Gandhi and John Lennon: A Call to Quit School - Part 1.

[Aunty Kamala]

Gandhi and John Lennon: A Call to Quit School

P.K. Willey, Ph.D. Amritapuri, 2010

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

The question is not whether we will be extremist,

but what kind of extremist will we be.

Dr. M. L. King, Jr.

The Hippies

Let's face it. The `development' model has failed the planet miserably, and it's now failing the chances of human civilization even existing. I'm a 60's
baby. I grew up in the USA when people from every age and walk of
life in the US and Europe were making a last ditch effort against the
tom-toms of industrialized war crushing the poor on Earth, against a
system of economic governance that raped the Earth, and made trash
with it. My millions of bigger brothers and sisters were fighting
with the swords of ideals. What I saw as a child made me proud,
made me feel free. Peace. Love. Truth. Co-operative living,
even communal living.

My exemplary teachers didn't heed ridiculous ideas about private property, gates and manicured lawns. They shared. A car wasn't to exalt themselves, it was to get as
many of their friends where they needed to go. A nice house was one
where everyone could be together, growing flowers and vegetables,
cooking, eating, being friends and working. Where you could count on
a welcome, a place to sleep if you needed it, and even a plate of
food. They could smile and give a helping hand to \emph{anyone}. They
could share their things, and didn't get worked up or worried about
them. They weren't tensed, they were relaxed. They accepted each
other, where a person was `at'. When they greeted each other, their
raised their hands in a mudra (a fixed gesture) of Peace. Some
people called them `hippies.' If trying to live out one's ideals of
Love, Truth and Peace, meant being a hippy, then, they were admirable
to me.

n childhood days in rural Connecticut, USA, children got off the bus, and we played outside until it was too dark to see --- and then some. Outside where Nature
could help us heal and recover from a day of being stuck inside, in
a classroom with strange adult minds and their stranger goals for us.
Fifteen years later, one never saw children outside their houses,
playing. Everyone had moved indoors, into their own rooms. Houses
became enormously big, and the grounds around them, stylized,
untouched...unrelated to the hearts inside the house. Nature became
entertainment, a recreational vehicle, as did our own bodies. We
became dead to the knowledge of making ourselves sensitive
instruments to know Truth, how to be harmonious, to express inner
beauty.

One summer, my true-blue friend and I hitched rides up the California coast to Oregon. Several nights, after our last ride for the day, we would camp in the lovely
landscaped back yard of a beautiful house. Fish ponds, flower
gardens, arbors, perfect benches and table nooks, placed just so,
right out of Better Homes and Gardens but no one to enjoy
them, everyone was inside, absorbed with the box that gave off a
blue-glow.

My bigger peer teachers took ideals, like: Thou Shalt not Kill, to heart: many became vegetarian, none thought war and hitting back were solutions to anything. They
were wiser than our leaders. They weren't afraid to say “NO.”
There knew there were no enemies anywhere to be hunted and killed,
only brothers and sisters, who may have forgotten the relation. They
had faith in the power of Love to heal, to overcome. Those that
became Mothers taught their children to walk a path of peace, and
their kids were called, “flower children”. Their songs,
coming from the depths of their hearts became my bhajans, or
sacred hymns, and teachings, touching chords that made me weep with
the affirming knowledge that our Oneness was Truth. They sang great
songs – We Shall Over Come, Peace Train, Blowing in the wind,
Little Boxes, Mercedes Benz, Through the Eyes of a Child, Let it Be,
Sounds of Silence, Here Comes the Sun, My Sweet Lord, O Beautiful
for Spacious Skies, Heart of Gold, tons and tons of beautiful
songs, filled with beautiful ideals, that my heart absorbed like
water in a desert. And many looked to India, for the light that
guided them.

India turns to Kindergarten

Ironically, I first heard popular American music in India, in high school there in the early 70's. And India then was clearly in love with America. I didn't understand
why. They were only in love with a dream of things, a dream of a
life with things, and an empty freedom. Indian life showed me, that
no one really needs those things. India had more meaningful things –
India acknowledged our interdependence with reverence and Love.
India was deep fun, in a totally real way, that had nothing to do
with entertainments, but everything to do with the joy of dutiful and
ethical inter-relationships.

