multiple intelligences (Gardner 1999), considers the possibility of ‘moral intelligence’ and emphasizes the importance of education and schooling, alongside the family and the community, for the development of such a morality. The ‘moral’ here is however not any kind of dogma to be enforced by religion. It is more a matter of ‘individual conscience’, celebrating an individual’s ability to cognize her responsibility to the earth and to humanity. The moral domain in this sense is indicative of personal agency whereby the individual has a sense of purpose in the context of relating to others and to their life processes. If the moral is about individual agency, individuals would necessarily assume responsibility in different ways.
To seek to nurture the moral as a form of intelligence through educational processes and practices implies building what we may call ethical subjectivities. In viewing the individual as charged with moral agency, and the role of education in developing ethical subjectivities, I am not however advocating that there is once again a striving for the sacred or a reaching out to a ‘superior’ moral phenomenon to beget a change. It is in the everyday that both the moral and the change lie. Educational institutions inhere in society and it is imperative that we view education as an exercise in building moral agency as much as in imparting knowledge and skills.
The sociologist Emile Durkheim too was simultaneously committed to an understanding of the psychological bases of the child that took into account ‘altruism’ as an equal partner to ‘selfishness’ (1961: 217). He sought to instil the importance of the view that even within our egotism, there is always ‘something other than ourselves’ (1961: 224). In this duality, there is the possibility of making the child truly social and ready for collective life through the discipline and rigour (albeit, without punishment) of the school environment and the curriculum. This points to the significance of the school’s role in promoting ideas and values that may be absorbed and appreciated by the intrinsic goodness in the child. Such a view emphasizes the importance of schools as not only socializing agents, but of providing a moral compass in society, and points to the urgency with which we need to foreground and recognize this aspect of schooling in everyday life.
The ability to realize a child’s ‘goodness’ does not however rest on young children alone, with some help from an educator, as classical educational thought tells us. Significantly, it rests on the ability of schools and teachers to provide an ethos, a culture, wherein cognition and emotion are both equally valued and nurtured so as to enable the development of a morality that is not steeped in religious diktats, nationalism, or petty social virtues, but rests on a sense of the ‘moral worth’ of individuals. School cultures must enable the development of a secular morality that engenders empathy, compassion, and humanism.
Most educational institutions have taken on the role of merely imparting skills and knowledge in different academic subjects over a period of time to various age cohorts that pass through them. Krishnamurti set up schools where, apart from paying attention to the pedagogic processes and activities associated with certification, there is a simultaneous effort among both students and teachers to engage with their emotions, behaviour and understand their own agency in the public domain.
One of the aims of the Krishnamurti schools is to ensure that students develop a global outlook. To this end, there is an attempt to not only enrich the curriculum with local knowledge and contexts but to also bring about a deeper understanding of the fragile ecosystem and a consciousness about the need for change at a global level. The idea of translocation is central to this—it is the coming together of the local and the global, the earth and humanity, the individual and the collective, for developing greater consciousness about the fragility of the ecosystem and our attitude towards it. I use the term ‘translocation’ to emphasize the transcending of local or national boundaries, individual selves and self-centred attitudes and goals. It also implies the opening out of the self towards humanity in a very diverse, global sense.
It is possible to translate such a perspective to the cultural context of a school. Since Krishnamurti held that the transcendent is to be discovered through relentless questioning of everyday thinking and the emotions embedded in thought, the boundary between the sacred and the profane, between the transcendent and the worldly, is permeable. There is a fluidity and openness through which we need to comprehend our relationships with others, not merely through a rational understanding but with our emotions and senses. This could enable each of us to experience the sense of interconnectedness, which is the basis of true morality.
References
Durkheim, Emile. 1961. (1938) Moral Education. A Study of the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education. New York, The Free Press.
Gardner, Howard. 1999. Intelligence Reframed. Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York, Basic Books.
Krishnamurti, J. 1973. The Awakening of Intelligence. Chennai, Krishnamurti Foundation India. The Core of the Teachings