Waking the Mind: A personal study of the pedagogy of
 J. Krishnamurti's educational philosophy

By Geetha Waters

Geetha Waters’ engaging selection of short stories, Waking the Mind, is a reflection on Jiddu Krishnamurti’s impact on her education based on her experiences at a school he founded in South India. She credits her passion for inquiry as being sparked the first time she heard Krishnamurti speak when she was six. That talk at the Rishi

• Language: English
• Publisher: 31556151122
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648203636

Book preview

Introduction

The Benefits of Discursive Inquiry

Since volunteering at the Summer Hill Krishnamurti Centre in Sydney over the past five years, I have been pondering how to demonstrate the lifelong benefits of Krishnamurti’s educational pedagogy. The best explanation I have been able to come up with is this: Krishnamurti’s discursive inquiry alerts the mind to the fact that words ‘seek’ to justify existence. They ‘seek’ to get things right. These are automatic habits of thought. However, existence needs no justification. Existence can be observed and can effortlessly inform us from moment to moment, whereas words keep drawing on the past to certify existence as right or wrong, beneficial or otherwise … implying that we are somehow separate from it.

During interactions with his students at the schools he founded in India, Britain and the United States, Krishnamurti would ask us to explore the implications of the benefit of perception rather than relying lazily on the act of recall to feel secure. While his instruction led to confounding exercises or experiences, he served us well by setting us on this course of inquiry.

I believe that children need to gain a sense of this inquiry through opportunities that enable them to discover and express – through their own experiences – what they think is true. Ideally, this process should happen in an environment that encourages spontaneity and peer interaction. This allows them to express what they deem to be true and engage in airing their thoughts and convictions in an environment where the risk of being downgraded will not inhibit their spontaneity in participating with their peers in dialogue. I noticed this as a welcome addition to the conventional classroom practice at the Rishi Valley School in India.

Observation and free-flowing dialogue are crucial when it comes to awakening intelligence. If the fact of life is eminently observable and uncontrolled, why then do we seek to justify our thoughts about life? Surely the need for justification is a preoccupation of an overworked imagination. Krishnamurti often implied it was up to each individual to take stock of the movement of their thoughts and keep track of the dissonances which give rise to a sense of confusion.

As a child, it was wonderful to have the insight that knowledge is always suspended in the wider context of life. To understand that observation is sufficient proof of existence grounds intelligence in the context of actuality. This awareness challenges the notion that intelligence is something that has to be acquired and undermines a sense of obligation to uphold one’s knowledge base.

Trusting in one’s ability to observe and learn builds resilience in the face of contradiction and confusion – disturbing emotions that are bound to occur when the mind is engaged in the act of approximating the ‘actual’ to an abstract idea.

If children are introduced to confounding challenges while being given the opportunity to savour the difference between the ‘actual’ and an expression of it in language, they are likely to have a clear advantage over those who have not been encouraged to explore their emerging inner worlds. So, the mind is prepared to learn from active engagement in life – rather than being satisfied with simply relying on what is known.

I believe that in an effort to stay informed, children are more empowered when engaging with observation over recall. The desire to recall loses its hold when faced with the sheer scope of accessing information from immediate observation. However, this trust in one’s infinite potential for learning is deeply undermined by the collective preoccupation with language. I have no solutions to this predicament other than promoting Krishnamurti’s approach to holistic education, which counters the deeply entrenched problem of human conditioning to recall in order to get things right.

Krishnamurti’s pedagogy is a radical shift from the state of being satisfied with the mere ‘interpretation of information’ to one of challenging preconceptions. The awareness that comes from this is a far more sensitive and therefore more alert state of mind than any mental or emotional state based solely on memory. I think that awareness is abundantly linked with an aesthetic perception of wholeness whereas thoughts are largely concerned with playing with definitions.

In an attempt to generate greater interest in the benefits of discursive inquiry into learning, I’m exploring here through anecdotal narrative how this process grounds human intelligence to the emergent facts of life. Discourse and inquiry educate individuals to handle the tools of language and thought with sensitivity and discretion while relying greatly on their powers of observation. Sustaining a discursive inquiry can be extremely interesting, requiring children to exercise all their faculties rather than be content to sit back and let a teacher take the lead. This shift from passive learning to active engagement with life is a challenge, awakening the senses to stay abreast of what is actually going on.

A child introduced to this kind of challenging inquiry will begin to notice that the powers of observation fulfil all the conditions demanded by thought. This is a valuable insight which sustains further inquiry throughout life, freeing the mind from a disposition towards merely accepting what is already known. Discursive inquiry into what is held to be true alerts the child to what are outdated attitudes, beliefs and information.

