In any case it’s a working title for my next book which will be on the spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, sometimes called K, or with the honorific used in India, Krishnaji. While doing my mandatory one hour peripatetic lap walk in a local gym, in the inevitable battle to lose weight and to keep my other carotid artery from becoming plaque-ridden, I think about K. Presently I am reading Krishnamurti’s Notebook which is a spirtitual diary that comes with the adviso that K was not on drugs when he wrote this, and I believe that to be so, for he was too much the ascetic, a vegan. watched his body, and he was taken care of by others for much (coddled, then pampered) if not all of his life since he was declared a messiah, if you will, in his early life by Anna Besant and the Theosophists. More on that later. K never had a 9 to 5 job in his life, never had an argument with a boss, never was fired; he was out and apart from his society and others made it work for him. If they were not disciples, they were something close to that. For a while I resented that, although I worked that through, for what he has to say, his testimony, as someone said, is more than worth intense scrutiny for what it offers. If I am swine, at least let me take a pearl back to the sty — might give some class to the joint.
Gossip is rife about him. He may or may not have had an affair; he deserved at least one shtupp in his life. He was said to have the capacity to heal, but he put that aside for his own reasons. We do know in the twenties in a town north of Los Angeles, Ojai, he had an intense spiritual awakening which lasted for days and weakened him. In the Notebook and elsewhere this continued in one way or another all his life, he was almost 90 when he died. He practiced Kundulini yoga which is supposed to have been an intense variant and I do believe he had a lifelong unique experience with that. I believe in some way his brain “exploded,” and what I mean is that somehow he was able to see much deeper than the rest of others. In fact, his confidants sometimes suggested that he was a freak which he sometimes said that may very well be true. Given his teachings, I felt at times that he was beyond grasp because he was just different, remarkably so.
Ducks and drakes is not a game nor a sport, but something that early man most likely engaged in. Simply stated, one is by a lake or pond, settled waters. A flat stone (think David’s sling) is selected from the shore and cast sideways across the surface waters. One observes how many times it hits the water and by friction or physics unknown to common man skips again and so on. The idea is to see how many surface hits one can get the missile to make before it submerges. A natural effort, a simple effortless exercise — stone, throw, sight and it is all over. What is to be gained? I will not hazard a guess. Metaphorically it means something else for me as I observed for more than three decades reading K’s work, often occasionally, not consistently, mind you; but I do return to his wisdom under certain anxiety states to see if he has something to say to me. For the purposes of this “memoir” ducks and drakes represemts my off and on again distant relationship with an intriguing presence; if he is to be accused of selling anything to me, it is not philosophy, or a way-to, it is not a Dr. Phil. Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer product of Emersonsian-tainted bromides. K offers awareness, not his, but yours.
So I am the duck and the drake. This reminiscence is an effort to record the distant relationship with him. In 1975 I decided to enroll in the school of social welfare at Stony Brook University at the eastern end of Long Island. It was about an hour or so away from my home in Glendale, Queens. At 35 I was in a second marriage with one child. After work at a high school on exit 51 in Suffolk County it was not too far away a commute to the university. I went at night. And then a long trek back through Suffolk and Nassau counties into Queens. I did that for three years. When you are young, it doesn’t get to you, you’re not even aware of it. In a course called “How Humans Change,” the professor recommended Krishnamurti’s The Flight of the Eagle. I do dimly recall hearing a record of K in class with that often parodied sing song chant of the Indian speaking English, you know, Sam Jaffe doing his Gunga Din bit. So I entered the book and realized by the end of page two that it was the equivalent of reading Plato at 18 and being dumbstruck by the idea or ideas being explained or having entered Buber’s I and Thou and being lost immediately, for if you don’t get his definition of I and Thou in the first pages you might as well give up. Immediately I sensed that K had to be read slowly and with care, that yellow marker readily in hand. The sonofabitch made me work!
Intensely practical, written in that lucid style of his, plain, matter-of-fact, as if steel wire being slowly, deliberately spun about a coil, I realized it was philosophical in ways I was not used to. It did not present a theory or a personal point of view, let us say of Spinoza or Marx. It was beyond that. Inherent in the book as I recall it, I, the reader, was being asked in so many words to participate in the colloquy, for it was not so much what K was making clear or adumbrating, as the metaphor of being escorted through Kane’s castle and the good citizen stepping before you to open each door as you went through that castle maze. By the way, implicit in all this was not that you were entering a labyrinth nor a maze. You were entering you. It was a book about awareness. I know that I can quote passages or that I can read him again so as to be clearer but it would be a cheat. I want to share what has stayed in me without resorting to books. Facts or data I need to share with you about his personal life I may look up or I may not. I prefer to write about him as if I were speaking of a friend I have known casually over the years. There is no need for research on that, is there?
