K Group Discussion 29th April, 1948 (reader & experientially friendly edited)

Final Words of Wisdom

K: We have been discussing the problem of individual transformation and why it has not been possible for you to effect immediate transformation. We saw that transformation can take place only in the Now and not in the hereafter; any form of approach which involves thinking in terms of time, evolution, growth, leads to postponement.
The (self-centred) thought-process cannot bring about ( a holistic inner) transformation since it implies a constant response (from the 'known'?) of the conditioned mind ( this conditioning is due to the psychological memory which is the residue of incomplete experience).

All human (related?) problems are changing and not static. Therefore, a mind that has a fixed opinion or a conclusion cannot understand a new problem. Emotions, feelings, cannot lead to transformation since they are within the field of the ( self-centred) mind and they are sensations. When we put aside all the above 'screens' or barriers (blocks ) to ( self-)understanding, what is left with us? When all these forms of ( calculated?) intellection are removed, there is an inward sense of creative being. There is no problem outside the mind; so, when the mind is cleansed, we are face to face with the problem. (Hint:) It is only when you directly experience this state that you will see what difference it makes.
What is the actual state of the mind when the mind is alert and when there is no action of ( one's past) memory on the problem or when there is no desire for a ( psychologically rewarding?) result?
We said that when the mind is not acting on the problem, we experience first a 'stillness' ( an inner peace?) . The whole content of one's consciousness, not merely the superficial layers, is quiet. (However?) if only the superficial layers only are still, the deeper layers will project themselves into the superficial and there will be the pulsations of the past, the promptings of the deeper layers. Therefore, this state of quietness where there is no such prompting, is the one corresponding to the quietness at all levels of one's consciousness. In that state, we are not ( concerned with?) naming and recording – this is the (integrated) state of experiencing, in which there is neither the 'experiencer' nor the 'experience'. When the experience fades away, there arises the experiencer and the experience, the thinker and the thought. This stillness is not the result of a desire. Desire or seeking a result creates action; from action the actor is born. Therefore, if there is seeking for a result, there cannot be stillness.

Question: Did I not ( in my attempt for meditation?) push out all the thoughts that arose in my mind, in order to bring about stillness?

Krishnamurti: No. Your ( global) understanding of the thought-process led to the thoughts dropping away by themselves. But... as long as you do not understand that ( the past?) memory cannot ( holistically) solve any ( inner) human problem, your effort to push away, which is based only on memory, cannot produce stillness of the mind. When you realize that no action of memory can lead to (self-) understanding, then ( the psychological ) memory ceases to function and the ( self-centred) mind is no longer acting on the problem, and therefore the mind is ( finally silent & ?) still.
In this state, the ( mental momentum of the 'psychological' memory of the ?) past has been 'wiped away' (put on hold ?) , even if it be only for a split second. ( Hint:) This memory is always waiting to creep in and therefore an (ego-centric?) thought may arise during this interval of stillness. The understanding of this ( possibility ?) makes the mind very watchful and very alert, but it is also still. The ( totality of the?) mind has now realized that all this has to be put away; therefore, all these (hectic thoughts?) drop away and the mind is silent. In that silence, there is only the ( integrated) state of experiencing - an inner stillness which is not static but with an extraordinary ( creative?) activity. Only the ( self-imposed) stillness which is the product of ( the knowledgeable?) memory, is static.

Question: My mind is now still and seems to be 'non-existent'(transparent?) .

Krishnamurti: If I tell you anything (felt very) strongly , you ( may subliminally ) accept it even if you have not (the actual) experiencing; this is (a very popular ?) form of 'hypnotism' ( aka : messmeric suggestion ? )

Question: When I understand that ( the mechanical response of) memory conditions, there is stillness. Then I tried to experiment with the suffering of another person whom I knew. I then felt as though I was myself suffering and not the other person of whom I was thinking. Then the thinking crept in.

Krishnamurti: We were trying here to find out what it means to have this constant revolution inside us, the inner regeneration. Regeneration is a new state ( of integrated consciousness of ) which I do not know (anything yet?) ; and I must approach it through negation, and understand it negatively.
Any ( mechanical) response of memory, however fleeting, cannot produce regeneration. When I see it, the response of ( my psychological) memory drops away. It may come back again; but, if I see it again, again it drops away. From every movement ( of this negative ?) thinking there is a creative existence. When ( the psychological?) memory is in abeyance, the mind is very ( naturally?) quiet. By constant watchfulness, this ( silent inner) 'interval' arises when thought does not act at all. What comes out of this interval is a natural expansive awareness which is not exclusive; i.e., there is a state of concentration without a 'concentrator'.

The (inwardly regenerative?) process is as follows : (a) one is inwardly watchful. (b) When any thought arises it is examined and its truth seen. Then ( c ) that thought 'drops away'. (d) The self-understanding mind is denuding itself of all ( its redundant?) thoughts and as a result (e) there is also the lengthening of the interval between thought and thought. ( f) When a new thought arises in that interval, that thought is examined ( ASAP?) with greater quickness & anew. ( Hint:) The lengthening of the ( silent) interval between two thoughts gives (to the earnest mind ?) a greater capacity to deal with any (self-centred) thought that may arise in that interval. (g) There is a ( renewed) vitality in this interval. In this interval all effort has stopped; there is no choice, no condemnation, no justification, and no identification; there is also no ( personal) interpretation of any kind.

Question: What is meant by examining a thought, in the state of silence? I suppose it is not merely to recognize it as a form of memory and to push it out, but to realise the significance of it.

Krishnamurti: We are trying to see if the 'new' (thought, challenge, etc?) can be met anew and understood without the burden of ( our psychological) past. Meeting of the new as the new is ( bringing its own inner) regeneration. I have understood a thought and that thought disappears. There is an interval of calm and clarity. Then another thought arises. How do I deal with that thought? Can you examine the ( incoming) thought without ( the help of) your ( previous?) memory?

Question: If I do not push that thought away, the thought ( unfolds & ) disappears of itself.

Krishnamurti: How do you deal with the thought without memory? Has not that ( silent) interval a relationship with that thought? Does not that interval which is a state of being which is 'new', meet the 'old' which is the thought arising? This means the new is meeting the old; but, (the experiential difficulty is that) the 'new' cannot absorb (incorporate?) the old. The old can absorb the new and modify it; but the new cannot absorb the old. Therefore ( realising this fine point?) the (silent intelligence of the?) new always extends and ( eventually?) the 'old' disappears by itself (dies of a 'natural death'?) . There is no exclusion, no suppression, nor condemnation, nor avoidance. It is in this manner that that ( particular self-centred?) thought arising in the (silent) interval (simply... ?) disappears.
( In a nutshell:) In that silent interval the newly (awakened intelligence?) is operating on the old and – as the old cannot be absorbed by the new - the thought ( withers & ) disappears. This ( thought-free ?) interval is extraordinary in that it is ( self-sustaining?) without effort, without choice.

Question: Will there be a 'pure perception' then?

Krishnamurti: In that interval, there will be a complete cessation of desires. That ( silent) interval is ( an integrated inner state of) alert, passive, choiceless awareness. There is cessation of desire, cessation of thought. In that state which is 'experiencing' ( the 'real thing'?) , any verbal communication is impossible & there is no ( material?) 'sensation'. If you and I are experiencing the same state, then, because it is non-sensuous, we can ( love & ) understand each other.

( To sum it up?) Regeneration is not a factor depending upon me; because, it cannot be brought about by any effort or any struggle on my part. In itself, that ( silent ) interval lives by itself and it also gets lengthened. There is a state of being without causation, with no time in it (no 'yesterday' producing 'today' and no 'today' producing 'tomorrow'), a state without time and yet living vitally. In other words, this is a ( self-sustained) state of being which is full of vitality, which has no causation and therefore timeless, and yet without death. There is also a newness which is not repetitive. That state is Creation. In that state a new birth takes place always, a ( regenerative?) transformation -not in terms of time- is taking place all the time.
(In a nutshell:) It is a ( most excellent?) state of real action without a cause, timeless, living and undergoing a transformation in itself. It is not one isolated experience but it is a state of constant experiencing. Therefore, ( this inner) regeneration is ( creating ) a constant revolution (of the new?) inside us, which will meet every problem anew. If that (integrated Intelligence?) is functioning, the 'new' meets the old without being contaminated by the old. Therefore, such a man can live even in the midst of a 'greedy' world without being affected by that (stream of collective?) greed, but himself altering (from the inside-out?) the greed in the world. This New (holistic Consciousness?) is always 'moving' and it transforms ( qualtatively?) everything it meets.

Now (for optional homework:) your difficulty is not in understanding (your countless personal ?) problems , but to have that (silent) interval between two ( self-centred) thoughts. Therefore, you do not have to strive to be 'good', to be 'non-violent' etc. You are only concerned with that ( silent creative?) 'interval' with which you can live from moment to moment. You have no ( personal?) problem ( no deeds to do ?) and nothing to maintain; for, as that (silent) interval functions, the problems as they arise will be promptly dealt with, by the (Intelligence of the?) New meeting the ( time-binding momentum of the ?) old without being in any way contaminated by the old.

As this thread is dedicated to 'lost & found' pages from the Book of Life, the following insightful notes are dating from the same period (Bombay 1948) and were recorded by Mrs Pupul Jayakar who was part of a rather select K discussion group ( the selected exerpts are from her remarkable book: Krishnamurti, a biography)

"The first discussions in Bombay in 1948 were confused and dispersed. A question was asked of K. His fluid mind took in the question and turned it back, challenging the questioner and the group to seek the answer within the field of self-knowing. K spoke slowly, with many pauses, bending forward as if each response was for the first time. He listened to his own responses with the same openness and receptivity as he did to the voice of the questioner. The energy of Krishnaji’s response was met by struggling minds, battling with confusion, conditioned to respond from memory and to seek solution from a higher authority, inner or outer, spiritual or temporal. We found Krishnaji’s way difficult to comprehend. We strained to understand the words of Krishnaji and to apply them to our own minds. We attempted to approximate, to reach beyond the word with the only instruments of enquiry available—memory and thought. But these were the very instruments that were being challenged, and there was a sense of bewilderment. The clues were missing and the mind, clinging to words, was a battlefield of despair and conflict.

The discussions proceeded slowly. K moved from thought to thought, pushing, blocking, retreating, advancing. In the very movement of this step-by-step observation of the mind, the thought process slowed down until, in an instant, the (inward) perceptions of the participants awoke, and there was direct contact of perception with mind and its flux. The first “seeing” of mind was the starting point of enquiry. It was the clue that unraveled and revealed and, in the very revealing, illumined the question and the answer.
The people who investigated with K were discovering the structure and nature of consciousness and the immense strength and resilience of the thinking process. To observe the movement of the mind caught in thought and to “see” its own inadequacy had in it the excitement and awe of discovery, of traveling uncharted terrain.

Thought held in its grooves could not break through its own bondage.But by discussion, seeing, observing, challenging, and doubting, the grooves in which thought moved and the process of becoming was born were being shattered.

A new methodology born of ( direct) seeing and listening was unfolding, new perceptions were awakening. A ground of observing and enquiry was being established. The energy generated by the question was not permitted to dissipate in the reflexive answers and responses that arose from the store house of memory. K was challenging the minds of the participants. Every cell in the body and mind of K was awake. His relentless questioning opened up the psyche; and as the muscle and tone of the listeners strengthened, the mind of K in turn was deeply challenged. In K’s very challenging there arose rare insights into the human condition. Like an antenna, K’s mind reached out to sense the minds of the participants. When the dialogue got bogged down or the group entered into sterile dialectics and the discussion was barren, K’s mind would take a leap, carrying the discussion out of its rut. He brought into the discussion the nature of love, death, fear and sorrow; feelings and situations that were of the skin and heart; and suddenly the discussion would come in direct, tactile contact with the problem.

The breakthrough in the discussions began one morning in 1948 when Rao Sahib Patwardhan said that the ideals and beliefs that had carried him through the political struggle had crumbled under him. He was faced with a blank wall and felt that the time had come for him to reexamine his fundamental beliefs. Then he turned to Krishnaji and asked him what he meant by “creative thinking.” Krishnaji, who had been sitting quietly, listening intently to Rao Sahib, sprang to his feet and sat down next to him. Leaning forward, he said, “Do you want to go into it, Sir, and see whether you cannot experience the state of creative thinking now?” Rao was perplexed and looked at K, unable to comprehend what he was saying.

