Treading the Road of Peaceful Revolution - last blog

Above is blue sky, the pale tender blue of an early spring, crossed by wisps of smoky cloud blown by a sharp breeze.

There is a call, a shrill cry, and the form of a bird of prey, long wings outstretched, drifts over the bare trees.  The grey brown of its feathers can be seen and its head moves from side to side, surveying the ground below.  There is another and another, at different heights, barely a movement of wings, yet they cover immense distances in a matter of seconds.  They are magnificent, free and beautiful.

The ground below is damp and muddy with the footprints of many sheep; several trees lie like broken giants felled by the unusually strong winds of the winter.  It is a blessing to be alive on such a day.

 To wander through life, both physically and psychologically, with no end in sight and no roots to put down, brings a sense of exploration that is neither romantic nor seeking out new experiences.  In engaging with living in this way there is an immediacy to relationships, an openness to question assumptions and a willingness to face insecurity.  It is not possible to hide behind dogma, ideology; to join any movement; to follow or to be followed; and yet if there is any separation from life then all exploration ceases

To wander; to move around; to be free; to travel; to see foreign lands; to observe; to swim in cold rivers and warm seas; to walk in mountains and forests; to see all manner of birds and animals; to listen to the voices of others; to talk to friends and strangers; to make mistakes along the road….. to be human. 

However, I am an ordinary man, somewhat cautious, neither a courageous explorer, nor a discoverer of truth.  Nevertheless, I have always been curious as to what might lie on the other side of the next hill.  I am a family man; I have not as yet uncovered any extraordinary revelations; I have not changed the world although I may have made some difference somewhere; my steps are small, almost inconspicuous, leaving the barest of footprints in the dust, sand, snow, mud and leaves.  All the same there has been movement, constant movement, the passing of time, travelling, ageing, and learning…..always learning.  Not the accumulation of knowledge, just learning: finding out, understanding; so that one word, a gesture, an observation, a reflection, has the possibility of changing the mind, opening new doors and closing old ones.  I have travelled across Europe to India, to various parts of that country and met so many people.  I have visited places in Europe, observing the different cultures.

However, I am a teacher, not of a particular subject, but of children and young people and I have been teaching for a long time.  I have discovered I know very little with certainty, and have more questions than solutions

The pilgrim, the wanderer, the teacher, has a particular responsibility; that is to observe, to listen, to question and to communicate.  How communication comes about varies from person to person.  When modern society is seen in its insanity, arrogance and stupidity, then there has to be some kind of action, and an action that does not arise from a reaction that will further contribute to the mess.  There is a slow, urgent, revolution in progress. The present stage of my pilgrimage is to question and explore the relationship between young and older people through learning and to participate in this revolution.

My pilgrimage may be one I have taken alone, but it is not a lonely journey.  My wife has been is an intricate part of these wanderings; the pattern of my life is weaved in with hers.  My children, grown and living their own lives continue to be an essential part of this exploration, and now my grandchildren form part of this delicate and fragile pattern.  The students I am with now, all the students that have come before them and those that will come after are a constant source of discovery: the wanderer learns the danger of conclusions and the illusion of knowing.

Now, in my seventh decade, the road has left more time in the past than that which will be to come.  As the leaves of the trees turn brown, become brittle and fall, and the branch’s stark beauty is outlined against the silver of the winter sky, so my wanderings will cease.  But now it is spring and there is energy and life in the air; and I am quietly treading the road of peaceful revolution.  

J Krishnamurti and me: a relationship

For over 45 years I have had some kind of relationship with the work of the educator J Krishnamurti.  I have seen him, heard him speak, I have read books, watched videos and listened to audio recordings; I met him briefly once, but he was more interested in my young children than he was in me.  The man himself has been of passing fascination in that his story has more than its fair share of fairy tale elements, and, inevitably, many of those that have written about him have shed more light upon themselves than they have upon the man.  It is in the message that I have found a constant source of learning and renewing of understanding.

