Jayachandran

Chapter 20

I wonder why you are being educated? Do you know? As soon as you are old enough your parents send you to school. They perhaps know why they send you to school, but do you know why you go to school? All that you and your parents know is that you must go to school and be educated.
Now, what does it mean to be educated? Have you ever thought about it? Does it mean merely passing examinations so that afterwards you can get married and have some sort of job which you may or may not like, and continue in that job for the rest of your life? Is that education?
You are in various schools and you are being educated, that is, you are learning mathematics, history, geography, science, and so on. Why? Have you ever wondered? Is it merely in order to earn a living afterwards? Is that the purpose of education? Is education merely a matter of passing examinations and putting a few letters after your name, or is it something entirely different?
If you look around, you will see what an awful mess the world is in. Do you see the poor who have very little to eat, who have no holidays and must work day after day from morning till night, while your parents go to the club in luxurious cars and enjoy themselves there? That is life, is it not? There are the poor and the rich, those who are ill and those who have good health, and throughout the world there are wars, there are miseries, there is every kind of trouble. And should you not begin to think about these things while you are young? But you see, you are not helped in your schools to prepare yourself to meet that vast expanse of life with its extraordinary struggles, miseries, suffering, wars; nobody talks to you about all this. They just tell you the bare facts, but that is not enough, is it?
Surely, education is not just to enable you to get a job; it is something which should help you to prepare for life. You may become a clerk, or a governor, or a scientist, but that is not the whole of life.
There are all kinds of things in life. Life is like the ocean. The ocean is not just what you see on the surface, is it? It is tremendously deep, it has enormous currents and is teeming with all kinds of life, with many varieties of fish, the big living on the small. All that is the sea; and so it is with life, in which there are all kinds of enjoyments, pleasures, pains, extraordinary inventions, innumerable systems of meditation, and the mass search for happiness. The whole of that is life, but you are not prepared for it. At school nobody talks to you about all those things. There are too many boys and girls in each class, and the teacher is only concerned with helping you to pass the examinations, he is not interested in the clarification of your minds. But education is surely not a process of stuffing the mind with information. If you know how to read you can pick up any encyclopedia and get whatever information you want. So I think education is something entirely different from merely learning certain facts and passing a few examinations.
You see, as long as we are afraid, we are not educated. Do you know what fear is? You know you are afraid. The children are afraid, the grown-up people are afraid, you are all afraid; and as long as we are afraid, we are not educated, we have no intelligence. So education is not merely the stuffing of the mind with information, but the helping of the student to understand without fear this great complexity of life.
You are afraid of your teachers, of your parents, of your elder brother, of your aunt, or of somebody else, are you not? The older people have the power to punish you, to push you away or ask you to stay in your own room; and so in the school as well as in the home we are continually trained in fear. Our life is moulded by fear, and from childhood till we die we are afraid. And do you know what fear does? Have you ever watched yourself when you are afraid, how your tummy tightens up, how you perspire, how you get nightmares? You don’t like to be with the people of whom you are frightened, do you? You want to run away like an animal that is threatened. You see, with that fear we go to school and college, and with that fear we leave college to meet this extraordinary thing, this vast stream with its enormous depth which we call life. So it seems to me that the thing of first importance in education is to see to it that we are educated to be free from fear; because fear dulls our minds, fear cripples our thinking, fear makes for darkness, and as long as we are frightened we shall not create a new world. Do you understand what I am talking about, or is it something of which you have never heard before?
You know, in the world outside of your of family, outside of your home, in the world beyond Bombay, in Europe, America and Russia, they are preparing instruments of enormous destruction. The world is going through an awful phase, and all the politicians all the leaders are very confused, though they say they are not, for they are always having wars, there is always some kind of trouble. So the world at present is not a beautiful thing, it is not a happy place to live in; and if you who are very young are not rightly educated, you will obviously create a world which is equally unhappy, equally miserable, equally confused. Is it not therefore very important to find out how you should be educated so that you can create a totally different kind of world? – a world in which we can all live happily together, in which there are not the rich and the poor, neither the big politicians who have all the power, position, glamour, nor the underprivileged who have nothing in life and must work without ceasing till they die.
It is you who will have to create a new world, not the old people, because the old people are making an awful mess of it. But if you are rightly educated you can create a new world. It is in your hands, not in the hands of the politicians or the priests. If you are rightly educated you will create a marvellous world – not a world of India or Europe, but a world which will be ours, yours and mine, a world in which we shall all live happily together. And I assure you, the creation of such a world depends on you, not on anybody else, and that is why it is very important how you are educated and what kind of teachers you have. If the teacher is afraid, he will have students who are also afraid. If the teacher is narrow, petty, small, merely passing on information to you, then you too will have minds which are very small and you will grow up without understanding what life is.
So it is really very important to be educated rightly, which means growing up in freedom; and you cannot be free if you are frightened of your parents, of your teachers, of public opinion, or of what your grandmother would say. If you are frightened you can never be free. And you may notice in the schools that the teachers have not thought out this problem of fear; because the moment you have any kind of compulsion to make you do something, either through so-called kindness or through a system of discipline, it does create fear. If I am the teacher, and in order to make you study I compare you with another student, saying that you are not as intelligent as some other boy or girl, I am destroying you, am I not? In our present schools we have examinations, which breed fear, and we also have systems of grading, which means that the student is always being compared with somebody else; therefore it is the clever boy or girl who is considered important, and not the individual student. The student who is very smart at his studies, who has a peculiar capacity to pass examinations, may be stupid in other directions, and probably he is.
Giving marks, grading, comparing, and any form of compulsion, either through kindness or through threats, breeds fear; and it is because we are caught in this fear while we are young that we struggle in fear for the rest of our life. The older people, by their attitude towards life, create a form of education which is merely a repetition of the old, so there is no new way of living. That is why it seems to me very important to think about all these matters while you are still very young. Even if you don’t understand what I am saying you should ask your teachers about this, if they will permit it, and see if you can really be free from fear. When there is no fear, you study much better. When you feel that you are not being compelled to do anything, you will find out what you are interested in, and then for the rest of your life you will do something which you really love to do – which is much more important than becoming a miserable clerk because you must have a job. To do something because your parents say that you must do it, or because society demands it, is all non- sense; whereas, if you really love to do something with your hands and with your mind, then through that love you will create a new world. But you cannot create a new world if you are frightened, and therefore while you are young there must be a spirit of revolt.
Do you understand what revolt is? As you grow from childhood to adulthood, life presses in upon you in the form of parents, teachers, tradition, neighbours, the culture or society in which you are brought up, and so on; all this encloses you like a prison and compels you to do what it wants, so you are never yourself. And is it not very important that education should help you to be free so that you can think and live without fear and thereby know for yourself what love is? If your parents really love you they will bring about this kind of education, they will see to it that you are free – free to live and grow without fear, free to be happy. But there are very few such parents in the world, because most parents say that the child must do this and not that, he must be like his father: a lawyer, a policeman, a merchant, or whatever it is.
It is really very difficult to understand all these complex problems, and as we grow up we can understand them only when there is intelligence. Intelligence should come while we are young, which means that the teacher himself must first understand all this. But there are very few teachers who understand it, because to most of them teaching is merely a job. They cannot get another job where they would make more money, so they say, “Teaching is a good job”, which means that they are interested neither in educating you nor in education itself.
So, as a boy or a girl you have to find out the truth of all this, you cannot just be tame, like a domesticated animal. I hope you are understanding what I am talking about, because all this is really very difficult and requires a great deal of thinking on your part. The world is disintegrating, going to pieces, there are wars, starvation and misery; and the creation of a new world is in your hands. But you cannot create a new world if in you there is no spirit of revolt; and you cannot have this spirit of revolt as long as there is fear which cripples intelligence.

