... for they have their own thoughts - Multiworld India

2005 Goa, India31STEPHEN SMITHThe question of freedom is very essential to learningand living. In the schools that we have in India,England and America we do have curriculum,courses, classes. When the child chooses to dosomething he does it with all his heart. The questionsand questioning is where it begins.How do we question and to whom do we question.We do question our teachers when we want toget information, but mentally we question ourselves.When a question was asked to Krishnamurti he usedto say, Why are you asking it to me? The person whohas the answer is you. And the constant pushingback of the question on the questioner is the actualmovement, if we want to dismantle the old structureof authority. So the alternative is not subscribing tothe same values. It is trying to go a different way;one way is by re-examination of the basis of learning,what learning is. Learning is something that wehave acquired.Learning is something that we go to school topick up and later on at some stage one is tested onit. You put it in a form that is accepted by the examinerand ultimately you get a piece of paper andhopefully a job. That is the accepted belief oflearning.There is however a different kind of learning. Thelearning that we are involved in is the things that arehappening – not only the gestures, the words, andthe meaning of the words but what is going betweenthe words. In the span of the awarenesswhich is being limited to the language or the span ofwords used, there is a different kind of learning, it isnot just a mechanical exercise that a computer cando. It is tuning in of everything that is going in andaround you. Life has different kind of quality, texture.Yoga and other breathing exercises make a personsensitive to life’s underlying quality.There was an incident in the US where 2 youngboys of the age of 14 or 15 stocked a lot of weaponsincluding the automatic weapons. They went toa school and shot 20 people and later shot themselves.Where is civilization going? One will think that USis the most prosperous and powerful country onearth, this is what happens. The response is equallyalarming because the school authorities, governordidn’t know what to do. This type of situation callsfor a reorientation of our way of thinking and ourway of perception.Krishnamurti had no place for thinking or noplace for thought but that is simplification becausewhen he talks about the limitation of thought hetalks about thinking itself as active present likelearning in a very interesting way. We can’t fortunatelydo much of it today but we have been doingit in some sense by thinking together. We have beenthinking for the past two days during this meetingabout education without the object of contemplation.This is a kind of process that can move aroundin the country and create a sense of alignmentwhich is not an agreement.Poetry as you know isnot just collection ofwords. A kind ofthinking, sensitivity andmental make-up isrequired if one has tocreate poetry.– Neema Vaishnava