Page 215 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

Dharma and Svadharma in the Teachings of J Krishnamurti

dedication of the staff—especially the initial three (Dorothy and
Montague Simmons and Doris Pratt)—that it was well-stocked
and flourishing when I arrived.
Brockwood provided three things I was looking for—an inten-
tional community with a spiritual basis, a group of people with
whom one had a ‘wavelength’, and a means of earning a livelihood.
The latter was meagre, to say the least, but like everyone else I
accepted it. Being a full-time teacher also went with the job, along
with other responsibilities, but I pitched in—we all did—and was
soon at home.
This sense of feeling or being at home is crucial. Most schools
are cold, bleak institutions and uncannily align themselves with the
definition of being an extension of ‘the military-industrial com-
plex’. They are. But in summer, when Krishnaji gave public talks
at Brockwood, the whole place was transformed once again into a
country seat, a Hampshire manor, of which Jane Austen could be
proud. It had none of the reek and nervous tension of a school as,
indeed, it did not during term-time. Students as well as staff felt it
was their home.
This ties in with the sense that these schools—all these schools—
are places where care and affection are paramount, where the
human individual counts—not the numbers—and where one is
given permission to be oneself. While most schools condition, sub-
tly or grossly, here the attempt is made to unravel conditioning, to
see it for what it is and to go beyond it. In this sense, the timeless
is always present.
The Buddha-Christ-‘Maitreyic’ consciousness was synonymous
with the consciousness of J Krishnamurti. At no point did he need
to ‘stretch’ for it: it flowed easily through him in daily life. What
manifested outwardly as a separate human being did so only in the
eyes of others; in his own view, he was never separate. The fact is,
we are so inured to feeling separate that we can scarcely imagine,

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