I remember as a sophomore in high school, going home to the USA for `vacation', the chill I felt in my heart when the KLM stewardess came down the airplane aisle, pushing a
drink cart, her face covered in make-up, and a completely insincere
smile on her mouth – that came from her head and her training, and
not her heart. I sat frozen in my seat, and wondered wildly – “O
God! Where are you taking me?”

As the plane circled JFK in industrialized, smog filled, grey New York, where people walk with their faces within 12 inches of each other with no acknowledgment,
I wondered, ``To where have I come?'' I was desperate to get back to
India, where people were more natural, where Mothers could be proud
of their stretch marks, and few people put a make-up mask on –
where one could still feel the heart everywhere, still touch that
interconnectedness of human love that ran underneath everything. My
daughter Anni was to spend half her life in India in Holy Mother
Amma's ashram. As a lovely, poised young teen, she once told me,
“Mom, its just so nice to have hair just be hair, not a statement
about yourself.” Anni was the quintessence of ideals for Indian
maidenhood – chaste, honest, brave, brilliant, stunningly beautiful
with no awareness of it, with perfect control over her speech, and a
forgiving, compassionate heart. As a mother, I was intensely
grateful to the atmosphere in the ashram and India, which assisted
her in intuitively guiding herself towards her own ethical
instincts.

Traveling back and forth between the US and India in high school, and later for a year in college brought an awareness of what India was turning away from in herself, and what
she was turning towards. But India was big and slow, too slow I
thought, to leave her deep moorings of a spiritually and socially
sanctioned way of life, of being, based upon communities,
committed to peace, harmony and acknowledgment of the right of all
life, to live. The government handled the television, and there were
censors on the movies. Modern life was free of heavy media pressure
to become fad consumers. India was clearly a world teacher, of
human wisdom, ethics, tolerance, spiritual Love, art, community life,
how to live responsibly together, how to honor all the gifts of
Nature well, how to accept one's purpose and role in the vast scheme
of Life, so many things.

Living in India now since 1999, at the ashram of Holy Mother Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi, the change in more than 30 years has been massive and dramatic. I have to say now,
exponentially noticeable every 6 months. There is hardly a hut one
passes in the local village without the blue-glow of colour satellite
TV at night. Completely uncensored television media. India is now
in free-fall towards the West. Its alarming and disturbing. It
seems like the Teacher forgot she was the teacher, and decided to
join kindergarten.

The Pain of taking care of \#1

My studies on Gandhi and life experience in India revealed to me what was going wrong in American society. Education that cut us off from Nature, that could not
serve our families or communities, that felt meaningless. It had
less and less ethical values, more and more emphasis on transitory
ideals – presentation and competitiveness. Along with this was
centralization, outsourcing and importing of everything, instead of
localization. Privatization instead of community, to the point we no
longer knew or even cared deeply about our neighbors. And with
privatization came alienation, and human mistrust, and a lack of
responsibility taking for one another, a myopic cancer, that in the
US, has eaten into the very vitals of family life, as the fading
flowers of humanity stuck in old age homes attest.

Books came out, espousing the new social philosophy, like Taking care of \#1. Selfishness was made into a virtue. Capitalism was the root of all this
private-ness, and led to the socially and legally sanctioned
licensing of greed, and all the other problems of a system we have
been forced to live in, that I have come to view as an economic
gridlock. It has become a globalized consumer culture, a
monoculture...it has many names. I like Dorothy Day's – “a
filthy, dirty, rotten system.” Dorothy founded the Catholic
Worker Movement, and knew for certain, that we are all One human
family. She lived, worked, spoke and moved in light of that
knowledge.