“How does one think?” K began. Rao responded, “A problem arises, and to meet the problem thoughts arise.”

K asked, “How do you try to solve a problem?” “Find out an answer,” said Rao.

“How can you find an answer and how do you know that it is the right answer? Surely you cannot see the whole content of the problem—how can then your answer be the right one?”

“If I do not find the right answer the first time, I try other ways of finding it,” answered Rao.

“But whatever way you try to find an answer it will only be a partial answer, and you want a complete answer. How then will you find a complete answer?” K was blocking all movements of the mind—refusing to defuse the energy held in the question.

“If I cannot see the problem completely, I cannot find the right answer,” Rao responded.
“So you are no longer looking for an answer.”
“No.”
“You have shut off all the avenues seeking an answer.”
“Yes.”
“What is the state of your mind when it is no longer looking for an answer?” My own mind was quite blank, but this was not what he was getting at. We were missing something.

During a discussion a few days later, K spoke of memory as the “I” consciousness, the factor that distorts and hinders understanding of the present. He separated factual memory from psychological memory—the “I” will be, “I” should be. Then he asked, “Can we live without psychological memory?”
The discussion proceeded slowly, and I lost interest. My mind darted away in pursuit of some desire. The more I tried to concentrate on the subject, the more restless the mind grew. I was so disgusted that I let it roam. Soon I found that it settled down, and for the first time that morning I listened to what was being said.

Professor Chubb of Elphinstone College had entered into an argument, and I listened. Could memory drop away? I asked myself. I did not want to be free of the “I” principle. I had built it up so carefully; why should I be free of it? I would be lost.
Then I felt curious to find out whether one could drop memory. There was an immediate clarity. I started watching the mind. K was saying, “What can you do, Sirs? You are faced with a blank wall. You can’t just leave it, you have to do something.” In a flash I spoke: “Drop memory.” Suddenly, my mind was clear. K looked straight at me. The clarity deepened.

“Go on,” he said. “What is the state of your mind when you drop memory?” It was as if the fifty people were gone, and there were just K and I. “My mind is still,” I said. Suddenly, I felt it—a quality so potent, so flexible, so swift and alive. He smiled and said, “Leave it, go slow, don’t trample it.” The others tried to intervene to get at what I had experienced, but K said, “Leave it alone, it is so delicate, don’t strangle it.” When I left the meeting he came to the door with me and said, “You must come and see me, we must talk of it.” I had the feeling my mind had been washed clean.

As the intensity and clarity generated in the dialogue became evident, we were eager to continue. And on days when public talks were not held, we met and discussed with K. Most of the questions that arose concerned the urgency of ethical action in the midst of a chaotic society, and it was only later that the fundamental human problems—envy, ambition, fear, sorrow, death, time, and the agony of becoming and not achieving—were to surface and find expression.
In later years K wrote, “To be still after tilling and sowing, is to give birth to creation.”

As the discussions proceeded through the years, various analytical enquiries were made; tentative and exploratory. We questioned without seeking immediate solution; rather, we developed a step-by-step observation of the process of thought and its unfoldment—penetration and withdrawal, every movement plunging attention deeper and deeper into the recesses of the mind. A delicate, wordless communication took place; an exposure of the movement of negation as it met the positive movement of thought. There was the “seeing” of fact, of “what is,” the releasing of energy held in “what is,” which is the mutation of “what is.” This was again perceived from various directions to examine its validity.
The nature of duality and nonduality were revealed in simple language. In that state of questioning—a state where the questioner, the experiencer has ceased—in a flash “truth” was revealed. It was a state of total nonthought, the ending of duality. At the end of the discussion many of us felt as if our minds had been freshly bathed.
In later years K was to say of these discussions, “The mind which is the vessel of movement, when the movement has no form, no ‘me’, no vision, no image, it is completely quiet. In it there is no memory. Then the brain cells undergo a change. The brain cells are used to movement in time. They are the residue of time and time is movement; a movement within the space which it creates as it moves... When there is no movement, there is tremendous focus of energy. So mutation is the understanding of movement, and the ending of movement in the brain cells themselves.”

The revelation of the instant of mutation of “what is” provided a totally new dimension to the whole field of intellectual and religious enquiry.
Years later I said to Krishnaji, “Having a personal discussion with you, one is exposed to a nothingness. It is like facing something totally empty. There is nothing except ‘what is’ as reflected in oneself. You throw back on the person exactly ‘what is.’ ”
K replied, “That is what Aldous used to say. But when K throws back, it is yours.”

When he arrived in Delhi, I went to meet K alone. He told me that he had dreamed about me (he rarely had dreams). “Listen to what I say. I am going to talk as if I were you. I am a Brahmin born of a tradition of culture and learning with a background of intellect and sensitivity. In this background there is a vein of weakness, of crudeness. I spent my childhood in a civil servant’s house. I ate meat and was made to reject my Brahminism. I went to Europe, married, had a child, a severe illness. I went blind, life used me and left its mark on me. I grew ambitious and cultivated ruthlessness and denied sensitivity. In meeting people I have absorbed and reflected their coarseness or their sensitivity. I have not had the intelligence to meet coarseness with intelligence. Then Krishnamurti came. At first I saw in what he had to say a way of sharpening my brain, but soon I was caught in it. In the most powerful influence I had known. And all the time, although I denied my Brahmin background, it was there, the main contradiction, the Brahmin background never understood but rejected, and so I am always in conflict.”

Then he said, “You see the picture, the patches, the lights, the shades, the crudeness, the sensitivity. What is it you feel when you see the picture as a whole?” I said it was a mess, and asked what I could do to straighten out the contradiction. Surely I must be able to act in the contradiction.
He said, “You are still concerned about doing. But any action on your part will mean adding another patch. Why can’t you just see it? It is you, with all its shades and lights. What is the use of prejudice or pleasure? Just absorb it and see yourself as you are, clearly. Then you will stop bridging the coarseness and sensitivity.”
“That is, I must stop trying to be sensitive, when I am coarse.”
“No,” Krishnamurti replied. “You cannot do anything. Just watch the truth of your 'bridging', which you are constantly doing.” This was the first time I had heard him refer to the background and the necessity of understanding it. I asked him how it could be understood.
“See that it is there in all its richness, its fullness, its thousands of years of racial memory. Then when it next projects itself, you will see it and there will be instant understanding and the end of conflict with it. You cannot reject the ( racial) background, for it is there as much as your arm or skin. You can only understand it, and understanding it be free of it.” A little later he said, “What man needs is that contentment that is in the earth when it has given birth to a tree. In a bush when it has produced a flower.”

This post was last updated by John Raica Sat, 11 Aug 2018.

Here are ( flash posted !) a few very inspiring 'lost & found' pages from W. T Stead's 'Letters from Julia' For one thing, they do justice to what K called in his last years of life listening ( & also thinking ?) with 'the mind in the heart'

September 27th 1896.

It is a mistake to say that there is no longer time in which to think. With the increased rush there are many oases. But, with the continued rush there disappears the capacity to utilize them. And what I wish to do to-day is to point out some of the methods in which the lost Meditation-time may be recovered. What I want Meditation-time for is to get a chance at your soul. The mundane and material veil the soul from us. We catch fitful glimpses of your soul as if through thick hanging clouds. We want to see more of it and to influence you more in Time with the thought of Eternity. And the first way to help is to teach you how to utilize your spare moments. Here let me answer that thought of yours as to the idleness of purposeless meditation. It is not my purpose that your meditation should be purposeless.

What you have to do is to take the first steps towards the realization of the Divine. This you can do only in one way. Where Love is, God is. There is no formula so true as that. To get man into the presence of God, make him love. And the worst sign of the latter times is when the love of many has grown cold. But do not quench the smoking flax. Break not the bruised reed. Wherever life is, love is not impossible. For the complete absence of love is the final cessation of life. Love is often latent as heat is. But the development, the expansion of love - that is the growth of life. Hence the use of the Meditation-moment is primarily the development of Love. And this can be done quite simply by giving the Divine nature within each a free chance to assert itself.
For all around man lies the quickening spirit of God. And you have but to allow it a chance, instead of hustling it out of the way, to see the God-germ grow.

Must man, then, think first of himself and not of the others? Now you are surprised, but what a man ought first to think of when he meditates is himself. What am I making of myself? For love begins at home. And if a man is cruel to his own soul - - ? No, you must care for your higher self, the God within. What are you doing with that? Giving it exercise? And what? Since when has it had an opportunity of doing anything worth doing? And are you stunting or starving or killing it? Soul-murder - are you guilty of it? For it is possible to murder your own soul. And then the next thought must be, My enemies, what good have I done them? For an "enemy" is the man with whom you have failed. It may not be your fault, but if he is your enemy, you have failed; for it is failure when any fail to realize that One is your Father, and all ye are brethren. Whom you dislike, that is an enemy - a failure. Have you done anything to make him a success? You may do nothing. But have you thought kindly of him, pitying his blindness and his shortcomings, longing to see him better? But sometimes it is best kindness to punish? Yes, I know you are quite right in thinking that there are times when it is necessary to punish evildoers; but as you punish, love! And remember that punishment without love is not of God. Have, then, a list, long or short, of the people you dislike, and run over them lovingly. Out of joint with this, with that, with the other - this is not in the Divine order, and you ought to try to be in charity with, that is to like, all men. Then your friends, and those to whom you are related. Your success depends upon individualizing. Take each in turn. What have you done for him, for her, since yesterday? What have you left undone? In short, evil is the want of thought. Think - a loving thought is a prayer. You have not time to pray? Then make time to think of those you love. Without thinking on to people you lose vital connection with them. To all men and women you know you owe some duty, however slight. It may be a smile, it may be a word, it may be a letter, it may be praise, it may be blame; and there is more love needed to blame rightly than to praise. But whatever it is, it is due from you to each of these. Have you paid your dues? Not in the lump but to each his due?

What is the excuse for the unkindness in the world? What is the cause of most of the sadness? Not poverty of this world's wealth, but poverty of loving thought. You do not think; you forget. You neglect for want of thought. You allow the love that is in you to grow cold. For love dies when you never think of the person loved. Therefore think of them all. If you can do nothing else, think of them lovingly; for the loving thought of a friend is an Angel of God sent to carry a benediction to the Soul. Yes, in this way we all fulfil, or help to fulfil, our own prayers. When you think with real feeling and earnestness of another's welfare and long to help him, you do help him. Here is, as it were, the secret source whereby the fire is fed which would else have flickered out and died. Oh, my dearest friend, if you only knew the power of thought, and if you would but think, think, think! Do not forget that the supreme need of the Soul of Man is time to think ( & meditate ?) , which means time to love, i.e. time to live.

(...) But the doorway into the Infinite is the 'Soul' (see K's 'Mind' ?) , and the Soul is lost. When you have no time to think, no time to pray, you have no time to live. Therefore you must before all else make time.

S: Easier said than done!

J: Oh, my dear friend, you waste more time in brooding over the Past which you cannot recall, or in anticipating the evils of the Future which you may never meet, than would help you to possess your Soul in the living Present. What you do not seem to see is that the Soul (the Mind ?) is not a mere abstraction. It is the Power which enables you to do all things. I speak the most sober and literal truth, when I say that if you did but possess your Soul and exercise its powers, Death or separation in this world would cease to exist for you, and the miseries which haunt the human race would disappear. For the whole of the evils that afflict society arise from the lack of seeing things from the standpoint of the Soul. If you lived for the Soul, cared for what made the Soul a more living reality, and less for the meat and drink and paraphernalia of the body, the whole world would be transfigured; you have got a wrong standpoint and everything is out of focus.

I do not say neglect the body. But make its health and ease only the means to the end. The body is only a machine. The work that it does ought to be for the Soul. What you do now is to make the ( body) 'machine' everything. It consumes on itself its own force. The wheels go round, but nothing moves. And in the whirl of the wheels the Soul is lost. No I must repeat once more - you must find time to live. At present you have lost your Souls even partly by the strain ( effort ?) of trying to find them. I mean that much of the so-called 'religious life and works', while good in their way, constitutes no small addition to the preoccupation of time which renders Soul-life impossible. It is possible to lose your Soul in Church as well as on the Stock Exchange. If you have not leisure to be alone with your Soul - it does not so much matter whether the rush and whirl and preoccupation is ecclesiastical or financial - the Soul is lost, and there is nothing to do but... to find it again.

