Not long after I came to Rishi Valley as a teacher, we hosted a public Gathering. It was during the Diwali vacation and the weather was chill and wet. It had to be held during the break so that participants could be accommodated in the student hostels. At the time I was a house parent, in a hostel that was one of four in a vast grey building fronted by slender trees. It so happened that the other three house parents were away, and in effect I was the only host in a block of four hostels that would normally house 70 to 80 boys. During the Gathering it hosted perhaps 50 adults, most of them considerably older than I.
Of course I attended all the sessions: the talks, small group discussions, video screenings, and escorted walks in the campus and its surroundings. I don’t remember, however, that they left a strong impression on me, or at least not as strong as that of being a vacation-time ‘house parent’ to adults. Even if I understood my role as being no more than to ensure that they were as comfortable as possible with the spartan arrangements—metal cots on bare cement floors, candles to counter the unpredictable power cuts, mosquito coils, Indian-style toilets, bath water from wood-fired boilers, drinking water from large canisters—it felt at times as if their entire wellbeing was in some way in my hands.
There was a group of elderly men who had come by train and bus from a town in Rajasthan. Some of them walked slowly and with difficulty on the uneven terrain, but they were never short of stamina. Late into the night I would hear their impassioned discussions on matters that had arisen from the day’s sessions. These discussions seemed, at the time, a little surreal to me. Or at least after a day packed with this kind of engagement, it was hard for me to understand their wanting to keep at it through the night as well. For me, at 25, it felt as if life had other compulsions.
Yet, I was touched by the fact that they were here; that they had made these long and perhaps costly or uncomfortable journeys, for three days of intense hobnobbing, as I saw it, with people like themselves. Most of them were middle aged or older, and seemed intent on making use of every minute of their time here. I think I didn’t quite understand what was driving them, but their presence was strangely moving. Clearly the fact that there was a Gathering to attend meant a great deal to the people who had come. I felt a little humbled by this.
In fact, I felt as I was to do a few years later at Kedarnath, the Himalayan shrine at 12,000 feet, reached in those days by way of a mostly uphill trek for 14 kilometres. You could hire a mule or be borne in a kind of palanquin, but most pilgrims chose to walk. The evening after I had myself made the trek (more trekker than pilgrim, it must be said), I stood at a tea shack near the entrance to the small but bustling settlement, and watched a party of mostly elderly men and women from somewhere in Tamil Nadu labouring, in short sleeved cotton shirts, saris, slippers, and in a drizzle and chill that far exceeded Rishi Valley’s, the last few hundred feet to their destination. They stopped neither for tea nor to locate their lodgings, and made their way through the crowded rows of trinket shops and eateries to the small stone temple on its high platform. That is what they were here for and I felt again, with a certain deference, that I was in the presence of something I neither shared nor fully understood.
Curiously, I felt something similar another 25 years later when I participated in the first post-pandemic Gathering of the KFI, hosted at Sahyadri School. It was curious because this time I was one of the people invited to speak at the event. I had undertaken to do so after initial reluctance. I wondered if I would have anything useful to say about self-knowledge, which was the main theme. Did I even know what it was? Eventually this uncertainty is what induced me to accept the invitation: it seemed probable that the need to speak about it would help clarify matters for me, and that a deadline would energize my enquiry.
This it did. But when I stood at the podium to make my presentation, I felt that I could only offer questions rather than insights. I had arranged my questions, and tentative responses to some of them, in what I hoped was a cogent manner. I knew roughly what I wanted to say and had rehearsed in my mind how I might say it. But would this meet the expectations of the people who had taken the trouble to come? Did I understand why they were here and listening to me? Of what use could my tentativeness be to them? Perhaps they were seeking answers that I did not have.
Before I knew it the presentation was over and I found myself responding to questions, faintly relieved both that I wasn’t fumbling for words and that I would soon revert to being more listener than speaker.
What I had not anticipated was that the questions did not end with the session. Straight afterwards and subsequently for the rest of the day and spilling into the next, people came up to comment on, or ask me about, something or the other that I had said. Some came over at mealtimes and others stopped me on walks with their thoughts or questions, and, in a couple of instances, to ask me for suggestions on how to face specific dilemmas in their lives. (It appeared that this was the experience of the other speakers as well).
I was pleased that the session had stimulated such a response, but I was also uneasy. I was not used to being regarded as someone to consult in such matters. I felt I was in the limelight under false pretences, even though I was not conscious of pretending to anything. My unease was also at sensing that I was mildly conscious of having made a transition from providing creaturely comforts to being a ‘keynote speaker’ (as per the compere) and that this transition had been successful, apparently. Even though I attached no importance to it, what did my thinking about it in terms of a ‘transition’ imply for reflections on the self and the contradictions that the self engenders? And who was to say which kind of fulfilling of needs, physical or ‘spiritual’, contributed more to wellbeing? There was division here, and a deficit in clear thinking, even if I was aware of it!
But my unease had an older and more familiar cause as well. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, I hadn’t quite resolved for myself why people found it necessary to take time out of their busy or retired lives to come at all (though with a higher proportion of young people this time). What was this need to seek out the elusive self, or its ending, in the company of like-minded people? Would I have come all this way myself, if I had not already been there as host or speaker? Probably not. And though I could identify reasons why they had come, and why I might not have, it felt that I was still missing something.
Not that I am deeply troubled by this: it’s more a recognition that questions that first occurred to me half a lifetime ago remain somewhat unresolved. What I see, however, is that explanations might conceal as much as they reveal. In the face of the unknown, the space to ‘keep on not knowing’ is necessary, as Wislawa Szymborska indicates in her response to the question of what poetry is (in the poem ‘Some People Like Poetry’ that my presentation had drawn upon). In that space questions no longer have to be met with definitive answers. And in the presence of an attentive mind, things begin to be seen in unexpected ways: among them, in this case, that nobody’s wellbeing lies entirely in anyone else’s hands. Perhaps it is enough to acknowledge a human need even when explanations for it fall short. And perhaps that is what I had done intuitively all those years ago at Rishi Valley and at Kedarnath—and was doing more consciously now.
The Gatherings, then and now, served a purpose. This I am convinced of, from seeing and listening to the people who come. Their compulsion to be there indicates a lack, in society at large, of things that people who work in the Krishnamurti centres perhaps take for granted. These include time for serious enquiry, in fact for shared enquiry, and the physical spaces that are conducive to it because they are peaceful, natural and sufficiently uncluttered to allow for reflective time and for being alone or in company. It is a rare privilege to live and work in such spaces.
And doing so raises the question of whether we who are in these places are aware of what a privilege it is, and whether we are taking sufficient advantage of it. The purpose of the Gatherings is not fundamentally different from the purpose of the schools. But it seems quite a challenge for us to retain that quality of enquiry and reflection that underlies both all through our everyday working lives in the schools. It would be a strange thing if we, like the outside participants in the Gatherings we host, needed to leave our homes and families, our work and schools, to pursue self-understanding!