Education and the significance of life
What are we living and struggling for? Of what value is knowledge if we continue in our confusion? what significance has technical and industrial capacity if we use it to destroy one another? What is the point of our existence if it leads to violence and utter misery? Though we have our money and capable of earning it, though we have our pleasures and our organiser religions, we are in endless conflict.
All of us have been trained bu education and environment to seek personal gain and security, and to fight for our selves. Though we cover it with pleasant phrases, we have been educate for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear. S.13
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and others, is education.
The present system of education is making us subservient, mechanical and deeply thoughtless; though it awakens us intellectually, inwardly it leaves us incomplete, stultified and uncreative.
Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves.
The ignorant woman is not the unlearned, but her who does not know herself, and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding. Understanding comes only through self-knowledge, which awareness of one’s total psychological process.
The man who know how to split the atom but has no love in his heart becomes a monster
If human beings were mechanical entities, automatic machines, then the future would be prefictable and the plans for a perfect Utopia could be drawn up; then we would be able to plan carefully a future society and work towards it. But human beings are not machines to be established according to a definite pattern. Between now and the future there is an mimende gap in which many influencens are at work upon each of us, and in sacrificing the present for the future we are pursuing wrong means to a probably right end. But the means determine the end; and besides, who are we to decide what human should be? By what right do we seek to mould him according to a particular pattern, learn from some books or determined by our own ambitions, hopes and fears
To study a child, one has to be alert, watchful, self-aware, and this demands far greater Intelligence and affection than to encourage her to follow an ideal
Because we ourselves have been brought up to act for the sake of results, we do not der that there can be action free of the desire to gain
Past generations with their ambitions, traditions ans ideals, have brought misery and destruction to the world...If those who are young have the spirit of inquiry, if they are constantly searching out the truth of all things, political and religious, personal and environmental, then youth will have great significance and there is hope for a better world.
Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those who we seek to control? To dominate is to use another for self-gratification, and where there is the use of another there is no love. When there is live there is consideration, not only for the children but for every human being. Unless we are deeply touched by the problem, we will never find the right way of education.
When we hear the truth (about our world falling into ruins) and do not act upon it, it becomes a poison within ourselves, and that poison spreads, bringing psychological disturbances, unbalance and ill health. Only when creative Intelligence is awakened in the individual is there a possibility of a peaceful and happy life.
To have peace, one must employ peaceful means; for if the means are violent, how can the end be peaceful?...there can be self-knowledge and intelligence only when there is freedom at the very outset; and freedom is denied by the acceptance of authority.
Intellect is thought functioning independently of emotion, whereas, Intelligence is the capacity to feel as well as to reason; and untill we approach life with Intelligence, instead of intellect or emotion alone, no political or educational system in the world can save us from the toils of chaos and destruction.
In our search for knowledge we are loosing love, blunting the feeling for beauty, the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialized and less and less integrated. Wisdom cannot be replaced by knowledge, and no amount of explanation, no accumulation of facts, will free human from suffering. Knowledge is necessary, science has its place; but if the mind and heart suffocated by knowledge, and if science explain the cause of suffering away, life becomes vain and meaningless. Our education is making us more and more shallow; it is not helping us to uncover the deeper lagers of our being, and our lives are increasingly disharmonisks and empty
To raise a child sanely, to help her to be perceptive so that she seed through these stupid prejudices, we have to be in close relationship to her...We have to encourage the spirit of inquiry and discontent which is already in her, thereby helping her to discover for herself what is true and what is false.
Education and food in the hands of the few have become the means of controlling humans; and governments, whether left or right, are unconcerned as long as we are efficient machines for turning out merchandise and bullets.
Fear, which us the result of our desire to be secure, makes us conform, imitate and submit to domination, and therefore it prevents creative living. To love creatively is to live in freedom, which is without fear; and there can be a state of creativeness only when the mind is not caught up in desire or the gratification of desire. It is only by watching our own hearts and minds with delicate attention that we can unravel the hidden ways of our desire. The more thoughtful and affectionate we are, the less desire dominates the mind. It is only when there is No love that sensation becomes a consuming problem
The desire to be secure creates fear; it sets going a process of isolation which builds Walls of resistance around us, and these Walls prevent all sensitivity... Since our hearts are withered and we have forgotten how to be kindly, how to look at the stars, at the trees, at the reflections in the water, we require stimulation if pictures and jewels, of books and endless amusements. We crave an ever increasing variety of sensations. It is this craving and its satisfaction that make the mind and heart weary and dull. Sensation can be bought but not the love of beauty.
Without an intermediary (a singer for songs, a poet for poetry, a painter for art) we feel lost; but we must be lost before we can discover anything. Discovery is the beginning of creativeness; and without creativeness, do what we may, there can be no peace or happiness for humans.