As a 19 year old in London just 18 months out of British Public School after 11 years as at boarding school, I had embarked upon an unconscious process of re-education.  Rejecting the system that had been effectively designed to produce leaders of the British Empire; men who would be unemotional, insensitive, arrogant and capable of withstanding all the possible physical and psychological discomforts that could be found in any foreign land, I pursued the possibilities that had been awakened by the intense cultural shift that had taken place during the 1960s, the decade that I had spent at school.  At an evening talk at the Buddhist Centre I came across Krishnamurti through a passage read by someone there.  It was on organised religion and powerfully exposed the hypocrisy and deceit that I had experienced at first hand in my schooling.  It was uncompromising, stark and discomforting.

What does it mean to engage with the work of one individual in one’s life?  Does it mean you become a devotee, a follower, as I saw so many people do, creating a sense of belonging by seeking out their own pet guru choosing from seemingly endless array that rode in on the tides of interest that flowed to and from India in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s?  In life, does one have to find a code by which one lives; an orthodoxy, an ideology?  Or does one engage directly with life itself?  Attracted by the sparseness of Zen Buddhism, the similar brevity of words found in the Tao te Ching and the simplicity of Buddhism, I found that Krishnamurti’s way of questioning, creating seemigly paradoxical statements and unfolding insight through negation led me to explore life, not settle on ‘inspirational quotations’ or trite phrases.  As I have over the years met people who were closely involved with Krishnamurti’s work, mostly in education in the UK and India, some for a very long time, I have been struck by the integrity and humour of the vast majority of these people.  Many have become friends.  All have spoken of Krishnamurti the human being, not his intelligence alone, but also his fallibility and mistakes. Always they spoke of his sense of affection for humanity – you could feel it, hear it when he spoke in front of the crowds in the tent all those years ago.

I have learnt from my wife, our children, the students I have taught and continue to teach.  I have learnt from the wind, the sun, the rain, the sea and the hills that fall away into the mist.  I saw into death through the eyes of our golden retriever on the night before he died, and through a moment of understanding with my father just a few days before his troubled life ended.  There is so much that teaches us and we do not need the words of another to tell us how to live.  However, I continue to return to the work of Krishnamurti, particularly regarding education and nature, as I walk the path of shedding all the thoughts that have crystallised into unshakable convictions, empty ideas that carry their own destruction: re-education is a lifelong process.

I have deliberately not quoted any words from Krishnamurti here.  Look if you are interested, but treat them lightly, observe them as you might some lofty bird circling the sky that melts away so silently.  As with all words, watch yourself and do not get caught up in the net of identification or rejection.  If necessary, put them to one side.  My feeling with language is that what is not said contains as much significance as any utterance.

photographs taken by Maggie Alexander of the Ganges near Rajghat, Varanasi.

People move from place to place

People move from place to place, some search, some flee and others resignedly take whatever faces them.  For centuries there have been the nomadic survivors creating a way of life that gives attention to both the land and people’s needs; ensuring that the delicate balance is maintained and life continues.  Similarly, for centuries there have been people seeking refuge and safety from attack, abuse, escaping from conflicts and desperate for a life of peace; hounded from their homes through floods, droughts and crying out for food and shelter.  This is nothing new.

What is new is that we can now so effectively terrorise our neighbours and we can do it without leaving the comfort of our own little war offices hundreds of miles away.  Bombings can be done to order, smashing the fragile growth of young children; strutting militias can be directed to rape women and hack down men; and the politicians of the world can play their deadly games whilst the men in the background grow obese on the fare that is bought through the sale of death.  We are all in it for the profit, and we are all are clever people who can string together so many lies that for centuries we believe it is the way of man to destroy another; to cut the flesh so that it bleeds and ensure that only certain lives are worth anything at all.

