Krishnamurti - What is the point of education?

Krishnamurti Subtitles

SD72CA2 - What is the point of education?
San Diego, California - 16 February 1972
Conversation with A.W. Anderson 2

0:21	Krishnamurti in Dialogue with Dr. Allan W. Anderson J. Krishnamurti was born in South India and educated in England. For the past 40 years he has been speaking in the United States, Europe, India, Australia, and other parts of the world. From the outset of his life’s work he repudiated all connections with organised religions and ideologies and said that his only concern was to set man absolutely unconditionally free. He is the author of many books, among them The Awakening of Intelligence, The Urgency of Change, Freedom From the Known, and The Flight of the Eagle. In dialogue with Krishnamurti is Dr. Allan W. Anderson, professor of religious studies at San Diego State University where he teaches Indian and Chinese scriptures and the oracular tradition. Dr. Anderson, a published poet, acquired his degree from Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary. He has been honoured with the distinguished Teaching Award from the California State University.
1:33	Anderson: Mr. Krishnamurti, in your book ‘Education and the Significance of Life’, you write about discipline and I remember, and I hope I’ve remembered correctly that you talk about discipline as essentially beginning with the child or the student in the sense that the child must be helped to see the cause of his behaviour. But now the teacher is the one who helps him do this. And it seemed to me very clear that what you were saying is essentially that discipline rather begins with the teacher. It would require the teacher to be very disciplined himself. And what does it mean not simply to admonish the child, but to try to penetrate into the cause of his misbehavior?
2:38	Krishnamurti: Sir, what do we mean by that word ‘discipline’? What does that word mean actually, as it is generally accepted?
2:49	A: I think it usually means training. It has to do, of course, etymologically with teaching.
2:58	K: Teaching, yes. That’s what I was going to say. It has to do with disciple who learns from the master. It is a way of learning. Not conforming to a pattern, not subjugating oneself to an ideal, to suppressing oneself in order to be something. I mean the general meaning as it is now used, it implies conformity, suppression, comparison, drilling oneself in order to be, to fit into a particular – like a military discipline and so on. All such disciplines must invariably create conflict in the human being.
4:00	A: If the child, let us say, very small, is taught the alphabet and how to trace the letter, he must make an ‘A’ when he’s trying to make an ‘A’, not a ‘B’.
4:16	K: No, no.
4:17	A: Now, are you suggesting that in trying to make this ‘A’ and holding to the form of ‘A’ that he necessarily will generate conflict?
4:33	K: Probably he does, but I would rather, if I may suggest, look at it from the point of view of the educator rather than the child. Shall we? A: Yes. Please.
4:46	K: What is the function of an educator? Not the educated, not the student, not the child, but what is the function of an educated teacher?
5:02	A: Well, I had always thought it was two-fold. On the one hand, to draw from the person some manifestation of his latent capacity. And on the other hand, to teach him something different from what he knows now.
5:29	K: We’re talking about the educator, the teacher.
5:32	A: Yes, the educator.
5:33	K: Not the child or the student – the educator.
5:36	A: No, the educator, the one who educates I had always thought has this two-fold responsibility.
5:42	K: Which is?
5:44	A: On the one hand, to draw from the student.
5:50	K: Ah, no, I’m not talking of the student at all.
5:56	K: What is the function of an educator? If I am a teacher, what is my function? What is important?
6:05	A: To avail myself to the student in such a way that the student can learn.
6:10	K: Which means, the educator must establish a relationship with the student which is not hierarchical, authoritarian – you up there and me below – but a relationship of mutual enquiry, study, sharing, communication all that is implied in the educator, isn’t it? If you are a teacher, as you are, sir – I am a student. If you are the educator, you must establish a certain relationship with me. Is that relationship based on giving me information?
7:18	A: No, no.
7:19	K: Is it based on this sense of ‘you know, I don’t know’.
7:26	A: Partly, partly.
7:30	K: The meaning, the significance, the authoritarian background of ‘you know, I don’t know’; therefore there is an assumption of authority in that.
7:47	A: Do you mind if we go back to the little child?
7:49	K: Yes, all right.
7:52	A: It is the case that the teacher knows how to make the ‘A’ correctly.
7:56	K: But we’ll come back to that. A: Oh, all right.
