Page 210 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

accordance with your skills and talents’ and ‘that for which you are
responsible’ (your karma). This brings it down to the level of the
individual and implies that not only as a species (homo sapiens)
are we responsible—via ritual, via attunement, via right living—for
the maintenance of the cosmic order, we are at the same time, in
our personal lives, duty-bound to fulfil our destiny. That which
is in ‘harmony with our true nature’ and ‘in accordance with our
skills and talents’ may be part of the picture, but it is surely not the
whole of it.
Many things happen to us—a chance encounter, a conversation,
a new and different work of art—for which we may be totally unpre-
pared but which thrust us willy-nilly into the next phase of our life.
What is implied in all this may remain obscure, hidden under lay-
ers of accumulated karma, but the feeling, when it happens, is one
of release. The opaque prison of our conditioning reveals a hidden
skylight—dusty, dirty, cobweb-ridden—but a skylight nonetheless,
a light unto the sky. “I am going there,” something within us says.
I never wanted to be a teacher. “There’s always teaching,” a friend
of mine said; and another, more bluntly, “Can’t you think of some-
thing better?” It was synonymous with drudgery, with recalcitrant
students, with the flame of intelligence being gradually dimmed
until it ended on the scrapheap of its own exhaustion. A weary, pre-
dictable, failed, faltering life. Probably, faute de mieux, marriage and
children. Probably, in tandem with that, promotion—a borrowed
ambition, falsely fulfilled. This is what they called the real world.
It was clear to me, at the same time, that the world had lost its
moral compass. The march of science over the centuries had cer-
tainly given rise to a value-free world, but at a terrible price—it
was value-less. The bottom had dropped out of Western culture,
and the fervid attempts to fill the void resembled nothing so much
as a non-stop shopping spree. The Mall was the ever-open, ever-
empty maw, the consumerist monster swallowing its own children.
The lost inner meaning of the twentieth century was written in

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