Challenging the authority of the known is a great boon to the thinker as the tendency to hang on to a backlog of information usually distracts the mind from being attentive to the immediate. For me, sustaining discursive inquiry into the nature of thinking enables a growing respect towards the resilience of our powers of observation. This exercise in serious discourse and inquiry stirs the imagination while spontaneously integrating information through the senses. There is a sense of poise gained in using all one’s faculties in the process of learning where intelligence is exercised as a whole. So this whole inquiry, if it is engaged in with care, concern and love for the larger context of life, does enable the mind to literally wean itself from the authority of the known.

Morning Prayers

In these schools you are free, and all the disturbances of your young lives come into play. You want your way and no one in the world can have his way. You have to understand this very seriously – you cannot have your own way.

I woke up this morning and turned on the computer. Scrolling through Facebook, I came across my high school senior’s page, where Oopali Operajita, a Krishnamurti Alumni member, had posted the translation of the morning prayers we used to sing at Rishi Valley School. Like many of the staff at the school, my father had loved Oopali – a stunning dancer who had gone on to do great things in her life. These days she’s an advisor on international affairs and public policy to Indian parliamentary leaders.

Sitting at the computer, I allowed my mind to wander back several months to the Aalankrita Resort in Hyderabad, and a reunion with my former classmates. There were thirty-five of us from the 1976 Year 10 batch, and one thing we wanted to do, for old time’s sake, was to sing together.

We were meeting after forty years and our love for the ancient chants lifted our hearts, flooding our minds with memories. The songs we used to sing in Sanskrit at school were so evocative and the sounds of the ancient words were a challenge to articulate. Somehow, they would resonate right through our bodies, filling our minds with a sense of exaltation. We were celebrating the feeling of being alive – listening to the rise and fall of our own voices and enjoying the harmony we were able to produce. Back then, I would occasionally catch myself paying particular attention to the range of pitches we were creating. We would glance at and nudge each other, only narrowly avoiding the temptation to lapse into discord merely for the sake of teasing those sitting nearby. But the majority of us loved to join a sing-along. There was no way we would have disrupted the sounds of hundreds of voices harmonising together.

We would sing together three mornings each week before getting down to serious study. I remember that stand-alone hall set in the midst of a rose garden. Just sitting together in that auditorium with no walls had been an event in itself. Built of concrete with granite pillars, the large open hall had been especially built for Krishnamurti – it’s where he would speak to the school when he came to visit us towards the end of each year. His visits would last for weeks at a time, and the whole place would come alive. It was as if his very presence cleared the air and challenged us not to fall asleep from monotony, and also not to fall into a habit of living as though human intelligence was sustained by language alone.

We students had come from all over India to study at Krishnamurti’s school. We spoke many different languages but Sanskrit was the root language of all the languages we knew. That is why chanting together to start the day brought a feeling of synergy and a special sense of purpose. We believed we were going to discover why human beings across the world could not live in harmony together. We thought we were going to find the root of the problem of human existence, which had troubled humankind for millennia. We would uproot this problem, and explore, investigate and examine it together. And to succeed, we would start close to home – by observing everything that went on in our lives, including ourselves. Most importantly, we had to observe the impact of conditioning on the mind.

To help us in this most arduous task, Krishnamurti had founded our school in the midst of a wilderness, away from the distractions of the modern world. Secluded from the traditional preoccupations of an ancient religious culture, he hoped that we would seriously consider the task he had put before us. The force of tradition had driven us all into a slump from which few of us could dig ourselves out. But it was implied that observing the impact of labels and conditioning on the mind would free us from wanting to blindly follow the old ways.

The school was an idyllic place set in the midst of the Deccan Plateau. When we made the effort to climb to an elevated vantage point, we saw blue hills flanking the horizon in every direction.

Now in Sydney years later, I’m scanning through Oopali’s Facebook posts and I read the chant my former senior schoolmate has posted:

Morning Prayers

Om asato maa sadgamaya

Tamaso maa jyotirgamaya

Mrityormaa amrutam gamaya

Om shanti shanti shanti

Lead us from falsehood to the truth

Lead us from darkness into the light

Lead us from death to immortality

Let there be peace, peace, peace

When I’d first chanted those words as a child, the word for peace had sounded like a celebration. Years later, after struggling with the many ideas that I came across in an effort to understand the concepts I was being introduced to by society, I began to realise that approximating the actual to an idea of it only sets the scene for psychological unrest.

The lilting feeling that had come with the word ‘peace’ had disappeared, and the word took on an evocative meaning all its own. As I puzzled over the word, I understood that the abstract idea of ‘peace’ was increasingly out of my reach … and so my desire for it redoubled, and then continued to grow in my heart, filling me with a longing.

After that, every time we sang the song, the word for peace, ‘shanti’, lured me on in