Summary:

1. 1.     Is there a way of living not based on thought? - 28 November 1978

Duration: 100 minutes

• As educators, we are responsible for the future generation.

• Are we learning about relationship with each other, the students and all our contacts whether intellectual, emotional, sentimental or romantic?

• Why do we have opinions at all?

• What will the brain do to un-condition itself?

• How do I know I am conditioned?

• Where there is a desire there must be illusion.

• Thought is the source of all illusion.

• I want to find out a way of living in daily life which is correct and accurate.

• As an educator, my responsibility is that students must have knowledge and yet realise that knowledge is very limited.

• Any action in relationship based on knowledge is destructive.

2. Learning the art of attention - 2 December 1978

Duration: 110 minutes

• Will greater capacity come as a result of comparison?

• When I use learning for the acquisition of status, I am comparing.

• Our educational system and social structure are based on comparison. If you teach students not to compare you revolutionise the whole system.

• I refuse to separate the educator from the human being.

• What is an educator?

• Can you look at yourself without measurement?

• Are we concerned to help the student and therefore ourselves to understand the enormously complex factors of existence?

• How will you help students to be attentive?

• Why do you listen to me?

3. How will you, as educators, help the student to listen? - 3 December 1978

Duration: 95 minutes

• How is an educator to help the students give total attention?

• Thought itself is a distraction.

• What is the capacity to learn?

• How will you listen to the statement, which may be false or true, that education is the study of the whole nature and structure of human existence?

• What is your common interest?

• What is your relationship to your students?

• How do we, as a group of teachers, feel responsible for the students and the whole of this place?

4. What will bring about total relationship in our life? - 9 December 1978

Duration: 80 minutes

• In listening there is a learning which is an absolute fact. Learning implies the discovery of the fact. Action is then from the fact, not from my opinion or knowledge.

• What is the truth under the clamour and extraordinary struggle of relationship?

• There is insight into something when the mind is uncluttered.

• Discrimination exists only when the false is opposed to the truth. Insight has no discriminative or divisive quality.

• Do you as an educator actually see the fact that you and the student are in the same boat?

• When I use the word ‘relationship’, that very word implies division.

• The question, ‘What is my relationship to myself?’ is a divisive question, a wrong question; therefore I can never find the right answer.

5. What is our responsibility as educators and human beings? - 10 December 1978

Duration: 85 minutes

• What do we mean by responsibility?

• I want to know myself. What is involved in that?

• Why do human beings live in concepts, conclusions and ideals?

• When you tell me I am the world, I listen to it without any conclusion, concept or idea, so that it enters me like a seed. If you don’t listen that way, you will make a concept of it.

• Why does the brain record?

• There is no recording when the mind is not concerned with pleasure or fear, reward or punishment. There is no centre as the experiencer.

• My responsibility is that neither the student nor I functions from a centre, so I am going to find out a way of teaching this.

• Total responsibility implies a quality of great affection.

6. How can we bring about human beings who are flowering deeply?

- 16 December 1978

Duration: 100 minutes

• Why has a school of this kind not brought about, during these forty years, a few human beings who are not mediocre and are flowering deeply?

• Is it possible to stop all competition here?

• Do we know what love is?

• When I say, ‘I don’t know,’ I mean I do not know. I am not waiting for an answer nor expecting to find one by looking through memory. Then I can approach the question afresh.

• The very quality of not-knowing is wholeness.

• The fact is that people are not equal. How shall I deal with this inequality without any sense of the few and the many?

7. How will you bring about a group of people who are helping each other to uncondition themselves? - 17 December 1978

Duration: 87 minutes

• We want to bring about a group of students who are not mediocre, who are not oriented to a career, marriage and the establishment.

• The very breaking away from the whole is the individual, a fragment assuming all-importance.

• There is a constant battle between the fragment and the whole, the individual and the collective.

• Do you see the truth that you are the whole of mankind?

• Thought itself is a fragment.

• You and the students are conditioned socially, economically and religiously. How will you then bring about a group of people who are helping each other to un-condition themselves?

• Are we strong enough, vital enough, to create this kind of school?

• Teaching is the greatest profession in the world.