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Word Gems self-knowledge, authentic living, full humanity, continual awakening
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Public Talk 3, Poona, India - 31 Jan 1953 excerpts What do we mean by education? Why do we want to be educated? Is it the mere acquisition of some technical knowledge which will give you a certain capacity, with which to lead your life, so that you can apply that technique and get a profitable job? Is that what we mean by education, to pass certain examinations and then to become a clerk, and from a clerk to climb up the ladder of managerial efficiency? Or, do we educate our children or educate ourselves in order to understand the whole complex problem of living? With what intention actually do we send our children to be educated or do we get educated ourselves? Obviously, taking it factually as things are, you get educated in order to get a job and with that you are satisfied; and that is all you are concerned with, to be able to earn a livelihood by some means. So you go to a college or to a university, you soon marry and you have to earn a livelihood; and before you know where you are, you are a grandfather for the rest of your life. That is what most of us are doing with education; that is the fact. With that, most of us are satisfied. But is that education? Is that an integrating process, in which there can be a comprehension of the whole total process of life? That is, do you want to educate your children to understand the whole of life and not merely a segment of life like the physical, emotional, mental, psychological, or spiritual, to have not the compartmental divided outlook but a whole total integrated outlook on life in which, of course, there is the earning capacity? Now, which is it that we want - not theoretically but actually? What is our necessity? According to that, you will have universities, schools, examinations or no examinations... Do you want your children to be educated to be glorified clerks, bureaucrats, leading utterly miserable useless, futile lives, functioning as machines in a system? Or, do you want integrated human beings who are intelligent, capable, fearless? We will find out probably what we mean by `intelligence'. The mere acquisition of knowledge is not intelligence, and it does not make an intelligent human being. You may have all the technique, but that does not necessarily mean that you are an intelligent integrated human being... Now is it possible through education, the right kind of education, to bring about this integrated human being - that is, a human being who is thinking in terms of the whole and not merely of the part; who is thinking as a total entity, as a total process, and not indulging in divided, broken up, fractional thinking? Is it possible for a human being to be intelligent - that is, to be without fear - through education, so that the mind is capable of thinking freely, not thinking in terms of a Hindu or a Mussulman or a Christian or a Communist? You can think freely only when your mind is unconditioned - that is, not conditioned as a Catholic or a Communist and so on - so that you are capable of looking at all the influences of life which are constantly conditioning you; so that you are capable of examining, observing and freeing yourself from these conditions and influences; so that you are an intelligent human being without fear... This is only possible where there is no ambition. Because, an ambitious man is not an intelligent man, he is a ruthless man; he may be ambitious spiritually, but he is equally ruthless. Is it possible to have a human being without ambition? Can there be the right education which will produce such a human being - which means, really a spiritual human being? I rather hesitate to use the word because you will immediately translate it in terms of some religious pursuit, some superstition... So far as we know, education is conditioned thinking, is it not? All that we are concerned with is to acquire a job or use that knowledge for self-satisfaction, for self-aggrandizement, to get on in the world... So, as long as the mind is seeking any form of security - and that is what most of us want - as long as the mind is seeking permanency in any form, there can be no freedom. As long as individually or collectively we seek security, there must be war, which is an obvious fact; and that is what is happening in the world today. So there can be true freedom only when the mind understands this whole process of the desire for security, for permanency. After all, that is what you want in your Gods, in your gurus. In your social relationships, your governments, you want security; so you invest your God with the ultimate security, which is above you; you clothe that image with the idea that you as an entity are such a transient being, and that there at least you have permanency. So you begin with the desire to be religiously permanent; and all your political, religious and social activities, whatever they are, are based on that desire for permanency - to be certain, to perpetuate yourselves through the family or through the nation or through an idea, through your son. How can such a mind which is seeking constantly, consciously or unconsciously, permanency, security, how can such a mind ever have freedom? We really do not seek true freedom. We seek something different from freedom, we seek better conditions, a better state. We do not want freedom; we want better, superior, nobler conditions; and that we call education. Can this education produce peace in the world? Certainly, no. On the contrary, it is going to produce greater wars and misery. As long as you are a Hindu, Mussulman, or God knows what else, you are going to create strife, for yourself, for your neighbour and nation. Do we realize this? Look at what is happening in India! Instead of being integrated human beings, you are thinking separatively; your activities are fractioned, broken up, disintegrated - your Maharashtra, your Gujurat, your