Questioner: I have everything to make me happy, while others have not. Why is this so?
Krishnamurti: Why do you think it is like that? You may have good health, kind parents, a good brain, and therefore think you are happy; whereas, somebody who is ill, whose parents are unkind, and who has not too good a brain, feel that he is unhappy. Now, why is this so? Why are you happy while somebody else is unhappy? Does happiness consist in having riches, cars, good houses, clean food, kind parents? Is that what you call happiness? And is a person unhappy who has none of these things? So, what do you mean by happiness? This is important to find out, is it not? Does happiness consist in comparing? When you say, “I am happy”, is your happiness born of comparison? Do you understand what I am talking about, or is this too difficult?
Have you not heard your parents say, “So-and-so is not as well off as we are”? Comparison makes us feel that we have something, it gives us a sense of satisfaction, does it not? If one is clever and compares oneself with somebody who is not so clever, one feels very happy. That is, we think we are happy through pride, comparison; but the man who feels happy by comparing himself with another who has a little less, is a most miserable human being, because there is always somebody above him who has more; and so it goes on and on. Surely, comparison is not happiness. Happiness is entirely different; it is not a thing to be sought after. Happiness comes when you are doing something because you really love to do it, and not because it gives you riches or makes you a prominent person.

Questioner: What is the way to get rid of the fear that we have?
Krishnamurti: First you must know what you are afraid of, must you not? You may be afraid of your parents, of the teachers, of not passing an examination, of what your sister, your brother, or your neighbour might say; or you may be afraid of not being as good or as clever as your father, who has a big name. There are many kinds of fear, and one must know what one is afraid of. Now, do you know what you are afraid of? If you do, then don’t run away from that fear, but find out why you are afraid. If you want to know how to get rid of fear, you must not escape from it, you must face it; and the very facing of it helps you to be free of it. As long as we are running away from fear, we do not look at it; but the moment we stop and look at fear, it begins to dissolve. The very running away is the cause of fear.
You must be teeming with questions, but perhaps you are shy. May I ask you a question? What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you know? Of course, for the girls it is simple, they want to get married, that is understood; but even if you get married, what do you want to do? Are you ambitious? Do you know what ambition is? It is the desire to become somebody, is it not? The man who has an ideal and says, “I am going to be like Rama, Sita, or Gandhiji”, is still ambitious. Are you ambitious in some way?
Now, what does that mean? Why are you ambitious? This may be a little difficult, but it is one of the problems of life and you ought to be thinking about it. I will tell you why. We are all ambitious; everyone is ambitious in his own way. And do you know what that does? It causes us to be against one another. We are always struggling to be rich, to have fame, to be more clever; I want to be greater than you, and you want to be greater than I. So ambition really means trying to be something we are not. And which is important? To try to be something we are not, or to understand what we are? Surely, we must first look at ourselves and begin to understand what we are.
You see, most of us are idealists; and idealists are hypocrites, because they are always trying to become something which they are not. If I am stupid and I strive to become clever, everybody thinks it is a marvellous thing. But a stupid person, however well he may learn the tricks of cleverness, does not thereby become intelligent. Whereas, if I know that I am stupid, then that very knowledge is the beginning of intelligence – which is much better than merely being clever. Do you understand?
If I am not very quick-witted, what generally happens? In school I am put at the end of the class – which is a disgraceful thing for the teacher to do, because I am as important as anybody else. It is stupid of the teacher to keep me at the end of the class by comparing me with the clever students, because by comparing he is destroying me.
But comparison is the basis of our so-called education, and of our whole culture. The teacher is always saying that you,must do as well as such and such a boy or girl, so you struggle to be as clever as they are. And what happens to you? You get more and more worried, physically ill, mentally worn out. Whereas, if the teacher does not compare you with anyone, but says, “Look here, old boy, be yourself. Let us find out what you are interested in, what your capacities are. Don’t imitate, don’t try to become like Rama, Sita, or Gandhiji, but be what you are and begin from there” – if the teacher says that, then it is you who are important, not somebody else. It is the individual who is important, and by comparing a student with somebody who is cleverer, the teacher is belittling him, making him smaller, more stupid. It is the function of the teacher to help you to find out what you are, and he cannot help you to do that if he is comparing you with somebody else. Comparison destroys you, so don’t compare yourself with another. You are as good as anybody. Understand what you are, and from there begin to find out how to be more fully, more freely, more expansively what you are.

