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The
Story Interview with Valentino Giacomin by Mark Singleton Alice Project School, Sarnath. 1 May 2000. Mark Singleton: Could you give an overview of the growth of your insight into the project? Valentino Giacomin: I came to India in 1994. At that time there were only wheat fields around Sarnath and many children were on the road. There were no trees and the only shadow came from the bamboo. So I decided to build the school near the bamboo. At the beginning the situation seemed quite hopeless. First because we had no money and second because the people didn’t trust us. When we opened for admission only seven children came. When we inquired into what was going on we discovered that people thought we were going to catch the children and sell them in a foreign country. We had to ask a social worker to tell them that in the West we already have enough children. Then people began to come. We stopped the admissions when we reached seventy children because at that time we had only two rooms. You can guess what the children were like then. You just have to look at the children in the evening class these days - they were the same. At the time we decided not to have a uniform because only a few could afford it and we considered that books and pens were more important. I’m not saying this just because I’m the founder of the project. Early on one of our Indian teachers offered some clothes to the children. Later on I noticed that a long queue of people was forming in the field near the school. It turned out to be all the mothers of the children. They were very angry and came to me saying, ''If you are going to give us clothes, then you must give us new clothes.'' I was quite shocked because it was an Indian teacher who had given the clothes, not me. At that time we had a psychologist with us from the local university. I asked her what was the matter; why the people were reacting in this way. She explained to me that the mothers were afraid the clothes came from dead people and were filled with spirits. This is an example of the kind of cultural problems we sometimes face. And this is not to mention the caste problems. Some of these people are very poor but are also very proud about their caste. If you were to compare the children as they were then with the students now, I do not think you would recognize them. Talking to the children you can see they are polite, they have dignity and self-esteem. This is one of the most important parts of our programme. When we first started very few of them had any self-esteem because most of them are from what in the past were known as ‘low castes’. In India, and especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh (where we are now) and in Bihar, the neighboring state, the caste situation is really very important and entrenched in their everyday lives. But despite this, Indian children, even though they are poorer, seem much more brilliant than Western children because their minds are still pure. It is as if they have in their deep memory the great civilization of India. Unfortunately this treasure of culture is hidden under much dust and many remains of the past. MS: What was your experience in training the teachers in the methods of the Alice Project? VG: My experience was worse with the teachers than with the children. I saw clearly the damage that traditional education had done to them. I remember one test we gave to the teachers on intelligence and personality. I was shocked by the result. All the teachers (apart from two) performed really terribly. I selected four teachers from twenty-five but it was less a case of choosing the best than choosing the least bad. I’m not saying that they didn’t know their respective subjects but after twenty years of school they didn’t realize the basic concepts of education like creativity and self-awareness. In this sense they were worse than the children. I had to teach them in the same way as I taught the small children. But it is easier with children because they are still quite flexible. They still have more than one single way of perceiving reality whereas the teachers were already bound by so many years of education in a single field. They can tell you everything about the chemical make-up of the tree, the botanical or biological aspects of the tree. In the end the poor tree disappears. The more you are able to cut up the world the better you become in your subject. They know nearly everything about the leaves, the roots, the atoms, but if you ask them, ''What is the relationship of this tree with the environment or with the whole earth or with you?'' they will just look at you as if you are mad. But I have to tell you that after eight years of Alice Project Training we have the best teachers'' in the world! I am exaggerating, of course, but some truth is there! MS: Is this a feature just of Indian education or is it everywhere? VG: Exactly the same thing is happening in the West and that is why we first started the project in the West. There as in India now education means competition for good marks, for good jobs, memorization of course materials and nothing more. As a general rule many teachers in the West, much the same as here, do not have any thoughts of higher motivation. Mostly they think about money and a comfortable life. This is good, but it is not enough! In addition in India, because the classes are usually so large and because of the tradition the relationship between the student and the teacher is more like it would be in the military. There is something I remember from Italy when I was a teacher in the national school there. Every year the director used to organize training for the teachers; how to teach the subjects in different ways. What was happening was that each year there was a new and better technique for the teaching of Math, Geography, History or whatever. Then one or two years later they would say, ''Wrong. This new method is better so we must replace it''. After observing this for some time I realized this is the law of the market, the law of capitalism, of consumerism. Like a new and better washing powder. Once I had realized this I said, ''Stop'', and I began to oppose this because despite the new techniques they were giving to us, the children were getting worse and worse each year. One interesting experiment would be to go to Italy and find the notebooks of ordinary