The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 32: July 2024
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Since in the last issue I drifted into the question of the creation of K centres and their religious implications, I thought I might simply reedit an article that I published last year in Friedrich’s Newsletter entitled ‘K on Study Centres’. This article was an attempt to summarise the contents of the book A Door Open for Anyone that KFI put together addressing the question of K’s vision and intention for such places. It seemed to me that such a perspective has become increasingly relevant for those of us who find themselves, willy-nilly, deeply involved with this work.
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During the last decade or so of his life, K was deeply concerned with the future of the teachings. He felt a tremendous sense of urgency about it and was intent on dedicating as much of his energy as possible during his remaining years to ensure that their perfume, flame or living waters would be sustained. Discussions began in earnest between K and the foundations about such matters during the 1977 international trustee meetings in Ojai. Between December 1982 and January 1983, K also held a series of discussions with KFI teachers and trustees in Rishi Valley and Madras/Chennai with the intent of establishing core groups of people that would be totally committed to the teachings.
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The whole question of continuity hinged on the significance of the teachings themselves. K viewed them as something sacred, encompassing the whole of human existence and extraordinarily life-giving. He saw them as a mirror of the truth that every serious person must find out for himself. Their value went beyond his presence and person. He, the speaker, was an anonymous instrument that had no authority. The teachings had come through him and had nothing to do with his personality; they were not his but for all mankind. The foundations were set up to preserve and disseminate the original teachings and to ensure the continuity of the schools. The foundations were not to claim any authority in the matter of the teachings, as the teachings themselves had the authority of truth. They were not to give rise to any sectarian spirit, nor create any place of worship around the teacher or the teachings. He felt the schools should continue because they might bring about a totally different quality of mind.
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While the foundations preserved the teachings and the schools educated the young, K felt there should be places where adults could retreat from their daily lives, be quiet and study the teachings. Such ashrams were intended as places of learning and austere living, without a guru or leader, where people would come to gather their energies and explore the deeper religious aspects of life. K saw great value in retreating from society, in stepping back from one’s daily routines to take stock of things and learn about oneself. He felt it was good to make a complete break with the past, leaving our ambitions, prejudices and desires behind. This inner emptiness and solitude would open the mind-heart not only to beauty, love and freedom but to the sacred reality that is waiting to come.
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K envisioned these centres as places of great natural beauty, with trees, birds and quietness. They are meant to be centres for the flowering of goodness, which requires absolute freedom from authority and tradition, from all sense of nationalism, racial prejudice and religious belief. K summarises these sets of requirements by saying that essentially one understands that knowledge is the enemy of man. Beauty and intelligence come with love and compassion, which do not exist when the brain is conditioned or anchored in the past. This demands a brain that is neither sentimental nor intellectual but that has integrity in word and deed. It was K’s wish that these places should last a thousand years, like an unpolluted river.
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He was therefore concerned with establishing core or nucleus groups of serious people who had the sense that this was worth putting their lives into. He felt they must be totally committed and so soaked in the teachings that they are both teachers and disciples not of K but of truth. People joining the nucleus group do so voluntarily and are free to leave at any time. It is not an elite or secret body, but the door is open for anyone to join or to start their own groups in different places. It is not an exclusive, sectarian community set up for idealistic or utopian purposes. It is not a traditional monastic order with rules of obedience, poverty and chastity. They might marry and have children, who would be the next generation of good people. Joining or starting such a group, however, requires that its members be totally honest with themselves, that they have a great sense of humility and integrity. They understand that freedom means responsibility, that a free man lives in complete order, first inwardly and then outwardly. For K the teachings are a sacred treasure, and these places are intended as centres of light amid the confusion and conflict in the world.
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The nucleus may be any number of people. Their responsibility is to study the teachings. Since the teachings hold up a mirror to our nature, in studying them we are studying ourselves. The spiritual quest is not an escape from what is. On the contrary, the way of freedom lies through the non-deviation from the facts, whatever they be. K denies all authority and does not offer a method or system, any kind of guidelines because he considers that they make us mechanical. He tells us to question, doubt and awaken intelligence, which is the awareness of the true and the false. Intelligence is also perception and action without the interval of time. K is constantly throwing us back to ourselves. He emphasises that we are totally responsible for our actions, and we alone can put our lives in order. Laying this ethical ground of order is the needful foundation for any further venture into the subtler realms of beauty, goodness and truth.
