Author: Arun Elassery

Livelihood Vs Life

There is a story that when the British wanted the weavers of Bengal to produce more cloth, the first response of the weavers was to refuse. The British who had assumed that more money would be an incentive to produce more cloth were told by the weavers that they could work only a few hours on the loom because they had many samajik duties that took up the rest of their time. How the British brutally got around this cultural roadblock is a story that we will not get into here and is narrated in detail in ‘The White Sahibs In India’ that we have republished at SIDH (write to sidhsampark@gmail.com for copies). The point I want to make is that there was a clear difference between ‘livelihood’ and ‘rest of life’ for our ancestors. How these have got mixed up today and the confusion that ensues is what I want to explore in this post.

Today, livelihood has taken centre-stage and it grabs all our attention. Our education system efficiently trains children to fit as a cog into some part of the modern world economy. We function as interchangeable parts of a large, complex, impersonal machine and this is harmful to our common human capacity for physical and mental well-being. The insensitivity we are forced to cultivate to survive in the system ends up making us lead an adharmic life and our growth towards wisdom and clarity is effectively short-circuited.

I was recently thinking about all this and the following insights came up:

– People who find their work intolerable and have the luxury of leaving it, think that the solution lies in finding work that they like to do. They end up even more stuck in the ‘livelihood’ paradigm and in the bargain become repetitive, boring people on a passionate, personal mission (I am like this :-)).
– This knee-jerk reaction to a perceived problem is also visible when successful people (people with lot of money in the bank) want to do social service of some kind or the other and be ‘useful’ to society.
– If our livelihood was approached as a yagna in our traditional samaaj, as Ravindra Sharmaji used to tell us, then our work was part of our practice towards moksha and was a natural part of our life.
– To joyfully engage in life and to grow in wisdom requires some relaxed time and energy, some fursat, that seems impossible to come by in the rush to do our ‘jobs’. Today, it is not unusual to find conventionally successful people who are near retirement age behaving like spoilt children.
– The samajik engagements, that were an important part of our ancestor’s lives, have almost disappeared in the modern shift towards individualism and there appears to be no alternative to spending all our time earning our livelihood.
– It seems that one non-reactionary way to look at ‘livelihood vs life’ is to minimise the time and importance we give to ‘livelihood’ and to engage more deeply with ‘rest of life’. ‘Rest of life’ meaning our relationship with ourselves, with others around us, with the culture of our land, our relationship with nature etc.

This is a very tentative post to share these insights. I would be interested in finding out what you think about all this.

SIDH Samvaad at Varanasi

The 4-day SIDH samvaad centred around reading and discussing Dharampalji’s Bharatiya Chitta Manas Aur Kaal has just concluded. The samvaad was held at the Krishnamurti Study Centre set in the 100-year-old, 300-acre, wooded campus that also has the Rajghat Besant School and Vasanta College for Women. The campus is situated at the confluence of the Varuna and Ganga rivers and from the first floor of the study centre, where our 30-person group sat talking, we could see the quiet majesty of Gangaji through the trees. It was an ideal location for a contemplative and deep conversation.

The samvaad was memorable for various reasons.

  • Since it was held in Varanasi, we could all go for darshans to the many powerful temples there.
  • We went for a boat ride on the Ganga passing through all the famous ghats of the city.
  • The Krishnamurti Study Centre were the perfect hosts, not only housing us in style and serving delicious food in their dining hall but also, once, taking the full group in one of their buses for a breakfast of the famous Banarasi kachoris and Jilebi.
  • The participants, from very diverse backgrounds, included the founders of two schools, two teachers from a rural school, a farmer from central India and eminent scholars.

Dr Brijendra Pandey, a professor from Lucknow University and the founder of the Coomaraswamy Foundation was the main speaker along with Pawan Gupta of SIDH. In the discussions, Professor Pandey talked about many books and articles that can help us break the hypnotic trance of modernity and build our understanding of the way forward. The list, that looks like a full curriculum on modernity and tradition, is as follows (I have copy-pasted the list that Professor Pandey sent us on WhatsApp):

  1. Bipin Chandra Pal: The Soul of India , Rupa & Co., New Delhi.
  2. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: Essays in National Idealism , Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
  3. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: Art and Swadeshi , Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
  4. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: East and West and Other Essays ,Ola Books Ltd, Colombo, Ceylon.
  5. KC Bhattacharya: Swaraj in Ideas.
  6. Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism.
  7. Swami Chandrashekharendra Saraswati: Hindu Dharma: The Universal Way Life , Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay.
  8. Sri Aurobindo: Foundations of Indian Culture , Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
  9. बद्रीशाह: दैशिकशास्त्र , पुनरुत्थान विद्यापीठ, अहमदाबाद।
  10. स्वामी करपात्रीजी: मार्क्सवाद और रामराज्य , गीताप्रेस, गोरखपुर।
  11. स्वामी करपात्रीजी: राष्ट्रीय स्वयंसेवक संघ और हिन्दू धर्म , धर्मसंघ प्रकाशन, वाराणसी।
  12. गिरधर शर्मा चतुर्वेदी: दिग्देशकाल-मीमांसा ।
  13. Rene Guenon: The Crisis of Modern World , Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY.
  14. Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace .
  15. Simone Weil: The Need for Roots .
  16. Simone Weil: Waiting on God .
  17. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Man and Nature .
  18. Frithjof Schuon: Transcendent Unity of All Religions .
  19. Frithjof Schuon: Understanding Islam .
  20. Frithjof Schuon: Stations of Wisdom .
  21. TS Eliot: The Idea of a Christian Society , Faber and Faber, London.
  22. AK Saran: Traditional Vision of Man , Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi.
  23. Kenneth Oldmeadow: Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy , Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, Colombo.

इनके अतिरिक्त म. म. मोतीलाल शर्मा शास्त्री, म. म. गोपीनाथ कविराज, विश्वनाथ शास्त्री दातार, आचार्य बलदेव उपाध्याय, वासुदेवशरण अग्रवाल तथा विद्यानिवास मिश्र जैसे विद्वानों की भी रचनाएं अवलोकनीय हैं।

इन पुस्तकों को इनके प्रकाशक के माध्यम से अथवा अमेज़न/ फ्लिपकार्ट के माध्यम से मंगाया जा सकता है। कई पुस्तकें आउट ऑफ प्रिंट हैं, इनकी सॉफ्ट कॉपी www.archive.com से ही प्राप्त हो पाएगी।

‘वैज्ञानिक प्रगति’ की अंतर्निहित विसंगतियों को समझने के लिए पाश्चात्य विचारकों की ही निम्नांकित पुस्तकों का अवलोकन किया जा सकता है :

  1. GH Hardy: A Mathematician’s Apology
  2. RG Collingwood: The Idea of History
  3. John Herman Randall (Jr): The Making of the Modern Mind
  4. Rene Guenon: The Crisis of the Modern World (specifically ‘Sacred and Profane’)
  5. Seyyed Hossain Nasr: Man and Nature
  6. Oven Barfield: Saving the Appearances
  7. Kenneth Oldmeadow: Traditionalism-Religion in the Light of Perennial Philosophy
  8. Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
  9. Arthur Koestler: The Sleepwalkers

इनके अतिरिक्त प्रोफ़ेसर एके सरन के लेख ‘On Modernity’ तथा ‘धर्म और धर्म-निरपेक्षता’ एवं प्रोफ़ेसर रघुवीर सिंह के लेख ‘पर्यावरण और विकास’ का भी अवलोकन किया जाना चाहिए।

I hope that the list above will be of use to you. As far as I am concerned, it looks like I am going to be busy reading a lot in the near future. 🙂

A Film Review

Recently I saw a wonderful Malayalam movie, ‘Nanpakal nerathu mayakkam’ (titled ‘Like an afternoon dream’ in English). The movie, directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery with Mammootty in the lead role, tells a simple but strange story. A Christian group from Kerala that has gone to Tamilnadu for a pilgrimage is on the way back home in their minibus. When everyone in the bus is asleep in the afternoon, James (Mammootty), the group leader, wakes up and asks the driver to stop the bus in the middle of a deserted stretch of road in rural Tamilnadu. He gets off and walks purposefully through the fields, through the lanes of a nearby village and directly into a house with an old man sleeping on the veranda and his old blind wife listening to a movie on TV. Sundaram, the son of the house had gone missing two years ago and, strangely, James has now started walking and talking like him. The city-dwelling, Malayalam-speaking James has suddenly become transformed into the village-dwelling, Tamil-speaking Sundaram. There is much confusion with Sundaram’s wife and daughter, the villagers, and with the Kerala group that includes James’ wife and son. Finally, the next afternoon, James as Sundaram goes to sleep and wakes up as his original self. The movie has many layers of imagery and sound that I will not get into but will let you watch and find out for yourself. I wanted to talk about the movie because of some unusual Bharatiya overtones it carries.