7:59	K: I’m just wondering, what is the quality of relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher is more important than the student for the time being, because we are enquiring into what is the state of the educator, what is the quality of the educator. We said that he must establish a relationship, a relationship in which the authoritarian spirit completely goes. Otherwise, you treat me like a servant – our relationship is entirely different, based on ‘you know, I don’t know’ this degree of knowledge. And you are imparting some information to me. Is that all? Or, is much more involved in it? That the teacher is not only established in a real relationship, wanting to communicate his information, and also he wants, doesn’t he, to bring about a quality of intelligence in the student which is not merely the intelligence of the activity of knowledge. It is much more. So the educator has to be intelligent in the deep sense of that word – not knowledgeable.
9:46	A: No, intelligent. K: Intelligent. And the teacher wants to convey his information so that the student in getting the information, is cultivating or growing in intelligence – I don’t know how – refinement, the quality of clarity.
10:16	A: Clarity K: Clarity. And also he wants to establish a relationship of real friendship, real affection, real love between himself and the student.
10:28	A: Yes, I think that’s very, very essential – especially that.
10:32	K: Yes, Especially that.
10:34	A: One of the things that fascinated me about a hymn in the Rig Veda, is that speech, the Goddess Speech, appears among friends.
10:46	K: Yes, sir.
10:47	A: It’s as though intelligibility disappears when enemies come together. K. That’s right. A: Please, go ahead.
10:55	K: When there is that quality of love, affection, a relationship, no sense of authority, awakening or cultivating or bringing about that intelligence in the student, then the responsibility of the teacher is enormous. After all, we are creating a new generation. Which means the teacher cannot belong to the establishment – ‘establishment’ in the sense of the orthodox, the social acceptance – he must be vitally different in himself from the rest of the world.
11:45	A: He must be himself.
11:46	K: Himself. Not himself, that brings in a different story.
11:50	A: No, I know what you mean. But he must be authentic.
11:53	K: He must be authentic, and have integrity – not just say one thing, do another. So that, in the presence of the teacher, the student feels completely secure. Because with the teacher he’s at home. Not with the family, because the family is too – they have their own problems, their own ambitions, their own greed, they are fighting. The student with the teacher feels now at last here is somebody who really cares.
12:38	A: This raises a question I should like very much to ask you, Mr Krishnamurti, about two apparently radically different notions of education. I’ve always been very impressed with the understanding that I think Indian culture has about the need for the student to abide with the teacher...
13:10	K: Yes, that is the old tradition.
13:13	A:... on the basis of a true inter-personal relationship.
13:16	K: He lived in the house of the teacher. He was part of the family of the teacher. He was brought up with the teacher’s children, so that he was the parent (not the mother and father), but he was the real parent who cared for him immensely. And when once you establish that kind of relationship with a student, I want to learn from you. I want you tell me. I’m awfully eager to find out what you know. Then, when you like me, it has quite a different feeling in it.
14:07	A: More than a copy book! Yes, I follow you.
14:11	K: And then also you don’t compare me with another student. If you compare me with another student, you are destroying the other student because I am probably dull and you compare me to somebody who is cleverer, there’s this conflict. In comparison, competition, you know, all that is bred in me. Where if you say, ‘Look, I’m teaching you, don’t bother, I’m not comparing you with anybody, you are’. So there is this sense of extraordinary feeling of intimacy, flow, friendship, without any sense of ‘you must be this or that’. Then my mind wants to learn.
15:04	A: In our culture we think we understand something of that when we refer to what we call the Socratic truth.
15:13	K: Socratic, yes. But you can’t do this with three hundred, or forty, fifty, or a hundred students in the class.
15:21	A: No, no. So what do you do?
15:23	K: That’s the point, sir, that’s just it. Given things as they are, you can’t suddenly bring about a revolution and have only ten students for each professor or teacher. That would be impossible. I should have thought if the educator had that quality of mind and feeling, he would spot out a few of the students, that boy, that girl, half a dozen, and care for them much more, give them, take them home, talk to them, walk with them, play with them. You follow, sir, this sense of – I did it a bit in various schools but I stopped in each place, I’m told, a shorter time. But if there is this feeling of real friendship, and affection, love, the student feels completely at home. And then you can see that boy, this girl – you follow? – you can have half a dozen, then they really are your children. They would be the elite – I know in democracy the word ‘elite’ is something terrible, but it is the elite. After all, you are the elite of a culture which says give more importance, you know, religion, philosophy – to you that’s important.