Questioner: You said that if the parents really love their child they will not stop him from doing anything. But if the child does not want to be clean or eats something which is bad for his health, must we not stop him?
Krishnamurti: I do not think I have ever said that if the parents love their child they will let him do exactly as he likes. Sir, this is a very difficult question, is it not? After all, if I love my son I shall see to it that he has no cause for fear – which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. As I said, to be free of fear, the child must not be compared with anyone else, nor must he be subjected to examinations. If I love the child I shall give him freedom, not to do what he likes – because merely to do what one likes is stupid – , but freedom in which to cultivate intelligence; and that intelligence will then tell him what to do.
To have intelligence there must be freedom, and you cannot be free if you are constantly being urged to become like some hero, for then the hero is important and not you. Don’t you have tummy-aches when you have examinations? Don’t you feel nervous, anxious? When year after year you have to face this terrible ordeal called examinations, do you know what it does to you throughout the rest of your life? The older people say that you must grow without fear; but it doesn’t mean a thing, it is only a lot of words, because they are cultivating fear through subjecting you to examinations and by comparing you with somebody else.
Another thing we should really discuss is what we call discipline. Do you know what I mean by discipline? From childhood you are told what to do, and you have jolly well got to do it. No one takes the trouble to explain why you should get up early, why you should be clean. parents and teachers do not explain these things to you because they have neither the love, the time, nor the patience; they merely say, “Do it or I shall punish you”. So education as we know it, is the instilling of fear. And how can your mind be intelligent when there is fear? How can you have love or feel respect for people when you are afraid? You may `respect’ the people who have big names, expensive cars; but you don’t respect your servant, you just kick him. When a big man comes around you all salute him and touch his feet, and that is called respect; but it is not respect, it is fear that is making you touch his feet. You don’t touch the feet of the poor coolie, do you? You are not respectful to him, because he cannot give you anything. So all our education is nothing but the cultivation or strengthening of fear. That is a terrible thing, is it not? And as long as there is fear, how can we create a new world? We cannot. That is why it is very important to understand this problem of fear while you are young, and for all of us to see to it that we are really educated without fear.

Questioner: Is it not important to have ideals in life?
Krishnamurti: This is a good question, because you all have ideals. You have the ideal of non-violence, the ideal of peace, or the ideal of a person such as Rama, Sita, or Gandhiji, have you not? Which means what? You are not important, but the ideal is very important. Rama is awfully important, but not poor old you, so you imitate him. All that you are concerned with is to copy either a person or an idea. As I said, an idealist is a hypocrite, because he is always trying to become what he is not, instead of being and understanding what he is.
You see, the problem of idealism is really a complex one, and you don’t understand it because you have never been encouraged to think about it; no one has ever talked it over with you. All your books, all your teachers, all the newspapers and magazines say you must have ideals, you must be like this hero or that, which only makes the mind like a monkey who imitates, or like a gramophone record which repeats a lot of words. So you must not accept, but begin to question everything and find out; and you cannot question if you are inwardly afraid. To question everything means being in revolt, which is to create a new world. But you see, your teachers and parents do not want you to be in revolt, because they want to control you, they want to shape and mould you into their patterns; and so life continues to be an ugly thing.

Questioner: If we are small, how can we create a new world?
Krishnamurti: You cannot create a new world if you are small. But you are not going to be small for the rest of your life, are you? You are small if you are afraid. You may have a big body, a big car, a high position, but if you are afraid inside you will never create a new world. That is why it is very important to grow with intelligence, without fear, to grow in freedom. But to grow in freedom does not mean disciplining oneself to be free.

Questioner: What should be the system of education to make the child fearless?
Krishnamurti: A system or a method implies being told what to do and how to do it; and will that make you fearless? Can you be educated with intelligence, without fear, through any kind of system? When you are young, you should be free to grow; but there is no system to make you free. A system implies making the mind conform to a pattern, does it not? It means locking you up in a framework, not giving you freedom. The moment you rely on a system you dare not step out of it, and then the very thought of stepping out of it breeds fear. So, there is really no system of education. What is important is the teacher and the student, not the system. After all, if I want to help you to be free of fear, I myself must be free of fear. Then I must study you; I must take the trouble to explain everything to you and tell you what the world is like; and to do all this I must love you. As a teacher I must have the feeling that when you leave school or college you should be without fear. If I really have that feeling, I can help you to be free of fear.

Questioner: Is it possible to know the quality of gold without testing it in a special way? Similarly, can the capacity of each child be known without some sort of examination?
Krishnamurti: Do you really know the capacity of the child through examination? One child may fail because he is nervous, fearful of the examination, while another may slip through because he is less affected by it. Whereas, if you watch each child week after week, if you observe his character, the way he plays games, the way he talks, the interests he shows, how he studies, the food he eats, then you will begin to know the child without requiring examinations to tell you what he is capable of. But we have never thought about all these things.

Questioner: Sir, what is your idea of a new world?
Krishnamurti: I have no idea about the new world. The `new’ world cannot be new if I have an idea about it. This is not just a clever statement, it is a fact. If I have an idea about it, the idea is born of my study and experience, is it not? It is born of what I have learnt, of what I have read, of what other people have said the new world should be. So, the `new’ world can never be new if it is a creation of the mind, because the mind is the old. You don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, do you? You may know that there will be no school tomorrow because it is Sunday, and that on Monday you will be going to school again; but what is going to happen outside the school, what kind of feelings you are going to have, what kind of things you are going to see – all that you don’t know, do you? Because you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, or the next morning, when it happens it will be new; and to be able to meet the new is what matters.

