I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in. I just can’t do it anymore.

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.
I just can’t do it anymore.
– John Taylor Gatto

Bill Watterson - Calvin's lament
Shortly after I posted my seven questions for Leonardo I learned of the death of educator and writer John Taylor Gatto.  My questions for Leonardo were intended to shine a light on the way people with a passionate interest in the visual arts are often schooled to produce a production-line version of “fine art” that will succeed in the mainstream market, rather than dive deep into their own authentic creativity regardless of commercial outcomes.  But the wider educational field suffers from the same malaise, and Gatto wrote about it extensively.  So, what is the difference between schooling and educating, and why does it matter?  In what way is it relevant to this site – The Awakened Eye?

In the introduction to the website – art and the intimate unknowable – I wrote,
The Awakened Eye is the eye that perceives without labelling; we could also call it the innocent eye or the eye of beginner’s mind.  Simply put, “schooling” tends to be an exercise in labelling, defining and separating in the service of acquiring knowledge. In other words, it’s a form of training.  It has its uses, but seeing without shadows is not one of them.  On the other hand, education (the root, educare, means to ‘draw out’) will endeavour to help uncover and foster the student’s innate and unique genius.  John Taylor Gatto had a lot to say about schooling; he was outspoken and ruthless in his criticism of the state school system, and he was in a position to know what he was talking about.

Fifty years ago I was venting the same sentiments about my experience as a young teacher in the state school system in New Zealand.  I had started to have nightmares about the psychological harm my students might be experiencing in my classroom as a result of competition and comparison.  If I’d read Gatto’s 1991 confession in the New York Times – “I can’t teach this way any longer.  If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.” – I’d have been hugely comforted to know I wasn’t the only one.

But I didn’t know about him then; he inhabited the mists of my future.  Life conspired instead to introduce me to the thoughts of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the highlights of my teaching career occurred in the schools he founded worldwide.

… if we really love our children and are therefore deeply concerned about education, we will contrive from the very beginning to bring about an atmosphere which will encourage them to be free.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Please read the full (short) article here: the taming of innate genius

Related:
education for wholeness
the act of seeing
the art of learning

Cartoon by Bill Watterson,  the creative genius behind the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Calvin and Hobbes

 

the process of perception is one of creation

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

Perception underpins all human behavior and helps interpret sensory information to make sense from the senseless. The brain, to create meaning where there is possibly none, processes perception from the unperceived and thought from the unthinkable. The process of perception is in fact one of creation. What we perceive is not what is out there or within. There is no inherent value in the incredibly complex patterns of light that fall onto our eyes, and yet we see coherent forms and motions that enable us to survive. Exploring the nature of perception can help us glimpse life beyond experiencer and experience, perceiver and perception.

– Science and Nonduality website

This year’s Science and Nonduality Europe Conference is only 5 weeks away.
Hop over to the website and register now!

SAND_EU13

SAND13 EU – “The Science and Mystery of Perception”
Doorn, May 28th to June 3rd 2013.

Instead of saying, ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can more appropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movement involving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and “the object he is looking at”.
– David Bohm

The observer is the observed.
– J Krishnamurti

There is no separate, inside self and no separate outside object, other or world. Rather, there is one seamless, intimate totality, always changing when viewed from the perspective of objects, never changing when viewed from the perspective of the totality.
– Rupert Spira

to be a tree

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Friedrich Grohe: Single tree in meadow, grey clouds on blue sky

 

This awareness that the observer is the observed is not a process of identification with the observed.  To identify ourselves with something is fairly easy.  Most of us identify ourselves with something – with our family, our husband or wife, our nation – and that leads to great misery and great wars.  We are considering something entirely different and we must understand it not verbally but in our core, right at the root of our being.

In ancient China before an artist began to paint anything – a tree, for instance – he would sit down in front of it for days, months, years.  He did not identify himself with the tree but he was the tree.  This means that there was no space between him and the tree, no space between the observer and the observed, no experiencer experiencing the beauty, the movement, the shadow, the depth of a leaf, the quality of colour.  He was totally the tree, and in that state only could he paint.

– J Krishnamurti,

Freedom from the Known

Photo credit:  Friedrich Grohe

the act of seeing

awareness, meditation and creativity

one with this rapturous world

… and colour was god

one with this rapturous world

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

The view from this hilltop was not breath-taking, like those which are seen occasionally, and which obliterate consciousness with grandeur and silence. Here it was not like that. Here there was peaceful enchantment, gentle and expansive; here you could live timelessly, without a past or a future, for you were one with this rapturous world. You were not a human being, a stranger from a distant land, but you were those hills, those goats, and the goatherd. You were the sky and the blossoming earth; you were not apart from it, you were of it.

But you were not conscious that you were of it, any more than those flowers were. You were those smiling fields, the blue sea, and the distant train with its passengers. You didn’t exist, you who choose, compare, act and seek; you were one with everything.

– J Krishnamurti
Commentaries on Living, Second Series

the act of seeing

awareness, meditation and creativity

… and colour was god

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Painting by Fritz Rauh

 

The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth.  Everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was god, not the god of man.  The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime.  The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a stretch of immediate attention.  And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky.  You were of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word.  And as the sun went further down, every colour became more violent, more intense and you were completely lost, past all recalling.  It was an evening that had no memory.

– J Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti’s Notebook

Painting by Fritz Rauh
thepainter-fritzrauh.com

the act of seeing

awareness, meditation and creativity