The function of your teachers is to educate not only the partial mind but the totality of the mind; to educate you so that you do not get caught in the little whirlpool of existence but live in the whole river of life. This is the whole function of education.
The right kind of education cultivates your whole being, the totality of your mind. It gives your mind and heart a depth, an understanding of beauty.
Probably, the girls among you will grow up and get married and the boys will have careers and that will be the end. You know, the moment you get married - I am not saying you should not get married - you have your husband, children, and responsibilities begin to crowd in like crows upon a tree. The husband, the house, your children, become a habit and you become caught in that habit. All through your life, till you die, you will be working, working in the house or going to the office, every day.
I wondered - the other morning when I saw you all having a good time - what is going to happen to you all? Will you live a life with a fire burning in you or will you become for the rest of your life a businessman or a housewife? What are you going to do? Should you not be educated to cut through respectability, to burst through all conformity? Probably I am saying something dangerous, but it does not matter. Perhaps you will give an ear and perhaps this will sink somewhere into your consciousness and perhaps in a moment when you are about to make a decision, this may alter the course of your life.
Student: How is one to be sensitive?
Krishnamurti: I do not know if you noticed the other evening, it was drizzling. There was a sharp shower. There were dark, heavy, rain-laden clouds. There were also clouds that were full of light, white, with a rose-coloured light inside them. And there were clouds that were almost like feathers going by. It was a marvellous sight and there was great beauty.
If you do not see and feel all these things when you are young, when you are still curious, when you are still indecisive, when you are still looking, searching, asking; if you do not feel now, then you never will. As you grow older life encloses you, life becomes hard. You hardly look at the hills, a beautiful face or a smile. Without feeling affection, kindness, tenderness, life becomes very dreary ugly, brutal. And as you grow older, you fill your lives with politics, with concern over your jobs, over your families. You become afraid and gradually lose that extraordinary quality of looking at the sunset, at clouds, at the stars of an evening.
As you grow older, the intellect begins to create havoc with your lives. I do not mean that you must not have a clear, reasoning intellect, but the predominance of it makes you dull, makes you lose the finer things of life.
You must feel very strongly about everything, not just one or two things, but about everything. If you feel very strongly, then little things will not fill your life. Politics, jobs, careers are all little things. If you feel strongly, if you feel vitally, vigorously, you will live in a state of deep silence. Your mind will be very clear, simple, strong. As men grow older they lose this quality of feeling, this sympathy, this tenderness for others.
Having lost it they begin to invent religions. They go to temples, take drinks, drugs, to awaken this spontaneity. They become religious. But religion in the world is put together by man. All temples, churches, dogmas, beliefs are invented by man. Man is afraid because he is lost without a deep sense of beauty, a deep sense of affection. And, having lost this, superficial ceremonies, going to temples, repeating mantras, rituals become very important. In reality, they have no importance at all. Religion born of fear becomes ugly superstition.
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