Book Review: Beginnings of Learning

'Beginnings of Learning'

By J. Krishnamurti

Phoenix paperback 

This is Krishnamurti’s second book which I finished reading now. And what a wonderful book this is. Krishnamurti was an outstanding philosopher and thinker. He founded many schools in India, the USA and Brockwood Park in Hampshire, UK. This book documents his conversations with some of the students, teachers and parents at these schools (major one is Brockwood Park). The conversations ranged from anything to everything. The goal is to find how to help students/children meet the educational demands of the society without conforming to society’s conventional values. The focus should be on self-awareness, self-learning, avoiding prejudices, learning difference between affection and sentiment, being peaceful and non-violent in true sense, not conforming to other’s values, and acquiring spirit of cooperation.  

The book is in the form of conversations. A student or questioner asks something and then Krishnamurti replies, explains and takes the questioners along with him. The QnAs are very valid for even today’s times; perhaps more valid today to the wider audience.  

Here I have typewritten and reproduced some interesting paragraphs from the same book:  

“Have you thought about violence? What is involved in violence, how does it arise, what is the structure of violence? There is physical violence and there is the violence of obedience – are you obeying and therefore being violent? Do you understand what I mean? Where I obey you and suppress what I think, that suppression will burst out one day. So there is physical violence and violence brought about through obedience, the violence of competitiveness, of conformity. When I confirm to a patter I am violent – you see the connection? When I live a life of fragmentation – that is, when I think one thing and say another, do another – that is fragmentation and that also breeds violence. I may be very quiet, gentle, do all the work I am asked to do, but I flare up: which indicates there has been suppression in me. So violence is not just physical violence, it is a very complex question. And if you haven’t thought about it, when you are faced with violence you will react most unintelligently.” (P191-192) 

“A young man with a sensitive face and hands said, “I am one of those who take drugs. I have taken them regularly for hour or five years; not much; probably every month or so. I am well aware what it is doing to me. I am not quite as sharp as I was. When I am high I think I can do anything. I seem to have tremendous energy and there is no confusion. I see things sharply. I feel like a god on earth, perfect, without any problems, without any regrets. But I can’t maintain that state all the time and I am back on this mad earth. Now I need a stronger dose and where it is leading me I really don’t know. I am uneasy about it now. I can see myself gradually ending up in a mental hospital, and yet the pull of the other state is so strong that I seem to have no resistance. I experienced with it in the beginning because the others did. It was fun in the then, but now it has become a danger. You see how clearly I can explain all this? But yet there is part of me that has become slow, lethargic and ineffectual.” (P244) 

“The idealist who is also a revolutionary, though he may talk convincingly about freedom, inevitably will bring about a dictatorship of the few or of the many. He will also create a personal cult and destroy totally every form of freedom. You may have observed this in the French and Russian revolutions. Your ideal which may come out of the ashes of the present structure will only be speculative Utopia – call it what you like – you want to build a new society. This is what all the physical revolutionaries have done. They start off with equality, social justice, the withering of the state and so on, and end up with tyrannical bureaucracy, insistence on conformity and the exercise of authority in the name of the state. Surely this is not what you want.” (P247) 

“Knowing that you may be hurt, how ill you prevent this hurt taking place? If somebody tells you that you are not clever or beautiful, you get hurt, or angry, which is another form of resistance. Now what can you do? You saw very clearly how the past hurts go away without any effort; you saw because you listened and gave your attention. Now when someone says something unpleasant to you, be attentive; listen very carefully. Attention will prevent the mark of hurt.” (P256)  

It was an interesting and exhaustive read. I recommend this book for all who are interested in learning.  

- Rahul 

Book review: Conversations with God

‘Conversations with God: Book one, an uncommon dialogue’

By Neale Donald Walsch

Hodder and Stoughton 

The title of this book had fascinated me for long and when I could get this book in my hands, I was elated. Reading the introduction made my hunger a million times large. After all, the author claims that he has never written this book, but this book “happened to him.” One fine day, God started to talk to the author. The author was a failure on many fronts before writing the book and he also had many dilemmas and disillusions. God started talking to him – God’s conversation started coming in his mind and his hands wrote everything down. The author had the opportunity to ask as many questions as he wished and he made use of this opportunity very much. The product is in the form of this book and some more books in the series. The author claims that it was God who planned these books, and God was merely using the author as a medium. 