This post was last updated by John Raica Tue, 11 Sep 2018.

Here are for our readers' fun & pofit a few 'lost & found" pages from Sidney Fields' memoirs of K dating from the early 30's in Ojai, California

( ...) Here I was, at the threshold of adult life, just beginning the whole painful business, when Krishnaji kindly called me up to invite me to spend a week with him at Arya Vihara. Rosalind and Rajagopal were going to be away that week, and I’d have a chance to relax and be alone with him, to do anything I pleased. To be in Arya Vihara with Krishnaji, away from Hollywood and my sordid problems, loomed like a bit of paradise to me.

A pleasing warmth and the fragrance of orange blossoms filled the peaceful Ojai Valley the afternoon I arrived at Arya Vihara. Krishnaji was sitting alone on the front porch of his private cottage, behind the main house. There was a feeling of great peace and power about him. He said how happy he was that I had come. This remark presented an opportunity to ask him a question that had often come to mind. I said, “Krishnaji, does the presence of a friend, one you’re fond of, make you happier than the presence of just anyone who might come in from the outside?”
His smile told me immediately that he knew the meaning of my question. He answered, “I am truly happy that you are here, Sidney, but if you hadn’t come I’d be just as happy.”
That took the wind out of my ego’s sails, but after all, I reasoned, what else could he say and remain consistent with his view of complete self-sufficiency?
We then went for a long walk in the coolness of the late afternoon, behind the Thatcher School, in the shadow of the great Topa Topa mountain, enveloped in its darkening robe of dusk. All his life Krishnaji was a great lover of Nature, and it was always fun walking with him because you felt the bubbling sense of joy he experienced in the outdoors. As we tramped over the brush and rocks, I couldn’t help but think of the remark he had made earlier in the day, pulling the rug out from under me, when I had asked him, indirectly, if he had any favorites. It was, perhaps, an impertinent question, for it was obvious that a man like Krishnaji was really not one of us, even if he was concerned about our problems and sorrows. He was a man alone, unentangled, unattached, living on the mountaintop like a solitary eagle.

After a delicious vegetarian dinner that evening, we went into the kitchen to help wash and dry the dishes, a chore that Krishnaji had imposed on himself to help the aging cook. Then we moved into the wood-paneled living room, where Krishnaji built a fire in the fireplace. Both of us sat on a couch, watching the fire without making a single comment. There is something wonderfully relaxing about dancing flames and crackling wood in a fireplace. Tonight, however, the psychic atmosphere in that charming old California bungalow, given to him by a friend, was not conducive to relaxation. The feeling was more like that generated by a giant dynamo. There was a powerful force concentrated there; it was almost physically palpable. It didn’t surprise me, though, for many times before I had felt it in Krishnaji’s presence, although never with such intensity.

Krishnaji was one of those rare persons who could be perfectly relaxed in the company of another while completely silent, and I had visions of spending the whole evening with him just watching the fire wordlessly. I kept thinking about a remark he had once made to me, that he was like a deep well, out of which each person took as much of the quenching spiritual waters as he was capable of drinking. Unfortunately, the highly charged atmosphere tonight had a curious effect on me. Instead of sharpening my sensitivity, it dulled it. Perhaps I had eaten too much. Whatever the cause, my usually meager capacity to drink from the Well of Wisdom had diminished alarmingly. I simply wasn’t able to frame any kind of question appropriate to the occasion.
At length, Krishnaji got up to stoke the fire. He turned and faced me, straight and austere, regal in appearance, a prince in faded Levi’s and worn cotton shirt, his expressive black eyes alight with a great fire. All at once, the veil of unawareness that had obscured my perceptions vanished. I felt entirely vulnerable.

“What do you want out of life, Sidney?”
“I’m not sure, Krishnaji. I thought I knew in Eerde, when I walked under the tall trees with you. I felt sure then that I could face any situation in life with serenity, confidence. I felt I would never lose that inspiration. Today, after battling with lawyers, bill collectors, and sitting for weeks in the witness chair in Superior Court, I feel like a truck had run over me.”
“Forget about Eerde, what you felt and thought and did there. When you divide life between the beautiful woods of Eerde and the ugly business world of Los Angeles, you create a hopeless conflict. You long for a memory and fight the reality of your life now.”

“You’re telling me to fully accept my present situation, without complaining.”
“No, to accept is an attitude of the mind. To understand is to see, to perceive at the deepest level, and be free.”
“I understand and perceive this, Krishnaji. That I am unhappy, in pain, frustrated. A life without conflict, such as you talk about, seems to me, at this point in my life, totally out of reach.”
“It’s really easy,” he said casually. “But you complicate things. You don’t let Life paint the picture. You insist on doing it your own way.”

“You’re a spiritual genius, Krishnaji. Most of us don’t have any particular talent in that respect.”
“No, no,” he protested. “That’s just an excuse for not facing yourself. The very fact that you are here with me now shows you have the potential.”
“I thought I did a while back,” I said, thinking of the great joyous laughter I had experienced. “It’s gone now. That’s the sad part of all this. You have moments when you think you’ve made a breakthrough, then the next day you’re in the soup again. Men like Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter spoke about moments of great illumination, but they lost it, all but the memory of it.”
“They tried to hang on to it,” said Krishnaji, as if he were well acquainted with the lives of these great mystics. “They didn’t let it come to them.”

**“Are you in constant touch with the Reality you call Liberation?”

“There’s no separation,” he said. Then, after a moment: “I am an example. I have cleaned the slate. Life paints the picture.”**

There was a long silence. The fire crackled in the fireplace; the wind whistled in the orange grove. Then Krishnaji spoke about a subject we had often discussed before: the importance of being a "spiritual aristocrat", which he obviously was to his fingertips, of totally rejecting the deadening mediocrity which engulfed the world, of abandoning oneself to that great spiritual adventure which is unique to every person.

“You have had great teachers,” I said. “You have reportedly taken several initiations and have been especially trained and guided for your role as World Teacher. Is it reasonable to expect that we who have not had any of these advantages can attain what you have discovered?”
“I took the long road to find the simple Union. And because of that, because I have attained, you too can find the simple Union.”

I had quickly scribbled some notes, which Krishnaji thought useless. We talked some more and then Krishnaji picked up his big Mexican hat and sauntered out, advising me to go to bed early, that I needed the rest. But that would prove a difficult task. I went over my notes and expanded them, then glanced at some of the interesting books on the living room shelves ( Krishnamurti was a contemplative mystic, not a studious man of letters. His favorite reading was mystery novels, and he also enjoyed nonfiction books, especially about nature. His “library” was more a collection of books presented to him by some authors he knew and other gifts) My mind was racing; there was no possibility of sleep. I went out for a walk, but quickly returned because of the evening chill. Arya Vihara is a spooky place at night. I had been told that Dr. Besant had magnetically sealed off the place to keep “uninvited astral entities” from loitering on the premises. But the fact was that the night noises here were scary. No doubt they were caused by the expanding of the wood in the daytime with the heat, and the contracting of it with the evening chill. The effect, however, was disturbing. On top of it was the great force generated by Krishnaji, which did not leave with him. The house still felt like the central dynamo of a power plant.

I went to bed, closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep. Impossible. The creaking, thumping, bumping noises no longer bothered me. It was that inescapable, pervading, challenging power that filled the house which I seemed unable to adjust to. At about three in the morning, without a wink of sleep, I could no longer cope with what a friend of mine had called “Krishnaji’s roaring kundalini.” I got dressed and went out for a long walk. The sun was peeking over Topa Topa when I returned. I had walked miles, but I was so filled with the restless energy I had “caught” at Arya Vihara that I felt I could have walked back to Hollywood.

At breakfast that morning Krishnaji asked me if I had had a good, restful night. When I told him what had happened, he laughed. I said, “I thought if I didn’t get out quick and walk fast I’d go out of my mind, like Fenn Germer.” Fenn Germer was a young devotee of Krishnaji’s who had worked for him at Arya Vihara and Eerde, and who had to be taken to a mental institution after suffering a nervous breakdown.
“The trouble with Fenn was that he had completely repressed sex. I don’t think that will ever be the case with you, Sidney,” he laughed.

strong textI stayed on several more days at Arya Vihara, enjoying Krishnaji’s companionship, the unique beauty of the valley and the fine weather. They were restful, happy days. Either I had become adjusted to Krishnaji’s “roaring kundalini” or else he, compassionately, had turned it off for my benefit. There were no more serious discussions. I helped him clean the stable, which a sloppy cow kept messing up, helped with the dishes, took long walks with him, talked about unimportant things, laughed and read the “nut” mail. Krishnaji’s “fan” mail, which was voluminous, was answered by his secretary in Hollywood. But the “nut” mail he kept aside and showed me for my edification. One hilarious letter was written only along the margins of the paper. It stated that both the writer and Krishnaji were “electrical eggs” specially hatched in order to save a crazy world. There were suggestions on how the world’s redemption might be accomplished, including instructions on how to prepare certain foods, and when to eat them, in order to attain enlightenment. This letter should have been preserved; only a totally scrambled brain could have written it.

In the car, just before leaving, thinking about the inner treasure I had discovered at Eerde, but had not found again at Arya Vihara, I said, “I want to rediscover something that I first experienced at Eerde.” Krishnaji was silent for a long moment, during which I thought, uneasily, that he might ask me what it was I had experienced. He didn’t. He said simply, “Go ahead, do it.”
About this time a big event occurred at Arya Vihara: Rosalind and Rajagopal became the proud parents of a baby girl, Radha. The new arrival became the center of attraction. Krishnaji was completely upstaged by the baby, and he seemed to enjoy it. He became very fond of Radha, picking her up at every opportunity and planting a kiss on her baby cheek. It was fun watching Krishnaji in his new role of “loving uncle.” Radha would grow into a lovely child who fully returned Krishnaji’s love. She called him Krinch.

This post was last updated by John Raica Mon, 17 Sep 2018.

For our readers 'fun & profit" here are more excerpts from Sidney Field's book of memoirs entitled "The Reluctant Messiah' .

(...) In the summer of 1925, we had just settled in our new home in Hollywood and were awaiting Krishnamurti and his brother, Nitya, who had been invited over for tea. My father had already met Krishnamurti ; I was thrilled, but also disturbed since I was sure he would see right through me—just an ordinary boy who had completely failed to live up to the precepts of the Order of the Star. I wished the visit could be postponed. If I tried hard, I might be able to improve myself, but I needed time. It was the middle of the week when my father announced that the visit would take place that Sunday—not much time for self-improvement! I was greatly tempted to feign illness, or to stay away on the pretext of having to attend an extracurricular school activity. But the desire to meet the World Teacher overrode all other considerations. I waited for their arrival upstairs, looking out a window into the street, my heart beating fast.

At long last a sleek black limousine stopped in front of the house. Two slim, smartly dressed young men stepped out of it. I immediately recognized Krishnamurti. He and his brother walked slowly toward the front door, stopping for a second to check the house number over the front porch. When the doorbell rang, my heart was pounding so wildly against my ribs I thought it must be heard by everyone. I heard my father’s voice greeting them in the entrance hall, and their answering voices. There was no escape now. My knees felt weak, and my mouth tasted like sawdust.
Father introduced me to the visitors, who smiled, called me by my first name and shook hands. Each of them said something which I didn’t really hear for the thumping of my heart. Krishnamurti’s wonderfully expressive black eyes were fully on me as I stood staring at him, speechless and immobile. I think he was conscious of my overly excited inner state, for he took his attention off me momentarily and talked to other members of the family. I was grateful to him for that. Soon I began to regain my composure.
Nitya, well informed on the world situation, took command of the conversation. Annie Besant had taken the two boys to England while they were still in their teens for a proper education, which took better with Nitya than with his older brother. He spoke with the polish of an English gentleman, and with incisive wit tore into the inflated postures of various world leaders in the news. Nitya was very funny and had us all in stitches, particularly his brother, who would explode with his contagious, boyish laughter. A well-known newspaper writer friend of ours, who had begged to be introduced to Krishnamurti, was the only other person present besides the family at that little tea party. Afterward, he remarked that although Krishnamurti was much the better looking of the two, in his opinion Nitya was cast more in the mold of future World Teacher. Everyone was very much impressed with Nitya. He had a special charm, and he made you feel at ease with him. But Krishnamurti’s physical beauty and the extraordinary and luminous quality of purity that radiated from him set him apart.