rural children from fifty years ago and compare them with the notebooks of today’s children. You would not believe the good work they were doing in the schools fifty years ago and today you will not find this quality in the best schools of Italy with the best computers, the best teachers etc. New methods are like some kind of trick. So I thought, ''How did the teachers in the past manage to get these kinds of results?'' Even the students at the bottom of the class were very good compared with the students now. And I found that the teachers of the past had one secret: they were holistic and all the subjects were in some way related to Christianity. So religion was an integral part of knowledge and education. We can judge whether this was good or not later, but for the moment we just analyze, okay? At that time 99% of the people in Italy were Christian so it was no problem integrating religion with the traditional subjects. I remember my own teacher who would go to Church every day before she came to school. She gave us the feeling that she was doing her job not only for the salary but also because she had a mission. She taught us to do everything with some higher motivation. This was the feeling that I got from her. These kinds of teachers were teaching from the heart not only from the brain. That is why they managed to get such incredible results. It’s true that sometimes they were quite strict but this is nothing compared to what they are doing now in Asia where the teachers really beat the students with cruelty. At that time I realized that the more we try to teach in the modern way, the fewer good results we were getting. I tried to tell the other teachers to be aware that in some way they as well as the children were being cheated. This negative trend didn’t limit itself to Math, Science etc. It also had a terrible effect on the childrens’ behaviour. We had serious discipline and attention problems in the class. This was fifteen years ago and we know that now the situation is much worse in both India and the West. Where there is no holistic education, or let’s say integrated education the academic and intellectual quality of learning will deteriorate and behaviour will continue to get worse and worse. I asked myself how we could stop this negative trend and remedy the children. This is how the Alice Project started. MS: With the cultural climate as it is in Europe now, it seems to me that such ideas, and the premises of the Alice Project itself, would be treated with some suspicion and scepticism. How did you go about introducing these ideas given the probable hostility you encountered? VG: You ask these people, ''Is it possible to be successful by using these methods? You are intelligent, you have a degree from the university and you have a good job but you are frustrated and sometimes you look depressed and appear to be suffering mentally. Is this useful for your society or for you? Is it useful to have so much violence in the school? So if not, then what is the remedy?'' I read in the newspaper that a student shot six or seven of his classmates in a park in America. This is not an unusual occurrence there! Then the American President comes on television and laments the violence in the schools saying, ''We must stop violence''. But these are only words. What I am suggesting is one way to prevent this. My analysis is that this violence, this unhappiness, this lack of success, is present because you have the wrong approach to education. I may be wrong but at least hear what I have to say. There is currently a unilateral approach to education which means that the students are taught only a fraction of what they really need. The rest is missing. It’s like training only the right arm while the rest of the body wastes away. Practically, is this useful for you or for society as a whole? So first of all you ask, ''Do you agree that the situation is quite desperate?'' If people agree, you ask if they know the cause of this desperation. I do not believe that they know this. I have been experimenting with education for fifteen years simply to find out the cause and thereby to find the remedy. Since in the West we haven’t found the real cause, we have only a few methods to keep violence under control, but sooner or later this aggression will show itself again. What we are trying to find is some means whereby violence can be brought under control once and for all. MS: Do you think your method could be seen as a threat to a consumerist society and its modes of production, relying as they do on intensive specialization for the continuation of the system? VG: If these days you read the books written for people in business, you can see that they are all stressing the same idea that we are teaching in this school i.e. emotional intelligence. You won’t find any training courses where they teach dishonesty, lack of morality and so on. It has been discovered that you must found business on real values... MS: But surely the motivation is different? VG: Businessmen also want to be happy and to avoid suffering. Before we used to think that money was the root of all evil. Capitalists say, '' No, money is not evil!''And now they are starting to say, ''But it is not enough!'' They are now teaching their managers with this philosophy and are having incredible success. In some ways they become more spiritual'' MS: But spiritual consumers..? VG: Well, that depends on how honest they are. Business people with good motivation can do so much good. After all, it is business people who gave the money for religious constructions in this school. The president of Alice Project Society, in Italy, is a business - woman. A very kind and generous lady! So I don’t believe that all business people have stopped their development - as a yogi would say - at the navel chakra (material power). Many of them are going to the heart chakra (generosity, kindness). Take Richard Gere for instance. I cannot be sure but I would think that previously he was slave of his instinctive mind, the lowest chakra. Now he is a spiritual man. He has managed to raise all this energy to the level of the heart and he is doing incredible work for the Tibetans and the poor. You could also look at Deepak Chopra. He is working with rich people who have many problems and he is curing them by teaching the value of the inner treasure. People are suffering because they are blocked. Capitalists are