17:01	A: I think we do tend quite badly to get upset about a distinction of that sort because after all in the last analysis surely what is meant by elite is simply that somebody does what he does well.
17:19	K: Yes, if you are a good, first-class carpenter, you are an elite. A: That’s right.
17:25	K: If you love carpentry, not because you are going to get eight, ten or fifteen dollars a day – you may get fifteen dollars – but the thing in itself.
17:36	A: We have generated a rather curious notion, it does seem to me altogether a dysfunctional one. And I would be very grateful for your light on this. I have never taught in grade school or in high school, so I’m only talking about what I’ve heard and read. But we did begin some time ago if I’m not mistaken, a tendency to level the performance of students, so that if a student is gifted, bright, and devoted to his task, he is naturally going to excel. But we must be careful somehow or other that we don’t really encourage him too much in that
18:32	K: But, sir, after all, if I’m the educator, I want him to excel.
18:37	A: Of course, of course, exactly.
18:39	K: Not excel and get benefit or exploit others. After all, if you excel in something, it’s marvelous. But if you use that excellency in order to crush me...
18:56	A: It’s disastrous.
18:58	K: That’s what is taking place. A: Yes. Well, I suppose the sentiment that we employed was in itself not much more than sentimental.
19:13	A: It turns out to be cruel because sentimentality always becomes cruel. Yes. Yes, I know. It’s awfully hard to make that point in a class of fifty or a hundred people because we do cherish the things that we hold sentimental.
19:29	K: That’s why, sir, I feel the educator is far more important than the student.
19:37	A: Yes, I understand. Yes, that’s why I wanted to hear what you said about discipline beginning with the educator rather than the other way around, with the student. There’s another question I should like to ask you, if I may, about the idea of a child's behaving badly in the sense of becoming a disciplinary problem. On the one hand, there’s a clinical approach in which one might say, ‘Well, now, let’s get behind it, let’s look into the cause of it’.
20:17	K: The cause of it. An analytical process, yes.
20:20	A: But is bad behavior necessarily caused? Would it not be quite possible for somebody to decide that he is just going to behave badly?
20:37	K: And then he becomes a neurotic – it is quite a different thing. But why in the modern world children are so violent, so disorganized – so, you know what they are, you see them all over the world. Why? Is it the society in which they live, parents who have really no affection for them – you follow? – though they say, yes, we love our children – but a society, a group of parents who allow their children to be killed in a war. You follow, sir? A: Yes, yes, I’m following.
21:33	K: Though they say we love our children, they shed tears when they get killed in Vietnam. But it is this sense, I feel, of utter lack of love for the children because they are concerned about themselves, their looks, their hair, their dresses – you follow? – their nails. God, look at the commercials and you see tremendous self-concern.
22:06	A: In terms of what we said earlier then, we’d say that they don’t see the child.
22:09	K: No, they don’t, they don’t want to see the child because if they see the child, if they see what is going to happen to the child, they would be horrified. So they cover it up, and send them off to school, or you know, get rid of them, and the home is no longer a real home, and therefore they become delinquents, naughty, and all the rest of it. But if the teacher says ‘I’m going to give you a home, you’re my children’ – you follow, sir? Then you create something new. Not all this tremendous technological information, which is necessary, but this importance. And therefore you turn out people who don’t care for anybody. And you have these perpetual wars. If the mothers in America really said, ‘Look, we love our children, I’m not going to allow my child to be killed anymore, it doesn’t matter what happens, I’m not going to allow it’ – war would end tomorrow. But they don’t care. They care for their security, for their pleasure – you follow?
23:31	A: Yes, I do.
23:32	K: The whole ugliness of self-concern.
23:39	A: For a long time we’ve had the notion in education that... ‘how to teach’ can be taught. We speak about professional education, and sometimes the disagreements between the academicians solely on the one hand and the men of the class-room on the other, become rather severe. But in your view of education, would it be the case that you could really teach someone how to teach?