Under the setting sun, in the cool breeze of an autumn evening there is such a clarity to the air that the distant trees set on top of the hill stand with stone like sharpness against the backdrop of a black, crimson sky.    Close by, the living creatures that hop, spin, scurry and nibble are going about their business and will leave traces for us to find in the dewy morning – a delicate web here, small cavities in the ground there and many mysterious droppings.  In the cold, clear air wisps of departing mist cling to the trees and the dripping can just be heard, as the leaves tremble from the weight of such fine liquid.

photo: courtesy of Maggie Alexander

  So time stands still in the English countryside, as time stood still all those years ago when a young man swam from the banks of the Euphrates, ate dates from the palms that swayed in stately fashion on the outskirts of Baghdad and walked the streets of Kabul resplendent in cheap Afghan coat and even cheaper locally crafted boots: time standing still in a world of magic, of exploration and where the stench of fear was conspicuous only by its absence – a time that connected this emotionally hungry and reticent youth to the World.

Since then there has been progress and the advent of a modern world, where money rules and violence comes in the guise of the smiling politician whose only concern is our security:  and the hooded individuals prepare to shatter their bodies so that others may be broken apart and made grotesquely disfigured, torn and bloodied.  Life becomes even cheaper as the lifeless float face down on to the soft sands of tourist beaches.  We have arrived at that modern world that separates, crystallizes and breaks everything down to its essential components – divide and rule, divide, create enemies, real and imagined, divide and grow fat on the suffering of others.

We do not stand by and wring our hands in a pathetic show of empty concerns, but we blow through our cupped fingers, we blow the winds of change, and they will be irresistible.

I like to sleep...

I like to sleep.  Give me some sunlight; a small pool like a cat or dog would find indoors on a hazy, cold winter’s day with the sun creeping into the room through the cold glass of a frosted window.  Give me some sunlight; in a garden, on a station platform, anywhere in February in India with a sun that penetrates the bones and thaws out the damp cold of an English winter so that I take off my open sandals and let the soles of my feet touch the soul of the earth: thawing out the cold reserve of an Englishman.  Eyes close and breathing deepens by a Grecian sea and the clarity of the water washes through the mind with soft movement over the gentle stones.  Eyes close and breathing deepens with the breeze in the trees and the birds calling and the beguiling sound of a bird of prey wheeling on the warm currents of the summer air over the fields near the cottage we are calling home for the time being.  Maybe I can die like this – eyes close, breathing deepens and then it is finished, only the sunlight and life.  But we do not choose our birth and with great difficulty may we choose our death.

To be connected to nature, in fact to acknowledge that we are inextricably part of nature, is to be alive.  Watch and listen and learn.  Watch the people walking in the city moving from their certainty and their despair.  Watch the bees that buzz and hum around the clover in the grass, and listen to them.  Learn from the leaf that dances in the wind.  But we don’t….  Instead we like to kill.  To kill the animal whose bloodied flesh we burn and eat with perverted sensory satisfaction; to kill the animal in the name of sport so that we can enjoy a sense of fulfilment; and to kill each other to further our greed, our hatred and to seek some hiding place from our fear.  Steadily all this killing seeps into our consciousness and we see it as a normal way of living in our insane world.

I like to sleep in nature.  Not in some box rising halfway up to the sky or dug deep into the ground.  There are creatures out at night searching and snuffling, surviving and seeking; they are nearby and I can hear them.  There are people out in the towns at night vomiting, shouting, urinating and stumbling, I have heard them nearby and I don’t sleep well.

To educate the spirit is to learn in nature, with nature and from nature.  There has been much written recently about children and their disconnection from nature; not just children, but adults as well, and apparently there is research that has shown the beneficial effect that even a walk in the park can have on the psychological well-being of the individual.  Educators in India in the 20th Century such as Tagore and Krishnamurti had the love of nature in their very being and this comes through in their writing, transcriptions of their talks and the legacy of the schools they have founded.  Now we have Forest Schools, Rewilding projects, and many other calls for reconnection, but there still dominates a sense that humanity is apart from nature, not a part of the natural world.  If humanity remains separated from nature then we are lost.

I have begun work on exploring  learning, education, nature and the human mind.  There is in this an interesting paradox, for to be connected to nature means that the individual goes beyond her or himself, and this connection is beyond the limitation of words.  So how can this exploration be expressed?

blown by the wind of despair

The wind blows and shakes the rigid edifice with windows rattling, and the boughs of the trees outside wave their new grown leaves in a dance of elation.  There is strain and tension in the air, whilst the black birds launch themselves from the tops of the trees into the path of the wind to be buffeted and thrown around like black rags; playing with flight.