Whether you believed in the claims made for him or not, everyone who met him agreed that he was indeed special and unique, all the more so because he seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was not like other men. He was so unassuming and vibrantly alive that you were immediately drawn to him. He asked about Costa Rica and said he would like to visit it some day. Then, turning to me, he inquired about my activities at Hollywood High School. I had to admit I was not a particularly good student, but, I added, I managed to get by. He laughed and said that he, too, had been a poor student. He was leaving shortly for Europe, he told me, then India, before returning to Ojai, a little town about eighty-five miles north of Los Angeles. He asked me to visit him there, which pleased me immensely.

I think Nitya, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was not feeling well at this point, because Krishnamurti kept glancing at him with concern. Suddenly he got up to go. I had heard my father refer to the young Indian teacher as Krishnaji, but I didn’t know whether it would be proper for me to address him likewise, so as we were walking out to the car after the visit I asked him, “Should I call you Mr. Krishnamurti, or Mr. Krishnaji?” He smiled, amused, and said simply, “Call me Krishna.”

Some months after that first meeting, Nitya died in Ojai while his brother was on his journey to India. Krishnamurti has written about the great grief he suffered when he heard of his brother’s death, and of the mystical union he had felt: “On the physical plane we could be separated and now we are inseparable ... For my brother and I are one. As Krishnamurti I now have greater zeal, greater faith, greater sympathy and greater love, for there is also in me the body, the Being, of Nityananda.” It was a turning point in his life.

Upon his return to the States, I called him in Ojai. We made an appointment to meet at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Ingleman, where he always stayed while in Hollywood. I was still very self-conscious and shy with him, and since he has never been known as a great extrovert, our conversation was necessarily somewhat labored. There was, however, one subject that mutually interested us and helped establish an easy rapport: automobiles. I found out that he knew a great deal about them and that he loved fast and expensive European cars. He had a big Lincoln, he told me, but was going to trade it in for a Packard, which in his opinion was the best American car. He promised to let me drive it. He was curious about the kind of car I was driving and accompanied me outside to see it. It was neither a Packard nor a Lincoln, but for a kid of eighteen it was a car to be proud of, an elegant-looking Jordan, long since gone.

Some weeks later I visited Krishnamurti at Arya Vihara, the six-acre estate which Mrs. Besant bought for him in the Ojai Valley, whose name in Sanskrit meant “the monastery of the noble ones.” He had already acquired his Packard and reveled in showing me all its special features. It was beautiful, a sky-blue, sleek, convertible roadster. He did not ask me to try it out, and I was relieved. The idea of putting a scratch on this beauty froze me with apprehension. He told me proudly the time he had made with it on his first trip from Hollywood to Ojai. I was envious. He asked what my best time was. I hated to admit it, but it was much slower than his. I vowed to myself I must do something about it. I stayed for lunch and met Rama Rao, one of Krishnamurti’s close associates, a sweet and gentle person with soft, doe-like eyes twinkling with humor.

A couple of weeks later I paid another visit to Arya Vihara. This time I drove the family Cadillac. (My father would never lend me his new Cadillac for any other reason than to go and see Krishnaji in Ojai.) I had managed to cut his time by two minutes and a half! He was surprised but a little skeptical. I was prepared for that, however: I showed him a stopwatch I had set upon leaving my home in Hollywood, and the time it marked as I arrived at Arya Vihara. He was convinced, but instead of congratulations he gave me a little lecture about speeding which somehow lacked conviction. I promised him I’d take it easy. After all, there was no reason to speed now: the new record had been set.

We went inside, and I met Rajagopal for the first time. I liked him. He had a good, quick mind and a sense of humor. We had lunch, and then Krishnaji took his siesta. Later we went out for a long walk behind Arya Vihara and had our first serious talk. I asked him whether he was in contact with Nitya on the other side. “Nitya is here,” he said. “He sends his love.” But he would not elaborate. When I pressed him for an explanation, he stopped and looked straight at me. He said the important thing was not whether the personality survives bodily death but the quality of relationship here and now.

“Have you always been clairvoyant?” I asked him, hoping to draw him out on that subject.
“Clairvoyance doesn’t really help,” he said. “I can see my family in India any time I want to. They’re all starving.”

When we got back to the house, Topa Topa, the highest peak of that broken range of mountains that cradles the valley, was bathed for a brief period in a soft, rose-purple hue that is not to be found on any painter’s palette.
I returned to Arya Vihara a couple of weeks later. Krishnaji appeared to be in great shape. Sometimes he seemed a bit tired and haggard; on this day he was radiant. He was outside doing some gardening and came directly to my car before I had a chance to get out. Gleefully, he related that a few days before he had driven to Hollywood in the Packard and had broken my record by a full two minutes! Before I could say anything, he exclaimed, “Smoke that!”
“Didn’t you get a speeding ticket?” I asked, hoping that he had.
He laughed and shook his head, like a kid who had done something naughty and gotten away with it. It had been early in the morning, he said, and there had been hardly any traffic on the road. Still, it was an impressive performance. I knew how fast I had driven to set the previous record, and what chances I had taken.
“I can’t compete with you. You have the Masters on your side.”
Krishnaji laughed and pointed at his Packard in the garage. “That’s on my side,” he said. Thus ended my racing competition with Krishnaji. A sleek Packard roadster and what I considered the protection of the White Brotherhood were odds I couldn’t beat.

Krishnaji was very much interested in what young people were thinking and feeling, and he asked me if he could meet some of my young friends. That was easy. With the extensive media exposure he was getting, everyone wanted to meet him, especially girls, who considered him “dreamy.” The girl I was going with at the time, Dorothy Taft, a pretty young lady whose father, a prominent realtor, had developed and subdivided most of West Hollywood, was delighted at the prospect of meeting the handsome young Brahmin. She collected a group of her friends who were attending the exclusive Marlborough School for Girls, some eighteen or twenty of them, all very attractive and impressionable. We met at her home on Sunset Boulevard on a warm Sunday afternoon.
Krishnaji was very nervous and wondered what he should talk about to a crowd of young girls. I told him not to worry, that the girls were probably not so much interested in what he had to say as in looking at him and being with him in the same room. That made him all the more nervous.
Dorothy’s parents and her actress sister, Sally, met us at the front door. Then Dorothy escorted Krishnaji, elegantly attired, into the living room. I was behind him and could hear the subdued “aahs” and “ohhs” of the excited girls as he came into view. Dorothy introduced him much as you would a motion picture superstar. He glanced apprehensively at me and sat down, surrounded by a semicircle of lovely teenage girls, all of them eager to be impressed. Seated on chairs and cushions on the floor, they kept their eyes riveted on the handsome but uncomfortably self-conscious young man from India. He fumbled with his handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his face. So did I. The silence that ensued began to worry me. What if he just sits there in utter silence, I thought. I had had experience of how easily Krishnaji could lapse into a long, deep silence. Then a sudden change occurred in him. Calm and composed, he began to speak. He spoke about the different lifestyles of American and Indian young people, their different attitudes toward courtship, marriage and the raising of a family. The girls seemed to love the short talk. There were questions afterward, which he answered very adequately, I thought. Some of the girls had bought copies of At the Feet of the Master and rushed to him for his autograph. There were some refreshments and many thanks, after which the girls insisted that he come to their school and speak to the entire student body. Krishnaji promised he would, and we left.

Getting into the car, he asked me if I thought he had handled the situation well. I told him he had handled it beautifully. For the first time I reflected on the interesting phenomenon that would occur many times in the future, when the shy, uncertain and self-conscious young man would suddenly become full of poise and authority.
Driving him back to the Inglemans’, I asked whether he had been aware of the strong atmosphere of sex pervading the living room.
“Of course,” he replied.
“Isn’t it distracting?” I asked. “What can you do about it?”
“You bank your sex force. You don’t let it disturb you.”
“You’re different,” I said. “It’s very hard to control thoughts. They go where they want to. I’m sure every girl in that room was fantasizing about getting in bed with you.”
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed.

That weekend Krishnaji’s Packard either was being serviced or loaned to a friend. At any rate, he was to be without a car, and I volunteered to drive for him. He made me feel I was doing him a great favor when in fact it was the other way around. He asked whether I could pick him up at the Ambassador Hotel the following day before dinner, around six. He gave me the room number I should go to, and left it at that.

Promptly at six I drove into the Ambassador Hotel parking lot and went directly to the room he had indicated, full of curiosity about who he was meeting there. My imagination was running to all kinds of things.
I knocked at the door and waited. Then I heard somebody’s steps approaching. The door opened, and I was face to face with John Barrymore. The great actor looked me up and down rather disdainfully. I said I was there to pick up Mr. Krishnamurti. Recognizing my voice, Krishnaji came over and introduced me. Barrymore gave me a gruff “How do you do” and turned around and went back inside, probably wondering why Krishnamurti allowed his chauffeur to appear on duty without his uniform.

As I drove him home, Krishnaji told me that he had met Barrymore through the actor’s agent, Henry Hotchener, whom I knew, and who was married to the former opera singer Marie Russak, a prominent Theosophist friend of Annie Besant.
Krishnaji liked Barrymore. He thought he was an interesting, witty man. I asked him, “What do you talk about with Barrymore?”
“The Buddha’s life, mostly,” he answered. He explained that Barrymore was interested in Buddhism and thought that the Buddha’s renunciation was one of the most dramatic and inspiring events in history. The actor had told him that he would love to play the role of Buddha in a movie but so far hadn’t been able to sell the idea to any of the movie moguls.
Krishnaji, who always emphasized the positive side of a person’s character, was impressed by the fact that Barrymore, an alcoholic, totally abstained from liquor on those particular weekends when he came with John Jr., his young son, to visit him. To Krishnaji that was a sacrifice born of love that commanded respect.

Krishnaji had invited the celebrated actor to come to Arya Vihara in Ojai and have lunch with him. Barrymore delightedly accepted the invitation, after solemnly promising to keep the appointed day the soberest of his life.
Free from any alcoholic influences, John Barrymore set out for Ojai on a bright and sunny morning to spend the day with his distinguished friend. While driving through the town of Ventura, however, he was seized with thirst. He parked his custom-built Lincoln convertible outside a bar and went in to ask for a glass of water. According to his account, the waiter brought him a beer instead. You can never rely on waiters, he later told Krishnaji, tongue in cheek. Contemplating the cool, frothy, golden liquid, he thought: what’s one little beer to a man of purpose? Another little beer followed, then another, and then another. How many, he couldn’t recall. Some time later, his thirst quenched, he got into his car and resumed his journey. Miraculously, he arrived at Arya Vihara in one piece, though he was more than an hour late for lunch. Krishnaji, the perfect host, had waited for him. Barrymore staggered out of his car. With an unsteady gait he managed to climb the porch steps of Arya Vihara, knocked at the door—and practically fell into Krishnaji’s arms.
Afraid that the noted visitor might not be able to make it back to Hollywood, Krishnaji invited him to stay overnight. Barrymore wouldn’t hear of it; he could never put Krishnaji to such an inconvenience. He had made it to Ojai, and he would damn well make it back to Hollywood. And so he did.
The next day, realizing that things had not gone according to form, Barrymore wrote Krishnaji a letter apologizing for his fall from grace. He enclosed a large photograph of himself, dedicated “to the only man I have ever met who treads the path of the great Indian Prince, Siddartha Gautama.” In his letter, Barrymore added that he was more determined than ever to do the life of Buddha on film, with a slight change in the casting: Krishnaji would play Buddha, with Barrymore cast as Buddha’s favorite disciple, Ananda. Obviously, he was now thinking of The Life of Ananda, with Buddha in a supporting role!

The following week Krishnaji was back in Hollywood to visit with us. As he entered and greeted the family, I noticed that he kept his right hand extended slightly in front of him, rather stiffly. He asked me where the bathroom was, and after showing him, I inquired whether he had injured his hand. “No,” he replied. “It’s Norma Talmadge’s perfume.” He explained that earlier in the evening Barrymore had taken him to Norma Talmadge’s home and that he couldn’t get rid of her perfume after she shook his hand.

Krishnaji told us of an occasion when he was walking alone in Yosemite National Park and a huge grizzly bear came menacingly toward him. Krishnaji stood silently before the animal, only a few feet away from him, quite calm and unafraid, so he said. They eyed each other for a long moment, and then the bear quietly ambled off. So did Krishnaji. But when he got back to the safety of the inn where he was staying, his body trembled all over. He explained that fear is often a purely physical reaction of the body when it senses danger to itself.