24:24	K: I think so. Sir, what is the point of education? Why do I want to be educated? Why should I be educated? To fit into this thing? To be killed, to fight for the rest of my life, die fighting, and die with endless problems in myself? What’s the point of education? I know several people who are top – mathematically, philosophically, technically – and their life is so shoddy, meaningless; they know it. And they say, ‘My God, why ever did we even go to a college to end up like this’. Unless one understands the total meaning of living, merely to be educated to be a first-class engineer, what the heck does it all mean?
25:30	A: Sir, some people have written rather cogently and persuasively that Plato’s Republic is really not a political treatise but after all, really a philosophy of education. And in terms of what you’ve said some of what Socrates has remarked in that dialogue would seem to relate. For instance, Socrates’ idea that justice is the internal order of the soul, and all the weight is brought to bear upon ordering oneself interiorly so that the work of justice which is ordered to external things is done well. This must have something to do, if I’ve understood you correctly, with your requiring that the teacher first of all be able himself to see.
26:28	K: Obviously, sir! If the student is like those people who say ‘don’t smoke’ and smoke. You follow? It has no meaning. And also, sir, in this question of educating, comparison is destructive, obviously, between two students – and also this whole idea of concentration. They must learn to concentrate to study; and therefore there is this tremendous effort made to concentrate. Isn’t there a different way of doing this? Instead of forcing a child or a student to learn concentration; you understand, sir? Is there not a different approach to this problem altogether? I think there is because I have talked a little bit about it in schools, various schools I go to.
27:44	A: I think there is, too. But perhaps if we look at in the ‘round’, what is very difficult is to bring together integrally, on the one hand, the activity of education, which has its end in itself, not outside itself, but training always has its end outside itself. So for instance, the athlete, he practises to run, not simply to be running but to improve his running.
28:26	K: And the improvement in comparison with somebody who has run faster.
28:30	A: No, just the record. K: Just the record. The same thing.
28:34	A: But not in comparison with that person.
28:36	K: No, with the record. A: With the record, yes.
28:38	K: The old person is forgotten.
28:42	A: It has to do with the idea that I must take pains to do better than I’m doing now. Please go ahead. K: I mean, I love what I’m doing. All my life I’ve really loved what I’m doing.
29:03	A: Oh, I believe that.
29:04	K: I wouldn’t do anything else – I couldn’t for money, for – nothing. This is for me, breath. I don’t want to excel in it. I don’t want to beat the record established by Buddha, Jesus or X, Y, Z. I don’t want to become somebody – popular, unpopular – that doesn’t really interest me, because I really love what I’m doing. The love of what I’m doing excludes everything else. And that very love is the highest form of excellence.
29:51	A: Yes, it just occurs to me that it’s a loving thing to see you loving. Yes, yes, I do understand.
30:01	K: And if the educator can convey this feeling, not to the three hundred students but to the ten who he feels can do something, they will excel without competing, without saying I must beat the record. Love makes one tremendously efficient.
30:29	A: I think a good deal of the objection that students make to grades – those who don’t like to receive grades, is based largely upon this notion of a personal comparison between themselves and another. Now there are other objections to grades that seem to me without any foundation. But there is a psychological point here: if the grade is used as a sledge-hammer, then, of course, it becomes altogether dysfunctional and destructive. Still I would not go so far as to say that grades as such are useless, since if the teacher relates to them adequately, he is telling something to the student about the student’s own performance with respect to a given task.
31:29	K: Yes, I understand that. But you as a teacher had five or ten students, in the real sense, you would help one of those ten to love the thing he’s doing whatever it is – gardening or whatever – and there is no grade in that. The more I learn the more I love. I don’t say, well, you must have a grade in your mind about me: you watch me. You say well that’s not quite right, this is right, let’s talk it over. You follow? There is that relationship in which all sense of making me conform to your ideal disappears. Therefore there is a relationship of real affection, and that is enough. It’s like sunshine and a flower.
32:36	A: Isn’t it the case that a person could, indeed, love flowers, love his garden, love gardening, as a appreciator but might not be gifted as a grower?
32:50	K: Then I study, then I would find out. You may not have the green thumb, and you say, ‘Well, I’ll find out’.
33:06	A: He turns around and he says after he’s planted this flower, ‘Well how am I doing?’ And he means to ask you whether he has done well, or ill, in the way he has planted this flower.
