Media Insights

Consciousness certainly produces suffering, but the suffering is not on the part of the consciousness. It’s a real cycle. And made worse over time because, as we were talking about earlier, in the world of advertising, it moves down and down and down, younger and younger and younger, probing for vulnerabilities in order to gain advantage to sell your product and so forth and so on. This is a big deal. We were vastly better off when Mom said, “Go outside and play.”

Now, to fight against that is foolish but to recognize that’s my state—now, what do I do about it? If I can accept this old man (myself) in his 40’s, this professor, can choose to suffer about his inner world and how, here he has pursued all these things, he is known for his eruditeness and so forth and so on, throughout his life, and then he suddenly comes up against the fact that it is almost all foolishness, and it was wrong and it is not real relative to what is possible. Then, that is a big deal in the line of an individual life. If he’s not conscious of it, he just thinks that Gurdjieff is a bullshit artist and that’s the end of it. So, there isn’t any in between. There is either the possibility of becoming conscious, for however brief a time in a given circumstance, or there isn’t.

Mrs. Irmis Popoff was very clever as my first mentor and was very creative in the moment. She could create a circumstance, seemingly out of nothing: with mixing potatoes for supper, or with cleaning the table, or feeding the cats, or doing any one of a hundred, so-called, ‘ordinary life’ things. She would come along and say something, or simply come along and point to something and then walk away, and she would create mayhem inside you. “What was that all about? She must be up to something. Is she seeing something that I’m not seeing?” You would be in this inner state, and then you would have to go to work on it, and say, “Isn’t that interesting. I am so easily buffaloed in life that somebody can enter the room and point, and I’m lost.” There is so much that is so hard to communicate if you’re going to talk about what’s real. What’s real was in the pointing! Then, what happens inside of you. So, the flow of that kind of event becomes absolutely real–something that Skinner was a thousand miles away from ever seeing. So, it’s like that. The consciousness certainly produces suffering, but the suffering is not on the part of the conscious.

MM: How do we get out of the loop?

KB: God, it’s a real cycle, isn’t it?

MM: Yeah.

Childhood, Education and the Future

KB: And made worse over time because, as we were talking about earlier, in the world of advertising, it moves down and down and down, younger and younger and younger, probing for vulnerabilities in order to gain advantage to sell your product and so forth and so on. This is a big deal. We were vastly better off when Mom said, “Go outside and play.” Vastly better off. Growing up, this was a constant theme. I’d go in and she [Mom] would say, “I have to get super; you go outside and play,” and we were on our own. But, where are we when we’re on our own outside? We’re in the world of nature, and this is where I discovered climbing apple trees and looking at the pear tree and wondering if we were going to have any pears this year, looking at the grass . . . coming in touch with what was real out there. This was far better than being spoken to about some lofty religious perspective on the part of my parents. They were very wise; whether they knew it or not, that’s not my point. But, they did a marvelous job of raising me by not interfering with what a child naturally will do; he’ll poke his nose into this, or he’ll wonder about that and he’ll try something out.

It’s like my son. Everybody got all upset the day that he went out in the car and stuck he’s finger in the cigarette lighter. Then he came in bawling. It’s a great lesson; it’s hard. It hurts, but would I have prevented him from going out and fooling around, playing around in the car and so on and so on? Well, I hope not.

Yes, relative to the point that you raised, we are in a big giant mess because we keep prodding our egoism and selfishness and greed into the world of the child. Unless we can bring something really sustained into that world–and I think this is Waldorf Education, Two Rivers Farm in Oregon, education and group work, the Village School at Camp Caravan in Massachusetts, this is Krishnamurti’s schools, there are a thousand other efforts that are real and that are going on, where there are teachers and parents who realize that what these kids are being exposed to today is crazy, and it’s going to drive us further and further into a terrible spot.

So, we have to do something about it. There is real effort going on in many parts of the world to bring wholesomeness and reality back into the world of the child growing up. Will it be enough? Will it change the line of those children’s lives? For the children that I have met, yes, because I’ve now had a chance to see products of these schools that they entered when they were 5 years old and they are now 35. I’ve seen that, and they are stable; they are very good people, and good parents to their children, and carry those values into their adulthood. So, is it possible? Yes, I think it is. There is no question in my mind that it’s possible, but not if we go with all the trinkets, not if we stay and remain as vulnerable as we are to permitting the television, the video games and on and on and on–all these arenas of artificiality that simply create more hypnotic images, not if we move in that direction.