Passion is free of the self.

“Passion is wholly different from lust, interest or enthusiasm. Interest in something can be very deep and you can use that interest for profit or for power, but that interest is not passion. Interest may be stimulated by an object or by an idea. Interest is self-indulgence. Passion is free of the self. Enthusiasm is always about something. Passion is a flame of itself. Enthusiasm can be aroused by another, something outside of you. Passion is the summation of energy which is not the outcome of any kind of stimulation. Passion is beyond the self.

 

Have the teachers this sense of passion? – for out of this comes creation. In teaching subjects one has to find new ways of transmitting information without this information making the mind mechanical. Can you teach history – which is the story of mankind – not as the Indian, the English, American and so on, but as the story of man which is global? Then the educator’s mind is always fresh, eager, discovering a wholly different approach to teaching. In this the educator is intensely alive and with this aliveness goes passion.

 

Can this be done in all our schools? – for we are concerned with bringing about a different society, with the flowering of goodness, with a nonmechanistic mind. True education is this, and will you, the educators, undertake this responsibility? In this responsibility lies the flowering of goodness in yourself and in the student. We are responsible for the whole of mankind – which is you and the student. You have to start there and cover the whole earth. You can go very far if you start very near. The nearest is you and your student. We generally start with the farthest – the supreme principle, the greatest ideal, and get lost in some hazy dream of imaginative thought. But when you start very near, with the nearest, which is you, then the whole world is open, for you are the world and the world beyond you is only nature. Nature is not imaginary: it is actual and what is happening to you now is actual. From the actual you must begin – with what is happening now – and the now is timeless.”

 

(Krishnamurti in Letters to the Schools I, 1st June, 1979)

 

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Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, isn’t it?

STUDENT: You ask us to change, what do we change into?

 

KRISHNAMURTI: You ask us to change, what is it we change into? You cannot change into a monkey, probably you would like to, but you cannot. Now when you say, “I want to change into something” – listen to this carefully – if you say to yourself, “I must change, I must change myself into something”, the “into something” is a pattern which you have created, haven’t you? Do you see that? Look, you are violent or greedy and you want to change yourself into a person who is not greedy? Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, isn’t it? Do you see that? But if I say, “I am greedy, I will find out what it means, why I am greedy, what is involved in it”, then, when you understand greed, you will be free of greed. Do you understand what I am talking about?

 

Let me explain. I am greedy and I struggle, fight, make tremendous efforts not to be greedy. I have already an idea, a picture, an image of what it means not to be greedy. So I am conforming to an ideal which I think is non-greed. You understand? Whereas if I look at my greed, if I understand why I am greedy, the nature of my greed, the structure of my greed, then, when I begin to understand all that, I am free of greed. Therefore, freedom from greed is something entirely different from trying to become non-greedy. Do you see the difference? Freedom from greed is something which is entirely different from saying, “I must be a great man so I must be non-greedy”. Have you understood?

 

I was thinking last night, that I have been to this valley, off and on, for about forty years. People have come and gone. Trees have died and new trees have grown. Different children have come, passed through this school, have become engineers, housewives and disappeared altogether into the masses. I meet them occasionally, at an airport or at a meeting, very ordinary people. And if you are not very careful, you are also going to end up that way.

 

STUDENT: What do you mean by ordinary?

 

KRISHNAMURTI: To be like the rest of men, with their worries, with their corruption, violence, brutality, indifference, callousness. To want a job, to want to hold on to a job, whether you are efficient or not, to die in the job. That is what is called ordinary – to have nothing new, nothing fresh, no joy in life, never to be curious, intense, passionate, never to find out, but merely to conform. That is what I mean by ordinary. It is called being bourgeois. It is a mechanical way of living, a routine, a boredom.

 

(Krishnamurti in On Education, p.12-14)

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The two can never come together.

“Ideas and ideals are one thing, and the fact, the actual happening, is another. The two can never come together. Ideals have been imposed upon facts and twist what is happening to conform to what should be, the ideal. The utopia is a conclusion drawn from what is happening and sacrifices the actual to conform to that which has been idealised. This has been the process for millennia and every student and all the intellectuals revel in ideations. The avoidance of what is, is the beginning of the corruption of the mind. This corruption pervades all religions, all human relationships. The understanding of this process of avoidance and the going beyond it is our concern.