Firstly, the movie is shot almost entirely with static wide-angle shots. This highlights and brings out the beauty of the backgrounds in which the action is happening. This includes the fields around the village, the lanes and houses of the village, the insides of the village buildings etc. Everything that the camera captures is beautiful and vibrantly alive. The stereotype of the ‘backward’ village that we get educated into is completely absent.

Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the way that the city folk from Kerala and the village folk from Tamilnadu behave once they both realize that they have a problem they have to solve together-to get James back to Kerala. There are wise and foolish people in both groups and they communicate in Malayalam and Tamil and, in spite of their bewilderment, are all finally willing to wait and give time for whatever strange process is going on with James. One of the older men from the village says that the group is after all coming back from a pilgrimage and sometimes strange things happen.

Lastly, the movie does not talk down to its audience and gives no explanations or justifications for what is being shown and leaves the interpretations to the viewer.

I recommend that you take the time to watch this movie and hope that it warms your heart as it did mine. Do add a comment here if you see the movie.

What is wrong with the Western political class?

I came across an article that I thought had many important insights about the Western political establishment. Here are some excerpts:

Excerpt 1:
A breakdown of diplomacy doesn’t quite describe how bad things have become. The behavior of US and European leaders has become increasingly unhinged and any semblance of rationality has been abandoned. It is impossible to listen to western leaders without coming to the conclusion that something is very wrong. Firstly, they seem to have created an upside-down fantasy world where Freudian projection rules and opponents are demonized. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are both Satan himself, Russia is still losing, and the West is still almighty – as well as the pinnacle of justice, freedom, democracy and culture. Secondly, they can’t seem to be able to open their mouths in public without insulting the non-western world.

Excerpt 2:
You can’t just hire anyone [to be part of the political elite] for a cultural and literal genocide and there aren’t really many options. You could seek out psychopaths but you might have loyalty problems with them, and strangely, some of them actually have principles. What you need is a person who likes, or even needs to force his will upon others and interfere with their lives. You need a person who has unwavering zeal for the cause and is incapable of backing down. You need a person who can rationalize any actions while not being affected by them. You need a person who can be brainwashed and controlled like a trained monkey. You need a person who can destroy his own home without realizing what he is doing. You need a narcissist. . . . But what are narcissists and why are they ideal for the demolition work on western societies? A narcissist is a person with self-awareness so low that he can’t develop a self-identity without the help of others – and who has been told that he is better and/or smarter than others. On top of that, he has high emotional neediness and dependence on others.

Excerpt 3:
The Ukraine war and the loss of control over the non-western world have caused economic chaos in the West – which will be followed by social chaos. This is bringing the whole house of cards down far too fast and they [political elites] fear they might lose control. They need to react and solve those problems – but they don’t know how – because they are incompetent. All these challenges and failures are causing their models of self to be challenged, which has serious emotional consequences for them – so they escalate on every level. They shout at people, insult people, make up delusional explanations, and then retreat into absolute denial. Everybody can see this – including the leaders of the non-western world. Nobody wants to talk to our political elites these days, because a narcissist who is losing control is not pleasant to be around.

(The full post is available at:
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-the-western-political)

Advice to a young educator – Part 2

(Continued from last week…)

Young potential educator (Ype): I am not saying that I agree with you but you have certainly given me some food for thought. Tell me some more about modern education.

Me: Let us look at it from two perspectives. Think of a large school. A school with thousands of children, hundreds of teachers, dozens of school buses and huge buildings. In such a school, a teacher stands in front of 40 or 50 children in a class and tries to ‘teach’ some uninteresting, obscure content. If each child is unique, doesn’t this way of ‘teaching’ seem an impossible, insurmountable task? Also, considering the huge infrastructure and the crowd of people moving in it, it is obvious that the school’s focus will be on logistics and administration and classroom management rather than on ‘teaching’. Now let us zoom out and think of the entire Indian education system. The MHRD document ‘Educational statistics at a glance’ which you can download from the internet had the following interesting data points in it. Of the 2.6 crore children who join 1st standard only 90 lakh pass the 12th standard exam. This means that 65% children fail and the 90 lakh who pass through the system are fighting for the less than 1 lakh seats in the ‘good’ colleges. This is how the system is set up at the macro level. Modern education is an impossible-to-succeed exercise in mega-scale logistics.

