Question: You said the teacher should have the intention not to
influence the child. Is it possible to avoid influence altogether?

     Krishnamurti: What do you think, sirs? Are you waiting for me?
Again you are assuming the role of the spectators.

     What is influence? Don't you know what influence is? Are you not
influencing your children? The teacher, the parents, the government,
the Bible, the Upanishads, the sun, the food we eat, the words we use
- everything is influencing us, is it not? Take the word `love'. What
an extraordinary neurological influence merely the word itself has on
us. So everything is influencing us, and we in turn are influencing
others. When we read a newspaper we are being influenced by the
proprietors, by the columnist, by the pictures; we are influenced by
propaganda, by the so-called spiritual magazines, by books, by
lectures, by the way we dress, the way we sit. Everything is
influencing us, and the questioner wants to know whether there can
ever be the cessation of influence, even when one has the intention
not to influence the child. This is really a complex question, so let
us take time to go into it.

     We see that everything, physical and mental influences us. Where
is one to draw the line? I may not want to influence my child, but
influence is going on, conditioning his mind; the magazines he reads,
his friends at school, his teachers, everything around him is
influencing him. Consciously or unconsciously I am myself influencing
the child, and the whole culture or civilization in which we live is
conditioning his mind to be a Communist or a Capitalist, a Hindu or a
Christian, and so on. So the question is not whether it is possible to
stop all influence, but whether one can help the child to understand
and be free of the influences which are conditioning him. Is it
possible for education to help the student to be so intelligent that
he will see and understand for himself those influences which are
conditioning his mind, and put them away? Surely, that is our inquiry,
not how to stop influence, or what kinds of influence the child should
have.

     Now, what is it that conditions the mind? If the mind were
completely secure, it would have no fear, would it? And when the mind
has nothing to lose, it is completely secure, is it not? Which means
that in its own insecurity there is security. As long as the mind
demands to be secure, as long as it is seeking permanency in any form,
it creates influences which will condition it. But cannot the mind be
aware of total insecurity, of being completely insecure - which in
fact it is? Life is insecure, impermanent. The resistance, the denial
of the fact that life is completely insecure produces opposition
between the desire to be secure and the fact, thereby creating fear,
and it is this fear that conditions the mind, the fear that comes into
being when you do not accept the fact. This fear may be described in
different terms as the fear a boy has towards his parents, or the fear
of not passing an examination, or the fear of being scolded, or the
fear which arises when the mind wants to fulfil and is denied. The
mind which is ambitious at any level has always with it the shadow of
fear, because however much its ambition is being fulfilled it may at
any moment be thwarted.

     So, can the student be given an environment of complete security?
- which means, really, an environment in which he is not compared with
the less clever or the more clever, in which there is no sense of
condemnation, so that he feels completely at home. He generally does
not feel at home with his parents because they do not know what it
means to give the child that feeling of complete security. The parents
want the boy to be something, they say, `You are not studying as well
as your brother, who is so clever', and so they destroy the poor boy
by instilling fear. When the mind of the student feels completely
secure he can study more easily; but that means the educator must be
totally free of his own demand to be secure, because the moment he
demands security he instills fear. That is why teaching is a
dedication, not a job.

From a discussion in Rajghat in 1955