Page 162 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

continuity comes down to looking to Krishnamurti for insights
into situations. And every work context I have been part of has
been the ground in which to explore the teachings.
K once asked a group of teachers, “Sir, what can you do alone?”
This simple question has over the decades kept me away from
fantasies of ‘withdrawing’, including from the messy world of
large organizations. It gave me the energy to throw myself whole-
heartedly into the organizational context that I was part of at that
moment. And building organizations became the ‘problem’ that I
spent my energies on. Organizations seem to, very often, be spaces
that distil our individual stupidity into collective dysfunction. And
their very architecture—with its hierarchies, competitive cultures,
mechanistic processes—often seems to bring out the worst in the
people in it.
In spite of this, or perhaps even because of this, organizations are
excellent grounds to observe the nature of thought, a subject that
K has been spectacularly insightful about. K, at least to a casual
student of his teachings, suggests that there is something wrong
with thought. I completely accepted the limits and limitations of
thought. I accepted wholeheartedly that thought would always
get me into trouble and cause fragmentation and misery. And of
course, it did and continues to do so every single day!
My first lesson was seeing that thought (in spite of its propensity to
cause fragmentation and misery) deserves a lot of compassion! It has
an impossible task. It is tasked with producing a complete, coher-
ent account of the world of experience. And yet it is conditioned to
divide all of experience into a ‘self,’ an ‘I,’ and create a narrative that
explains the rest of the field of experience from the point of view
of this ‘self’. Whenever it tries to do this, it quickly comes to ‘prob-
lems’, things that don’t fit the narrative. Then it throws everything
at the problem—redefines the ‘self’, tries a different story, makes
tremendous efforts to change the experience to fit the story. Quiet
heroic, if you think about it. Never gives up. Day and night.

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