Questioner: How can we create anything new if we don’t know what it is we want to create?
Krishnamurti: It is a sad thing not to know what it means to create, is it not? When you have a feeling, you may put what you feel into words. If you see a beautiful tree, you may write a poem describing, not the tree, but what the tree has awakened in you. That feeling is the new, it is the creative thing; but you cannot bring it about, it must happen to you.

Questioner: Must the children take all these matters seriously. And if they do, will they ever be free to enjoy themselves?
Krishnamurti: Are you not serious now? But you cannot be serious all the time, can you? You cannot play all the time, or sleep all the time, or study all the time. There is a time to play and a time to be serious, and this meeting is meant to be serious; but if you do not want to be serious, it is all right, no body is going to compel you.

Chapter 21

We have been talking about fear; and do you not think that what we call religion is really the outcome of fear? You must have noticed how your parents, your grandparents, or your relatives go to the temple, worship an idol, repeat sentences from the Gita or some other sacred book, or perform some ritual. Doing these things and believing in something, is what they call religion. But do you think it is so? Going to the temple, putting flowers at the foot of an idol made by the hand, doing some ritual day after day, year in and year out till you die – is that religion?
And if religion is not the worship of a thing made by the hand, then is it the worship of something made by the mind? When you enter a temple you see there an idol which some sculptor has carved out of stone. People put flowers before this image, they pour water on it, they clothe it; that is what they call religion, and they think it is irreligious not to do these things.
We also have an idea of what God is, and that idea is created by the mind, is it not? The idol is made by the mind through the hand, and the idea of God is made and held in the mind as something marvellous, something to be worshipped like the sacred idol. Both the idea and the idol are made by the mind, are they not? Obviously they are not God, because the mind has invented them. In Europe you will see the sculptured figure of a human being stripped and nailed on a cross, and that figure they worship. Here in India we do the same thing in a different way. Whether in India, in Europe or America, we pray to an image, we worship an idea, and gradually we build up a thing called religion – a religion which is invented by the mind.
You see, we are afraid to be alone, we want somebody to help us. At your age we want to be helped by our mother, by our father, by our grandfather, and as we grow older we still want somebody to help us, because life is very difficult; we want a glorified father to protect us, to tell us what to do. So, out of the fear of being lonely, of not being helped, we believe in a God who is going to help us; but it is still an invention of the mind, is it not? Because we are afraid and want to be guided and told what is right and what is wrong, as we grow up we create a religion which is not religion at all. Religion, I think, is something totally different, and to find the real thing we must obviously be free of the thing which man invents. Do you follow? To find out what God is, to discover something that is real, one must be free of all the pseudo-religious trappings that man has imposed upon himself. You can discover the real thing only if you are completely free of fear, which means that as you grow up and go out into the world you must have the intelligence to find out what you are afraid of – to take it out of the cupboard of your mind, look at it and not run away from it.
Most of us are afraid to be alone. Do we ever go out for a walk alone? Very rarely. We always want somebody to go with us because we want to chatter, we want to tell somebody a story, we are all the time talking, talking, talking; so we are never alone, are we? When one grows older and can go for a walk alone, one discovers a great many things. One discovers one’s own ways of thinking, and then one begins to observe all the things about one – the beggar, the stupid man, the clever man, the rich and the poor; one becomes aware of the trees, the birds, the light on a leaf. You will see all this when you go out alone. In being alone you will soon find out that you are afraid. And it is because we are afraid that we have invented this thing called religion.
Volumes have been written about God and what you should do to approach him; but the basis of it all is fear. As long as one is afraid, one cannot find anything real. If you are afraid of the dark, you dare not go out, so you pull up the sheet and go to sleep. To go out and look, to find out what is real, there must be freedom from fear, must there not? But you see, to be free from fear is very difficult. Most grown-up people say that you can be free only when you are older, when you have gathered knowledge and have learned to discipline your mind. They think freedom is something very far away, at the end, not at the beginning. But surely there must be freedom right from childhood up, otherwise you are never free.
You see, being themselves frightened, the older people discipline you, they tell you what is right and what is wrong; they say you must do that and not this, that you must think of what people will say, and so on. There is every form of control to make you fit into the groove, into a frame, a pattern, and this is called discipline. Being very young, and out of your own fear, you fit in; but that does not help you, because when you just fit in you do not understand.
Now, look at it the other way. If you were not disciplined, if you were not controlled, held down, would you do what you like? Would you do as you please if there were nobody to tell you what you should do? You probably would now, because you are used to being forced, held down, put in a framework, and as a reaction you would do something contrary to it. But suppose that from childhood up, right from the beginning as you go through school, the teacher talked things over with you and did not tell you what you should do – how then would you respond? If, right from the beginning as you go through school, the teacher pointed out that to be free is the first thing, not the last thing when you are about to die, then what would happen?
The difficulty is that to be free demands a great deal of intelligence; and as you don’t yet know what it is to be free – free to do something which you really love to do – , it is the function of the teacher to help you to discover the ways of intelligence. It is intelligence which brings about freedom from fear. As long as there is fear, you are constantly imposing upon yourself a kind of discipline: I must do this and not that, I must believe, I must conform, I must do puja, and so on. This self-discipline is all born of fear, and where there is fear there is no intelligence.
So education, rightly speaking, is not just a matter of reading books, passing examinations and getting a job. Education is quite a different process; it extends from the moment you are born to the moment you die. You may read innumerable books and be very clever, but I do not think mere cleverness is a mark of education. If you are merely clever you miss a great deal in life. The important thing is first to find out what you are afraid of, to understand it and not run away from it. When your mind is really free from demands of every kind, when it is no longer envious, acquisitive, only then can you find out what God is. God is not what people say God is. God is something entirely different – something that comes into being when you under. stand, when you have no fear.
So, religion is really a process of education, is it not? Religion is not a matter of what to believe and what not to believe, of doing rituals or clinging to some superstitions; it is a process of educating ourselves in the ways of understanding so that our life becomes extraordinarily rich and we are no longer frightened, mediocre human beings. Only then can we create a new world.
Politicians and religious leaders say that the creation of a new world is in the hands of the young people. Haven’t you heard that? Hundreds of times, probably. But they don’t educate you to be free; and there must be freedom to create a new world. The grown-ups educate you in the pattern of their own ideas – and they have made an awful mess of things. They say it is you, the younger generation, who must create a new world; but at the same time they put you into a cage, do they not? They tell you that you must be an Indian, a Parsi, this or that – and if you follow their ideas, you are obviously going to create a world exactly like the present one. A new world can be created only when you create out of freedom, not out of fear, not out of superstition, nor on the basis of what certain people have said the new world should be.
You who are young, the coming generation, can bring about a totally different world only if you are educated to be free, and are not forced to do something which you do not love or understand. That is why it is very important, while you are young, to be real revolutionaries – which means not accepting anything, but inquiring into all these things to find out what is true. Only then can you create a new world. Otherwise, though you may call it by a deferent name, you will perpetuate the same old world of misery and destruction which has always existed until now.
But generally what happens to us when we are young? The girls get married, have children, and gradually wither away. The boys, when they grow up, have to earn a livelihood, so they get jobs and are required to conform, forced to follow a profession whether they like it or not; being married and having children, they are dragged along by their responsibilities and must therefore do what they are told. So the spirit of revolt, the spirit of inquiry, the spirit of inward search comes to an end; all their revolutionary ideas of creating a new world are crushed out, because life is too much for them. They have to go to the office, they have a boss there for whom they must do this or that, and gradually the sense of inquiry, the feeling of revolt, the eagerness to create an altogether different way of life, is completely destroyed. That is why it is very important to have this spirit of revolt right from the beginning, from childhood up.
You see, religion, the real thing, means a revolt in order to find God, which is to discover for oneself what is true. It is not a mere acceptance of the so-called sacred books, however ancient and venerated they may be.