Into the unknown we step and walk the tightrope between fear and excitement, acknowledging that control is an illusion and decisions are made with very little understanding of any outcome.  The road behind has gone and the road ahead stretches out like some meandering river and we are mesmerised by the mirage in the distance, ignoring what lies beyond the hedgerows either side of us.   We want someone to hold us, something to guide us, we crave certainty and steadfastly turn our gaze away from that one thing that defines our lives – the fact that we have an ending.

Here in the UK it is the time of the General Election, where the tired old body of a democracy that is anything but democratic receives its regular blood transfusion so that it might continue to exist.  So the promises are made that are transparently impossible to keep, and truth seems to have taken a holiday far away and left us to get on with it.  We are bombarded with reasons to hate; to hate those two enemies of the civilised world – the poor and the foreigner.  We are exhorted to the level of greed of the politician and the self-aggrandising rich, so that the central virtue of society is now crystallised in materialistic aspiration, and elevated to the highest form of motivation in our lives.  The heavy handed conditioning continues to hold is to this central fact that success is to be striven for and universally admired, whilst failure is to be avoided at all costs and even its very existence denied.  The consequence of this is the ever widening and deepening stinking river of corruption.

Now the votes are cast and the smiling complacency of the winners is matched only by the abject demeanour of those that have lost.  And nothing has changed.

Wild winds have given way to a chill breeze and branches move against the steel grey sky.  Spring is heard through the song of birds; the greens are deep and bright and there is new growth everywhere.  The year is turning, leaving behind the old and dying, seeking to replace and renew.  All the talk, words spoken and written cannot describe this movement for it is life itself.  And all the inventions and ideas of humankind are lost in this enveloping green, leaving the bare bones of the fallen tree in a bleached brown-grey submission to Spring: to played on by lambs, climbed by children and find a new existence as the home for so many insects.  In hope we look for answers, in desperation all we can do is look.

Where are you in all this?

Tear down the walls!  Deconstruct the language!  Wash away the thinking!  Exams are killing the young, sucking out their souls and mangling their senses until they are completely absorbed with their ‘future’ and the present has been sacrificed at the altar of arbitrary qualifications and random grades.  Joining the armies of the empty and the ranks of the frightened, your boys and girls stare from their lifeless eyes like fish on a slab, and are imprisoned in a world of make-believe.  Fairy-tale princesses glide by whilst their muscled young men loll contentedly like tom-cats ready to prowl out into the night of stark cold lights and drunken screams whilst the grass grows quietly through the relics of their dreams, leaving them like rusted limousines of lies.

Can you live in uncertainty?  Can you walk through a wood, over a moor, by the sea, by the river, along the trail of a mountain, through the dry, dusty desert, and the lush green valley, and not know where you are going?

What if there was a place in the world which said: you can do exams, but exams are not on the curriculum?  How can your child keep all her options open?  How can he keep up the pace of this global race, and how can she fulfill her potential… be happy?

He was really quite a small man, white hair swept defiantly over a shining nut brown dome of intelligence.  His eyes had the quality of depth and fullness that is not uncommon among many South Indians and the voice that seemed to join the wind still had that Asiatic feel.  He sat straight-backed, trembling hands gripping a white handkerchief….  A man may make statements, a man may ask questions, a man may challenge; but if all those that listen do is to stare in awe, wonder and reverence, then that it would have been better if that man had never lived.

What if there was a place in the world that was about learning about life; not just someone’s idea about life?  What if I, a man whose thinning white hair and stiffening joints, could engage with the vigour of youth, absorb the tears of young eyes, the smiles of laughing faces and listen to the passing of life in the understanding of an exploration which would not be fettered by fear and expectations, but revel in an ocean of possibilities.  Look at the hands of the maker, the planter, the painter and the poet; their fingers are at work, their bright eyes open; and their minds touching a stillness that has no possessor, no separation.