not stupid - they too want to be happy. If they realize that real happiness comes from spirituality they will change their motivation and their behaviour. So, I am optimistic that these children could be very active in changing the trend of society. We must go gradually, step by step basing it on the development of each child. There is one step where the child is very selfish and only thinks about milk. Another step the child wants only to play. Another step when the child wants power and money. And another step when they use this power and money for helping others like in social work. We should help children to recognize which level they are at and show them that this is not the end of the journey. As Jung said, when you don’t respect this development, when you don’t give an answer to what the Self is asking, you have many problems. To cure these problems you have to have an answer. MS: At the school you lay the emphasis on inner work. And you have said that this kind of inner awareness must precede any kind of social or political action in the world..... VG: Before you get inside an aeroplane as the driver, you need to know something about the working of the machine and how to fly. Our minds are no different from the aeroplane. We must learn to be pilots of our minds otherwise we will create a disaster! Once you have self-knowledge and awareness, naturally you will know what to do. This is the prerequisite for mental equilibrium and happiness. From this basis, and only from this, can compassion and wisdom arise. Someone who has spiritual realization is extremely powerful - like an atomic bomb - because he controls the energy not of the atom, but of his mind! Perhaps these spiritual people don’t do social work according to our paradigm but how can we judge them? How can we judge a Christian monk who spends his whole life in one room? I think that millions of ‘normal’ people are like this Christian monk. MS: These ideas about the processes of perception are also contained within the Madhyamika philosophy? VG: Yes, it is true. There are several philosophical sources. The first is a Buddhist one, Madhyamika. Also Advaita Vedanta. It seems sometimes that Vedanta borrowed from Madhyamika. And also if you study the Vedas you can feel - how to say? - at home. There are many spiritual traditions where we find these concepts. It means that this kind of wisdom is to be found wherever spirituality and religion are practiced. Wherever you find people practicing seriously and with their heart, you can find these ideas. Christians, Sufis, Buddhists, all''. I think all religions have it. If you move from the outside to within, you ‘find’ wisdom and non duality. In some religions it is more obvious but the seeds of this wisdom are present in all the spiritual traditions. Then there are psychological schools like Transpersonal Psychology, Psychosynthesis, Humanistic Psychology''. all these gave me inspiration and insight for Alice Project. I should mention four names: Jung, Assagioli, Laura B. Gilot and Ken Wilber. These are my - how to call them? - my secular teachers. I have a debt to them because they opened my mind beyond the ego. A final note about this topic: I think that, in the future, Transpersonal psychology will play an important role in our schools. MS: Sarnath is a Buddhist place. I know you have certain criticisms of Buddhist methods of education. What are these and what do you suggest in their place? VG: I hope that I am positive in my criticism! It is based on my experience and what I am seeing here and in the West. I can only talk about the Tibetan Buddhists since I know something about them. They developed their own system of education and it must have worked since we have had so many great saints in the past. But some Tibetans forget that they are no longer in Tibet, that they are in a different cultural situation in India. Many things have changed and they cannot go on teaching according to the old methodology. My idea is that we should realize that the child of today is no longer protected as he or she was in the past. In the past, children had time for childhood; nine or ten years where they were completely protected and where the adult world was set apart from them. Now this is no longer possible. The child only has to turn on the television for the adult world to enter completely inside him. He can see sex, he can see revolution, and so on. Now we must understand that we have to work with the minds of the children in order to provide them with some defence against this kind of stimulation from the world of adults. For me, the best defence is to help the children to go inside their minds and prepare them to filter all the stimulations that are coming from the outside world. This means that what we used to start doing at the age of twenty or twenty-five we must now start at the age of six. It means Vipassana meditation- watching the mind''. MS: What do you mean by vipassana meditation? VG: It is just one way to say that we watch the mind without judging the mind in order to find out the real nature of the mind. It is a very powerful method for the children. It is not only for monks and so on. I should also mention other kinds of meditation like Mahamudra and Dzogchen'' I am a little bit critical because I don’t believe that we can teach children the way we did in the past. You can’t say, ''Be good, because you must be good''. Or, ''Be good, otherwise you go to hell!''. This is imperative morality. Only if people understand actions through wisdom will true morality come. For instance, our students stopped killing fish not when we said, ''Killing fish is no good- the fish will suffer'', but when they realized that we are all one, interdependent and that the suffering of your right hand is the suffering of your left hand. Then the students started thinking, ''Oh my God, the suffering of the fish is my suffering''. Our whole teaching is about how to make them understand this concept of unity. We don’t stress morality or ethics. We stress wisdom, believing that from wisdom; morality will come naturally.I have me many people in Italy with very strict rules: ''Don’t do this! Don’t do that!'' They have negative minds. They are fighting in their minds. Fighting means aggressiveness, fighting means unhappiness. And this is why I think there are so many unhappy religious practitioners in the West. And then there are the ''converted