One major idea in that book was the observer was the observed; that took some while to settle in my mind. K has always argued that division creates conflict, that in negation we come upon that which is whole. I struggled to understand this idea and others in the book. I now see the truth in his observation that we are that which we see or look at; or we project upon others and situations all that we are so we are blinded by what we see. Elsewhere he comments that we should look as if for the very first time, and I found that valuable when I went to practice as a psychotherapist, to see the client, the person, from moment to moment, with fresh eyes free of judgment and personal coloration. From insight to insight the book was strewn with tight-fisted insights about mind and relationships, all new to my western mind. I knew that I had read and grasped and struggled with something unique and I tried to understand what I did not understand by searching out other books of his. I came across Think on These Things which is a popular book of his and much more accessible than The Flight of the Eagle. Here in transcribed dialogues he speaks with young people in schools throughout India discussing all kinds of ideas and answering questions from students. I began to grasp some of his ideas and found them appealing. I now wooed him.
More in another blog.
Midway Reflections
Ducks and Drakes with Krishnaji is about half done. I have no idea how many pages it will be. I’ll know when it is about to end. While preparing for this effort I’ve been reading two books about K. One is by a fairly impartial biographer and is a recent book about K that came out in 2000, Star in the East by Roland Vernon. The other one is by Mary Lutyens, friend, colleague of K for decades and it is called The Years of Awakening. a hagiographic biography which presents little disagreement or objective sifting of evidence about the World Leader. What is appalling in her story about the Theosophists, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter especially, is the grotesque adherence to what is essentially occult bullshit. One reads about astral travel, clairvoyance and clairvoyant messages idiosyncratically interpreted to serve conscious and unconscious purposes, delusional thinking creating more delusions among others, the servile pampering and coddling of two Hindu boys, K and his brother Nitya, the upper crust of English society donating and giving this house, this mansion, and this castle and its estate to the new messiah, expensive cars and free apartments, staying at top-notch hotels, across Europe, Australia and India for the comfort of the all-seeing, all-knowing elite is sickening. Into this goulash K and Nitya are cast and indoctrinated thoroughly until K has a transformative experience under the famed pepper tree in Ojai, California.
At no time does Lutyens pull back and make some observations of how splendid dinners, volleyball and tennis matches, skiing, riding in limousines and all the other appurtenances of the rich are all part of the cult ethos that they alone are in “possession” of a messiah — by the by, how does one rear a messiah? At least Jesus knew carpentry; K until his late twenties beginning at 14 or so, learned how to tie a cravat, polish his own shoes and that was about it. In sevral letters he curses and damns the environment that has him tied to Theosophy’s silken strings. Annie Besant, the grand doyenne, he calls “mother,” and he is so enmeshed in her and his love for her that the word merger comes to mind, big time. He is saturated with her fats. Leadbetter, who was his tutor, is most likely a pederast who often escapes punishment by stonewalling accusations. Luytens goes so far as to say he is an “enigma” to her. Really? Imagine Miss Besant, an occult true believer, as a deranged Miss Havisham and you have only a taste. Imagine, you have a messiah to raise!
K is a before and after act. Before his transformative experience, there is much to dislike about him, for he gathered a kind of hauteur to himself. What is to be expected? Brainwashed and I use that word carefully, indoctrinated and conditioned by the Theosophists with the very utensils of mind control that K in his after act tore into had made him something of a dandy, whipped cream on a charlotte russe. What he accomplished as a spiritual thinker later in life as he freed himself of this occult drivel and movement overshadows the bleak early years. He was a true and committed believer in what he had been taught. He came to believe in it thoroughly, he used it, he maligned it as well, for he felt he was trapped in a bell jar environment which he was. K could not breathe as a young adult in this insidious environment that awarded badges, had priests clothed in silken robes, put people on probation as inititates so that they could rise to a high spirtual plane and the needy, competitive lust for that, created jealousy and envy among the acolytes, shared mystical lunacies that any outsider would see through immediately. Give Houdini ten minutes with these “Magi,” espcially their fondness and reliance on messages from this Hindu deity and that one, direct lines to the eternal powers, Ouija board par excellence.
Reading about the Theosophists is reading about the Jazz Age and Jay Gatsby, and it occurred in about the same time period, the Twenties. A kind of soft decadence wafts from this group, a moral blindness as well, and a delusional grandiosity that is grotesque. They had a rabid devotional belief in their occult systems and doctrines so as to remind us of Druids in secret rites at Stonehenge. I feel that to be a member of this group was to enter into a psychotic world, thus bordering on hysteria. I have no doubt that there exists a store that contains relics from K’s earlier life as a Theosophist, a vial of the World Teacher’s urine; a pin cushion made from his pillow’s tickings; a monogrammed handkerchief; one of his gold knobbed malacca canes; his car which was a donation to the great teacher; his turban, a robe perhaps, forever and forever on. In a footnote Luytens mentions that in the 70s or later on a store did open that contained paraphernalia about him. Stifling and stultying and aggravatingly pompous, the milieu of the Theosophy Society was decidedly creepy. What we have to deal with is K’s second act which is mostly unexplainable.