What if there was a place in the world where there was a sense of discovering together?  She would always touch the giant redwood when we passed; her long golden hair shrouding her face as she pressed against the soft trunk and her hands flattened as if gently communing through their touch.  She would say that it was like returning to an old friend, no need to explain the absence, just taking up where they left off.  The tree stands in a grove and is flanked by others that reach up to an extraordinary height; today it is dark with the rain and the branches drip amid the thickening gloom…its stillness reaches into her, an unbroken connection of wood, water, flesh, bone, blood and earth.

The seed is growing; the flowering may take a while in the presence of the dead weight of inertia and brittle certainty.  Courage is needed at every cautious, but steady step.  Nonetheless, the plight of the young cannot be left to their first faltering, clamorous demands, neither with the smooth, unctuous piety of those that exploit in the illusory game of success and failure.  It has to be with the rough-hewn, mistake-ridden, half-blinded adventurers who have seen a light shining dimly in the distance, and have some understanding that it is learning, a learning that cannot be measured.

And the killings go on.... last night the moon rose...

The killings go on, justified by men on television in their impenetrable grey/black funeral suits and carried out by men dressed as plastic action men dolls.  Flesh and bone torn apart to make room for ideas: there is nothing sacred about a life which does not agree with you, may threaten you, might defy you.  Sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters brothers; indiscriminate lives, indiscriminate tears, lost smiles and all tenderness exposed as bloodied flesh in the explosion of bomb and bullet....

Last night the moon rose from the Albanian hills, a ghost of what it was to become.  As it gained form and substance it filled with an extraordinary gold/silver light, sending a pathway across the sea towards the tiny village on the coast of the island of Corfu.  Today the sunlight dances on the water against the background of the blue, misty hills and the pale early morning sky.  The beauty takes the breath away, not in some sentimental moment, but in the realisation this is the natural world of which all humanity is part.  It exists, untouched by human thought. 

This week has seen what human thought does at its most vicious: the attack on the Palestinians in Gaza and the shooting down of a civil aeroplane as it was flying over Ukraine.  Both these events have seen the violent deaths of innocent people caught up in the desperate fighting of other human beings, who appear not to care who they kill as long as their goal is achieved.  Elsewhere bombings and killings continue, the number of refugees rise and those who suffer most are women and children – the powerless.  As a species we seem to be addicted to violence, to the cruelty and greed that drives aggression.  We lack sensitivity and are dominated by fear, which leads us to seek security in ways that make us all much less secure.  We are divided by nation, by ideology, by religion; by the way we define ourselves; by the images we create and we use these divisions to give meaning to our lives, whilst we cut short the lives of others.  One wonders sometimes how we, who are so destructive, continue to live on this planet that contains so much beauty; and, if we continue as we are, it would seem likely that we will not survive much longer.

What can be done amid such apparent callousness and ignorance?  Can a new generation be brought into being where violence, anger and selfishness are not seen as the way to be? At the moment we live in a world of separation and we teach our children through this separation: humanity is separate from nature; I am separate from you.  So we compete instead of collaborate; we exploit instead of care; we are individuals standing out from the crowd – who we despise.  We compare so we might feel superior, but all too often we feel inferior.   The continuation of war takes place in our families, in our classrooms, in our entertainment, in our media and ultimately in ourselves.

Do we really want to live without war?  Are we prepared to face the reality of how we live; in conflict with ourselves and in conflict with others?  Or will we continue to wring our hands in horror at the photographs of bloodied, broken bodies?  Cry our tears of outraged hypocrisy at the carnage, call for revenge upon the perpetrators and carry on the madness that underpins our so-called sane society.

We have to look at what life is, without sentiment, without judgement, and observe exactly where our behaviour is leading us.  So come to understand what is happening, without justification and without condemnation.  And then that understanding leads to a change in behaviour, not through the creation of a new ideology or system, but through taking care of humanity through pure observation.  Taking care in the sense of learning what it means to be human in this world, not separated, but unified through our common consciousness.

This has tremendous implications as to how we bring up our children – this is where the road to sanity begins.