Ype: You paint a very depressing picture. Surely there are national level efforts to correct this situation. And isn’t what you describe the perfect scenario for the holistic education I want to create?

Me: You must have heard about the national efforts. I have no faith in them but I will only say that making incremental changes in a system that cannot work is no recipe for success. A Sanskrit scholar told me that in our decentralized, indigenous education system that the British destroyed, we used to focus on vyakti-nirmaan. Today’s education is fully focussed on training students to get a livelihood. Vyakti-nirmaan is a natural process unique to each student that cannot be fitted into a ‘system’ or into textbook lectures. An inspirational teacher is probably a basic requirement. All the effort in modern education is in trying to ‘fix’ teaching. What we probably need are environments where children learn on their own with minimal teaching. I hope that also answers your question about creating a holistic learning environment. The World is one such environment and all of us are students in it.

Ype: I think that what you are telling me is that I should not leave my corporate job to start a school.

Me: You are a victor of the extremely competitive game of school and college education, and you have won the prize that modern education is pushing every student towards – a good job. If you leave that and go and start teaching children, will you be working to take these children in some other direction? And how will you succeed if the entire system that you are working inside is geared in the direction of only getting a good job? And even if you want to steer them in some other direction, do you know what that is? Yes, I think you should stay in your good job and not get involved in the sad, crowded, confused field of modern education.

Advice to a young educator

I was talking to a young man who wanted to leave his corporate job and go back to his town to start a school and I thought that the (slightly exaggerated version of the) conversation we had may be useful to other young people interested in education. The conversation went something like this…

Me: Why do you want to start a school?

Young potential educator (Ype): Most children have no interest in what they are learning. They learn by rote to pass exams without understanding anything. Also they have no idea of what they can do after they finish school. The only goals seem to be engineering or medicine and, if unsuccessful, to do whatever graduation is possible and then try for a government job.

Me: What kind of school are you thinking of starting?

Ype: We would like to create a space where holistic education is provided that creates strong, knowledgeable children who can contribute their knowledge and talents to the world in a meaningful way.

Me: That is a very noble idea. How are you planning to go about it?

Ype: I am still reading up and visiting alternative schools to see how they are doing things. I think that our school has to have an environment where children can learn with freedom and without fear. Also we have to make the academic content interesting so that the children don’t need to do rote learning.

Me: A philosopher I read says that the opposite of a bad idea is not a good idea but a bad idea in the opposite direction. If you think schools foster rote-learning and you create a school that has zero rote-learning, you will be creating a bad idea in the opposite direction. Rote-learning has its place and we have to neither over-evaluate it nor under-evaluate it. Is it not true that small children ‘rote-learn’ and remember any number of songs and poems without apparent effort? Is there anything wrong with that? Similarly, if you think that too much discipline is the problem with the current school system and you choose to provide 100% freedom to the children of your school, you would be creating an environment as toxic as the one you wanted to get away from. What do you think?

Ype: I will have to think about it. What about making the academic content interesting? Do you have any problem with that?

Me: Gandhiji has written that modern Indian education (which was set up by the British to subjugate us and which we suicidally continue to propagate) alienates us from our culture and our roots. If you read the works of scholars like Dharampal, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Professor C.K. Raju etc., you see how badly distorted and intentionally demeaning our academic content is. If you think a little, you will realize that the academic content is also arbitrary, needlessly excessive and of little practical use. Because we cannot change it immediately, what we need to do, ideally, is to minimize the damage it does to our children. To me, spending effort to make it interesting seems to be a waste of time.

(To be continued next week…)

The Crisis of Global Liberalism

Excerpts from an interview of Alexander Dugin, Russian philosopher and author of over 70 books:

Question: If Liberalism won against its only competitors – Communism and Fascism, where does the crisis of global Liberalism come from?

– Till Communism and Fascism (openly totalitarian ideologies and products of the same Western political science that created Liberalism) existed, Liberalism had a seductive vision as the upholder of freedom, giver of the good life etc. When Liberalism won, its inner totalitarian, anti-human, nihilistic, satanic nature was revealed. It has now become a dictatorship pushing all of humanity towards Liberalism.
– Liberalism started with humanistic individualism but is now approaching anti-human, trans-human individualism – destroying history, the family, all kinds of identities and traditional institutions.
– There is nothing surprising or unexpected in all this. The crisis is the natural ending of Liberalism towards which it was always heading.