Andhra, your Tamil - you are all fighting; that is the result of this so-called freedom and so-called education. You say that you have unity religiously; but actually you are fighting, destroying each other, because you do not see the whole process of living, because you are only concerned with tomorrow or to have better jobs. You will go out after listening and do exactly the same thing. You will be a Maharashtrian forgetting the rest of the world. As long as you are thinking in those terms you are going to have wars, miseries, destruction. You will never be safe, neither you nor your children, though you want to be safe and therefore you are thinking in this narrow regional way. As long as you have these ways, you have got to have wars. Your present way of living indicates that you really do not want to have freedom; what you want is merely a better way of living, more safety, more contentment, to be assured of a job, to be assured of your position, religiously, politically. Such people cannot create a new world. They are not religious people. They are not intelligent people. They are thinking in terms of immediate results like all politicians... Freedom is something entirely different. Freedom comes into being; it cannot be sought after. It comes into being when there is no fear, when there is love in your heart. You cannot have love and think in terms of a Hindu, a Christian, a Mussulman, a Parsi, or God knows what else. Freedom comes into being only when the mind is no longer seeking security for itself, either in tradition or in knowledge. A mind that is crippled with knowledge or burdened with knowledge is not a free mind. The mind is only free when it is capable of meeting life at every moment, meeting the Reality which every incident, which every thought, which every experience reveals; and that revelation is not possible when the mind is crippled by the past... The good is not the `respectable'. The respectable man can never know what is good. Most of us are respectable and therefore we do not know what it is to be good. Moral education can only come, not with the cultivation of respectability, but with the awakening of love. But we do not know what love is. Is love something to be cultivated? Can you learn it in colleges, in schools, from teachers, from technicians, from the following of your gurus? Is devotion love? And if it is, can the man who is respectable, who is devoted, know love? Do you know what I mean by respectability? Respectability is when the mind is cultivating, when the mind is becoming virtuous. The respectable man is the man who is struggling consciously not to be envious, the man who is following tradition, he who says, `What will people say'? Respectability will obviously never know what Truth is, what good is, because the respectable man is only concerned with himself. It is love which brings morality. Without love there is no morality. You may be a great man, a moral man; you may be very good; you may not be envious; you may have no ambition; but if you have no love, you are not moral, you are not good, fundamentally, deeply, profoundly. You may have all the outer trimmings of goodness; but if you have no love in the heart, there can be no moral, ethical being. Is love something to be taught in a school? Please follow all this. What is it that prevents us from loving? - If you can be taught in the school and in the house, to love, how simple it would be, would it not? Many books are written on it. You learn them and you repeat them; and you know all the symptoms of love without having love. Can love be taught? ... If love cannot be taught, what are the things that are preventing love? The things of the mind, the thoughts, the jealousy, the anguish, the ideas, the pursuits, their suppressions, the motives of the mind - these may be the things that prevent love. And as we have cultivated the mind for several centuries, it may be that the mind is preventing us from loving. So perhaps the things that you are teaching your children and the things that you are learning [might] be the things which are at the root of the destruction of love; because you are only developing one side - the intellectual side, the so-called technical side... If love can be taught in school through books, shown on the screen in cinemas, then it would be possible to cultivate morality. If morality is a thing of tradition, then it is quite simple; then you condition the student to be moral, to be a Communist, to be a Socialist, to think along a particular line, and say that that line is the good line, the true line; any deviation from it is immoral, ending up in concentration camps. Is morality something to be taught - which means, can the mind be conditioned to be moral? Or is morality something that springs spontaneously, joyously, creatively? This is only possible when there is love. That love cannot exist when you cultivate your mind which is the very centre of the `me', the `I', the thing that is uppermost in most of us day in and day out - the `me' that is so important, the `I' that is everlastingly trying to fulfil, trying to be something. And as long as that [self-centered] `I' exists, do what you will, all your morality has no meaning; it is merely conformity to a pattern based on security, for your being something some day, so that you can live without any fear. Such a state is not a moral state, it is merely an imitation. The more a society is imitative, following tradition, the more deteriorating it is. It is important to see this, to find out for oneself how the self, the [little] `me' is perpetuating itself, how the `me' is everlastingly thinking about virtue and trying to become virtuous and establishing laws of morality for itself and for others. So the good man who is following the pattern of good is the respectable man; and the respectable man is not the man who knows what love is. Only the man who knows what love is, is the moral man.
reprinted from the 'authority' page
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