The following year Krishnaji returned to Ojai with Dr. Besant, Rajagopal and Rosalind Williams. The devout had arranged a welcome for him and Dr. Besant at the Southern Pacific station in downtown Los Angeles. Besides a small crowd of curious spectators, there must have been some three hundred or so devotees, mostly women, excitedly holding bouquets of flowers in their hands. My father, brother and I were also among those present to welcome him, sans flowers.
As Krishnaji and Dr. Besant walked along the concourse toward John Ingleman’s waiting limousine, there was a chorus of welcoming shouts from the women, who started to throw flowers at their feet. Krishnaji recognized us just
then, waved a hand and proceeded to do a nimble danse macabre trying to sidestep the tender things at his feet. One of the curious bystanders next to my father turned to him and said, “If that’s the Christ, I’m the Devil’s brother!” My father fixed him with a stern look and said, “Maybe you are.”
Battling through the shower of flowers, Krishnaji and Dr. Besant finally made it to the waiting car. I caught a glimpse of Krishnaji sitting next to the window, a forlorn and puzzled expression on his face as the flowers kept coming his way, smashing against the window pane and collecting on the car top and hood. By the time they pulled away, the Ingleman limousine, laden with welcoming flowers, looked like a funeral hearse.

A few days later Krishnaji called to invite me to Dr. Besant’s lecture at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Since Krishnaji and Rajagopal were driving in from Ojai, I met them at a box they had reserved close to the stage. The place was packed. Punctually at eight-thirty, Dr. Besant stepped onto the huge stage of the Philharmonic, dressed in a long-sleeved, flowing gown that matched the silvery white of her wavy hair. As she acknowledged the audience’s applause, I kept thinking how very small she looked on that huge stage, and how paralyzed with stage fright I would be in her place. Dr. Besant, Krishnaji had told me, was one of the greatest orators in the world, but I wondered whether she would be able to hold this restless audience. She stood silent and erect before the lectern, waiting for the crowd to quiet down. Then she started to speak, slowly and deliberately, with that beautiful, distinctive diction of the cultivated Britisher, and a magnificent command of the language. As she got into her subject, “Civilization, Its Past and Future,” Mrs. Besant unleashed a power that kept the audience riveted to their seats. An extraordinary transformation had taken place. The little white-haired lady who stepped onto the lecture platform became a commanding force of tremendous stature, holding the capacity audience in the hollow of her hand. She spoke without notes, and without the slightest hesitation—always the right word, the right intonation, the right climax at the right moment. It was a masterly exhibition of oratory and an amazing display of historical knowledge. Krishnaji had asked me to go to Ojai toward the end of the week and meet Dr. Besant personally, so I left right after the lecture, glad to avoid the crush of people that were attempting to go backstage to meet the famous Theosophist.

Some days later I shook hands with Dr. Besant in the wood-lined living room of Arya Vihara. I was greatly impressed by her, but in a different way than at the Philharmonic. Here, in the privacy of her home, she was the embodiment of gentleness and graciousness. I was enchanted by a soft, feminine quality that emanated from her, in sharp contrast to the regal, austere style of her public personality. We sat down and spoke at length. She told me that Krishnaji had spoken to her about me, and she seemed very much interested in my Costa Rican background, my family’s role in founding the Theosophical Society in that country, my school work and my plans for the future. When I rose to say goodbye, I felt like hugging her, there was such a genuinely sweet and motherly quality about her. Well could I understand Krishnaji’s devotion to her.

I had been seeing Krishnaji on an average of twice a week when he stayed in Hollywood at the home of John Ingleman on Beachwood Drive. We talked, or we went to a show, or he came over to have dinner with my family. Then there were times, before his annual departure for Europe or India, when I couldn’t seem to get to him. He was busy interviewing people, meeting the press, dictating letters. My usual personal problems, the kind most young people are afflicted with, had become aggravated at this time. I felt it imperative to talk to Krishnaji, but I couldn’t seem to reach him. Finally I got him directly on the phone. He said to come right over. I did.
As always, Krishnaji appeared serene, happy, carefree. On that day, his peaceful spiritual aura had a strange effect on me: it irked me. Misery demands company. I sat next to him on the couch and excitedly protested that nothing was working out for me. Life was a “drag.” He remained silent. Of course, he probably couldn’t understand someone with real problems, I went on, for his life had always been smooth sailing. He had everything everybody wanted: money, fame, friends, independence, the freedom to do what he wanted most, and all this without ever having made any effort to get it; it had all been handed to him on a silver platter ever since he was a boy. Where would he be today if it hadn’t been for Dr. Besant and her rich and influential friends? What did he know about loneliness, fear, unrequited love, boredom? I was trying hard to get a rise out of him, but the more I tried the more I got a sickening sensation of just punching the air, a very empty feeling that finally put a stop to my diatribe.

When I had gotten it all out of my system, he put a gentle hand on my knee and silently gazed at me. Suddenly I had the disconcerting feeling of something having been punctured inside of me, and all the hot air going out. After a long moment he said, “That’s a great case you built against me, Sidney,” “Why don’t you try to come over to my side of the fence?”
I said I wished I could, but it seemed impossible. We talked a while longer. I apologized for my rude behavior, and he brushed it lightly aside. I’m sure it never touched him. That was precisely why I felt like such an idiot.

I drove him back to Arya Vihara the following day. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, and Krishnaji spoke glowingly of the beauty of the green hills, the lone tree standing by the road, the drifting clouds, a bird in flight. “You say you have attained to the basic unity of life,” I said. “Does that mean that you know exactly what it means to be a bird in flight?”
He thought for a moment and said, “It’s not quite like that. Because I know real beauty, I understand the significance and special beauty of a bird in flight.” He went on to say that while watching the different manifestations of Nature you don’t become “a bird in flight,” or a “tree by the roadside,” or a “drifting cloud.” But because you have touched the real source of Beauty, Nature reveals its inner beauty to you. Then, to bring the conversation around to a problem that was bothering me, I asked if it worked the same way with people: in other words, did people reveal themselves to him as they were, with all their ugliness, their problems and their good things? “It’s not the same thing,” he answered. At this point I asked him point-blank about my problem.* As I spoke about it, I was aware of how childish and silly it sounded. That it amused Krishnaji didn’t surprise me. But I felt that from the mountaintop where he dwelt, some of the petty problems that worried human beings didn’t really concern him. And that irked me. He told me how to tackle the problem, but I felt his answer was inadequate and superficial, and I was disappointed and angry. However, some years later I asked him the same question, and with great patience and comprehension of the situation at its deepest level, he told me how to proceed. I followed his advice and realized what a master psychologist he is. He had given me the golden key to the problem. It was like opening a large window into a stuffy and airless room.

Before reaching Arya Vihara, I asked Krishnaji about sex. “I’ve heard so many different opinions about your views on the subject,” I said.
“Forget about what you’ve heard,” he returned, “and think of sex simply as energy, energy to be used to attain a goal.” He knew I played a great deal of tennis and asked, “Would you indulge in sex prior to a tennis match?” I said no, not if I wanted to win. “That’s just the point,” he said quickly. “If you want to climb a mountaintop you conserve every ounce of energy.”
“Does that mean a man who would attain the highest must be an ascetic?”
“Not at all. Asceticism as a goal is destructive. There is the biological need for sex, and there is also the need to conserve energy in order to attain a goal.” I knew Krishnaji had met D. H. Lawrence, a great literary favorite of mine at the time, and I asked him if he had read a recent interview published in the Los Angeles Times in which Lawrence said that in his opinion liberation was only possible momentarily through sex. Krishnaji laughed. Then he was pensively silent for a moment. “Liberation is sex inverted,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, perplexed.
“Think about it,” he answered, a half smile on his lips.
I’m still thinking about it.

( more 'for fun & profit' excerpts from Sidney Field's memoirs on K : )

(...) Krishnaji was soon leaving for Europe and the Camp gathering at Ommen in Holland, in June 1928, so my family invited him, Rajagopal and Rosalind Williams, who had been staying at Arya Vihara, to come for a visit. This was the first time the family had met Rosalind. A beautiful girl, blonde and blue-eyed, she had a guileless quality about her that was very attractive. We all liked her.
It was a very pleasant social evening. One thing stands out from it clearly in my mind: Krishnaji asked my father whether, following my graduation from Hollywood High, he would let me go with him to the forthcoming Camp gathering at Ommen, and the pre-Camp gathering at Castle Eerde. The family was obviously pleased by this request, and I was thrilled.

Accompanied by the whole family and some friends, I was bid farewell at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, where the prestigious Sunset Limited train would take me to Chicago. (Airplanes were crossing the country, but they carried only mail and the occasional intrepid solo flier out to establish a new distance record.) In Chicago I was met by friends who put me on board the Century Limited to New York. After two days of freedom, a little confused and bewildered by the great city, I anxiously stepped on board the great cruise ship Rotterdam, flagship of the Holland American Line, and departed for Holland.

Five days later, after a smooth sailing with a festive crowd, I arrived at Rotterdam, a tremendously busy port city with masses of bicyclists on every street. A taxi took me directly to the railroad station, where I boarded a train for Amsterdam. I rode through flat, beautifully cultivated country of blazing poppy fields—crimson, white, yellow, pink—and arrived a couple of hours later. With some friends I had met en route, I went on a boat trip through one of the city’s picturesque canals. I fell in love with Amsterdam immediately and wished I could stay there a few days. However, I had promised Krishnaji I’d go directly to Ommen, so I called Castle Eerde to say I would take the five o’clock train. Krishnaji’s liveried chauffeur met me at the little Ommen station in the official Mercedes Benz convertible, and we drove on to Castle Eerde.

It was a misty evening when we arrived at the Castle Eerde estate. I shall never forget it. We drove slowly through a wide avenue of tall, magnificent beech trees, their heavy tops swaying gently, forming a whispering canopy overhead as they reached playfully toward each other in the mists. The tunnel of luscious, velvety greens framed the dim outline of the eighteenth-century castle at the far end, a scene reminiscent of a Walt Disney fantasy of the enchanted entrance to the legendary abode of Prince Charming.
The ornate wrought-iron gates were opened, and we were about to drive in when the chauffeur stopped the car to let a wandering deer leisurely cross the road. The deer looked at us curiously and trotted off. The chauffeur explained that Krishnaji had given orders that the deer in the woods had the right of way. The unexpected pause gave me a chance to get a first view of the great old castle at just the right distance. It stood serenely, in all its dignified splendor, facing the formal lawn and gardens, surrounded by a wide moat that was spanned by a broad, elegant bridge leading up to the stately entrance. The castle, together with its five thousand acres of surrounding woods and meadows, had been given to Krishnaji by Baron Phillip van Pallandt, a wealthy Dutch aristocrat and devoted friend.

I suppose I expected Krishnaji to meet me on arrival, or at least to be greeted by someone with a smile and a cheerful word. No one was around. The chauffeur showed me to my room in the annex, a new wing that had recently been built to accommodate guests. Presently, a Mrs. Christie came to meet me with the unwelcome news that I was one of the first guests to arrive. I asked to see Krishnaji. Instead, Lady Emily Lutyens appeared. She seemed to be in charge of things, and although cool and aloof, with the appearance of a Victorian matron, she had an old-world charm that was very appealing. She informed me that Krishnaji had arrived the previous day from London with a bad cold and would be unable to see anyone for several days. Tough luck for me, I thought: I should have stayed in Amsterdam for a few days, as I had wanted to, playing tourist with some of my traveling companions. Still, I was here, in this fabulous place, with Krishnaji, whom I would probably see in a couple of days. Women were always overly protective of him because of his childlike innocence and magnetism. Meantime there would be books to read and records to play.

After a quiet dinner in the large, formal dining room with its elegant decor, I wandered around the place, admiring the priceless antique furniture, paintings, ancestral tapestries and objets d’art. It was a magnificent place, regal yet unpretentious, truly befitting its master.
By the time I returned to my room, it had started to rain. Suddenly I felt terribly alone, thousands of miles away from my home and family. The next few days were most depressing. It rained continuously. One couldn’t even go out for a walk through the beautiful woods because the paths were a series of impassable puddles. The few arrivals were older people who seemed to disappear into their rooms to “meditate and commune with the higher levels.” The whole thing was a terrific comedown from the last few weeks of partying and fun. I presumed this
period of “quiet introspection,” as it was put to me, was a necessary prelude to the spiritual experiences ahead, so there seemed to be nothing to do but stick it out.