To begin with, I bet the author has read or heard about Hinduism or Vedanta. I say this because the concept of God as he describes in this book, or better, the concept of God which God reveals through this book, is present only in Hinduism in general and Vedanta in particular. The central point in this book is that each one of us is God waiting to be realised. “Aham Brahmasmi”, as the holy Hindu scriptures tell. All of us are the same God, no one is superior no one is inferior. And then God through his book also tells that reincarnation is truth – thereby accepting one basic belief of Hinduism and its sister religions/sects. There is hardly any conflict between what God tells through this book and what Hinduism and Vedanta told us a long time back. The author is reformist when it comes to Christianity. He attacks the Church, calls propaganda a propaganda; but he then very politically accepts some basic beliefs of the religion. The author doesn’t name many religions in this book and claims all that is in this book came from God and these are not a product of his mind or any insanity. If he is true, then this book can become yet another proof that Hinduism and Vedanta perhaps touch the truth in a way no other religion or sect has ever done.

Excerpts from the book: ‘Conversations with God: Book one, an uncommon dialogue’ by Neale Donald Walsch.  

—  

Page 67: 

Most of the New Testament writers never met or saw Jesus in their lives. They lived many years after Jesus left the earth. They wouldn’t have known Jesus of Nazareth if they walked into him on the street. 

The Bible writers were great believers and great historians. They took the stories which had been passed down to them and to their friends by others – elders – from elder to elder, until finally a written record was made. 

And not everything of the Bible authors was included in the final document. 

Already “churches” had sprung up around the teachings of Jesus – and , as perhaps whenever and wherever people gather in groups around a  powerful idea, there were certain individuals within these churches, or enclaves, who determined what parts of the Jesus story were going to be told – and how. This process of selecting and editing continued throughout the gathering, writing, and publishing of the gospels, and the Bible. 

Even several centuries after the original scriptures were committed to writing, a High Council of the Church determined yet one more time which doctrines and truths were to be included in the then-official Bible – and which would be “unhealthy” or “premature” to reveal to the masses. 

—  

Page 137 

You are making mock of Me. You are saying that I, God, made inherently imperfect beings, then have demanded of them to be perfect, or face damnation. 

You are saying then that, somewhere several thousand years into the world’s experience, I relented, saying that from then on you didn’t necessarily have to be good, you simply had to feel bad when you were not being good, and accept as your saviour the One Being who could always be perfect, thus satisfying Mu Hunger for perfection. You are saying that My Son – who you call the One Perfect One – has saved you from your own imperfection – the imperfection I gave you. 

In other words’ God’s Son has saved you from what His Father did. 

This is how you – many of you – say I have set it up.  

Now who is mocking whom? 

—  

Page 161 

You carry a thought around that money is bad. You also carry a thought around that God is good. Bless you! Therefore, in your thought system, God and money do not mix. 

This makes things interesting, because this then makes it difficult for you to take money for any good thing. 

—  

Page 191 

If you ever lit a cigarette in your life – much less smoked a pack a day for 20 years as you have – you have very little will to live. You don’t care what you do to your body. 

And if you have every taken alcohol into your body, you have very little will to live. The body was not meant to intake alcohol. It impairs the mind. 

Author: But Jesus took alcohol! He went to the wedding and turned water into wine! 

God: So who said Jesus was perfect? 

I will stick to my original statement: the body was not meant to intake alcohol. 

Author: But even some medicines contain alcohol! 

God: I have no control over what you call medicine. I will stay with my statement. 

—  

Page 194 

I designed your magnificent body to last forever! And the earliest of you did live in the body virtually pain free, and without fear of what you now call death. 

In your religious mythology, you symbolise your cellular memory of these first humans by calling them Adam and Even. Actually, of course, there were more than two. 

At the outset, the idea was for you wonderful souls to have a chance to know your Selves as Who You Really Are through experiences gained in the physical body, in the relative world – as I have explained. 

This was done through the slowing down of the unfathomable speed of all vibration (thought form) to produce matter – including that matter you call the physical body. 

Life evolved through a series of steps in the blink of an eye that you now call billions of years. And in this holy instant came you, out of the sea, the water of life, onto the land and into the form you now hold. 

—  

Page 197 

Your body, your mind, and your soul (spirit) are one. In this, you are a microcosm of Me - the Divine All, the Holy Everything, the Sum and Substance. You see now how I am the beginning and the end of everything, the Alpha and the Omega. 

Now I will explain to you the ultimate mystery: your exact and true relationship to Me. 

YOU ARE MY BODY. 

As your body is to your mind and soul, so too, are you to My mind and soul. Therefore: Everything I experience, I experience through you. 

Just as your body, mind, and spirit are one, so too, are Mine. 

—  

Page 204 

Author: Is there such a thing as reincarnation? How many past lives have I had? 

God: It is difficult too believe there is still a question about this. I find it hard to imagine. There have been so many reports from thoroughly reliable sources of past life experiences. Some of these people have brought back strikingly detailed descriptions of events, and such completely verifiable data to eliminate any possibility that they were making it up or had contrived to somehow deceive researchers and loved ones. 

You have had 647 past lives, since you insist on being exact. This is your 648^th.  

—  

- Rahul