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Studying means going deeply into the subtleties of the words used and seeing their truth in relation to daily life. In their study, the people in the core group absorb what is being said and that naturally changes their way of living. The living is far more important than the systematic organisation of the teachings. K says, however, that they should also be able to discuss with top specialists in any branch of knowledge, like scholars do. So they must be acquainted with religious and philosophical thinking, with Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, Platonism, etc. They must be able to meet the guests’ questions about the teachings. Their responsibility is to see that the source of truth is alive at the study centres, so the guests get the perfume of it.
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Thus the study centres are places to meet, be quiet, study the teachings and dialogue together. Dialogue, as K saw it, is not a dialectical exploration of ideas and opinions but a serious inquiry. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continues until the questioning reaches an impasse. If the questioning is serious and deep and is left alone, it brings its own answer. The important thing is to discover for oneself what one is. This discovery is what liberates. We are the history of mankind. If we listen and look at ourselves closely, with affection, we begin to read what we are and there is flowering in freedom.
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In inquiring into these things together the question of interpretation arises. K explicitly stated that there were no interpreters or representatives of either his person or the teachings during his lifetime or thereafter. However, as we grapple with K’s meaning, we have to express it in our own words and according to our own understanding, not just repeat what he says verbatim. So we are honest about the extent we have gone into it and the limitations of our understanding. K does not call this interpretation. What he objects to in the word is people setting themselves up as authorities and middlemen. Being choicelessly aware of oneself and talking things over together does not require interpreters. The interpreters can provide explanations and comfort but not freedom. Freedom comes only in total awareness of the complexities of living. These complexities have been created by each one of us, and we need to understand their cause, which is our own thinking. But we must also invite the sacred. For K, the sense of the sacred demands that there be some people who have investigated into themselves and have a certain quality of freedom. They are preparing the ground, with a sense of constant awareness and attention, of entering into something that requires all one’s care, love and intelligence. K says that if we want it with all our being, the door to the immeasurable will open.
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K was quite clear that the fate of the teachings depends on each one of us. Our responsibility is to throw the seeds all over the world, because we are concerned with mankind and have the quality of respect for the sacred. If they are not just words but we live them, the teachings won’t be corrupted for, when left alone, truth has its own power. Anyone is free to set up a little centre somewhere, but he can’t say he represents K or that he is his follower. The basic thing is that there is something original here for people to investigate and understand. Then you are either interested to live that way or you aren’t, but don’t join the circus of the gurus and interpreters.
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These are some of the key aspects K pointed out about study centres as reflected in A Door Open for Anyone. They touch on the reasons and implications of setting up such places, the activities involved and the qualities of humility and integrity necessary to undertake this kind of work. As study centres, they are intended as retreats where people gather to study and inquire together into their own lives. As each of us is the world, we all share the same global predicament and responsibility. As the teachings encompass the whole of human existence, they are not sectarian. Truth cannot be handed over to another, but we can investigate together into the numerous challenges we face, whose fundamental causes lie in the content and structure of consciousness. The invitation is to look into this deep mirror together and set out on an inward journey of self-knowledge and discovery. Implied throughout is that whoever is seriously committed to this and has the needful integrity and understanding, can either join others in the same movement or set up their own place to go into these things with whoever should be interested. This offers a beautiful freedom in terms of creating many more such study centres, a possibility that would be perfectly in keeping with our responsibility of preparing the ground, throwing the seeds all over the world and inviting the sacred.
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I think this creative and compassionate possibility is worth putting out there. The time is out of joint and, however much we may regret it, we are the ones to set it right, for we are the world. What the teachings invariably do is to face us with our universality as the embodiments of the history of mankind that is written in the book of time that is human consciousness. That phrase is a mouthful, but it points to the needful depth of awareness that gives substance to that otherwise empty phrase that we are the world and the world is us. I feel strongly that realising just that would be a major revolution in consciousness, laying the ground for a true and compassionate relationship, for the radical transformation society. And God knows such transformation is urgently needed, for as things stand we are constantly courting disaster.
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Be well, amigos, and ask yourselves whether together we cannot do more for mankind,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. Amsterdam harbour, the Netherlands; 2. View of Rianxo from the pier, Galicia, Spain.
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