As I look back upon the decades of reading Krishnamurti, I’ve sensed that the essential teachings I was attracted to are these: K’s concepts of seeing, choiceless awareness, the observer is the observed, and the understanding of what is. Other ideas came along for the ride: K’s comments and definitions about conditioning, how to look as if for the first time, his thoughts about radical revolution within the individual person, his questioning of all authority, indeed, even of what K had to say; his putting the onus of his dialogues on the listener or questioner; his commentaries on society and religion which I delighted in, subversive that I was. Like preaching to the choir, we often like what we already know at some level of intelligence or understanding, and so it was with me, except he said what I was feeling, more than thinking, so lucidly, so eloquently. I am one of those human beings who feels first, thinks later — Shoot me!

I almost blocked out an association I just had. At my age I go for broke, as my writing has that characteristic to it because I am constructed in this way. I want to stay free as a man and writer. Sometimes I feel, in my younger days, there was an air of servility in me, that is, as a learner I wanted to please, or be the good child or son. It was not a measurable substance at that, but it smacks of pleasing the other so that I would be favored, adored or recognized in some fashion. I see some of that when I went about “acquiring” Krishnamurti into my orbit. I was Jacob, not Esau. Make of this as you will. To return —

K’s writings infiltrated my teaching, practice as a therapist, and  life, to some degree. I wonder, as I reflect, if I wasn’t a parrot, good for a few vocabulary words and that’s all. Once you manage to get  a hang on K you have a ready lexicon to use, much like religion — eucharist, consubstantiation, transsubstantiation, the trinity, et al. And for some years, I imagine, I tried K on for size, working out his thoughts into my own language in a small array of articles, and as you’ve read, a novel. I was searching to apply his constructs, observations and testimonies in my own life and I can say it did not work as I imagined it might. Rather, I sponged his reflections inwardly and they leak out and are applied even to this day; they just dwell within me. I see his thinking reflected in my own personal attitudes often inextricably wound up in my psychoanalytic thinking and perceptions.  I find his idea of societal and religious conditioning monumentally freeing (especially so for me), once you allow yourself to enter, for if anything, you have to enter K as mercury seeking egress beneath a door. You have to come to K, for assuredly he will not come to you, nor should he, as is apparent in his writings. As he wrote, he wanted to set man free everywhere, yet he did not cajole, advise, stir up, appeal, persuade or any other human quirk to convert. He did not need or wanted disciples, but they did flock to him.

So in the human juice each one of us exudes everyday, K is part of my flavor. However, what is healthier now is a more balanced appreciation of the wizard of what is. Call it a good skepticism if you like. I am not capable as an academic philosopher raised in the West to abstract K’s testimonies and make comment, but they are decidedly experiential. I can more clearly view K dispassionately at this point in my life, see his flaws as a man, where before I challenged him, but overlooked “things.” Having read more about him as a man, I realize, as I didn’t before, how much of him was imperfect, not much of an insight. Rather, I’ve come to admire his teachings as one thing, his behavior as another — oh, the split. K has not changed, I have seasoned. I look back not with a jaundiced eye, for his genius was unique. I relent, that is, I am easier on myself for what I cannot grasp in his work, as if I was his doppelganger. He is K, I am me. I extract his presence which was too close, all a consequence of my own behavior, and hold him apart and away in order to see him better and his influence on me which was significant if not dramatic. I was a seeker, still am, have a philophical bent to my mind, quite useless in the land of Palin and Bachmann. He touched that in me, the desire to learn, to change, to better one self in ways other than capitalistic tracks set down for us all by this society.

Characteristically for all my life, I have had atendency to build up the other, over-esteem that person, and then if piqued, irked or hurt, degrade and demean that person. This cyclical behavior is seen by me and there is such an element for K in this writing. I have an appointment next Wednesday at 7.00.

As I write I think of an interaction I had with the next door neighbor, a likable woman in her forties with two youngsters in elementary school. She revealed an incident in which she came across two children in a local park who were left there by the father, the older sister to “watch over” the younger brother, both children under seven in an illogical, stupid and child abusive fashion. Concerned about these children, rightfully so, she called 911. Police arrived and in essence informed her, after speaking to the children, that under Nevada law, they could do so much, and in essence not very much in this instance, aggravating as it is to relate. What the father did was unimaginable, but a reality nevertheless. For my purposes here, in her telling of this incident our neighbor felt guilty in the sense that she called 911, but she did act appropriately — and she knew that. She was just feeling uncomfortable. I listened to her guilt feelings and then she said in passing, “As a Christian mother…” Everything was in all that; in fact she mentioned “Catholic guilt” in the telling. I did not smartass her and query what an atheist mother might feel, although it did cross my mind. What I found sad, if not appalling, was the conditioning in her, the religious lacquer that had polyurethaned her existence. So unnecessary, is it not? I see it, blind elsewhere in my own life, and she does not see it. This Krishnamurti and psychotherapeutic sensibility is always present in me.