people'' who look unhappier now than they were before they changed their root religion. Now, in order to avoid being labelled as negative and unkind towards other people, I have to specify that everything I have just said is the result of my perception - something that comes from my mind - and is only a product of my mind, it is a projection. True for myself but absolutely untrue for others. Finally, I am talking about''myself! MS: You mean some religious people seem unhappy because they are trying to be something they are not? VG: Yes. They are trying to be something they are not. I repeat: I am talking about a reality that is only my experience. I do not want to say that my point of view is objectively true. My idea is that some practitioners create repression within themselves. The worst thing you can do is to try and practice dharma while refusing what you are. It would be the same as if you refused the bottom step of the stair where you are. How can you go up? You will go nowhere! You will have a high chance of getting into psychological trouble! Lama Yeshe always said, ''Love yourself! You are positive, you are positive, you are positive!'' He knew how much Westerners need this. We have a tendency to put ourselves down by saying, ''I am no good, and I am a bad person.'' This is why Lama Yeshe is the inspiration for Universal Education - Alice Project. MS: Do you think these kinds of meditation that you mention (Vipassana, Mahamudra) are right for people in the West? VG: If they don’t have a psychotic mind then yes, they are. But if westerners have some mental problems then the answer is no. Psychotics are already lost inside themselves. They should not be encouraged to go further inside themselves because they are cut off from the external reality. When we say that someone is ‘spaced out’, this really means that they are lost in their own inner space. It is better if they are helped to go outside, to project their fantasies in the concrete world. In this way they have more control. With our method, first we start from the concrete world and then we reach the cockpit - the command center where all the drama of our life is created and projected on the so-called external world. The next step is the recognition of these projections for what they are; as simply a play of the mind, as real as the images of our dreams! If we work with strongly neurotic and psychotic people, however, it is better if we encourage them to stay ‘out’ and help them to work with the external reality. Many people in the West need this kind of work. It is good if they do social work, for example. In India it is called karma-yoga. MS: What do you think is the heart of the Alice Project? VG: We are working to realize both knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge about external reality as it is''. MS: Technical knowledge? VG: Yes, and the wisdom to understand the processes of knowing, the processes of perceiving what is going on with our minds and how we project the world. These are our key questions: Who am I? What is mind? What is thought? What is emotion? The content itself is not important but rather the process. This is essential to an understanding of the Alice Project. We tell the children that it doesn’t matter which emotion they have as long as they realize that they are having that emotion. It doesn’t matter which kind of thought they have as long as they realize that they are thinking. Any kinds of thoughts are welcome. Let them come, let them go. But check what the thought is made of. Since thought is the cause of our suffering, we analyze our thoughts: What is this thought? Where is it coming from? Where is it going? We discover that all our suffering is coming from
ignorance. We don’t realize that we just don’t know. That is why Socrates
was so right when he said, ''I know that I don’t know.'' We don’t
realize that our perceptions are wrong. What is worse is that we project
what is in our minds onto the outside and call it reality. An incredible
mistake! So what can we do? We can realize that what we are perceiving
as existent ‘out there’ is only a projection. When we understand this
we go back to find out where all this is coming from. We will discover
that it is coming from the mind. Therefore this is the place where we
have to work. This is why we don’t stress social work in our school. We go from the outside to the mystery of our heart. The first ''social work is with ourselves! However, you must remember that once we have done this, we go back outside to external reality with that new knowledge, or with new projections, if you will. But now we project a good, happy and positive world with no more enemies. If you purify your thoughts, of course you will project something good. I have tried to explain this concept in all the books written for my students. This is the drawing printed on the book-cover of the last book written for my students. The protagonist of the story is thinking about the world, but also about himself. He himself is not out of his own projection. His own body is an experience, so is not existing ‘out there’ as are the birds, the plants and other human beings. Once a student asked, ''Sir, what do you think you are?'' I joked, ''I think ''I am just the result of a game that thought is playing. What else?'' You are the creator of your world. That is another key phrase. If I am the creator of my world then I take full responsibility for it. If my world is polluted, then I am a hundred per cent responsible and there is nobody else to blame. I can’t blame my mother because she was no good or my father because he was an alcoholic and used to beat me or my teachers because they did not understand me'' Everything is inside us from the saints to the Nazis. MS: And it is dangerous to deny this'' VG: Yes. If you deny it, it is repressed. Repressed material comes back as ghosts and monsters. It is better to open the door and let it all come out. To say, ''Welcome. You are my reality and I accept you.'' This is my reality. These bad thoughts are me. I can’t just cut them off. If I don’t have nice feet am I going to cut them off? That would be stupid. I must accept myself, good or bad. ''Welcome yourself in your entirety!'' advises the Wise Man of our stories. This is Alice Project! Interview
of Valentino Giacomin by Mark Singleton
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Alice Project Updated July 2004 |