In the last several days I’ve ordered two biographies about Krishnamurti. I feel I need to dwell within his context. His writings are so voluminous, his collected works in 17 volumes, in addition to many other transcriptions of talks, several films about him, videos, tapes and CDs is all beyond my ability to comprehend or assess. At his deathbed his chef, Michael Krohnen, whose book I have read, The Kitchen Chronicles gives his response to a question put to him. “‘What really happens to that extraordinary focus of understanding and energy that is K after his death?’ His answer was immediate, short and unambiguous, ‘It is gone.’ Almost as an afterthought, poignant and poetical, and not without an enigmatic touch, he added, ‘If you only knew what you had missed — that vast emptiness.’” Think on that. I see it as pure, unadulterated emptiness, the exquisite negation of it all.
I went to my bookcase and took down several books I have on him, two by a philosopher, Raymond Martin, another is a collection of his writings over the decades, another is a collation of different readings, all of them not really helpful for my purposes. Scouring the introductions and the bibliographies, I am seeking something, some scrap of information that I can peg my feelings on and continue to write about him, but to no avail. I am not a biographer, I am not a scholar. I just read or sampled Krishnamurti’s writing as they interested me, a kind of buffet browsing you might say at a very good bar mitzvah. Yet what I read has impacted upon me and I feel inadequate in any way to do him justice. That is not my task, I have realized of late. I want simply to assay what he has affected within myself, feeling that I may have only the barest threads of his total measure as a spiritual thinker. So here in these essays may rest the expression of a dilettante revealing his superficialities about K. However, what “truth” I do possess is only what I know about myself as I came into contact with his writings. He awakened something in me and that I can try to struggle and to reveal to you. Other than that there is the entire cosmic world contained within his own world for you to explore. I can say that I have nibbled around the edges, and what I devoured was very illuminating. And what I can also say is that when I cannot go any further into understanding K, you will be the first to know it as I will call time out and take a rest.
There is much to K that I cannot grasp or comprehend; much that eludes me, no matter how many times I read him. I don’t think I am alone in that judgment. However, I have detected much of that idiosyncratic scent he gave off. He is so different, so new, that I found it alluring and difficult at the same time. He made me struggle, he made me think, he made me annoyed and angry with him. He challenged ancient belief systems in me, he made see into my society and my own ethnicity; metaphorically he threw ice water at my face. He left me to brood and brew in my own slosh, he was Socrates for the Twentieth Century. Other than Kazantzakis, I have never read a writer with so much zeal on my part. Perhaps this small book is a fool’s errand; yet I want to write it. It explains me more than it explains Krishnamurti and if that is of some interest as I encountered this spiritual thinker, take it for what it is. I think K might proffer that all this is to the good, for he should be removed from all this as any radical and revolutionary change should come from me. He is not even the tour guide.
As previously said he touched me in areas that were of psychological and emotional concern. I was especially drawn to his questioning of authority; what compels us to obey and heed, the good Nazi in us? What is the herd instinct in humanity that leads to the ovens at Auschwitz? And what would it take in me to question my parents, my friends, my boss, my culture? All of society is given to us throughout the lengthy years of our childhood and if it is not questioned (often not) we carry this stale pablum to our graves unaware. All this K termed conditioning and if you take the blinkers away from your eyes you can see how we swim in a sea of visual, media, societal and religious pollution, conditioners.
As an example, poor unaware Sean Hannity of Fox News. If you look at him and the way in which he inquisitorially goes about his reporting, how he is trapped forever in his own political opinions which allow for little or subtle gradations of gray, if you observe the hardness, the brittleness in him, if you see the rigidity, you can see how paralyzed he is as a human being, and strongly conditioned by his church beliefs. It cascades from his pores, that he has the religious answer, the one true faith. Send him to the Incas with a sword in one hand the Bible in the other. His mind is closed, his thought processes arthritic, because he has swallowed whole the calcified bromides of his two thousand year old religion. Hannity, alas, is inhabited by dogma and doctrine. I believe him to be a man who has never dared intellectually or psychologically. He cannot be retrained. He cannot learn another way. That will only occur if he comes to it, which is unlikely. He cannot come upon the new and fresh, for his religious background is old, state and inflexible. He does not inhabit his self.
I think I can comment on Hannity without denying my political point of view which is an antithesis of his politcal views. Nevertheless, I do see him (psychotherapeutically so) as a highly restricted, self-confined human being who believes in god and all that and is so sure that Christ exists and the rest of it. I wholly subscribe to Freud’s comment that a man becomes fully mature when he puts away or outgrows the illusion of religion, his childhood blocks, pun intended. Perhaps psychotherapy, especially in this country, causes such antipathy, rejection or negative humor is that what it offers is insight, or awareness at levels most Americans shun. We rather not know. Oh, yes, we rather not know. I call that FEAR. Someone like Krishamurti is totally anathema. I make the case that one has to be prepared or ready at some level of consciousness to allow Krishnamurti’s thinking to enter one’s mainstream, one’s very arterial passageways. And so it was with me.
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