33:22	K: Therefore, the way you tell him how he has done, that is important – not better grades or this or that. The way you convey to me that what I’ve done isn’t quite right, or it’s quite right, that it is done marvellously – your very look is sufficient. That means you have to be extraordinarily sensitive.
33:50	A: Yes, yes, I know how very true that is. Because oftentimes one has the feeling that a student who might not be too gifted, nonetheless does have a capacity which still stands to be reached and actuated.
34:19	K: Yes, sir, but you see the difficulty? All religions are based on this comparison: eventually reach the foot of God or sit next to God. There are all the priestly, hierarchical methods: the priest, the bishop, the archbishop, the cardinal. This whole hierarchical sense is a competitive sense. And religion, business, family, the whole structure is based on that. And you bring up a child to fit into that. Whereas if you say, ‘Look, you’re my child, I’m going to look after you, I’m going to see that you are the most marvelous human being on earth’ – totally, not just technologically, but psychologically, spiritually, – you know. And you produce quite a different entity.
35:35	A: Do you think perhaps this notion of hierarchy has been badly applied, because we tend to believe that hierarchy is static rather than functional?
35:51	K: Functional, yes. It is functional, but don’t bring status into it.
35:57	A: The parent, this teacher who loves his family of students, is still the parent. And in that sense a ‘functional hierarchy’ persists – would that be natural?
36:16	K: Yes, but after all, you may be a first-class engineer and I may be a cook. But see what takes place. You are a top engineer and I’m a top cook.
36:31	A: Yes, yes. Well, that’s what I meant by functional.
36:33	K: Don’t let’s introduce status into it. You the Cadillac and I the Jeep!
36:44	A: I quite follow.
36:45	K: So that brings up really quite a different thing, which is: is there psychologically progress at all? Because that’s what is behind this – that psychologically, inwardly, you will grow; better and better. Which is self-improvement. All that’s implied in it. After all, that is the basis of so-called religious hierarchy – you are gradually getting nearer and nearer God. The whole Brahmanical system is based on that. The lowest born will gradually evolve until he becomes a Brahmin, then he’ll go on gradually. And whether there is such a thing as a permanent entity in you which gradually evolves. Or this whole thing is totally wrong.
38:11	A: It’s a very difficult thing in our culture to get across the notion that there is no such thing as ‘essential progress’.
38:19	K: One can see it oneself. It doesn’t exist!
38:26	K: Oh, what people say, that’s irrelevant. But say for instance, if there is sorrow, is it to be gradually wiped out, or is it to be wiped out instantly?
38:44	A: I understand. Would you mind if I asked you a question about meditation, since you’ve brought this question of sorrow back. Meditation in the last ten years especially, has had a rather remarkable press. As we know.
39:07	K: Yes, brought over from the East mostly.
39:09	A: Yes. I’m concerned to know, for instance, how I might reply to a student if a student said to me, ‘Well, what does Mr Krishnamurti mean when he uses the word ‘meditate’ – what should I...
39:27	K: I’ll tell you, sir, it’s fairly simple, I think. As it is generally understood, meditation is an escape from life – they will deny this.
39:43	A: Oh, yes, vigorously. K: Vigorously. But the fact is an avoidance, an escape, an overcoming life, the miseries of life, not working from below but imposing something. And in meditation is implied also that you must seek God; that you must experience – transcendental state you must get, through various practices. You know all that business.
40:16	A: Something you progress towards. K: Progress. That’s one thing.
40:22	A: That is the common notion.
40:23	K: Of course it is. And it’s so utterly false. You become my guru, who say, ‘Well, I’ve had transcendental experience’, whatever that may mean, and you form a system, and because of your beard and your reputation and circus round it, frills, all that, I say, ‘He’s right’ and I follow; I don't understand what's implied in all this, whether it’s a personal experience – if it is your personal experience, I don’t want your personal experience. It doesn’t mean a thing to me because you might be deceiving yourself. Obviously you are, when God is your personal experience.