By the time I arrived on the planet, the military-industrial complex, the big guns of business were in full swing. The medical-industrial complex was gaining steam.
Advertisements incessantly drilled new values into us, from all
sides, even without watching TV, their jingles were in the air, the
effects of their images in people's minds, which children acted out
with one another. They tried to tie our finer subtle feelings that
lead to our ideals to material products, entertainments and
short-lived enjoyments. Freedom was tied coke-cola, cars and
throw-away items. Happy family life – to Disneyland vacations, and
fast food restaurants. Beauty and personal success – to sexuality
and money. The new values stressed entertaining each other rather
than working together. Entertainment of children soon became almost
a duty for parents and now it has reached a high note in westernized
societies. There were social pressures upon us, put forth by our
educations, the media, the goals of big business. We were all
affected.

Gandhi noted:

“I have not come across any human being who remains unaffected by his surroundings. I for one think there can be no such person. If there is any such person in a
million, he must be a Vatapi, that is, one who lives only on
air.”

The 1960's were a people's statement, about how we didn't want these pressures. How we wanted real values that reflected what we all know, that we are One human family, under
God, and `God' here, means the Truth of that Oneness.
We wanted community, to work meaningfully together with the Earth
and be able to live with that work, to have education for peace
instead of war, a chance to contribute towards a better human
culture. And to be responsible and generous on the global level, for
all `Americans' have come from somewhere else. We wanted
leadership that was connected, like we were trying to become again,
to the Earth, to the interdependence of all life.

Lennon Sings out our Educational Deficiency

The former Beatle, John Lennon, wrote a song “Working Class Hero” which described well the scene for many of us, who dared to keep in touch with another value
system found in our hearts, besides rank materialism and capitalism.
Who dared to think that actually, Love and Truth are what we really
are here for. We disappointed our parents plans for us, in a
solid rejection of all that they had worked for as being meaningful
and valuable, a comfortable plan of opulent and aspiring middle class
life, with all the politically correct clothing, furnishings, and
goals. They wanted to see us succeeding in the dream of cars, homes,
vacations, financial security and a place of standing in the world
until our exit from the glamorous dream.

It was awareness of that exit made us question everything, for senseless war in Vietnam was making so many of our peers exit early, death was on everyone's doorstep. And many
of us got lost. Drugs, sex, bad relationships, which distracted us
further and further. Some gave up, and renounced their quests, they
didn't want to think anymore – it had become too painful. They
bought into the you've got to survive and turned away from the
lights of their ideals. They brought a bad name to being a `hippy.'

Lennon's song spoke to the social conditioning and education that is failing us from “a filthy, dirty, rotten system,” for education is never limited to a
curriculum devised at some place, taught in another. Education is
always all the stuff, seen and unseen that we absorb and react to,
even if almost unconsciously, from our environments and ecological
settings.

T

hey Make You Feel Small

As soon as your born, they make you feel small

By giving you no time instead of it all

till the pain is so big, you feel nothing at all

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

When a child is put in a classroom, beside the teachers words, the books and the blackboard, he is in the proximity of the minds and thoughts of his peers. The physical
environment of the classroom, and its inclusion or exclusion of the
natural world is another powerful factor. Most importantly, the
contents of his teacher's character, his or her honesty, gentleness,
kindness, sense of justice or not, are picked up instantly. The
characteristics of the teacher have a great deal to do with the
ethical orientation of the class. All of us remember those rare
and outstanding teachers we had in our lives, and those that weren't.
The teachers that made the class honour fair play, or let it slip
into foul.

The value of our education is seen in the ethical standards we hold for ourselves. How can we call an MD educated, when he will perform breast enlargement surgery on an
insecure teenager? Or for that matter, on anyone? Into what has he
been educated? Where is the ethical board that should strip a
medical doctor of his license if he uses his medical training,
intelligence and skills just to get a buck? The medical world now is
filled with people who made a hypocritic promise to themselves, not
the Hippocratic oath. People aren't fools, we all know the use of
education for self- aggrandisement and greed is disgusting and
loathsome. Gandhi said:

“It is an abuse of one's education to use it for earning money. Education proves its worth when used for the service of others.ⁱ