Question: Is Russia leading the global revolt against Liberalism?

– The rules-based order of the West is not something we agreed on. It is imposed on the rest of the world. With the Special Military Operation in Ukraine we started inner work to liberate ourselves from the hypnosis of the West and return to our civilizational roots.
– In a multi-polar world one pole does not define the rules. Each civilization defines its own understanding and its own rules. A civilization is a larger space than a country. So, Eurasia not Russia, Islamic world not a particular country, China+Taiwan, India+neighbouring countries, Africa as a whole, a pan-Latin-American alliance etc. Each area with its own civilizational identity becomes a pole.

Question: What is Russia’s ideology? What is it fighting for?

– Russia has its own understanding of a human being. And that is not individual but collective. We are part of the Russian Orthodox Church which is more contemplative than active. We are agrarian and we have an agrarian psychology linked to earth and nature. We have a different understanding of life, death, time, God etc. We are different. Not better or worse. Just different.
– We look modern and Western but our ‘inner man’ is totally different from the Western ‘inner man’.
– In our civilization individualism is laughed at, mocked as some kind of perversion.

Question: Is it inevitable for Western civilization and Russian civilization to be enemies?

– Western culture identifies itself as Universal. If it can agree to its regional, provincial nature we could immediately have the basis for mutual understanding, respect and peaceful coexistence.
– The problem is not with us but in the West. Throughout their history they could not accept the existence of the ‘other’.
– If we do not accept gay marriage or LGBTQ rights we are sub-human, barbarian. This racism is what is characteristic in all historical stages of Western civilization. West is racist.
– China, the Islamic world, Africa, India etc. the majority of the world, will also have to fight Western racism, hegemony and pretension of universalism.

(The full video is available online at https://rumble.com/v3d907e-crisis-of-global-liberalism.html)

Ideas On Detoxification

I met some distant relatives for the first time recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that although they were almost 50 years old, they were healthy and happy and vitally alive. It made me realise what a strange world we live in, where, if you are a working person, you get progressively unwell as you age. By the time you retire from your job, you are a slave to various unhealthy habits and usually to medicines with multiple unknown side effects. To me one of the main side effects of modern work-life seems to be a loss of vitality, as if we were patients forever stuck in a hospital ward. I have my life markers more or less under control and cannot remember the last time I had an allopathic medicine, but I also feel the loss of vitality that seems to naturally accompany modern life. It is almost like whatever I eat or breathe in or think about or get entertained with is slowly poisoning me. Slowly draining the life away from me like a dripping tap that cannot be closed.

What is it that we can do? I can talk about what I do and what I think helps me and perhaps you can share what your practices are to keep mentally and physically healthy in a world bent on making everyone ill. The following is my incomplete list:

– I make it a point to walk outside in the sun as much as I can. A day when I miss walking in the sun, I consider a wasted day in which I have become a little less well than I was in the morning.

– When I feel that I have become poisoned with too much food over many days or months, I cut down drastically on my food intake and I make strict rules for recovering from the poisoning that I inflicted on myself.

– I am superstitious about missing my Pranayama practice. It feels like the poisoning that happens everyday gets partly reversed with this practice. At least it feels like that to me.

– And this may seem a little far-fetched but I was thinking that having a deep dialogue, a samvaad, with another human being also falls in the category of something that makes us less poisoned. By samvaad I mean an exchange where there is careful, respectful listening and a contemplative, authentic, tentative response, ideally based on personal experience.

– This brings me to the last point I wanted to make here about paying attention to the world around us (people, trees, birds, insects, animals, buildings… everything) and seeing the beauty and sacredness inherent in all of it. I think when we achieve a small part of this, we break free from much of the poison spread by modernity.

I will conclude this post here and request you to add your comment about your experience and what practices work for you. Thanks in advance.