41:13	A: It is really an amazing thing how many students these days have got it into their heads that there’s some external something that they can begin to do in order to achieve this end. I had a student, you know, who came to class and he wore a little bell, a little Tibetan bell, and the jolly thing of course would shake every time he moved in class, and it bothered a few other students. And I waited a few days; I thought maybe the novelty of it would wear off. And one day I walked up to him, put my arm around his shoulder and said, ‘You know, it might be that the bell is wearing you’. And he didn’t wear it anymore after that. He was capable though of grasping that point. He wasn’t offended, fortunately. But that’s very encouraging; he did grasp it immediately. Maybe we could say he saw, and the bell went. There wasn’t a gradual giving up the bell. Not wearing the bell three days and then two days, and then one day. Yes, I understand.
42:35	K: Then what is meditation? A: Yes. What is it as such?
42:39	K: Sir, that’s what I feel. One has to negate all the dictum, all the sanctions, all the things the human mind has invented about God, about meditation, as a means to reality. Negate all that, because it’s just a human invention. And all the rituals, all the ceremonies, all the paraphernalia that goes on in churches, it’s all put together by human minds. Therefore why should I accept a thing which human minds have put together? They are as deceived as I am. Therefore, meditation is to cleanse the mind of every form of deception.
43:41	A: At that point then it would be correct to say, even if it’s only a partial statement, that it is a clinical activity.
43:48	K: ‘Clinical’ in the sense, non-analytical.
43:53	A: Yes.
43:54	K: Because when you told that boy, student, ‘the bell is wearing you’, that’s not clinical. He saw it instantly. Whereas our minds are used to a clinical, analytical way of going at it. So meditation is this instant perception. And that requires a great sensitivity of the body.
44:29	A: Yes, it does.
44:30	K: I mean, alcohol, meat, drink, you know, all that stuff has to be put aside. And you have to have a very clear mind, sensitive mind, to say about the bell, the boy saw it instantly, and therefore stopped it. So meditation is, in the real, deep sense of the word, non-clinical, non-analytical, but seeing things as they are in myself. What I am; self-knowing. And the conflict which the self creates, see the truth of that and end it. All that is part of meditation. And also having a really quiet mind, not cultivate a quiet mind. Because it’s only when the mind is quiet you see things clearly. If my mind is chattering, I can’t see the carpet so clearly.
45:51	A: Yes, you seem to suggest what we might metaphorically refer to as the tranquil lake that reflects perfectly the shore.
46:04	K: Yes, but there’s no reflection here.
46:10	A: No, that’s where the analogy breaks down. I meant the lake in the surely, wholly receptive sense.
46:20	K: Wait, sir, let’s be careful in this word ‘receptive’ too. What is there to receive? Who is receiving?
46:31	A: There is ‘what is’.
46:33	K: So the mind, after establishing real order, and that real order can only be established when it has investigated disorder in itself. The investigation and understanding of that disorder brings order – not imposed order.
46:59	A: That’s the miracle.
47:01	K: Then that is established, then the mind, in the process of that the mind becomes very quiet, very still. Then, what is there to reflect? Or, that very stillness has its own momentum, its own energy, its own – activity, which cannot be put into words. The mind when it is quiet is not a dead mind. Is not a vegetating mind – it’s a mind very, very alert, very active, very alive, and highly intelligent, sensitive. Now, what takes place there in that state of stillness is a momentum of a totally different dimension. That’s why one has to be supremely careful not to deceive oneself from the beginning – you follow? A: Yes, yes.
48:21	K: And the whole function of the will has come to an end.
48:30	A: Yes, I think that’s in our culture what we mean by having a quiet heart because we tend to associate heart and will.
48:39	K: Ah, no, no.
48:41	A: I don’t mean, we also talk about heart in terms of hearts and flowers. But the radical sense of heart is the seat of the faculties.
48:51	K: You see, when you really go into this question of meditation, any conscious effort to meditate is not meditation.
49:07	A: The conscious effort to mediate.
49:12	K: You know, practice.
49:13	A: ‘It’s six o’clock and I think I’ll meditate’. Yes, I understand what you mean. One ought to be always.
49:26	K: Because you’re watching, you’re listening, you’re looking, you’re seeing what you’re feeling – you follow? There’s this momentum going on all the time, the movement.
49:39	A: I think that’s why in our tradition we speak of beatitude, not as a state, but as an activity, when it’s understood correctly. Now, I know that most people think of it as a state, but strictly speaking that’s not what the teaching is in our culture, but that beatitude is an activity.