 

Ideals corrupt the mind: they are born of ideas, judgments and hope. Ideas are abstractions of what is and any idea or conclusions about what is actually happening distorts what is happening, and so corruption takes place. It takes away attention from the fact, what is, and so directs attention to the fanciful. This movement away from the fact makes for symbols, images, which then take on all-consuming importance. This movement away from the fact is corruption of the mind. Human beings indulge in this movement in conversation, in their relationships, in almost everything they do. The fact is instantly translated into an idea or a conclusion which then dictates our reactions. When something is seen, thought immediately makes a counterpart and that becomes the real. You see a dog and instantly thought turns to whatever image you may have about dogs, and so you never see the dog.

 

Can this be taught to the students: to remain with the fact, the actual happening now, whether psychologically or externally? Knowledge is not the fact; it is about the fact and that has its proper place, but knowledge prevents perception of what actually is; then corruption takes place.

 

This is really very important to understand. Ideals are considered noble, exalted, of great purposeful significance, and what is actually happening is considered merely sensory, worldly and of lesser value. Schools the world over have some exalted purpose, ideal; so they are educating the students in corruption.”

(Krishnamurti in Letters to the Schools, volume one, p.43-44)

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Take every thought and study it to the end.

“Student: When I go for a walk by myself, my mind wanders. How am I to control it?

 

K: You and I are both going to learn from your question. I am not going to instruct you, and you are not going to follow me. In discussing both of us are going to learn. Do not control the mind when it wanders. I will tell you why. The mind wanders because it has innumerable interests. If you control the mind so as to concentrate on any one thing, you will build a resistance to all other things. That is not understanding. To understand you have to explore every thought to its end. For example, if you think about a friend when you want to do something else, go into it and find out why you think about that friend; find out what the motives are. When other thoughts come, just ask these thoughts to wait while you go into the first thought. Your interest in finding out why the thought about your friend arose will bring about a quality of perception not only with regard to that thought, but also with regard to all the other thoughts.

 

Suppose you have ten thoughts, and you want the mind to have only one thought. How would you know which of these ten thoughts is the right thought for the mind to hold on to? Not knowing it, you would struggle, you would be in a state of conflict. You’d choose some particular thought because you liked it or would have been told that that was the right thought but, as other thoughts keep pouring in, there would be conflict in your mind. Just like a machine soon gets worn out through friction, so also, through friction, through conflict, the mind soon wears out. When the mind understands the way conflict occurs, there will be no friction, and the mind will not wear out.

 

Therefore take every thought – good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant – and study it to the end. Then your mind will not be a battlefield. Then you will begin to know yourself, and there will be an extensive awareness which has no frontier.

 

What happens, in the case of most of you, is that when there is an unpleasant thought, you say, ‘This is a terrible thought, so I must concentrate on the other thoughts’. This does not lead to the understanding of that thought. To understand that thought, you have to investigate it even though you consider it terrible. And, unless the mind is extraordinarily alert, it is very arduous to go into each thought, to enquire into it and learn about it.”

(Krishnamurti in A Timeless Spring, p.78-79)

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Those who play a safe game die very safely.

“Sir, life is very strange. The moment you are very clear about what you want to do, things happen. Life comes to your aid – a friend, a relation, a teacher, a grandmother, somebody helps you. But if you are afraid to try because your father may turn you out, then you are lost. Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield to some demand out of fear. But if you say, “This is what I really want to do and I am going to pursue it,” then you will find that something miraculous takes place. You may have to go hungry, struggle to get through, but you will be a worthwhile human being, not a mere copy, and that is the miracle of it.

 

You know, in biology there is a phenomenon called the sport, which is a sudden and spontaneous deviation from the type. If you have a garden and have cultivated a particular species of flower, one morning you may find that something totally new has come out of that species. That new thing is called the sport. Being new it stands out, and the gardener takes a special interest in it. And life is like that. The moment you venture out, something takes place in you and about you. Life comes to your aid in various ways. You may not like the form in which it comes to you – it may be misery, struggle, starvation – but when you invite life, things begin to happen. But you see, we don’t want to invite life, we want to play a safe game; and those who play a safe game die very safely. Is that not so?”

 

(Krishnamurti in Think on These Things, ch.15, p.143-144)

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It is intelligence that brings order, not discipline.

