BENGALURU: I’m sure most of you will understand the importance of leisure, because it’s only when you have leisure that you learn. The meaning of that word ‘leisure’, according to a very good dictionary, means not having any occupation, at the time when we are talking over together. Not to be occupied all the time, psychologically, physically or intellectually, just have plenty of leisure so that one can learn.
That’s really the meaning of a school, where one can learn easily, without conflict, when your mind is not occupied with so many other problems. So I suggest that you should not be occupied, that your minds should not filled with problems, anxieties, occupations, trying to solve problems. We are here to actually experience leisure, so that when we talk over things together, the mind is not occupied, not chattering, and is experiencing enough leisure to understand and learn.
There are two types of learning: either memorise what is being said, which is what most of us call learning, or learning through observation and therefore not storing it up as a memory and then looking, observing through memory. I’m going to explain it. As we said, there are two types of learning: one is to learn something by heart so that you store it up in the brain and act according to that knowledge, skilfully or not skilfully. That’s what most of us do.
When we go to school, college and university, we store a great deal of information called knowledge, and according to that knowledge act, beneficially for oneself or for society, skilfully or incapable of acting, simply, directly. That’s one type of learning, with which we are all very familiar, which we do all the time. Every experience is stored as knowledge, and acted according to that... action taking place according to that knowledge. So that’s very clear; I expect most of us, it is so.
Then there is another kind of learning, which probably you’re not quite accustomed to, because we are such slaves to habits, to tradition, to every form of conformity. There is the other type of learning, as we were saying, which is to observe. Observation implies, to see without the accompaniment of previous knowledge; to look at something as though for the first time, afresh. And if you observe things afresh, then there is not the cultivation of memory, because each time you observe, and through that observation you learn, store it up as memory, then the next time you observe you are observing through the pattern of memory, therefore you see never anything fresh. Right?
So, as we were saying, leisure is extraordinarily important – not to have a mind that is constantly occupied, constantly chattering. Because it’s only in that unoccupied mind a new seed of learning can take place. Which is entirely different from the memory, cultivating memory, storing up as knowledge and acting from that knowledge. As we were saying, there is another kind of learning, which is to observe - the tree, the skies, the mountains, the beauty of the mountains, the light among the leaves.
And that observation if stored up as memory will prevent the next observation being fresh. You get this point? It’s quite simple. That is, if you observe your wife or your girlfriend or boyfriend, if you observe, can you observe without the previous recording of the incidents and all the rest of it, in that particular relationship. If you observe or watch the other without the previous knowledge, then you learn much more.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti