Category Archives: Philosophy

In the summer of 1975 or 1976 I began to write a series of short stories which later developed into a science fiction fantasy, called “Gruffworld.” When I look back upon it, Krishnamurti and Langs were fused together as I depicted an apocalytic existence in an apocalyptic world. That is, a merger of spiritual and psychoanalytic truths. Essentially I write of an emerging presence, a creature evolving from childhood into adulthood, bereft of parenting, abandoned and lonely and alone, separation the very mode of his being. As I review it in mind now it is all an allegory about my own benign neglect as a child. Gruff struggled with one appalling thing: awareness, the “kind” that K spoke of, the kind of awareness which is free of choice — come for the ride as I go into this. K posits in many of his writings as I understand them that choice is a divider, the very act of deciding is a split, and that causes conlfict and personal sorrow. Ironically as a therapist I was working with clients to think in terms of choices, for many of them were so constipated as selves that they could not flex their minds in order to see options other than the straight-laced ones they had come upon by default, serendipity or accident. This flies in the face of what K was dialoguing about. I was on Maugham’s razor’s edge.

So for K choiceless awareness is the ability to be aware in the moment without the incoming streams of past thought or memory, knowledge, instruction, conditioning. He explained that this kind of awareness, if free of the need to choose, a kind of negative space, brings one into a place of clear cognition and understanding. In the fantasy I was writing I was attempting to bring Gruff into that kind of state, going so far as calling a chapter “Choiceless Awareness.” In fact, now as I think about it, a symbolic attempt to  integrate, to bring together disparate parts of myself, for I believe I have struggled in some fashion to become whole for my entire life. If I were to crave an epiphany, it would be a moment of wholeness. Struggle ceases when one is entire.

It is only after 300 pages that I really got down to business. I had the creature carve into steles near a broiling, tempest-ridden sea, in which hideous, malformed creatures swam, what he had learned. I will later on incorporate a few paragraphs from the novel so as to let you see how I failed, but that the struggle I was enduring is metabolized onto these steles. The significance as I see it is that I was living a parallel existence and that in my novel I was trying, unlike this memoir, fictionally, to describe what I was undergoing, seeking to emerge into another state, or at least evolve. I was not into transcending, that is another spiritual matter. What is truthful is that I had no idea at that time what I was working out on an unconscious level; only years later did I see the book differently, as I diary of a kind, a Bilsdungroman. Perhaps, to some degree, it was my own awakening of intelligence. Thirty-five years later I view the book as my first completed novel, one which taught me many things about the art or craft of fiction. Rereading it now, it could use an editor’s scapel, for it is long-winded here and there, but there are nuggets of personal insight which give me pleasure. By the way, have I ever attained choiceless awareness? I can say definitely not. Wouldn’t know it if it bit me on my ass. Like many of K’s thinkings or insights, I personally find them unattainable except for a handy few, much like a kid with a select grouping of marbles in his pocket and one good shooter — less is more. Never would make a good acolyte.

The very first story of the book was later published as a short story, “Covenant,” in Owlflight,  a reputable science fiction magazine. No more after that. Only now do I consider going back to that novel and see if I can edit it. I grow impatient as I read the pages because so much change has occurred in myself that other than a possibly good story, if thinned out, who that person is in that book is no longer the writer I am now, or the person I am now. It is more of a record of a younger self trying to improve or better himself as a person, to garner insight, to grow, to enlarge his personal spectrum about the world. I was having a literary dialogue with myself, which might be a good definition of any decent novel.

Writing has served me as a way to, a tao to comprehend who I am, for in writing I define and explicate myself, although beset and confronted on all sides by doubts, weak thinking, false self prophets, and all the rest that assails each one of us as we set out to say who we are in between the poles of pre-existence and death. I associate to K as a kind of handrail on a bridge which I use to steady myself as the heights below are sickening. As the years went on through the eighties and nineties after K’s death I continued to throw  stones across the water, but my interest in him waxed and waned and I discovered if I was faced with significant issues in my life I went back to read his thoughts on such and such. He was not my bible, but more of a Baedecker: after all, life was a demented tour, was it not?