“Discipline is an easy way to control a child, but it does not help him to understand the problems involved in living. Some form of compulsion, the discipline of punishment and reward, may be necessary to maintain order and seeming quietness among a larger number of students herded together in a classroom; but with the right kind of educator and a small number of students, would any repression, politely called discipline, be required? If the classes are small and the teacher can give his full attention to each child, observing and helping him, then compulsion or domination in any form is obviously unnecessary. If, in such a group, a student persists in disorderliness or is unreasonably mischievous, the educator must inquire into the cause of his misbehaviour, which may be wrong diet, lack of rest, family wrangles, or some hidden fear.

 

Implicit in right education is the cultivation of freedom and intelligence, which is not possible if there is any form of compulsion, with its fears. After all, the concern of the educator is to help the student to understand the complexities of his whole being. To require him to suppress one part of his nature for the benefit of some other part is to create in him an endless conflict which results in social antagonisms. It is intelligence that brings order, not discipline.”

 

 (Krishnamurti in Education and the Significance of Life, p.33)

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This understanding of the hidden frees the total mind from conflict.

The conscious mind is occupied with the immediate, the limited present, whereas the unconscious is under the weight of centuries, and cannot be stemmed or turned aside by an immediate necessity. The unconscious has the quality of deep time, and the conscious mind, with its recent culture, cannot deal with it according to its passing urgencies. To eradicate self-contradiction, the superficial mind must understand this fact and be quiescent – which does not mean giving scope to the innumerable urges of the hidden. When there is no resistance between the open and the hidden, then the hidden, because it has the patience of time, will not violate the immediate.

 

The hidden, unexplored and un-understood mind, with its superficial part which has been ‘educated’, comes into contact with the challenges and demands of the immediate present. The superficial may respond to the challenge adequately; but because there is a contradiction between the superficial and the hidden, any experience of the superficial only increases the conflict between itself and the hidden. This brings about still further experience, again widening the chasm between the present and the past. The superficial mind, experiencing the outer without understanding the inner, the hidden, only produces deeper and wider conflict.

 (…)

 What is important is the understanding of the hidden, and not the mere education of the superficial mind to acquire knowledge, however necessary. This understanding of the hidden frees the total mind from conflict, and only then is there intelligence.

 

(Krishnamurti in On Learning, p.32-33)

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The hidden mind is far more vital than the superficial.

“In seeking to bring about a total development of the human being, we must obviously take into full consideration the unconscious mind as well as the conscious. Merely to educate the conscious mind without understanding the unconscious brings self-contradiction into human lives, with all its frustrations and miseries. The hidden mind is far more vital than the superficial. Most educators are concerned only with giving information or knowledge to the superficial mind, preparing it to acquire a job and adjust itself to society. So the hidden mind is never touched. All that so-called education does, is to superimpose a layer of knowledge and technique, and a certain capacity to adjust to environment.”

 

(Krishnamurti in On Learning, the introduction to Life Ahead, p.30)

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Your mind is society.

“To know how one’s mind works is a basic purpose of education. If you don’t know how your mind reacts, if your mind is not aware of its own activities, you will never find out what society is. You may read books on sociology, study social sciences, but if you don’t know how your own mind works you cannot actually understand what society is, because your mind is part of society; it is society. Your reactions, your beliefs, your going to the temple, the clothes you wear, the things you do and don’t do and what you think – society is made up of all this, it is the replica of what is going on in your own mind. So your mind is not apart from society, it is not distinct from your culture, from your religion, from your various class divisions, from the ambitions and conflicts of the many. All this is society, and you are part of it. There is no “you” separate from society.

 

Now, society is always trying to control, to shape, to mould the thinking of the young. From the moment you are born and begin to receive impressions, your father and mother are constantly telling you what to do and what not to do, what to believe and what not to believe; you are told that there is God, or that there is no God but the State and that some dictator is its prophet. From childhood these things are poured into you, which means that your mind – which is very young, impressionable, inquisitive, curious to know, wanting to find out – is gradually being encased, conditioned, shaped so that you will fit into the pattern of a particular society and not be a revolutionary. Since the habit of patterned thinking has already been established in you, even if you do “revolt” it is within the pattern. It is like prisoners revolting in order to have better food, more conveniences – but always within the prison.

 

That is not revolt, that is not revolution: it is merely heightened activity, a more valiant struggle within the pattern. Real revolt, true revolution is to break away from the pattern and to inquire outside of it.

 

And that is real education: not merely to require you to pass examinations for which you have crammed up, or to write out something which you have learnt by heart, but to help you to see the walls of this prison in which the mind is held.”

 

 (Krishnamurti in Think on These Things, ch.11, p.97-99)

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