Too Crazy to Follow Their Rules

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool

Till you're so \#\#\#\# crazy you can't follow their rules

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

Then there is the education that Life tries to give us through Nature. The Day, the sky and clouds, its moistures, lights, smells, moods, the plants, earth, birds, animals,
the Night, the moon and stars...the elements, heat, water, earth, at
all times, we are receiving unending and unutterable
instruction from every angle, through every pore of our being
from Nature. Through our contact with Nature we gain knowledge
about ourselves, without even being aware of it, by the ways in which
we interact with Her. Nature immediately gives us an honest
reflection of our actions and intentions. Animals and plants, all
life, can not be deceived. In Nature, we gain learning in the art
of abidance in ourselves.

But modern education cut that cord. And we suffered. Lennon's song spoke to the alienation from real Life, from Nature, that modern education is giving us.

Can't Function for Fear

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years

Then they expect you to pick a career

When you can't really function you're so full of fear.

A media, paid for by big business, furthering its goals, and journalism that chose to go along with pressures to conform, sought to condition and educate us all into
becoming needy, greedy consumers. Helena Norberg-Hodgeⁱⁱ
notes:

“Consumerism plays a central role in this whole process, since emotional insecurity generates hunger for material status symbols. The need for recognition and acceptance
fuels the drive to acquire possessions that will presumably make you
somebody. Ultimately, this is a far more important motivating force
than a fascination for the things themselves.

The cultural centralization that occurs through the media is also contributing both to this passivity and to a growing insecurity.”ⁱⁱⁱ

We're Still Ignorant

It was this more insidious indoctrination, from the totality of our environments, that grabbed hold of most of us, and rocked (or stoned) us to sleep.

Keep you doped with religion and sex and T.V.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free

But you're still \#\#\#\# peasants as far as I can see

A 1979 course with Dr. Jane Goodall, ``Monkeys, Apes and Humans,'' made me begin reflecting on how close
our social behaviors in the west were to our primate instincts.
Female primates `present' their bottoms to males when in estrus.
Males have characteristically threatening body languages that they
use with one another, aggressive postures in their walking. I
ruminated on these and other findings after class, at a cafe that
overlooked a busy street. Sequestered in its shadows, I silently
observed the movements and actions of human beings around me. It was
scary, and depressing. The line between human social behaviors and
the primate social behaviors seemed only to be covered by a piece of
cloth. Was this what our lives were for? To go through primate
roles, human beings dumbed down to primitive instincts, the law of
the jungle in some shape or form – ugly, constant competition,
aggressiveness in academics, business, marriage, in acquiring
property and bank accounts, everywhere and everything? The lowest
common denominator dominating our lives?

What college education was preparing me for seemed worse than meaningless – a career as a cog in a corrupted system of false values, where I should push myself forward,
for name, status, position, establish myself in some way on some
platform, join the system, encourage its perpetuity by the support of
my life force, my days on Earth...even the `NGO culture' was a
turn off – the same aggressiveness was there, in a different way,
even worse, because the ideal of human service seemed closer.
`Spirituality' in the West became infected with the same energies,
and people everywhere seemed to be on a fast track to nowhere.

A Working Class Hero

There's room at the top they are telling you still

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill

If you want to be like the folks on the hill

If you want to be a hero well just follow me

A working class hero is something to be...

I really didn't know what my life was for, and how I would ever really be able to give my heart's love to people in a way that was useful, that would help, that would really
matter. The wisdoms of the `successful' sickened me. No one, it
seemed around me, really knew what we were here for. Everyone was
pretending that they really believed the false goals that we had been
conditioned and indoctrinated into. It was a big lie, everyone was
trying to believe.

Part 2 concludes this article.

i CWMG 33:296.

ii Helena Norberg-Hodge is an Author as well as filmmaker, notably \Ancient Futures, founder/director International Society of
Ecology and Culture and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award,
co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization and a chosen
member of World Elders.

iii \url{http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_norberg_hodge.html