Parisamvaad at Bangalore

We have just finished a 5-day contemplative, residential, parisamvaad, a detailed discussion, on tradition and modernity, at Bangalore. The Parisamvaad was organized by Udhbhavaha, an alternative school that works closely with SIDH. Held at the Art of living ashram, the parisamvaad had around 20 participants who had a slow conversation around some passages from ‘Illuminations’, a book by Professor A.K. Saran. The objective of the parisamvaad was to help participants ‘see’ through the fog and brainwashing inflicted on us as we pass through the modern education system of India. It looked like the objective was met to a certain degree and all the participants felt that we had a useful conversation that opened some new doors and showed some new perspectives.

About the usefulness of the parisamvaad I had an insight that I shared with the participants. Long ago, I had gone for a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat to Igatpuri around the monsoon season. Set in the Western ghats near Nasik, Igatpuri was green and cloud-filled-wet and incredibly beautiful. I stayed in a small, isolated, single-room cottage on the campus as I went through the intense silent meditation retreat. I was deeply moved by my experience and at the end of the retreat I came out of the Vipassana centre thinking that my life was changed forever. I resolved that I would spend the rest of my life in the service of the divine and planned to further explore my deep meditative experience. As I travelled towards Mumbai in increasingly crowded local trains, I found my resolve weakening and my experience fading like a dream. My insight during the parisamvaad, however, was that even though the experience faded and I got caught in the rush of life, something had changed, because we cannot unsee what we have once seen. I felt that these slow conversations we have been having at SIDH samvaads also serve a similar purpose, where like minded people come together in friendship and openness and at an individual level get a little bit more clarity than before.

To give you a flavour of the parisamvaad, let me conclude with a sample passage that was discussed at length during the meeting:

“The Illuminations School has to grapple with minds which, to a good extent, are already formed and largely conditioned in favour of “modernity” (and the modern Western civilization) and against tradition (and the ancient civilizations). The first requirement of such a situation is to get out of the tradition-modernity antithesis or dichotomy…to go deeper and deeper into the nature and inner telos of modernity. Education aims at truth and not at desired types of mentality. The second requirement is to create a free, uncluttered intellectual space so that there can grow genuine receptivity in minds shaped and equipped by the present educational system for gullibility of one sort or another. The third requirement of our present pedagogical situation is to restore the internal relation between knowledge and action, theory and praxis, thinking and living; a relation which modern education completely disrupts, at best, rendering it contingent. Our task in the Illuminations School is to seek pedagogic methods, strategies and techniques that may meet the above requirements as adequately as possible.”
– Page 18 and 19, Illuminations, A. K. Saran

How to get out of your own way

The following is an excerpt from a talk by Alan Watts available on youtube…

The whole idea of self-improvement is a hoax. What happens if you KNOW beyond any shadow of doubt that there is nothing you can do to be better. Its a kind of a relief isn’t it? We are so used to making things better, leave the world a better place than we found it, I want to be of service to other people and all those dreadfully hazy ideas. But supposing instead of that – seeing that there isn’t anything we can really do, to improve ourselves or improve the world – If we realize that that is so, it gives us a break, in the course of which we may simply watch what is going on. Nobody ever does this you know. Therefore, it sounds terribly simple. To watch whats happening and what you are doing by way of reaction to it. Just watch it happen. And don’t be in a hurry to think you know what it is.

Look at things without fixing labels and names and gradations and judgments on what happens and what we do. Then it may be, that when you are in this way freed from busy-bodyness and being out to improve everything, that your own nature will begin to take care of itself. Because you are not getting in the way of yourself all the time. You will begin to find out that the great things that you do are really happenings. For example – No great genius can explain how he does it. Yes, he says I have learned the technique to express myself. Because I had something in me that had to come out. So, if I were a musician, I had to learn how music is produced. That means learning a musical instrument, or learning a technique of musical notation, or whatever it may be. But then beyond that I am afraid I cannot tell you how I used the technique to express this mysterious thing that I wanted to show you. Because what is fascinating always about genius is that the fellow does something that we can’t understand. He surprises us.

All growth you see is fundamentally something that happens. But for it to happen, two things are important. The first is that, as I said, you must have the technical ability to express what happens. And secondly, you must get out of your own way. But right at the bottom of the whole problem of control is – how am I to get out of my own way? And if I showed you a system – lets all practice getting out of our own way – It would turn into another form of self-improvement. And we find this problem, repeatedly, throughout the entire history of human spirituality. It is only as getting out of your own way ceases to be a matter of choice, when you see that doing something about your situation is not going to help you, and when you see equally that trying not to do anything about it is also not going to help you. You are non-plussed. And you are simply reduced to watching.