ON NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
To live is to act; to be is to be related.
All this may sound rather Utopian, idealistic, something that humans can only aspire to. But if you believe that then you will go on killing. Love is real, as strong as death. It has nothing to do with imagination, or sentiments or romanticism, and naturally it has nothing to do with power, position, prestige...but the man who kills the baby seals or the great wholes, is concerned with his livelihood and not very much with how he gains it. We have broken up life into fragments: the business, the artistic, the scientific, the political and the religious world. So we become hypocrytical, doing something ugly, corrupt in the business world and then coming home to live peacefullt with our family.
To look without the eyes of the censor is to be aware, to be aware that the eyes of the censor are the result of his conditioning. And can Thise eyes look with freedom, look innocently, freely?
Competetion is destroying the world, which is becoming more and more aggressive. If you are aware, change it immediately. That is transformation.
Madras 27 december 1981
From the moment we are born until the day we die we are in conflict. And put up with it; we tolerate. We find many reasons why we should live in conflict. We think struggle and constant striving mean progress, outward progress or inward achievement toward the highest goal...but after thousands of years of suffering, struggle, obeying, accepting, destroying each other, this is what we have reduced it to, a wilderness of wild thoughtless human beings, who do not care for the Earth, nor the lovely things of the Earth, for the beauty if the lake, of the swift running river. None of us seems to care. All that we are concerned with is our own little selves, our own little problems...Life has become extraordinarily dangerous, insecure, without any meaning. You may invent a lot of significance, but actual daily life has become lost of all meaning except to gather money, to be somebody to be powerful and so on.
Ojai, 1 may 1982
Is this consciousness common to all humanbeings? Whereever one goes, one sees suffering, pain, anxiety, loneliness, insanity, fear, the urge of desire. It is common, it is the ground on which every human being stands. Your consciousness is the consiousness of humanity. If one understandable the nature of this - that your are the rest of humankind, though we may have different names, live in different parts of the world, be educated in different ways, you are like rest of mankid: neurotic, aching, suffering loneliness and despair, believing in some illusion, and so on. Whether you go to the east or West this is so. You may not like it; you may think that you are totally independent, free, individual. But when you observe very deeply, you are the rest of humanity
.Ojai, 22 may 1983
If you actually are not aware of yourself, of your words, your gestures, your walk, the way you eat, why you drink or smoke, and all the rest of the things human beings are doing - if you are not aware of all the physical things, how can you be aware of what is going on profoundly? If one is not aware, then one becomes shoddy, middle-class, mediocre. The root meaning of that word, mediocre, is “going half-way up the hill”, going halfway up the mountain, never reaching the top if it. Thats mediocrity. That is, never demaning ourselves excellence, never demanding of ourselves total goodness or complete freedom - not freedom to do what we like, that is not freedom, that is triviality, but to be free from all pain of anxieties, loneliness, despair, and all the rest of it.
Journal 4 april 1975
Your interest is in a short survival, mindless, easygoing or violent. And thousands die of hunger or are butchered because of your irresponsibility. You leave the ordering of the world to the lying, corrupt politician, to the intellectuals, to the experts. Because you have no integrity, you build a society thats immoral, dishonest, a society bases on utterly selfishness. And then you escape from all this for which you alone are responsible, to the beaches, to the woods or carry a gun for “sport”.You may know all this, but knowledge does not bring about a transformation in you. When you have this sense of whole, you will be related to the Universe.
Madras, 29 december 1979
You go back to the book, as the organized religions are doing, and use that as authority - brutal, dogmatic, cruel and destructive. You live by the book, what other people have said, which you have accepted...would it be true to say that you have lived on other People’s ideas, other people’s doctrines and beliefs? And so the result, apparently, is that when one lives a secondhand life - a life based on words, ideas, beliefs -your mind, the totality of the mind, naturally withers... what will make you change? A crisis? Sorrow? Tears? All that has happened, in crisis after crisis. We have shed tears endlesslt and nothing seems to change humans because you are relying on somebody else to do the job...so what will make you change? Please ask yourself, burn with that question, because we have fallen into habit. Your house is burning, and apperently you do not pay attention. So if you dont change, society remains as it it. And clever people are coming along saying society must change, which means a new structure, and the structure then becomes more important than humans, as all revolution has shown.After considering all this, is there a learning, an awakening of Intelligence, a sense of order in our lives, or are we going back to the same routine? If you have that Intelligence, that goodness, that sense if great love, then you will create a marvellous new society where we can all live happily. Its our Earth, not Indian Earth, or english Earth; its our Earth where we can live happily, intelligently, not at each other’s throats. So, please give your heart and mind to find out why you dont change - even in little things. Please pat attention to your own life. You have extraordinary capacities. It is all waiting for you to open the door.