Questioner: In your book on education you suggest that modern education is a complete failure. I would like you to explain this.
Krishnamurti: Is it not a failure, sir? When you go out on the street you see the poor man and the rich man; and when you look around you, you see all the so-called educated people throughout the world wrangling, fighting, killing each other in wars. There is now scientific knowledge enough to enable us to provide food, clothing and shelter for all human beings, yet it is not done. The politicians and other leaders throughout the world are educated people, they have titles, degrees, caps and gowns, they are doctors and scientists; and yet they have not created a world in which man can live happily. So modern education has failed, has it not? And if you are satisfied to be educated in the same old way, you will make another howling mess of life.

Questioner: May I know why we should not fit into our parents’ plans, since they want us to be good?
Krishnamurti: Why should you fit into your parents’ plans, however worthy, however noble they may be? You are not just putty, you are not jelly to be fitted into a mould. And if you do fit in, what happens to you? You become a so-called good girl, or good boy and then what? Do you know what it means to be good? Goodness is not just doing what society says, or what your parents say. Goodness is something entirely different, is it not? Goodness comes into being only when you have intelligence, when you have love, when you have no fear. You cannot be good if you are afraid. You can become respectable by doing what society demands – and then society gives you a garland, it says what a good person you are; but merely being respectable is not being good.
You see, when we are young we do not want to fit in, and at the same time we want to be good. We want to be nice, to be sweet, we want to be considerate and do kind things; but we do not know what it all means, and we are `good’ because we are afraid. Our parents say, “Be good”, and most of us are good, but such `goodness’ is merely living according to their plans for us.

Questioner: You say that modern education is a failure. But if the politicians had not been educated, do you think they could have created a better world?
Krishnamurti: I am not at all sure that they couldn’t have created a better world if they had never received this kind of education. What does it mean to govern the people? After all, that is what politicians are supposed to do – to govern the people. But they are ambitious, they want power, position, they want to be restricted, they want to be the leaders, to have the first place; they are not thinking of the people, they are thinking of themselves or their parties, which are an extension of themselves. Human beings are human beings, whether they live in India, in Germany, in Russia, in America, or in China; but you see, by dividing human beings according to countries, more politicians can have big jobs, so they are not interested in thinking of the world as a whole. They are `educated’, they know how to read, how to argue, and they talk everlastingly about being good citizens – but they must have the first place. To divide up the world and create wars – is that what we call education? The politicians are not alone in doing this; we all do it. Some people want war because it gives them profit. So it is not only the politicians who must have the right kind of education.

Questioner: Then what is your idea of the right kind of education?
Krishnamurti: I have just told you. Look, I will show you again. After all, the religious person is not one who worships a god, an image made by the hand or by the mind, but one who is really inquiring into what truth is, what God is; and such a person is really educated. He may not go to a school, he may have no books, he may not even know how to read; but he is freeing himself from fear, from his egotism, from his selfishness, ambition. So education is not merely a process of learning how to read, how to calculate, how to build bridges, how to do scientific research in order to find new ways of utilizing atomic power, and all the rest of it. The function of education is primarily to help man to free himself from his own pettiness and from his stupid ambitions. All ambition is stupid, petty – there is no great ambition. And education also implies helping the student to grow in freedom without fear, does it not?

Questioner: How can every man be educated like that?
Krishnamurti: Don’t you want to be educated like that?

Questioner: But how?
Krishnamurti: First, do you want to be educated like that? Don’t ask how, but have the feeling that you want to be educated in that way. If you have this intense reeling, as you grow up you will help to create it in others, will you not? Sir, look: if you are very keen on playing a certain game, you soon find other people to play it with you. Similarly, if you are really keen to be educated in the way we have been discussing, then you will help to create a school with the right kind of teachers who will provide that kind of education. But most of us don’t really want that kind of education, and so we ask, “How can it be brought about?” We look to somebody else for the answer. But if all of you – every student who is listening, and I hope the teachers too – want that kind of education, then you will demand it and bring it into being.
Take a simple example. You know what chewing gum is, don’t you? If you all want chewing gum, the manufacturer produces it, but if you don’t want it the manufacturer goes broke. Similarly on quite a different level, if you all say, “We want the right kind of education, not this phoney education which only leads to organized murder” – if you say that and really mean it you will bring into being the right kind of education. But you see, you are still too young, too frightened, and that is why it is important to help you to create this thing.

