NOTE TO THE READER: in the following severabl blogs, all called Ducks and Drakes, I am giving you the early beginnings of a new memoir, if you will. I will not blog for awhile, but if I do it will be to continue with Ducks and Drakes With Krishnaji. I look forward to your comments.
It was in the seventies and into the mid eighties that I read Krishnamurti’s works — The Awakening of Intelligence, a thick book of dialogues he had in Saanen, Switzerland in the late sixties; You are the World, and others. I read a dense biography of him by one of his disciples who he knew for over 40 years. I reread it once again to get the flavor of what it was to hang around the master, if you will. In fact, one of my 10th grade honor classes gifted me with that book and the class signed it for me to my delight; clearly I was sharing what I knew about K to whomever would ever listen, captive audience or not. Only recently a student now in his forties wrote me to say, in part, that having heard about K in my class he got up and went to Manhattan to hear him speak and called the event “amazing.”
What psychologically and emotionally attracted me to K, as I reflect, was his total questioning of authority which appealed to me deeply as I was a very controlled young boy growing up, chocked full of inhibitions, dos and donts. So he whet my need to question society, to be subversive, to be free. You might say he appealed to my split as a passive-aggressive personality, yin and yang. Subversiveness was kind of built-in, like shelving. I read him for that, in part, and he made an indelbile case against schools and societal institutions which conditioned and indoctrinated. As the director of an alternative high school, an outgrowth of the sixties’ ferment, he appealed to my need to cut a different path Slowly I began to see and to incorporate what I did see into my germ plasm. Thematic words took hold from his books — indoctrination, conditioning, deconditioning, questioning authority, and choiceless awareness, to see in an non-optical way, to challenge, to question. One favorite axiom of his was that society was essentially corrupt, all societies. Well, now, reader, take a look about you — Perry, Bachmann, Palin, Obama, Hannity, Krauthammer, Ingraham, Beck, Limbaugh, Biden, Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, the good, the bad and the ugly were all complicit in being corrupt. The clarion call K gave me was that essentially it was up to each individual to be a stranger in a strange land, to upset the internal applecart. I relished in his insight that all reforms and reformers were essentially incomplete and doomed to failure, consequently a waste of effort. That revolution was required within each of us. I relished the idea that causes, all causes, even to the Girl Scouts tainted one because inherent in them was a split, a division, between the observer and the observed. Causes slaughtered the individual. All in all, he made me think.
Alas, he was the only “writer” I vociferously argued with. As I reminisce I realize he was causing me to molt, to shed hidebound ideas I was pretty definite about, because I was and am a heavily defended personality. As I struggled with his thinking process, his almost other worldly thought processes which shook me up, I got angry with him, looked especially for faults in his seemingly perfect hide, wanted to find out that he had screwed twenty-two disciples over the years, anything that would dethrone him in my mind, to demolish his worth, to destroy his seemingly inpenetrable self-poise. I dreaded becoming a disciple which completely sucks, think of Jesus’ dirty dozen. God, wasn’t he imperfect? God, was he human? All this more of a commentary on my own biases, thinking processes, hangups and all the rest that makes up anyone’s personality.In short, for me to come to his ideas I felt in some emotionally illogical way that I had to psychological demean him. And that deserves three sessions with any good shrink. Well, I spent some wasted moments on that until I read more and more, and I persevered more and more until I reached a point that I became accepting of his ideas without attacking them, although I did question and continue to question his thoughts. K can be a brisk shower in a cool morning.
At this point a slight digression, but related one. I read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present published in 2000. Barzun is 100 years old or more as of this date. Here is a major literary critic and writer who in 878 pages writes about Freud and a few other Jews but in the index as well in the entire book — see the title again — he never mentions nor does he discuss the Holocaust. Four pages on HItler, nothing on National Socialism, about 31 pages on Napoleon. Barzun can argue that he is adhering to the title of his effort, but what “Decadence”? For a major historian to leave out the Holocaust is puzzling, and damning in a book of this kind. Similarly, although K wrote and spoke about society and its injustices, about wars, and the relationships between peoples, of people and their religions which are divisive, conflict-causers, I often wondered if he was not too intellectually ethereal to speak about the Holocaust. Nowhere can I find words about that species-devastating event in his works. The Krishnamurti Foundation, Kinfonet on the web, has hundreds of tapes, his collected works, a slew of books on him and by him. He is most likely the most recorded spiritual teacher in history, yet I hear a deafening silence. If he felt he was above all that, or if he felt he had discussed that within the boundaries of his total gestalt as a spiritual teacher, I find it a remarkable lapse. So he was in this world and out of it. K needed a job, 9 to 5, some difficult brats for children, and a surly wife, a nagging mortgage to meet and then I would have liked to hear from him. A hermit, as he once wrote somewhere, is in relationship to his society; that is, if I understand his thought, the more the hermit rejects society the more he is in reaction to it and thus is in relationship to it. That makes sense to me. He doth protest too much. Yet, K himself, says nothing about the Holocaust. I have not read enough of where he was during the war years, the forties, but I do know he was restricted from traveling when he was in the America; however, he is silent on the subject.
K died in 1986 so he was familiar with all that had been written about the Holocaust; he read newspapers, magazines, detective novels and made a point in his talks that he came upon his learnings/insights/observations from seeing what is. Let me clarify. What I think he means is that we deal with reality, each individual, from moment to moment, that we need to “die” to thought, memory, the dead hand of the past if we are to understand or see what is before us; books, learnings, the whole rigamorole serve only to defeat us. Mistakenly we think that knowledge will help us to see, perhaps a bit, but knowledge did not delay the Holocaust nor all the books in libraries across the world which declared war a dead-end, prevail against two world wars in the Twentieth Century. It explains why K was not impressed with books for they were frozen thoughts. I remember when I first understood that and how it challenged even the book of his I was reading; what did he want to do with his “knowledge”? or tomorrow’s lesson in class. What was unsettling for me was that if I accepted some of his ideas which I did feel were truths of a kind, great understandings to my eyes, everything I did on the morrow was useless. It was an odd and uncomfortable realization which I struggled with for years, trying to incorporate his learnings into my own sensibilities at a rate and degree I could metabolize them. Perhaps the hard thing about K is the metabolizing of what he has taught, his testimonies if you will. I struggle still with that, but I’ve improved.
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