What this anecdote just elicited in me was the feeling of being free, free of priests, rabbis and mullahs, of dogma and doctrine, of the deadening imposituion of school “learnings,” of a capitalistic system, in this instance, that defines poverty as a moral defect, and all the rest we imbibe in our mother’s milk. K spoke to that latent feeling in me to be free, free of my own parental and internalized injunctions about sex, of a defense system that camouflaged a child that needed to be felt, that caused me to use symbolically my own extremities to strangle my very self, to make me robotic, a stranger in a strange land, or to put it melodramatically, to never have had a close encounter with myself. To be free overrides the pursuit of happiness which is an insane idea to begin with, another American external we are taught to seek, much like the American dream which is entirely a nightmare, the soma, K might have opined, we give to one another, like Jim Jones ladling out cupfuls of cyanide in his compound.

In may 1987 I wrote this for my column in a local Forest Hills, Queens newspaper. In this instance I used a question by a student of mine, Debra Cavaler, age 16. Question: Why is it that when I read columns, everyone recommends counseling every time a question is asked? It isn’t that I disagree with counseling. There is nothing wrong with it, but I feel it builds dependency. Don’t you think it  builds character to cope with and solve’s life’s problems on one’s own?

By this time, eleven years into reading K, my response reveals how saturated I had become. The “Answer”:

The great spiritual teacher Krishnamurti (1895-1986) said that the way to truth is a “pathless land.” His desire was to set man free. “I desire to fee him from all cages, from all fears, not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosphies…I have no disciples, no apostles, either on earth or  in the realms of spirtuality.”

A psychotherapist should not convert his client into a Freudian, or Jungian. At termination of therapy, a client should be free of the therapist and the therapy. Although a therapist is a kind of secular healer working from a body of immense clinical knowledge, the issues are perennial — to see, to know to choose, to be autonomous and inner-directed, to be in relationship.

Life is a great teacher — if lived profoundly. Psychoherapy is one of many paths to tgruth and not for all.

Most of what we on interiorly is second hand, other people’s smarts. It is hard to be original. Some human beings are followrs, chamelons. Some find it hard to act from within an internal compass.

I believe we are conditioned, asleep in life. Our task is to decondition ouirselves, to defeat fear and anxiety.

Existentially, we are alone. Yet you are the world as well. The observer is the observed, Krishnamurti says.

Do you not sense that you rife, at moments, is driven by an engine and combustible not of your own making?

Some of us are seekers. Others work the soil of job, family and security. Some go along, quietly desperate. Some choose tofollow, for their emptiness needs grounding in a cause or leader. These are the hollow men.

Psychotherapy, a guru, a belief, a movement, a religion answer certain needs in men and women. A transcendent effort, altered state, awareness is sought by few.

Imagine mankind as a midnight croaking in an indifferent universe. We alone give meaning to ourselves. The task of anty significant philosophy, therapy or tent is to set someone free of any method or belief system.

Dependency is on a continuum. The human being’s lengthy childhood is a estament of the need to be succored. A dependency which inhibits,enfeebles, cripples, or narrows is a deteriorating relationship. Toask for help is not to be weak. And to give help to someone who is “weak” is to uplift both of you. The real task is to help each one of us to be internally, externally free.

So, to be in relationship is the crux of the matter, not solely one of dependency. The nub of your question rests on giving up something that you feel is vitally authentic, human and inherent in your very concept of who you are.

To see a need in oneself is not a kind of weakness, rather a point of departure. To ask for help dfoes not necessarily mirror an impaired sense of self. At times is iimportant to know how to lean. Some artists mistakenly feel, for example, they will lose their talents if they were analyzed. It is an untruth. Artists find new and more fertile fields to till in analysis.

Insight liberates. Seeing releases energies. Any therapeutic dialogue frees the individual from shadow, self-deception and conditioning.

The material world gives temporal pleasure and that is not to be denied. Putting on a brand new shirt feels good. Owning a new car gives a kind of empowerment. However, it is meaning and purpose, relationship, kindness, the love of a close one, friendship which enable us to live creatively, to live well anonymously, to accept our daily dying, our mortality, to leave worth behind us, and not chaos.

Psychotherapy is a significant collaboration of two people, no master and no disciple. It is a quest as well, a search, and at parting at the end. It’s nutrient is rich, mutual respect.

In society experts offer all kinds of answers, balms. Some of us are thrown off balance by questions and prefer the rock hard surface of an answer. Answers are a variety of finality, a kind of sediment that accrues, calcifying into rigid beliefs and systems.

A question unlocks and gnaws. It bites and signs. It challenges, riles and dares. It shatters; it sheds light. Perhaps the way to an answer is to pose another question and then another.

Your question provoked more questions than I’ve been able to answer. And like all intelligent questions both people, in dialogue, go away with more questions. This is very good.

To sit on the cusp of ambiguity, to entertain doubt, to question without need of answer is to create an internal awareness.

Think on these things! Krishnamurti might say.

After 24 years I would not change much except to be more felicitous in the writing of it. At 47 I could fling hash with all the rest of the Krishnamurti’s devotees. K had gotten under my skin and I was using what I had learned to experiment with, and that testing continued in other articles as well as you will see.