50:03	K: Yes. You see, that brings in the question whether there is a reality which cannot be grasped by the mind. What is the relationship of the mind – mind being the intellect – apart from the heart, has it any relationship to reality? Or when the mind and the heart and the whole being is one, harmonious, then there is a relationship. But to try to find if there is a relationship with the intellect in the sense, analysis and all that, that has no relationship with the whole. It’s only when there is total harmony of the body, the heart, and the mind, then in that state there is a relationship with truth. So let’s forget truth, put aside God, all this, but see if one can establish a harmonious living. Then out of that comes – that is part of meditation – and out of that comes the most extraordinary things.
51:55	A: A misapplication of the will, then, would corrupt this capacity. Yes, yes, I quite follow. The idea of meditation as something that is truly ongoing, is something that we ought to stress a great deal more.
52:19	K: But you see, sir, I would say don’t meditate if you don’t know the right thing.
52:28	A: Right.
52:30	K: Because all these gentlemen come over from the East and teach them meditation,
52:41	A: You’ve hooked up another freight car, another addition. Yes, yes.
52:49	K: That’s why self-knowing is so much more important than meditation. If in the understanding of yourself, not through analysis, clinically, but understand yourself, see exactly as you are; therefore give total attention to what you are, find out. You follow, sir?
53:13	A: Yes, that does effect a purgation. That’s what I meant by the word ‘clinical’ before, not clinical as a technique but in its effect it’s clinical in the sense that purgation has occurred, and now things...
53:30	K: After all wisdom is self-knowing. There is no wisdom in a book. The understanding of oneself totally is wisdom. And without that meditation means absolutely – it’s childish.
53:52	A: Do you think that we might go back at this point to relate love to what we’ve been saying. Earlier I seem to remember remarking that the Rig Veda has the Goddess Speech appearing among friends. We speak of philosophy etymologically as the love of wisdom and yet perhaps in the deeper sense it might be that one can’t do it except one loves and is among those who love.
54:31	K: No, after all, love of something is not love.
54:40	A: Well, loving is going on..
54:41	K: No, it is not, ‘I love God; I love truth’. When you say ‘I love truth’, then you don’t love. But with us love is greatly involved in pleasure. Without pleasure, we say, what is love?
55:11	A: ‘I have to fall in love in order to have more pleasure’.
55:14	K: A dozen things. A: Yes, yes, I understand.
55:20	K: You see that’s why this whole question of love, pleasure, suffering, death – we kind of, you know, shut our eyes to all that. We daren’t enquire about death, whether there is death.
55:45	A: No, we paint the corpse so it will look like it’s alive.
55:48	K: And it’s an appalling idea. A: It is, grotesque.
55:55	K: This requires really, to go into this question of death, love, living, requires a great deal of intelligence, love and affection, to look.
56:17	A: Sir, I just happen to remember a very beautiful story that I think the Sufis tell about Jesus who walking with some persons, came upon the corpse of a dog and mortification had already set in and decay. And so the shock of the stench caused them to walk across the street. And Jesus didn’t, he stopped and looked, really looked at the dog. And when he caught up with them, they wanted to know how he could stand it. And he said he was looking at how beautiful the teeth were. That story has always meant a great deal to me
57:18	K: That’s what we were saying at the beginning. This quality of attention in which there is no division. Sir, you see, it does take place when the scientist is examining something. He’s examining through a microscope, he’s completely – you follow? There is no division as ‘me’, the professor, the great Nobel prize winner who is looking through the microscope – he is looking. And I think that quality of looking, if it can be conveyed to a student, which is to look, before he enters the class, at the whole world – you know, look everywhere, the trees, the birds, the ugliness, you know, look at everything, then when you come into the room you have looked and you carry on with that look.
58:22	A: Yes. This reminds me when I first took chemistry how in the classroom I was hearing all about the molecules and atoms and so forth, and there was a very beautiful tree outside. And I would wonder, looking at this tree, and the thing that disturbed me very much was somehow we weren’t getting the molecules and the tree together.
58:49	K: No. I would look at the tree completely! Give your whole attention to that tree. Then look at the molecules. So that there is no division between the tree and the molecules. You’ve given your attention to the tree, and you’ve given your whole attention to the molecules. You follow, sir? Then there is no conflict, there is no division. It is this division both inwardly and outwardly that creates such havoc in the world.