As I suffer from cardiovascular disease, I have a fairly good idea of how I will close out my sentence here on earth. With that in mind almost every day I see as the last day. One does not run around with that knowledge like a chicken in a coop. One just gets on with it, a ruefulness descends and like everyone of  us we accommodate ourselves to the inevitable. What learnings we have gathered or I have learned really do not hold me in good stead. As  I observed K in his writings over the decades he was evolving. A deepening occurred in what he had to say and earlier themes were dropped or developed in different fashion. One cannot account for any creative expression; it just is. You cannot follow K, nor can you condense his teachings into some kind of mental or emotional flashcard to use at the moment. Like the flight of an eagle, it leaves no mark. I wonder what his purpose is for me. What is it that I require from him other than his illuminating psychological insights into human behavior. It is like asking, what is I want from Freud, what is it I want from my parents? what is it I want from the world? Am I a passive student or an active doer? What does Man want?

Once asked by a companion what did he think he attained after all these decades of teaching, for many listened but did not hear,  that societies were still riven, war continued on, religion exploited the masses, he replied, a rose has to give off its essence. I think ducks and drakes with K was perhaps just observing a fascinating presence work out his own existence in so many different ways as if he were modeling for us what we could do in our own idiosyncratic ways with our own idiosyncratic lives. I associate to the idea that we mere mortals often got too involved with what was really his litter, that which he dispensed with after he worked out things in his mind. I think of a friend of his, Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the great poets of the Twentieth Century. I can only imagine the conversation these two engaged in. Kazantzakis was a mystic, diplomat, novelist, who broke out with stigmata at times, and in his The Last Temptation of Christ and his magnificent confessional Report to Greco exposed his own struggle as a man to transcend, or as he wrote “to reach what you cannot.” Often I think of his epitaph: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Double Wow! and Whew! Kazantzakis and Krishnamurti have touched upon that latent, perhaps slumbering spiritual sciatica that has lain dormant within me.

Essentially how frou frou of me to be absorbed by ambition, greed, making money when my existence is so very short. Can’t I be serious about life?

During the seventies when I was engaged or “infected” by K’s teachings I began to integrate what I had learned as a therapist in training, all those readings of a different kind of masters and the writings of K. I spent an inordinate amount of time working on an extended essay in which I attempted to integrate psychotherapeutic learnings with that of K’s teachings. It never came to fruition. Essentially K had written  that psychotherapy is a method and inherent in a method is that someone or something is doing something to another. By applying a method you turn the other into an object, like a saw applied to wood. Someone is used or a victim of an application of a thought process or a method. For K this meant that psychotherapy, I gathered and assumed, really is not an engagement of the other but the use of a theory or method in the therapist’s mind being used on another. There is much truth to that; take a look at the diagnostic manual (DSM IV) used by psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers for within its pages are a plethora of definitions of mental behaviors, dysfunctions or diseases as well as many diagnostic “trees” splayed out with all their contingencies, all further adumbrated by examples and instances of this or that malady. So the therapist goes into his office with this armamentarium within himself. And, in effect, if I follow K correctly, the client, the person disappears or is reified, made much of a thing.

I sought to find a way in which choiceless awareness (that is a stunning concept that took me years to grasp) of  learning to see , and all that entails, to see clearly what is, essential concepts for K, could be brought into treatment. I had read a book in which Zen had been used but it suffered from too much theory in my eyes. In any case it was a conflictual experience for me, but I did try. What I observed about this wreckage was that I needed to read K for what he could give me, rather than  what I could extract from his teachings.Maybe they could not be applied as a rule or to others, but only as a self-discovery. Could be?

In the back of my mind was that therapy was method and I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could use what I had learned from K in some fashion and in some way in treatment. I wanted to integrate his teachings within myself. As I look back it did sneak in, my suggesting him to certain clients, my using words such as conditioning and deconditioning so that clients could understand what I was trying to achieve in their treatment. Here K might step in and go for half an hour about what I was doing was in many ways conflictual, sorrowful in the end, and a waste of time. I stick my tongue out at him. We can only do our best and at times I felt he was infatuated with intellect rather than with feelings. I associate to how it was with Freudians many decades ago. If you disagreed with them, especially if you were in supervision, you were labeled as resistive, defended, having oedipal issues with father Freud, suffering from this or that neurosis. A hermetically sealed trap, it was reductive and you could not escape. In Dan Wakefield’s wonderful New York in the Fifties he describes in detail his own treatment with a freudian, for this was the high time of psychoanalysis, and how ultimately he felt it had caused him inordinate pain; in one instance one could describe one psychoanalyst as cruelly indifferent to his anguish. In like fashion, K can be used to self-mortify the very person he chooses to teach. For his is also a worldview, of a kind, a unique way of seeing or thinking, but a worldview nevertheless, as I define it, as I see it, as I feel about it. Atmoments I did see him as a kind of freakof nature.