One evening I cornered Lady Emily after supper and asked her about Krishna’s health. When would I be able to see him? “Whenever he’s ready,” she replied sternly. “And by the way,” she went on, “now that Krishna has attained complete union with the World Teacher, it has been decided that we should all address him as Krishnaji, not just Krishna.” She went on to explain the meaning of the “ji” after the name Krishna—an honorific term of affection and respect.

I was so excited about seeing Krishnaji that I hardly slept that night. I was also hurt about the long silence and made up my mind to be cool, aloof and distant, and to let him know how I had felt these past ten days.
The next day I knocked at his door on the second floor of the castle promptly at three. My heart was beating fast when I heard his voice asking me to come in. To judge by Lady Emily’s previous reports regarding his condition, I expected Krishnaji to be pale, thin and haggard. But the man I saw as I opened the door, sitting cross-legged on a low dais, clothed in a golden robe over his white dhoti, was the most radiant, beautiful human being I had ever seen. He literally took my breath away as I stood, immobile, gazing at him. It was an unforgettable moment. He smiled and said, “Come in, come in, Sidney,” and motioned for me to sit on the dais alongside him. I advanced tentatively, and, overwhelmed with emotion, sat beside him. Out of politeness I wanted to ask about his health, although he certainly had never looked healthier since I had known him, but I was unable to say a word.
After a long silence he said he was aware that I had been unhappy. I nodded. He went on to say it was inevitable I should feel let down after my social activity of the last few weeks. I wondered how he knew about that, as I hadn’t seen him or communicated with him for over two months, but I figured it was a reasonable assumption. His eyes were particularly luminous as he gazed at me. Then he said, “I’m glad you canceled your trip to Paris.” This really startled me, as I had not told anyone about my plans. “Paris is a beautiful city, but it’s a rotten hole,” he added. When I found my tongue, I said I intended to visit it after the Camp. The conversation then drifted to the beauties of the castle and the estate, which he promised to show me personally in a few days, when we would go for a long walk through the woods and pastures. There was another long silence, which I felt was an invitation to discuss my problems. But at that moment there were no problems of any sort. I felt a great peace and contentment. The visit was at an end. As I got up to go, he told me that almost all the guests had arrived and that tomorrow morning he would give a short welcoming talk in the library.

At eleven o’clock the following morning, we all assembled in the spacious library and sat on a beautiful Persian rug facing Krishnaji, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, the only piece of furniture left in the room, under one of the magnificent seventeenth-century Gobelin tapestries made expressly for the castle. He started his talk by saying that we had all been together with him in past lives and would be together with him in future lives. (I mentioned this remark to him recently and he said, very surprised, “Did I say that?”) It was a short talk in which he briefly outlined what he wanted to do in the world: to set men free, to help them stand on their own feet, free of all authority.

At some point during the talk, something extraordinary happened to me. For no apparent reason I experienced a sudden outburst of intense joy in the region of the heart. It went on and on in increasingly strong rhythmic waves, until I thought I would have to open my mouth and shout for joy. It was an experience that practically lifted me out of my body, something I had never felt before or thought I could ever feel.
After the talk I stayed by myself, hoping to preserve the fragrance of that indescribable moment as long as possible. Alone and undisturbed under the leafy shade of a tall elm, I felt the joyous force quieting down to the rhythm of my breathing, bringing with it a sense of great peace and up-welling love. As the days passed, it receded into the background. I looked forward to my forthcoming walk with Krishnaji in the hope that he might be able to ignite again the inner spark that had given me such a great high a few days before. I longed to be swept up again in that joyous flame that had made the world appear purified and innocent, as if it had just come into being that morning.

We did go for a walk, Krishnaji and I, but the longed-for experience did not happen. Nevertheless, there was a wonderful feeling of lightness, clarity and serenity. We walked leisurely, and mostly silently, under the big trees and over seldom trod dirt paths, where brightly colored butterflies darted in and out of light and shadow. Krishnaji seemed intensely aware of every changing mood of Nature, of every living thing around, even the bugs under foot, which he was careful not to step on. I told him that I thought he had given an inspiring talk when he welcomed his guests, but never said a word about the spiritual experience I had undergone. It was too new, too fragile to discuss, like a tender plant that must be carefully nourished and not exposed to any strong wind. I felt I must tend it with my own hands, uninfluenced by anyone. I had previously experienced the way Krishnaji, at the least expected moment, would drop a casual remark that packed all the force of a Caribbean hurricane, wiping you out. I was taking no chances.

Just the same, I skirted around the subject, anxious to get his viewpoint on a matter of such vital importance to me. “Before you attained your goal of Liberation,” I asked, “did you have any special experiences, like... well, a great sense of joy and freedom?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“What did you do about it?”
“Nothing. I never pursued such experiences.”
“But if you felt that such an experience was an important signpost along the way, did you encourage it?”
“I looked at it with great awareness, with affection, to find out where it was leading.”

The long summer days slipped happily into weeks. There were more walks with Krishnaji through the lovely woods, and several informal talks when nothing revealing or profound was said because there seemed to be no need for anything except being there and enjoying his company.
The last talk I had with him, however, was disturbing. I had just graduated from high school before coming to Eerde, and although I had never been particularly devoted to schooling, I did intend to go on to college. All I needed was a little encouragement. I didn’t get it from Krishnaji. When I asked him if I should continue with my education and pursue a career, he responded with the same sentiments he had expressed in previous talks with me: that the only important thing in life was to learn to be inwardly free, unconditionally free, to attain liberation. Everything else was a waste of time. “Do not waste your time. Every day counts. Set your goal and concentrate all your energy in realizing it,” he said again and again, his whole personality afire with the personal goal he had set for himself, to set all men free.
To forget about education and a career and become “liberated” was not the best advice to give to an impressionable boy just beginning to open his eyes to a new world. This counsel, I suppose, was in line with Krishnaji’s views and feeling about the world then, but to judge by his views on education later in life, I very much doubt he would have continued to recommend it.

Through the years there were changes in Krishnaji’s technique of communication and his manner of conveying his teaching, which, generally speaking, appeared much sharper and more lucid in his later years. Perhaps he himself foresaw this many years ago when I said to him, after one of his early talks, that I had not understood what he was trying to say, that it was too choppy and disconnected. He answered, “Yes, I muffed it this morning. I’m trying to say something about a new dimension, to convey new meanings, but my words are interpreted in the old way. Like a painter expressing something new, I’m learning a new technique. It’s not easy.” He paused for a moment and then added, “But wait until I’m sixty...”

Lazy, contemplative days followed, as well as exciting, fun days. There was rowing around the picturesque moat surrounding the castle, and there were games, mostly volleyball, in which Krishnaji sometimes took part. There was the fun of making friends with interesting people from many lands, and the challenge of self-discoveries. I felt immensely grateful to Krishnaji for having given me the opportunity of being there with him, a sentiment which was hard to convey to him, for he refused to have anyone beholden to him. At all times he radiated a spiritual quality that sharpened one’s awareness and sensitivity.

The happy days at Castle Eerde came to an end too soon. The guests started packing, ready to move on to the Camp grounds, within the estate, about a mile from the castle.
It had rained early, clearing in the late afternoon, when Krishnaji and I went for a walk in the woods. The sky was streaked with color and summer light, and the ground under our feet was redolent of brown leaves and damp earth. We walked in silence for some time. The thought that I would probably never see this extraordinary place again cast a shadow of sadness over me. I tried to recall some of the more significant and special moments of my memorable stay there. Instead, a kaleidoscope of unrelated, inconsequential events flashed through my mind: Krishnaji walking alone through the woods, sporting his new black beard and looking frighteningly Christlike. Lady Emily agitatedly asking me to talk in Spanish to one of the guests, a prominent gentleman from Puerto Rico, and ask him to please abstain from spitting when he went out for a walk. (The culprit spat in rapid succession from each side of the mouth with great force and purpose, as if intent on setting some kind of record.) “It’s most antiesthetic and unsanitary,” Lady Emily complained.
A visitor from C. W. Leadbeater’s manor in Sydney, Australia, excitedly explaining that he couldn’t understand what Krishnaji was talking about because he was not a “bodhisattva man.”

I knew I was not likely to see Krishnaji during the Camp Ommen lectures, so I said goodbye to him as we stood for a moment by the main gate to the castle. I said a few words of gratitude that seemed entirely inadequate and gave him an "abrazo", or Latin embrace. He did likewise, told me how much he had enjoyed having me there, and said that we would be seeing more of each other later on. That was the cue that released again that wonderful burst of joyous laughter, lifting me to the treetops and leaving me speechless. Fortunately, I had already said goodbye, so I just walked away into the woods. It was dusk when I returned to my room in the annex. Everyone had already left.
While I waited outside for the chauffeur to return and pick me up, I reflected upon that great joyous gift, the spiritual legacy of my trip to Castle Eerde, and made up my mind that this time I would not lose it. But I was to learn, in time, that this was not the kind of experience you make up your mind to have, on command. It was a totally spontaneous thing that happened, or didn’t happen, and could not be invited, coaxed or cajoled. But at the time it was a great beginning to the Camp session and, to me, the most important thing about the proceedings. I remember, too, how Krishnaji’s fireside chanting in Sanskrit was always delightful, his voice melting with the crackling fire and soaring upward with the dancing flames.

So, that's pretty much everything of any spiritual significance , were it not for a late entry dating from the 70's :

(...) "My brother, John, died early in January, 1972. His death was totally unexpected and a great shock to me. John had been a photographer, a lover of adventure, women and wine, a man of great Latin charm. He had known Krishnaji as long as I had, and had many times delighted him with his stories and personal adventures. Krishnaji had just arrived from Europe and was staying in Malibu at the home of Mrs. Zimbalist. I called him to give him the sad news,
saying I wanted to see him, and he asked me to come the following day for lunch.

He greeted me most affectionately. At the dining table I came right to the point: “Has John survived his bodily death in a subtler form? Yes or no?” There was a moment’s silence. “My gut feeling,” I went on, “is that he is here beside me, right now.”
“Of course he is, right here beside you,” said Krishnaji. “He’s very close to you, and will continue being close for some time.”

Two hours later we were still deep into the subject of death and the hereafter. He referred to that part of the personality that survives bodily death as an 'echo', instead of an 'astral body', as the Theosophists call it, the echo of the person who lived on earth, the duration of its life on the other side depending on the strength of the individual’s earthly personality. “Dr. Besant’s echo, for instance,” he said, “will go on for a long time, for she had a very strong personality.”
“Your viewpoint here is very similar to that of the Theosophists,” I said.
“With one important difference,” he replied. “There is no permanent substance that survives the death of the body. Whether the ego lasts one year, ten thousand, or a million years, it must finally come to an end.”
Krishnaji’s remarks during this conversation were among the most revealing and enlightening I had ever heard him make on the subject of death and survival beyond it.

(...) Krishnaji’s increasing concern with the importance of education and the establishment of a Krishnamurti school and center in Ojai dominated his activities at this time. There were many meetings and discussions, with Krishnaji often becoming impatient when reminded of the enormous cost of such an undertaking. “You people of little faith!” he once exclaimed at a meeting, stressing again the urgency of rechanneling education.

Large funds were needed, and everyone tried to help. My very small contribution consisted of bringing a wealthy gentleman friend of mine, who knew about the school plans and the need for money, over to Mrs. Zimbalist’s to meet Krishnaji. Mrs. Zimbalist was a charming hostess, and the occasion turned out to be a pleasant social afternoon. But the gentleman in question was much more interested in pushing his own pet project, than in furthering Krishnaji’s. He proposed having a seminar at Saanen attended by prominent leaders in education, psychiatry, and the arts, a group he had collected around himself, to share the platform with Krishnaji in discussing world problems. Krishnaji’s answer was short and to the point. “At Saanen,” he said, “only this dog barks.” The potential contributor took a last gulp of tea and the conversation became noticeably chilly. So ended my fund-raising efforts.