Questioner: If I want the right kind of education, do I need teachers?
Krishnamurti: Of course you do. You need teachers to help you, do you not? But what is help? You are not living in the world alone, are you? There are your fellow students, your parents, your teachers, the postman, the man who brings the milk – everybody is needed, we all help each other to live in this world. But if you say, “The teacher is sacred, he is at one level and I am at another”, then that kind of help is no help at all. The teacher is helpful only if he is not using teaching to feed his vanity or as a means of his own security. If he is teaching, not because he is unable to do anything else, but because he really loves to teach, then he will help the student to grow without fear. This means no examinations, no grading, no marks. If you are to create the right kind of education, you need such teachers to help you to create it; so it is very important for the teachers themselves to be rightly educated.

Questioner: If all ambitions are stupid, then how can man progress?
Krishnamurti: Do you know what progress is? Now, have patience and let us go into it slowly. What is progress? Have you ever thought about it? Is it progress when you can get to Europe in a few hours by airplane instead of taking a fortnight to get there by boat? The invention of faster means of transportation and communication, the development of bigger guns, bigger and better ways of destroying each other, wiping out thousands of people with a single atomic bomb instead of shooting them down one by one with arrows – this we call progress, do we not? So there has been progress in the technological sense; but have we progressed in any other direction? Have we stopped wars? Are people more kind, more loving, more generous, more thoughtful, less cruel? You don’t have to say yes or no, but just look at the facts. Scientifically and physically we have made tremendous progress; but inwardly we are at a standstill, are we not? For most of us education has been like lengthening only one leg of a tripod so we have no balance; and yet we talk about progress, all the newspapers are full of it!

Questioner: I have a friend who hates her parents because they have separated her from a person she loves. How can I help her?
Krishnamurti: This is a very complicated question, is it not? You know, life is not very easy, some parts of it are very cruel. There are thoughtless parents who are not concerned with their children at all; or if they are concerned, they want the children to obey, to imitate, to do everything exactly as the parents wish. So resistance is gradually built up in the children, is it not? If the father happens to be intelligent, and the mother stupidly insistent when the father is not there, or vice versa, the children have resistance, antagonism to one parent or the other. Perhaps you can help your friend by being more understanding, more affectionate, and explaining in a kindly manner some of the things which you and I have talked about and which you understand for yourself.
You see, the moment you have a grudge, the moment you hate somebody, it harms you far more than the person you dislike, because that feeling is like a wound inside you that is festering, but it is very difficult for children, for young people to understand all this. After all, children are full of mischief, full of happy play – as they should be; and if parents force their child into a particular pattern or mould, it creates in the child a tremendous resistance, a blind antagonism which he is going to take out on somebody as he grows up. If you have begun to understand this, you can talk it over with your friend and perhaps help her not to build up this hatred, this antagonism within herself. Questioner: What is the definition of a student?

Krishnamurti: It is very easy to find a definition, is it not? All you have to do is to open a dictionary at the right place and it will give you the answer. But that is not the kind of definition you want, is it? You want to talk about it, you want to find out what a true student is. Is he a true student who passes examinations, gets a job, and then closes all books? Being a student implies studying life, not just reading the few books required by your curriculum; it implies the capacity to observe everything throughout life, not just a few things at a particular period. A student, surely, is not only one who reads, but one who is capable of observing all the movements of life, outward and inward, without saying, “This is right, that is wrong”. If you condemn something, you don’t observe it, do you? To observe you have to study without condemning, without comparing. If I compare you with somebody else I am not studying you, am I? If I compare you with your younger brother or your elder sister, it is the sister or the brother who is important; therefore I am not studying you.
But our whole education is to compare. You are everlastingly comparing yourself or another with somebody – with your guru, with your ideal, with your father who is so clever, a great politician, and so on. This process of comparison and condemnation prevents you from observing, studying. So a real student is one who observes everything in life, outwardly as well as inwardly, without comparing, approving or condemning. He is not only capable of research into scientific matters, but is also able to observe the workings of his own mind, his own feelings – which is much more difficult than observing a scientific fact. To understand the whole operation of one’s own mind requires a great deal of insight, a great deal of inquiry without condemnation.

Questioner: You say that all idealists are hypocrites. Whom do you call an idealist?
Krishnamurti: Don’t you know what an idealist is? If I am violent, I may say that my ideal is to be non-violent; but the fact remains that I am violent. The ideal is what I hope to be eventually. It will take years for me to become non-violent, and meanwhile I am violent – that is the real thing. Being violent, I am trying all the time to be non-violent, which is unreal; and is that not hypocrisy? Instead of understanding and dissolving my violence, I am trying to be something else. The man who is trying to be something other than he is, is obviously a hypocrite. It is like my putting on a mask and saying I am different, but behind the mask I am just the same old man. Whereas, if I can go into the whole process of violence and understand it, then there is a possibility of being free from violence.

