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It is a pre-K through grade 12 private school offering a small, intimate, inquiry-based day and boarding program that blends college preparatory academics with deep exploration of life’s issues. Teachers support open-minded and spirited discussion, encourage inquiry, and strive to develop in each student a self-reflective capacity that leads to inner honesty, independence and integrity. Graduates go on to college having developed a global perspective, sensitivity toward the environment and human relations, and exceptional critical thinking skills. www.oakgroveschool.com
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Everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is really the perpetuation of the 'me', the ego, in different forms. Self-improvement may be gross, or it may be very, very refined when it becomes the practice of virtue, goodness, the so-called love of one's neighbor, but essentially it is the continuance of the 'me', which is a product of the conditioning influences of society. All your endeavor has gone into becoming something, either here, if you can make it, or if not, in another world; but it is the same urge, the same drive to maintain and continue the self.
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August 7th, 1955
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If one is capable of studying, watching oneself, one begins to discover how cumulative memory is acting on everything one sees; one is forever evaluating, discarding or accepting, condemning or justifying, so one's experience is always within the field of the known, of the conditioned. But without cumulative memory as a directive, most of us feel lost, we feel frightened, and so we are incapable of observing ourselves as we are. When there is the accumulative process, which is the cultivation of memory, our observation of ourselves becomes very superficial. Memory is helpful in directing, improving oneself, but in self-improvement there can never be a revolution, a radical transformation. It is only when the sense of self-improvement completely ceases, but not by volition, that there is a possibility of something transcendental, something totally new coming into being.
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August 21st, 1955
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If we can discover from what the sense of domination springs, that discovery may answer the question of why we are violent.
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August 27th, 1955
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Being free of society implies not being ambitious, not being covetous, not being competitive; it implies being nothing in relation to that society which is striving to be something. But you see, it is very difficult to accept that because you may be trodden on, you may be pushed aside; you will have nothing. In that nothingness there is sanity, not in the other... As long as one wants to be part of this society, one must breed insanity, wars, destruction, and misery; but to free oneself from this society - the society of violence, of wealth, of position, of success - requires patience, inquiry, discovery, not the reading of books, the chasing after teachers, psychologists, and all the rest of it.
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August 28th, 1955
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~ J. Krishnamurti
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