I wonder if others such as myself initially begin to imitate K, trying to be like him — a foolish and weary escapade, of course, but there were hints of that, as if trying to be like the master, but I soon relinquished this “craving” and chose to select from the buffet what I could eat without indigestion. indeed, K’s works have to be ingested, not sampled or tasted. He is not a boutique spiritual thinker, this is no Rachael Zoe, a stylist for the spiritual dilettantes. I wonder if the disciples of Jesus weakened their own sense of self and resolve as they latently tried to manifest the master’s internal and very special characteristics. If I can out mendicant the mendicant, might I not become better than he. Ah, competition, envy and ambition, and what a religious/spiritual racket it is.

At this time period Krishnamurti died in 1986 and I wrote a short story and a very short essay, both melancholic and depressed, about  the impact of K’s death. As I reread them now they are not worthy of being included here for they smack of the  state of imbroglio I was experiencing at the moment and at the struggle I was going through. I have surpassed all that and they are reminders of my life in which angst ruled as I dreaded on a daily basis my daily indoctrinal work as a teacher. I resented and abhorred the very occupation for it was all drill and conditioning and preparing the next generation of dimwits to vote for the Tea Party. In my book, This Mobius Strip of Ifs, I clearly set forth my displeasure in three essays which describe my feelings and thoughts about teaching in America, or what Paul Goodman called “growing up absurd.” I was part and parcel of the Eisenhower expectorate of the Fifties.

In the mid seventies I was reading the works of a Freudian, a unique psychoanalyst at that, Robert Langs. As I began to take in his teachings which were very complex but quite telling, like K, he was one of a kind, and a school grew up around his teachings. At the same time I continued this and that book of K which struck my fancy. The Flight of the Eagle, Think on These Things, The Awakening of Intelligence were  read in that order and then followed, I believe, by The First Freedom, You Are the World and a few others in addition to whatever books I could read by friends of his as he grew up under the hovering wings of the Theosophists, and Anna Besant who he called “mother.” Years after he would reject all this and set out on his own as a thinker. Intrigued by the boy “messiah,” any details I could garner I thought might help me lasso or corral this most unusual thinker — to no avail. However, what I learned about him was delicious gossip.

He was spotted on an Indian beach by Charles Leadbetter who was a Theosophist and rumors were that he was something of a pedophile, although that hasn’t been determined. In any case he experienced the young Krishnamurti as having an unusual aura about him and reported back to Besant about what he had observed. Shortly after, he was somehow finagled, weaned, absconded with,  whathaveyou into her home and she became his adoptive parent, taking the young Krishana and his adored younger brother to England. He was separated from his father, his mother having died previously. What I learned was that he was dressed by the finest tailors in London, sent to school where he was a nondescript student, reared in this peculiar environment which smacked of esoterica, illusions, incantations and astral projection in which one has the capacity to leave the body and soar eleswhere — combine all this together and it makes for fascinating reading, a touch of Madame Blavatasky who had studied with the lamas in Tibet and Gurdjieff, the perennial wisdom, some salt, some pepper and you have an odd goulash for a young boy to be thrown into. I feel he was imperialistically nabbed as an Indian boy to serve the fantasies of mother Besant. In Yiddish this would aptly be described as meshuge or crazy.

I learned he was an English dandy, foppishly loved new clothes, enjoyed racing cars and quite mechanical with them, and before his experience in Ojai which changed him forever, one would not expect this coming messiah as amounting to much. According to Anna Besant and the Theosophists, his coming had been predicted and in Pupul Jayakar’s Krishnamurti A Biography she goes into exquisite detail about “The Young Krishnamurti 1895-1946,” with such chapter headings as “In Space One Is Born and Unto Space One is Born,” and “The Personality of J. Krishnamurti Has been Swallowed Up in the Flames.” It makes for good reading, delicious in its absurdity. The true story goes that Samuel Goldwyn offered a role as the Buddha in a new film he was producing which K rejected. He was an exceedingly good-looking young man and the press made much about this messiah who was in preparation to be the new world teacher, if I recall that lingo. In short he was coddled and pampered and infused with all kinds of esoteric junk, partial truths to my eyes. However, I cut him a lot of slack, given that environment, a stolen child serving adult and bizarre interests, a crypto-pedophile lurking about and who was his teacher and an impending old woman who had an interesting philosophical career herself in the arcane sciences of the east. In short this all happened and you can’t make it up. K was brewed like a good cup of English tea in this melange.

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.