Chapter 22

When you are young you are curious to know all about everything, why the sun shines, what the stars are, all about the moon and the world around us; but as we grow older, knowledge becomes a mere collection of information without any feeling. We become specialists, we know much about this or that subject, and we take very little interest in the things around us, the beggar in the street, the rich man passing by in his car. If we want to know why there are riches and poverty in the world, we can find an explanation. There is an explanation for everything, and explanation seems to satisfy most of us. The same holds true of religion. We are satisfied with explanations; and explaining everything away we call knowledge. And is this what we mean by education? Are we learning to find out, or are we merely asking for explanations, definitions, conclusions, in order to put our minds at rest so that we need not inquire further?
Our elders may have explained everything to us, but our interest has generally been deadened thereby. As we grow older life becomes more complex and very difficult. There are so many things to know, there is so much misery and suffering; and seeing all this complexity, we think we have resolved it all by explaining it away. Someone dies, and it is explained away; so suffering is deadened through explanation. Perhaps we revolt against the idea of war when we are young, but as we grow older we accept the explanation of war, and our minds become dull.
When we are young what is important is not to be satisfied with explanations, but to find out how to be intelligent and thereby discover the truth of things; and we cannot be intelligent if we are not free. It is said that freedom comes only when we are old and wise, but surely there must be freedom while we are still very young – not freedom to do what we like, but freedom to understand very deeply our own instincts and urges. There must be a freedom in which there is no fear, but one cannot be free from fear through an explanation. We are aware of death and the fear of death. By explaining death, can we know what dying is, or be free from the fear of death?
As we grow older it is important to have the capacity to think very simply. What is simplicity? Who is a simple person? A man who lives a hermit’s life, who has very few belongings – is he really simple? Is not simplicity something entirely different? Simplicity is of the mind and heart. Most of us are very complex, we have many wants and desires. For example, you want to pass your examinations, you want to get a good job, you have ideals and want to develop a good character, and so on. The mind has so many demands; and does that make for simplicity? Is it not very important to find out?
A complex mind cannot find out the truth of anything, it cannot find out what is real – and that is our difficulty. From childhood we are trained to conform, and we do not know how to reduce complexity to simplicity. It is only the very simple and direct mind that can find the real, the true. We know more and more, but our minds are never simple; and it is only the simple mind that is creative.
When you paint a picture of a tree, what is it you are painting? Are you just painting a picture of the tree as it looks, with its leaves, its branches, its trunk, complete in every detail, or are you painting from the feeling which the tree has awakened in you? If the tree tells you something and you paint from that inner experience, though your feeling may be very complex, the picture that you paint will be the outcome of a great simplicity. It is necessary when you are young to keep your mind very simple, uncontaminated, although you may have all the information you want.

Questioner: If all of us were educated rightly, would we be free of fear?
Krishnamurti: It is very important to be free of fear, is it not? And you cannot be free of fear except through intelligence. So let us first find out how to be intelligent, not how to get rid of fear. If we can experience what it is to be intelligent, then we shall know how to get rid of fear. Fear is always with regard to something, it does not exist by itself. There is the fear of death, the fear of illness the fear of loss, the fear of one’s parents, the fear of what people will say, and so on; and the question is, not how to get rid of fear, but how to awaken the intelligence with which to face and to understand and go beyond fear.
Now, how can education help us to be intelligent? What is intelligence? Is it a matter of passing examinations, or being clever? You may read many books, meet prominent people, have a lot of capacity, but does all that make you intelligent? Or is intelligence something which comes into being only as you become integrated? We are made up of many parts; sometimes we are resentful, jealous, violent, at other times we are humble, thoughtful, calm. At different moments we are deferent beings; we are never whole, never totally integrated, are we? When a human being has many wants, he is inwardly broken up into many beings.
One must approach the problem simply. The question is how to be intelligent so that you can be rid of fear. If from your earliest childhood whatever difficulty you may have had has been talked over with you so that your understanding of it is not just verbal, but enables you to see the whole of life, then such education can awaken intelligence and thereby free the mind of fear.

Questioner: You have said that to be ambitious is to be stupid and cruel. Is it then stupid and cruel to have the ambition to get the right kind of education?
Krishnamurti: Are you ambitious? What is ambition? When you want to be better than another, to get higher marks than someone else – surely that is what we call ambition. A little politician is ambitious in wanting to become a big politician; but is it ambitious to want to have the right kind of education? Is it ambition when you do something because you love to do it? When you write or paint – not because you want prestige, but because you love to write or paint – , that is not ambition, surely. Ambition comes in when you compare yourself with other writers or artists, when you want to get ahead.
So, it is not ambition when you do something because you really love to do it.

Questioner: When one wants to find truth or peace, one becomes a sannyasi. So a sannyasi has simplicity.
Krishnamurti: Does one know simplicity when one wants peace? Is it by becoming a sannyasi or a sadhu that one is simple? Surely, peace is something which is not of the mind. If I want peace, and I try to remove from my mind all thoughts of violence, will that bring me peace? Of if I have many desires and I say that I must have no desire, will I be peaceful? The moment you want something you are in conflict struggle, and what brings about simplicity is your own understanding of the whole process of wanting.

Questioner: If we are educated in the right way we are free of fear, and if we are educated wrongly we are fearful. Is that true?
Krishnamurti: It is obviously true, is it not? And are we not all afraid of something or other? Everyone is frightened of something – of public opinion, death, disease. That is an obvious fact.

Questioner: If, as you say, everyone is afraid, then no one is a saint or a hero. Are there no great men then in this world?
Krishnamurti: That is mere logical reasoning, is it not? Why should we bother about great men, saints, heroes? What matters is what you are. If you are afraid, you are going to create an ugly world. That is the question, not whether there are great men.

Questioner: You said explanation is a bad thing. We have come here for explanation. Is that bad?
Krishnamurti: I did not say explanation is bad; I said don’t be satisfied with explanations.

Questioner: What is your idea about the future of India?
Krishnamurti: I have no idea, no idea at all. I don’t think India as India matters very much. What matters is the world. Whether we live in China or Japan, in England, India or America, we all say, “My country matters very much”, and nobody thinks of the world as a whole; history books are full of the constant repetition of wars. If we can begin to understand ourselves as human beings, then perhaps we shall stop killing each other and put an end to wars; but as long as we are nationalistic and think only of our own country, we shall go on creating a terrible world. If once we see that this is our earth where we can all live happily and at peace, then together we shall build anew; but if we go on thinking of ourselves as Indians, Germans, or Russians, and regard everybody else as foreigners, then there will be no peace and no new world can be created.