Late of an April afternoon we went for a walk along the Malibu beach, a cool sea breeze blowing in our faces. Krishnaji was more talkative this time than on previous strolls. The beach was unusually deserted; even the sea gulls were scarce. The great empty space and the calm, blue sea were exhilarating. “I suppose if one could see clairvoyantly out there the place wouldn’t appear so empty,” I said. “People, sea elementals...”
He interrupted. “The place is full of them. I pay no attention to them.”
“Do you see them every time you come out here?”
“Only when I want to.”
Since the subject had been broached, I took this opportunity to ask him about Invisible Helpers. “Do such people really exist?”
“Why not?” he said. “Any decent person in this world will help another when in need. Why not on the other side? What’s so special about it?”
Since he was in a talkative mood, I thought I’d take advantage of it and asked him point-blank what he thought his life would have been like if Dr. Besant and
C. W. Leadbeater had not taken care of him in his early years and sponsored him. He was thoughtfully silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I probably would have died of malnutrition.”
“Do you think you would have been a liberated man, whatever that means, without the background they provided?”
A much quicker answer: “Yes. It might have taken longer, but the end result would have been the same. I probably would have become a sanyasi.* The drive was there. Nothing could have finally thwarted it.” Then he said something that surprised me because it sounded out of character: “One of India’s best known astrologers cast my horoscope when I was very young, and said I would become a Jivanmukta (liberated man).” He laughed lightheartedly, as if to stress the unimportance of such weighty predictions.

This post was last updated by John Raica Sun, 23 Sep 2018.

Here are a few 'lost & found' pages from K's 'official' biography written by Mary Lutyens ( courtesy of Mary Zimbalist )

He ‘went off’ for about an hour and talked of Nitya and later had what he called ‘a dialogue with death’. The next day he dictated to Mary Zimbalist an account of this experience:

It was a short ( prostate ) operation and ( although sedated) there was considerable pain. While the pain continued I saw or discovered that the body was almost floating in the air. It may have been some kind of hallucination, but a few minutes later there was the 'personification' of death. Watching this peculiar phenomenon between the body and death, there seemed to be a sort of dialogue between them. Death seemed to be talking to the body with great insistence and the body reluctantly was not yielding to what death wanted. Though there were people in the room this phenomenon went on, death inviting, the body refusing. It was not a fear of death making the body deny the demands of death but the body realised that it was not responsible for itself, there was another entity that was dominating, much stronger, more vital than death itself. Death was more and more demanding, insisting and so the other interfered. Then there was a conversation or a dialogue between not only the body, but this 'other' (spiritual entity ?) and death. So there were three entities in conversation.

Though the person [Mary Z] was sitting there and a nurse came and went, it was not a self-deception or kind of hallucination. Lying in the bed he saw the clouds full of rain and the window lighted up, the town below stretching for miles. There was spattering of rain on the window pane and he saw clearly the saline solution dripping, drop by drop, into the organism. One felt very strongly and clearly that if the other had not interfered death would have won. This dialogue began in words with thought operating very clearly. There was thunder and lightning and the conversation went on. Since there was no fear at all, neither on the part of the body or the other – absolutely no fear – one could converse freely and profoundly. It is always difficult to put a conversation of that kind into words.

Strangely, as there was no fear, death was not enchaining the mind to the things of the past. What came out of the conversation was very clear. The body was in considerable pain and not apprehensive or anxious and the 'Other' was discernibly beyond both. It was as though the Other was acting as an umpire in a dangerous game of which the body was not fully aware. During this conversation there was no sense of time. Probably the whole dialogue lasted about an hour but time by the watch did not exist. Words ceased to exist but there was an immediate insight into what each one was saying. The quality of conversation was urbane. There was nothing whatsoever of sentiment, emotional extravagance, no distortion of the absolute fact of time coming to an end and the vastness without any border when death is part of your daily life. There was a feeling that the body would go on for many years but 'death' and the 'other' would always be together until the organism could no longer be active. There was a great sense of humour amongst the three of them and one could almost hear the laughter. And the sound of this conversation was expanding endlessly and the sound was the same at the beginning and was without end. It was a song without a beginning or an end. Death and life are very close together, like love and death. As love is not a remembrance, so death had no past. Fear never entered this conversation for fear is darkness and death is light. This dialogue was not illusory or fanciful. It was like a whisper in the wind but the whisper was very clear and if you listened you could hear it; you could then be part of it. One must abandon all (fear ?) to enter into the light and love of death.

This post was last updated by John Raica Sun, 30 Sep 2018.

'Breakfast table questions' from Pupul Jayakar's K Biography

One morning, speaking with great intensity, Krishnaji conveyed a way of perception, of challenge and response from a state that lay beyond the mind, beyond brain, memory, all responses of consciousness. “A state that comes into being in listening at great depth; where consciousness and its movement do not obstruct. A state where seeing is whole, inclusive, nonfragmented, a state of no movement from or towards; beyond matrix and all racial memories of man.” “This state is not a state of the ending of thought,” said Krishnaji. “It is not the gap between thoughts, but a listening that has the whole weight and depth of the million years of man, and goes beyond. A state that can be touched at any instant. It is like tapping the energy of the universe.”

We spoke of the place of the guru and whether the role of the guru had validity. I said to Krishnaji that, looking back from today to the many yesterdays, I saw clearly that for me Krishnaji was the guru. Krishnaji intervened and asked, “What do you mean by guru?” Radha Burnier said, “He who points the way.” There were other comments. I said, “He who awakens. Krishnaji awakened me. There was an eye into eye looking. Such looking is rare.” I asked, “What was your role in 1948—did you not awaken?” Krishnaji said, “The ( dualistic) approach of the 'awakener' and the 'awakened' is wrong. When there is light and I am in darkness and move into the light there is no separation. There is just light. Where is the awakener? Some stay in the light, some wander away, that is all.” A little later he said, “I am not saying I am the light.”
Another morning at breakfast we discussed the brain and the possibility of transformation of the human brain. Krishnaji said he had been discussing the brain with scientists. He had understood them to say that “every cell in the human brain holds memory of the million years of man.” Then Krishnaji asked, “Can there be a total transformation in that?”

As discussions continued, Krishnaji’s concern with the brain and its operation was evident. His perception had shifted to an enquiry into whether the movement of memory within the brain cells could end. It was only then that a whole new way of perception could emerge.

Someone asked whether Krishnaji’s touch and contact could release energy held in an object, and in turn could that object communicate wholeness, sacredness? Could it heal, protect? Krishnaji said from boyhood he could read other people’s thoughts, heal people. He had been given objects to magnetize, to make potent with energy. But the boy Krishnamurti was not interested in these powers.
He spoke of an immense reservoir of energy which must exist. “Can man reach it and let it operate?” he asked. Asit said, “Surely a boy who had no evil in him, no self, was a very rare being; he could touch it, but could that energy be contacted by ordinary beings?”
“I think it is possible, Sir,” Krishnaji said with hesitancy.
Krishnaji was in a very strange state. He spoke of an approach to the sacred with a mind that could receive, but did not want power, position. What was necessary was an absolute purity of mind.
I asked whether anything else was necessary, and asked him the nature of this purity of mind. Krishnaji said, “The purity of my mind is not the purity of the Mind. The purity of the mind is the mind of the universe. That is sacred.”

I then asked whether the human being who had purity of mind, was a vessel that could receive. “As it is possible to give energy to an object, can a human being communicate wholeness, can you give the other?”
Krishnaji said, “No. However pure, the brain is still matter, it is still mind. The other is the universe. It is immense.” . He asked himself, “Is there an 'ultimate' beyond which there is nothing? A ground from which everything is, behind and beyond which there is nothing, no cause?”

We then discussed the sacredness of Rishi Valley. I said in India there was such a thing as a Punya Sthal—a sacred site. Gods could come and go, but the sacredness of a site continued.
Krishnaji said, “I feel the soil of Rishi Valley has this special quality. It is,” he said gravely, “ ‘the Sthal of all Sthals.’ ”
I said the whole valley was a sacred site. It had been impregnated with Krishnaji’s presence and his words. Rajghat also had that sense of the sacredness. “One has to see,” said Krishnaji, “that this feeling is not destroyed.”
Krishnaji said he was greatly tempted to stay on in Rishi Valley. He felt strongly about it. Asit asked Krishnaji why he could not live in Rishi Valley and let people come to see him there from all over the world.
Krishnaji was quiet, then said, “My life has been one of physical movement. It is important for me to stay here, but I cannot. For God’s sake, tread lightly on this soil.”
Later, Krishnaji was to say, “Energy is Cosmos, it is also Chaos. That is the source of creation. Anger is energy, sorrow is energy—but there is supreme order. Can it be established in Rishi Valley?”

Without Pupul Jayakar's profound respect & love for Truth, this very intimate interview she & her sister had with K in India in the early 80's would have been... just 'lost'

“I Suddenly Saw the Face.”

PJ : Most of the traditional systems of meditation require the need for support at the early stages. You have repeatedly said that there are no (paths) steps, no levels ( and at any point in time?) 'the first step is the last step'. But going into your historical past, as well as in casual conversations, I have observed that you have gone through all the kriyas ( self- purifying inner ) actions known to religious tradition. You have tested yourself, you have denied your senses; tied a bandage for days on your eyes to see what it is to be blind. You have fasted for days, you observed silence, ‘maun’, for over a year in 1951. What was your reason for this silence?

K: Probably it was to find out if I could keep quiet.

PJ : Did it help at all?

K: Not a bit.

PJ : Then, why did you do it?

K: I have done ( other ) 'crazy' things—like eating only vegetables, then only protein so that I did not mix protein with starch...

N: Do you put silence' in the same category?

K: You mean I did not talk to anybody—are you sure? It was never anything serious. There was no spiritual intention behind the silence.

PJ : In the ('K'?) 'experiences' that took place in ( 1947 in) Ooty, you still saw visions. Do you ever see visions now?

K: Sometimes I do...but what do you mean by 'visions'—( seeing psychic ?) pictures & images? You see, it must have been a very strange thing when they picked me up. As far as I remember, Master K. H. and the Buddha were always there somewhere in ( the background of?) my mind. Their 'images' used to follow me for a considerable time.

PJ : You have even talked ( in private?) about a 'face' which merged into your face.

K: That is right.

PJ ; Today, is that 'face' still with you?

K: Yes, occasionally. But...why are you asking all these questions?

PJ ( Because in my biographical book?) I want to write an accurate account, not only of ( the official?) events; and some events are very inconsequential from my point of view.

K: Right from the beginning, C. W. L. and Amma (AB) had said that (K's) face has been created for many, many lives. I was too young to know what they were saying, but apparently the ( boy's) face impressed them tremendously. They said it was the face of the Maitreya Bodhisattva. They used to keep repeating this, but (then) it meant nothing to me, absolutely nothing. Many, many years later, after the death of my brother, one morning I suddenly saw that 'face', a most extraordinarily beautiful face, that used to be with me for many years. Then gradually that face disappeared. It all began after the death of the brother.

PJ : Let us pursue the question of these (psychic) 'visions'

K: For many, many years I was not really ( 100% ?) 'all there'. Sometimes, even now, I am not 'all there'. ( The 1922 experience in?) Ojai was totally independent from C. W. L. At Ootacamund it was totally independent of (the all controlling?) Rajagopal and Rosalind. After I moved away from Ojai ( & came to India) in 1947 to 1948, things started happening, like seeing this extraordinary (Lord Maitreya?) face . I used to see it every day—in sleep or while walking. It was not a ( self-induced?) 'vision'. It was an actual 'fact'.

N: You saw it even when you were awake?

K: Of course, on my walks it was there.

PJ : We saw it in Ooty. A tremendous change taking place in your face...

K: That is true.

PJ : Then you said ''the Buddha was there''. But now ( in the early 80's ?) You say that occasionally you still see visions ?

K: The other night in Madras I woke up ( seeing) this face.

PJ : So it is still there ?

K: Of course...

PJ : Can I get a feel of it...

K: Yes. Which is, it is not a vision. It is not something imagined. I have tested it out. It is not something that I wanted (personally) . I do not say, ‘What a beautiful face’—there is no wish to have it.

PJ : What happens to you when you get this ( psychic) visions?

K: I look at the face.

PJ : Does anything happen to you (inwardly?) ?

K: It is like cleaning (purifying?) the body and the face and the air. I have seen the face in the dark, in the light, while walking...But I have never done anything for 'spiritual' purposes

MZ : And yet, before the 'mystical' ( awakening?) process that happened (in 1922 ) in Ojai, in your letters to Lady Emily, you were saying that said you were 'meditating' every day...

