Since 1975 I have been reading the works of Krishnamurti, spiritual teacher and remarkable human being. Often we are surrounded by rather unusual people in our culture or the cultures of other peoples who we know nothing about. And then they die, and we die. When you read history, you muse about the life of Spinoza, for example, who did his creative work and passed on. Often unknown to the world at large, these brilliant isolates are known to a few, most likely a friend or family, and yet a hundred years later they have shaken the world with their ideas. Such was Krishnamurti. His am influence will grow ever more. Only now are colleges beginning to introduce his works into their curriculum, for he is hard to define, corral or explicate, as most unique people are. I have learned a great deal from him over the years; he has opened my eyes a little bit more than they would have been. At the tip of my tongue are some of his insights, all societies are essentially corrupt, the observer is the observed (think on that one for an hour!), look as if it were for the first time (good for therapists and better still for family and relationships), and the word is not the thing itself.
After his death in 1986 the Krishnamurti Foundation continued to produce a plethora of materials, especially his recorded talks and writings; they are endless. The books that I have found quite telling are Think on These Things, The Flight of the Eagle and The Awakening of Intelligence. Read these three in this order and you either quit on him or have your pistons explode. His teachings have saturated who I am so that the plaque forming in my arteries have the letter K on them, delightfully insidious. When I am stressed or experience angst or the fear of fear or the fear of death, I return to his writings. A disciple of his, a misnomer, for he did not collect disciples about himself, wrote a biography of him which was given to me in the 1980s by a class that knew my fondness for K. They inscribed their feelings about me on the inside book covers which is interesting to read 25 years later. However, I am rereading the book once again, a chapter a night, for one has to go slowly with K. I will provide one quotation which I underlined last night and has motivated me to write this blog. Tell me what you think:
Krisnaji asked: If you knew that you were about to die, what would you do? Can you live one hour completely — live one day — one hour — as you were going to die the next hour? But if you die so that you are living fully in this hour, there is enormous vitality, tremendous attention to everything. You look at the spring of life, the tear, you feel the earth, the quality of the tree. You feel the love that has no continuity and no object. Then you will find in that attention, that the ‘me’ is not. It is then, that the mind, being empty, can renew itself.”
Let me assure you that this is mild K, for he can lacerate your mental structure, your sense of being through relentless and laser-like questioning that has no other purpose than to make you see. He is not a Western philosopher as we know it. He goes beyond Socrates in several aspects, for he pushes us to see what is, in the moment, right now, to observe our minds at work, how we go about thinking, how we project upon the world all our internal ills. It is much more, to my eyes, than merely examining one’s own self. And that is why, in some instances, this culture and others find it hard to digest what he is dealing with. I still struggle with seeing. In any case I have returned to him periodically for he provides not solace but a kind of reaffirmation of questioning as a way to get at core issues, which is to my liking. Answers are given on tablets and handed down to slaves. What if the decalogue was composed of ten or more questions? What larks, Pip, what larks!
As I go about aging, as I go about the slow dance to non-existence, I will not waste my time seeing meaning in what I have been, done, or accomplished. really irrelevant. I am more concerned in living the moments I have each and every day not in the pursuit of happiness, or nirvana, or moaning mantras which are all ridiculous. I seek no respite, no relief, no pleasure, nor transcendental aims. Krishnamurti seems to me to be about intellect, the awakening of intelligence, and we all know how tiring that can be; but he is suggesting that we maintain an ongoing internal dialoguing with ourselves; that we listen on levels that are almost at the level of quantum physics; that we dare not live the kind of life he lived, for he detests models, icons and disciples. He solely engages us to make our way in the world free of all conditioning, the pollution we face daily with the media and others about us; that we march not only to the sound of a different drummer, but that indeed, we become the drummer and drum, the music, the rhythm and the harmony (the observer is the observed). What I admire about this teacher is his diamond-hard yet compassionate injunction to be in the world, or as he said in the title of one book, you are the world.
The fact that such a man has lived in my time gives me some hope that humanity may yet have something going for it. He was no god, he was mortal, and for me that carries greater weight than any god created by man. Luckily for K, in any other century he probably would have been turned into a god.
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