Page 165 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

Working with Insights from Krishnamurti

skills and through effort become better at it. Similarly, with think-
ing. And in the context of organizations it is a very powerful
and valuable skill when it comes to achieving the purpose of the
organization.
By and large (and that is not a surprise at all!) it would be accu-
rate to say that my colleagues didn’t quite see ‘thought’ in this way,
even at the level of intellectual understanding. For many years, my
engagement with the nature of thought remained a private mat-
ter. In the last nine years or so, it began to dawn on me that if K
was right about thought, the insights would apply to all thought
and all thinkers, irrespective of whether they had any inklings
about the ‘real nature of thought’! To create a (perhaps simplistic)
metaphor—a complete belief in a ‘flat earth’ does not change the
shape of the ‘globe’.
This interest in the nature of thought and its applications to
the organizational context became something of a public project
within the organizations that I was privileged to lead. I began to
explore the possibilities of creating training programs for my col-
leagues and myself to learn to think better. K has an intriguing sug-
gestion to make here. In a conversation with Bohm he suggests
that thought would be ‘perfect’ if it can ‘vibrate to the emptiness
within’—like a ‘drum that vibrates to the space within’. The confu-
sion created by thought is itself a result of thought; we are condi-
tioned to imagine that there is a ‘thinker who thinks’ rather than
see thought as a conditioned process with the ‘thinker’ herself
being one of the products of thought.
I began, in 2011 or so, to develop a traditional training program
whose premise and explicit purpose was to help the participants
think better. Since I was imagining this in the context of social sec-
tor organizations whose ultimate purpose was societal change, and
the self-image of many of us in the sector was that of being ‘change-
makers’, my early articulation of what I was trying to do was to say
that I was creating a ‘Cognitive Tool-kit for Social Change Makers’.

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