Let us become a little more practical. How do we set about to help the student actually to be free from fear?
Teacher: I wouLd see that my relationship with the student is friendly. It would be stupid to discuss fear if I were not friendly with him. I would create situations, both practical and intellectual, where he would understand what fear actually means, intellectually explain the causes and effects of fear because the mind needs to be sharpened, and I would see if I could make him experience this wholeness of outlook and feeling.
Krishnamurti: Be factual. In the class, how will you teach? How will you help the student to understand? There is a gap between the child and the total feeling, how would you lead up to that?
Teacher: It should be possible to awaken in him a curiosity which is of a subtle type. The next thing I would like to do with him is to get him to appreciate quality in work, in playing a game, in mathematics or other subjects. I would find out what his interests were, how he reacted, and if I were able to progress further, I would see whether something more happened between me and the student.
Krishnamurti: You have done the obvious things which are necessary. You would talk to him, you would show him how fear comes into being and all that. What next? Factually how will you help the student to be free from fear? I think that is the real issue. When there is an opportunity, would you be in a meditative, reflective self-recollected state which might help the student to see clearly what fear is? You see that is the necessary thing, but you leave that thing hanging.
What would you actually do? What would you do factually?
Teacher: Meditation would help the mind to deal with the situation.
Krishnamurti: I may have a feeling for all this. Now how am I to translate it into action? What am I to do with those dozen children?
Teacher: The feeling will translate itself. It is a link of love with the children which will help.
Krishnamurti: First have affection, then use every occasion to help the student to be free from fear, explain to him the causes of fear and use every incident to show how he is afraid, In the class, in the very teaching of history, mathematics, talk to him about it. But what next? Proceed.
Teacher: In doing all this I am also watchful to see that what I am doing to him is not also being undone.
Krishnamurti: What is the total effect on the child of what you have said, the fact of your affection, your explanations? Is it not making him turn inward, and what does that do?
Teacher: It helps him face some immediate problems.
Krishnamurti: You have helped the student to look at himself, you have helped him to be aware of this fear and to turn inward in the sense that he feels more conscious of the fear. You have to balance it by something else.
Teacher: Do you mean, sir, that this process of internal introspection is likely to lead to some complications in the child?
Krishnamurti: It is bound to lead to a kind of self-conscious feeling. "Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?" There would be nervousness or self importance, or the showing off in "How fearless I am!" How will you balance that? Think it out, use your mind very carefully. At this stage I think the problem again requires a different kind of approach. Otherwise you will be helping the child by concentrated attention to become self-conscious, self-assertive, arrogant, and with an authoritarian outlook.
Teacher: There should be an opportunity for the child to be sensitive to other things which are not within.
Krishnamurti: It appears to me, you will unconsciously strengthen egotism, a sense of self-importance, a sense of being offensive, aggressive, rude.
You have so far dealt with the movement of the mind. The tide is moving in, the tide also moves out. If it remains inward it is like the backwaters of a bay, but if the tide has a movement inward, then it has to have an outward movement. You have dealt so far only with an inward movement. How will you help the student to move out?
Teacher: When you spoke of the outward movement, I felt I was not looking from the point of the whole but from the development of the partial movement.
Krishnamurti: If I had not kept on pushing and therefore made you realize it was only a partial answer, you would not have moved. You only talk of the inner movement but it is a movement of the tide both inward and outward. It is a movement you have created in one direction and you do not know how to treat the inner and the outer as one movement.
Teacher: Is it not possible right from the beginning to move both inward and outward?
Krishnamurti: What is the outward movement that is going to give the balance?
Teacher: Not only the balance, but a sense of humility that comes now and then.
Krishnamurti: There are hills, trees, the river, the sands. That is the outward movement. The perception, the seeing, that is the outward movement. Nature has provided you with the beauty of all this, the rivers, trees, the arid land. So there has to be movement both outward and inward, the everlasting movement.
Isn´t this a very important point for students (we are all students) and for teachers?
ReplyDeleteHave teachers read this passage?
I was walking today and thinking about this passage.
ReplyDeleteAnd I remembered that K said that the inward looking should be "balanced" with the external looking. But I could not remember what he said exactly that could happen if this looking was not balanced. So I read it again:
"You have helped the student to look at himself, you have helped him to be aware of this fear and to turn inward in the sense that he feels more conscious of the fear. You have to balance it by something else.
.....
-It is bound to lead to a kind of self-conscious feeling. "Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?"
- There would be nervousness or self importance,
- or the showing off in "How fearless I am!"
- self-conscious, self-assertive, arrogant, and with an authoritarian outlook.
- you will unconsciously strengthen egotism, a sense of self-importance, a sense of being offensive, aggressive, rude.
And the outward looking which is the balancing counterpart of the inward looking:
"There are hills, trees, the river, the sands. That is the outward movement. The perception, the seeing, that is the outward movement. Nature has provided you with the beauty of all this, the rivers, trees, the arid land. So there has to be movement both outward and inward, the everlasting movement."
And this still resonates inside. This applies to everybody....
And right now I think he means that by only or mainly looking inside there could be the possibility of strentghening the self concern, the separation....but when one combines it with looking at beauty, somehow this sense of separation tends to diminish or dissapear.
If this is so, it seems to me this is a very important point....somehow "lost" in the middle of a humble book.....
I was thinking today about this passage, but I could not remember what K was saying about the imbalance of only looking inwards.
ReplyDeleteSo, I read it again:
"You have helped the student to look at himself, you have helped him to be aware of this fear and to turn inward in the sense that he feels more conscious of the fear. You have to balance it by something else.....
- It is bound to lead to a kind of self-conscious feeling. "Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?"
-There would be nervousness or self importance, or the showing off in "How fearless I am!"
- Otherwise you will be helping the child by concentrated attention to become self-conscious, self-assertive, arrogant, and with an authoritarian outlook.
- you will unconsciously strengthen egotism, a sense of self-importance...."
So, I think he means that the "inward looking" on its own could increase the self-concern, the sense of separation. But the looking to beauty would somehow counter-balance that sense of separation....
What an important "pearl" in the middle of a humble book......
Yes, this passage really brings home the point that life is a unitary movement in which there is no fundamental division between the "inner" and the "outer". So if we reify this division and concern ourselves only with the inner, then we are distorting the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteThat´s right. However, when I read it, it had a flavor of being "new". New and important.....
ReplyDelete