Questioner: You say there are very few people in this world who are great. Then what are you?
Krishnamurti: It does not matter what I am. What matters is to find out the truth or the falseness of what is being said. If you think such-and-such a thing is important because so-and-so is saying it, then you are not really listening, you are not trying to find out for yourself what is true and what is false.
But you see most of us are afraid to find out for ourselves what is true and what is false, and that is why we merely accept what somebody else says. The important thing is to question, to observe, never to accept. Unfortunately, most of us only listen to those whom we regard as great people, to an established authority, to the Upanishads, the Gita, or whatever it is. We never listen to the birds, to the sound of the sea, or to the beggar. So we miss what the beggar is saying – and there may be truth in what the beggar is saying, and none at all in what is said by the rich man or the man in authority.

Questioner: We read books out of inquisitiveness. When you were young were you not inquisitive?
Krishnamurti: Do you think that merely by reading books you find out for yourself what is true? Do you discover anything by repeating what others have said? Or do you discover only by searching, doubting, never accepting? Many of us read lots of books about philosophy, and this reading shapes our minds – which makes it very difficult to find out for ourselves what is true and what is false. When the mind is already moulded, shaped, it can discover the truth only with the greatest difficulty.

Questioner: Should we not be concerned about the future?
Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the future? Twenty or fifty years hence – is that what you mean by the future? The future that is many years away is very uncertain, is it not? You do not know what is going to happen, so what is the good of being troubled or disturbed about it? There may be a war, an epidemic; anything may happen, so the future is uncertain, it is unknown. What matters is how you are living now, what you are thinking, feeling now. The present, which is today matters very much, not tomorrow or what is going to happen twenty years hence; and to understand the present requires a great deal of intelligence.

Questioner: When we are young we are very playful, and do not always know what is good for us. If a father advises his son for the good of the son, should not the son follow his father’s advice?
Krishnamurti: What do you think? If I am a parent, I must first find out what my son really wants to do in life, must I not? Does the parent know enough about the child to advise him? Has the parent studied the child? How can a parent who has very little time to observe his child offer him advice? It sounds nice to say that the father should guide his son; but if the father does not know his son, then what is to be done? A child has his own propensities and capacities which have to be studied, not just for a certain time or at a particular place, but throughout the period of his childhood.

Questioner: You said last time that the idealist is a hypocrite. If we want to construct a building, we must first have an idea of it. Similarly, must we not first have an ideal if we are to bring about a new world?
Krishnamurti: To have an idea of a building which you want to construct is not the same as being idealistic about something. Surely they are two different things.

Questioner: By aiming at the well-being of our own country, do we not also aim at the well-being of humanity? Is it within the reach of the common man to aim directly at the well-being of humanity?
Krishnamurti: When we seek the well-being of one country at the expense of other countries, it leads to exploitation and imperialism. As long as we think exclusively of our own country, it is bound to create conflict and war.
When you ask whether it is within the reach of the common man to aim directly at the well-being of humanity, what do you mean by the common man? Are not you and I the common man? Are we different from the common man? What is there so uncommon about us? We are all ordinary human beings, are we not? Just because we possess clean clothes, wear shoes, or have a car, do you think we are different from others who have not these things? We are all ordinary – and if we really understand this, we can bring about a revolution. It is one of the faults of our present education that it makes us feel so exclusive, so much on a pedestal above the so-called man in the street.

Chapter 23

I think it is a very rare thing, after leaving school, to find happiness in the latter part of one’s life. When you leave here, you will be facing; extraordinary problems, the problem of war, the problems of personal relationship, the problems as citizens, the problem of religion, and the constant conflict within society; and it seems to me that it would be a false education which did not prepare you to face these problems and bring about a true and happier world. Surely it is the function of education, especially in a school where you have the opportunity of creative expression, to help the students not to be caught in those social and environmental influences which will narrow their minds and therefore limit their outlook and their happiness; and it seems to me that those who are about to enter college should know for themselves the many problems that confront us all. it is very important, especially in the world that you are going to face, to have an extraordinarily clear intelligence, and that intelligence is not brought about by any outside influence, or through books. It comes, I think, when one is aware of these problems and is able to meet them, not in any personal or limited sense, not as an American, or a Hindu, or a Communist, but as a human being capable of bearing the responsibility of seeing the worth of things as they are and not interpreting them according to any particular ideology or pattern of thought. Is it not important that education should prepare each one of us to understand and face our human problems, and not merely give us knowledge or technological training? Because, you see, life is not so very easy. You may have had a happy time, a creative time, a time in which you have ripened; but when you leave the school, things will begin to happen and enclose you; you will be limited, not only by personal relationships, but by social influences, by your own fears, and by the inevitable ambition to succeed.
I think it is a curse to be ambitious. Ambition is a form of self-interest, self-enclosure, and therefore it breeds mediocrity of mind. To live in a world that is full of ambition without being ambitious means, really, to love something for itself without seeking a reward, a result; and that is very difficult, because the whole world, all your friends, your relations, everyone is struggling to succeed, to fulfil, to become somebody. But to understand and be free of all this, and to do something which you really love – no matter what it is, or however lowly and unrecognized – , that I think, awakens the spirit of greatness which never seeks approbation, recompense, which does things for their own sake and therefore has the strength and the capacity not to be caught in the influence of mediocrity.
I think it is very important to see this while you are young. because magazines, newspapers, television and radio constantly emphasize the worship of success, thereby encouraging ambition and competitiveness which breed mediocrity of mind. When you are ambitious you are merely adjusting to a particular pattern of society, whether in America, Russia, or India, and therefore you are living on a very superficial level.
When you leave school and enter college, and later face the world, it seems to me that what is important is not to succumb, not to bow your heads to various influences, but to meet and understand these as they are and see their true significance and their worth, in a gentle spirit with great inward strength which will not create further discord in the world.
So, I think that a real school through its students should bring a blessing to the world. For the world needs a blessing it is in a terrible state; and the blessing can come only when we as individuals are not seeking power, when we are not trying to fulfil our personal ambitions, but have a clear understanding of the vast problems with which we are confronted. This demands great intelligence, which means, really, a mind that does not think according to any particular pattern, but is free in itself and is therefore capable of seeing what is true and putting aside that which is false.