Luytens cites extensively from a letter by his brother, Nitya, describing the famous experience K underwent at Ojai under the now fully grown pepper tree, much like Buddha under the Bo tree. I cannot account for what it says except to extract what I feel is the mystical scent that the observers of K put into the account, not deceitfully but expectedly from their own conditioned minds. The experience is real and I will deal with that later on; however, it meshes beautifully into what the Theosophists and his close friends expected to emerge from him, although it came sooner than expected. I associate to the discovery of Christ’s tomb as being empty. Any number of theories other than the biblical account offer possible explanations, but in the environment of that time amid and among his disciples and followers it didn’t take much to say that he had risen. My mind says look for the yeast before you make such claims. In short a self-fulfilling prophesy did come to pass for the Theosophists, a “messiah” who renounced the group itelf, sending the entire society into a spin. K was a fully “realized” Avatar, Buddha, godhead, guru, teacher, pick your synonym. His later teachings are what mostly attract me, but his past as a Theosophist is just weirdly fascinating and outre. Like tinsel at a party, some of that you take home on your person.
K was an imperfect man with flaws like the rest of us. I am so glad to say that, to spit it out, to free myself of any idolatry within my own self. However, there is a special blindness caused by a flashbulb going off in your eyes. Recent accounts of being around K as a friend or even his chef, reveal that this bright light exposure often was self-sustaining and so K was seen through long time distortion. He could drop friends just like that if they no longer seemed attractive to him in terms of their mind or values, much as he did the same with others as a youth under the influence of the Theosophists, a peremptory manner about him. A young woman, Helen Nearing, nee Knothe, appears very early in K’s life and one could say that he was infatuated with or in love with her, perhaps his first sweetheart. The World Teacher had to be celibate so that was the fly in the ointment. Their relationship was strong, and most likely did not involve any sexuality, although intimate. It was so powerful that almost 50 years later Helen, who had married by this time, chose to visit her old friend. What she has to say in her own account is telling.
He meets with her and behaves as if he had never met her before, a kind of detachment as if a complete stranger which she most definitely was not. Helen is perturbed as if she had never existed in his life and says, “He had no more care for me or interest than he had for the fly on the wall.” She goes on to say that he had a greatness to him, no doubt, and as Vernon states, “Krishnamurti lacked ordinary human compassion and kindness; he was intolerant, even contemptous, of those who could not rise to his own high plane.” Helen goes after his belief that he was unconditioned, living a life free of attachments to things or people by remembering their past decades ago. Helen recalls “the Krishnamurti who slept in comfortable beds in costly houses, who got up in the morning, gargled, abluted, combed his hair, and dressed in fine clothes bought in elegant shops . . . He was conditioned and affected every second of his life, just as everyone else was and is.” It is this kind of reasonable slap in the face that is lacking in Luytens work, but Vernon cites this account and he should. Helen Nearing had a remarkable life herself, this was no spurned lover.
As I look over these words, the elephant in the room is K himself after he left Theosophy for all time. I am intrigued by what had occurred in this man to make him so different from what he had been and to imbue him with extraordinary insight and intuition, a remarkable perspicacity. It is more than this. He seems to have been drastically changed intellectually and psychologically and to attain levels of human erudition which far exceeds the usual intelligence of man or the creative artist. He is much more than a spiritual savant. Lucky is the reader who first comes upon his works for that initial experience is stunning if not baffling, asking the reader to consider, to wonder about who is this man who seems to have such innate wisdom and erudition, who shaves close to the truth, who has the ability for expression of one’s own thinking in a shared and lucid translation of feelings and thoughts. One comes away with a kind of awe. It does take time, a great deal of time, to separate out personal issues of self as they rise against what K is teaching. For me, it has and continues to take years, if not decades.
If you are lucky, if you are mentally brave, you will not be cowed or at best shade your eyes with your hand as you approach his testimonies. I do believe that his practice of kundulini yoga played a significant role in his transformation. I do believe he was “realized” man to a degree not seen for centuries. He was not special, and he was not different — he was sui generis. I do not believe him to be divine and all that rot. I do believe he suffered from physical pain, the “process,” as he called it, all his life. If you read his Notebook (1961), you will absorb the daily phenomenon he had in which in some way he communed with nature and his own consciousness in ways that are not bizarre, but relentless, completely penetrating his mind, offering in ways we can only imagine bursts of acute awareness, as he functioned during the day. The “process” was unique to him. He felt it to be a “benediction.” Since I am unrealized man, I see it as the cost for being so enlightened, which is a good word for how I understand his experience. I think we always have to go to his body of work and extract from that what we can use to further our own spiritual adventure. And in a very real sense, forget about Krishnamurti, which I think he would revel in. If we adore the man beyond a reasonable respect for what he owns and what he can offer, we become servile, fawning, sycophantic and consequently disciples. However his life story is a grand attraction much like Kazantzaks’ life, both knowing suffering, both , in a fashion, transcending.
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Posted in Commentary, Philosophy
Tagged Annie Besant, avatar, Charles Leadbetter, Emily and Mary Luytens, Helen Knothe Nearing, Kazantzakis, Krishnamurti, occultism, Ojai, Realized man, Roland Vernon, Theosophy, World Teacher