Well Now.

Coming to terms with Krishnamurti is coming to terms with yourself, always will be so. The Stockholm Syndrome has been roughly defined as the unconscious need or  willingness to identify with your aggressor, another one of man’s psychological quirks. When reading about K’s education and rearing as a Theosophist and his breaking that bond forever, striking out on his own for decades after, defining who he was as a thinker and man, he still gathered about him an entourage, highly educated spiritual groupies. Ironically K spoke and write about the misfortunes of identification with a cause,  brand,  religion or a spiritual thinker, or himself. Constantly in his writings he cautions the reader to forget him and to focus on his own self. The teacher was not important essentially. The more he shunned disciples and condemned the very concept of acolytes K was enmeshed and surrounded by disciples, if you will, who managed his expenses, saw to his needs, facilitated his talks and meetings to individuals and thousands across the globe, here in Ojai, California and in India. You know, if your body is covered with honey, it is hard to shoo away the gnats. Granted, he was no administrator, but on certain levels I believe he brought this about. For all of his life he had evinced and expressed a need to have women, or “mothers” about him. His personal history with the Theosphists is replete with examples of at least two women being present with the “messiah” at all times.

I sense that being close to him, beneath his spiritual umbrella if you will, followers aspired to be transformed by him. Personally, and in part by reading K, I abhor following anybody. I don’t need a leader. Do You? And what  does that imply if you need the other to direct you? Role models, in short, are for empty selves. And I suspect as I dimly and inarticulately experienced when I first read him, how admirable and wondrous it might be if I, too, could be like him. What more delectable prospect would it be to attain a spiritual realization that gave me insight into my  self and others, that allowed me to make subtly astute prognostications about human relationships, that might imbue me with the clarity of language so often revealed in spirtitual masters. Ah, the temptation to lose oneself to another; perhaps this is why we say people fall in love rather than stand in it. I will not be swooned.

This enthrallment of the other, especially if gifted, or divine, really is a kind of corrupt emptying of self, allowing who you are to flow into the other with the crazed expectation that you will be enhanced, given some vital blood serum  that the other has so as to make you ultimately one with the other. According to Greek mythology, the gods did not have blood in their veins. Rather, it i was ichor, a kind of ethereal fluid.   It is a kind of psychological magic which individuals are often dimly aware of as they kiss the “divine” one’s ass. This need to leave oneself and to become in some fashion the other is fascinating to observe and to reflect about. All religions use merger as an engine to power their systems. I believe it is the core of collective behavior and if perverted to its extreme end becomes totalitarianism. And I write this because I think when you go about reading K, it is healthful to take him in, to incorporate him, if you will, like we did with our parents and so established in our unconscious minds templates to follow, to obey. And with our parents we have had to separate out if we are to attain maturity. The classic twins are attachment and separation. I experienced an early and powerful attachment to K, ballyhooed his existence to my self and to others and serendiptiously and surreptitiously separated out from him. I think he says as much in his writings, learn from me, now get lost. Unfortunately I see those very close to him never really defined themselves nor  separated out from their self-imposed rapture. K was someone very special. I can see how his burnished spiritual and charming patina was forever fabulous.

As I  look back over the decades with my eastern buddy, I see patterns in myself in relationship to him, some of which I have explored here. I have no need to  make peace with K, because we are not at war. What I always want to sustain in our relationship is my capacity to differentiate myself out from his testimonies. I think that is critical in reading him. For decades he has always addressed the reader not to just read but to take what he is reading and apply it immediately to his present state of mind. He believes change can be instantaneous, a far cry from the therapist’s mind. K can cloud your mind with wonderful wisdoms, shoot you full of amazing realizations about school and society, for example. Yet one has to filter out the brilliance and settle in on what is good for your own regimen. I will try to say it better. If you become in any way intimidated by what you read with K, you will become lost. Indeed, that is the first battle, I think, you have to have with him. If you don’t know yourself, a major part of his teachings is to help you arrive at that insight, you will fall prey to self-delusion, of inordinate respect if not awe for the “master.” The real task is to become spirtually scintillating yourself and to leave K behind. It takes a long time as I am testifying to here. In short, do not exalt him because all along as you read him, or study his works, it is my feeling that you experience in relationship to him jealousy, envy, spiritual greed, comparison, anger and annoyance, a need to belittle him, to find fault in the man, all those human aspects when we come up against the unusual, the different, the splendid and creative. In a wild association I just had, I imagined early man, having learned to throw a rock as a missile, aimed at his first target, another man’s cave painting.

K is a spiritual wizard, and when you deal with wizardry you had better understand to have your wits about you or you will be blown away. He is intellectually astounding, no ifs and buts. Whatever happened under that pepper tree decades ago profoundly altered this man’s brain for the rest of his life. And if you imagine yourself under some tree or shrub trying to replicate his example, you are forever lost in the pit of identification. We all want special and magical powers, fairy tales are swollen with that; growing up as children our make-believe games and fantasies are equally saturated. Our science fiction literature, all literature, has a magical element. Ancient magic has continued to this day, religions practicing it, so-called “primitives” acting it out in their rituals, from the silly salt thrown over the shoulder to cannibals who devour their enemies’s brain so as to incorporate their powers — and that makes sense on one level of thinking. The world and civilization are swollen with magic and thank god for scientists who empirically stab at it like harpoons into a whale. One of the seductions of reading K is to allow oneself to be swallowed by the whale. Reading Luytens book I sensed she is so enmeshed in the man and his enlightenment that she is out of focus, her writing about him doesn’t allow a goodly dose of of objective thinking come in. She relates his life as if he were a kind of saint, whereas Vernon’s book brings in the pepper of dissent and presents K warts and all, although Vernon does find him and his teachings remarkable.

Dear K, the future acolyte says, I want to be just like you. That temptation has to be restrained if not rejected. When you read K, take the apple from the tree and that’s about it.