K: All that ( daily practice of) 'meditation' was on Theosophical Society lines. I did it because I was told to do it. It was part of the Theosophical Society belief, but it meant nothing to me. I did all that automatically...

PJ : But when you ‘grew up' , 'it just came' in a flash or was it something which matured without your knowing?

K: In a flash, naturally. I used to have a horror of 'taking vows' - vows of celibacy, vows not to get angry. I never took any 'vows'. If I did not 'like' a thing, that was the end of it. If 'I liked' it, I went on with it.

PJ : When one reads the ( 1961) K Notebook and then reads the talks of 1948, one finds there has been a major leap in the teachings. Are there (such quantum) leaps taking place all the time?

K: Yes, it is happening all the time, in my brain, inside me. After traveling this time from London to Bombay and then to Madras, that first night in Madras, I felt the brain exploding; there was an extraordinary quality, light, beauty. This is happening 'all the time', but... not every day. That would be a ( 'holistic' ?) lie. What is necessary is ( inner & outer) 'quietness'...

PJ : ( with some hindsight?) I realize that ( this kind of) things happen when you are alone. It happened when you were supposed to be very ‘ill’ in 1959, in Srinagar and later in Bombay. I have never been certain whether you have a (real) 'illness' or something else. At the end of any (period of) 'serious illness', you give extraordinary talks.

K: The illness may be a 'purgation'...

PJ : I know you have been ill on two occasions in Bombay. I have been present. There is a strange atmosphere when you are ill...

N: ( Nandini is Pupul's sister) I remember your being ill in Bombay. You had bronchitis. We had to cancel the talks. You had 103-degree to 104-degree temperature. Suddenly you wanted to throw up. So I ran to get a basin. I held your hand. I saw you were about to faint. I called out and you said, ‘No, no.’ Your voice had changed. Your face had changed. The person who sat up was different from the person who had fainted. You were cured (at once?) You told me not to leave the body alone; just to 'be there'. You said, ‘Never be anxious near me; never get worried, don’t allow too many people to come near me. In India they never leave an ill person alone.’ You asked me to sit down quietly and then you said, ‘I must tell you something. Do you know how to help a person die ( in a spiritually friendly way ?) ? If you know that someone is about to die, help him to be ( inwardly at peace & ) quiet, help him to forget his ( psychological involvement in material) accumulations, to be free of his worries, of his problems, to 'give up' (thinking of?) his attachments, all his possessions.’ You were silent and then you said : ''It (death?) is just (like) 'stepping over’ ( to the next world?) . And your face lit up. ‘If you can’t do that, you remain ( for a very long time stuck?) where you are.’ ”

This post was last updated by John Raica Sun, 07 Oct 2018.

This strangely mysterious (lost & found ?) page from Pupul Jayakar's biography of K is very probably unique:

The next morning after breakfast we went into the sitting room and Krishnaji began talking of Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater. His great love for Mrs. Besant was evident. He told us that, as a child, he had many extrasensory powers—the capacity to read thought, or what was written in an unopened letter. He could make objects materialize, see visions, and foretell the future. He had the power of healing. But he had put all these powers aside naturally. He had never felt any ( personal?) interest in them. We tried to pursue the topic.

K: Do you believe in mystery?

PJ : Yes, when we talk to you seriously, a 'mysterious' atmosphere comes into being.

K: Yes, that is so.

PJ : There is the feeling of a Presence, without anyone being there...

K: It is (now present ?) in the room, I don’t know whether you feel it—what is that? I must be awfully careful about this. I won’t ask ; you can...

PJ : What is It? Is it (something) linked with you?

K: Yes, obviously...I think there is an (Unknown?) 'force' which the (early) Theosophists had touched but ( eventually they) tried to make into something concrete. But, there was 'something' they had touched and then tried to translate into their symbols and vocabulary, and so lost it. This feeling has been going on all through my life—it is not...

AP : ... linked with your consciousness?

K: No, no. When I talk about it, something tremendous is going on. ( But ) I can’t ask it anything...

(PJ's note ; through windows, doors, silence... poured)

PJ : All your illnesses have been very strange. Every serious illness has been followed by a fount of new energy...

K: What are we talking about?

PJ : Is it something outside of you? Does 'It' ( That 'mysterous force'?) protect you?

K: Yes, yes—of that there is no question—absolutely.

PJ : Every time it takes place—does the nature of it change?

K: No, no...

PJ : Does it intensify?

K: Yes, it intensifies....( long pause) Is it an 'external' thing happening inwardly? The ( Mind of the) Universe pouring in—and the body cannot stand too much to it. As I am talking, it is very strong. Five minutes ago, it wasn’t there. When young 'They' told me, ‘Be completely like an 'open channel'—don’t resist. Only later did I wonder who ‘They’ were.

AP : : Has it any relationship to 'Maitreya Bodhisattva'?

K: Is 'Maitreya Bodhisattva' fictitious? Did C. W. L. invent it? Or is it something totally different from the (TS) indoctrination?

PJ : Does the word 'Maitreya' mean anything to you?

K: No.

PS : Do the words ‘Maitreya Buddha’ have an effect on you?

K: You remember Abanendranath Tagore’s ‘Buddha’—That picture had an extraordinary effect on the boy. He did not know what Buddhism was, but, the feeling of the Buddha has always been there. A feeling of enormity...

PJ : Can we go into that 'feeling' ? Is that feeling outside you? Or is it within? Is your ( frail physical?) body not able to take it?

K: Don’t think I am crazy. I have never felt as I feel now. That the ( Consciousness of the ) Universe is so close, as though my head was stuck in the Universe...

PJ : Are you saying that all barriers have ceased?

K: You see, the words ‘Buddha,’ ‘Maitreya,’ have lost their (old?) meaning. I have a feeling that all verbal sensation has ended.

PJ : But you just said something like 'being very close to the Universe'?

K: (laughing) Yes, my head is in it....

PJ : That 'comes through' (even in your public) talks. The center of your teaching has moved to a 'cosmic position' ?

K: It may be nothing at all, or... it may be a 'tentacle' (of the Universal Mind?) that is 'feeling around'. Now, this room is filled with it. Whatever 'It' is, it (the room ?) is throbbing with It. The more I watch, 'it' is there—the intensity of it. I could sit here with you two and 'go off'...
( Parting words:) 'Be' with that enormous thing and let it operate. It 'is' a mystery, and one cannot (really) understand the 'mysterious'—it is too infinite. I'd want to penetrate That mystery, and yet there is a certain hesitancy to go near it. 'You' cannot touch it. It 'is' there. It 'is' mysterious. On the platform it is something different. Or probably, it is the same thing...

And... that's all she wrote (the last excerpts from Mrs Jayakar's biography dedicated to K)

Krishnamurti at Ninety

At ninety, Krishnamurti’s day is little different than it has been for forty years. In India he awakes at sunrise, lies in bed, every sense of the body awake, but without a single thought arising until there is a 'coming to', from vast distances. He starts the morning with yogic asanas and pranayam. For thirty-five minutes he does his pranayams, his breathing exercises, and forty-five minutes are spent on yoga asanas, the physical stances—toning the body, the nerves, the muscles and the cells that form the skin tissue, the opening of every cell of the body so that it breathes naturally and in harmony.

At eight o’clock Krishnamurti has a breakfast of fruit, toast, butter, and whole wheat. His breakfast sometimes includes South Indian idlis or dosas, steamed rice cakes with coconut chutney. At the breakfast table in India his close associates gather to discuss education and the schools, consciousness, the seed of disintegration in man, computers, and the role of artificial intelligence. He asks for news of the international world and of India. The state of the country is freely discussed; the violence, the corruption, the decay of values; the future of man or the mutation of the human mind. Every problem is raised and probed; everyone participates; a sense of order and quiet pervades even the discussions.

He is quite childlike in his attitude to situations, especially political; but a supreme gravity is evident in his concern with the psyche or the spaces within the mind. He frequently pauses, letting the mind rest with questions, responding with passion and dignity.
When he is to hold his morning dialogues, the breakfast session is short. We disperse to meet again at 9:30, when the small group gathers to participate in the dialogues. The discussions continue until eleven, after which individuals with special problems or sorrows can speak to him. At times he takes them into his room for a few minutes. When there are no group discussions, his talks with his associates continue for two or three hours. We discuss death, the nature of God, the problem of the observer and the observed. Some of the most intense insights have been revealed at these sessions.

Around eleven-thirty he goes to his room and lies down for half an hour with the Economist, Time, or Newsweek, picture books of trees, mountains, birds, or animals, or a mystery novel. He rarely reads serious books, but is very well informed on the state of the world, on advances in science and technology, and the degenerating processes corroding man. At noon he has an oil massage and a very hot bath. Lunch is at one o’clock. He eats Indian food, but nothing fried, and very few sweets. He likes hot pickles and permits himself tiny portions. Again at lunchtime there are discussions, and guests are often invited.
The conversation varies from international affairs to scientific discoveries, war, nuclear disarmament and its insoluble problems. Krishnaji has an intense curiosity and questions deeply. New discoveries in science fascinate him. At times he is prophetic and feels into the future. His statements are far ahead of his time. He has insights into the significance of world events and can relate them to a global totality. He often asks visitors, “What is happening in the country? Why has it lost all creativity?” No answer satisfies him. The serious individual is made to hold this impossible question within and so be awake to its intimations. The question of degeneration in the inner processes has to be asked and the mind must remain with the problem, ponder on it.

His span of attention is formidable. He once said to me that some questions have to be held in the mind for eternity.
At lunch Krishnamurti continues the question he has discussed over the breakfast table, and sometimes he tells stories—anecdotes of his encounters with wild animals, or stories of St. Peter and heaven and hell, Russia and the commissars, which he repeats with eloquence, zest, and good humor. He is completely without malice. With strangers he is shy, and someone else has to fill in awkward silences.
For years he saw vast numbers of people. Sannyasis, Buddhist monks, siddhas, wandering yogis converge on him, seeking answers or solace. He never refuses to see them. The saffron or ochre robe of the ascetic evokes deep compassion within him.

After lunch Krishnaji rests. At about four he starts seeing people again. A woman going blind comes, and he places his hands on her eyes. A visitor who has lost a child sits with him, and he holds her hand and symbolically wipes her tears, healing her inwardly; a young man, bewildered, lost in this violent world, seeks answers.
Beginning in the late 1970s he saw fewer people, but at ninety he is again available to those who seek him out; he never closes his doors on anyone—the young man with hallucinations, in communication with satellites; the woman in sorrow; the adolescent; the old; the blind. He is never too busy or too tired.

When the sun is about to set, he goes for a walk. At ninety his strides are long, his body still erect and straight. His close friends, their children and grandchildren walk with him. Sometimes he holds the hand of a little child and walks and laughs with her. He walks three miles, breathing in the earth, the trees, listening to distant sounds. There is very little conversation. At times he prefers to be alone, his mind far away. He has said that not a single thought touches his mind during these walks.

At home again he washes, and does some more pranayam. He eats a light supper—salad, fruit, nuts, soup, vegetables. On rare occasions he sits over the dinner table with a few friends and hints of an eternity that lies beyond the mind. The hands assume the role of the teacher. His voice changes, fills with power and with volumes of energy; silences sweep into the room.
A river of quietude flows within him. His mind never crystalizes. He is prepared to listen to any criticism. I remember one day in 1978 in Colombo when he and I were staying in the same house. He had been restless. I said to him, “Sir, you are agitated.” He did not answer me. We started discussing something else. In the evening at supper, he turned to me and said, “You said I was agitated. This afternoon I took the question to bed with me. I asked myself, ‘Am I agitated? Is it because of ( psychological ) dependence?’ And suddenly I saw it. To seek an answer is to give agitation root in the soil of the mind; and it was over. I will not be agitated again. I have been watching and listening to everything, to my body, my mind, to root out any trace of agitation.”

Krishnaji’s mind holds few symbols, yet he has a close personal identity with rivers. In 1961, speaking in Bombay, he described the Ganga: “It may have a beginning and an end. But the beginning is not the river, the end is not the river. The river is the flow between. It passes through villages and towns, everything is drawn into it. It is polluted, filth and sewage are thrown into it, a few miles later it has purified itself. It is the river in which everything lives, the fish below and the man who drinks the water on top. That is river. Behind it is that tremendous pressure of water, and it is this self-purificatory process that is the river. The innocent mind is like that river. It has no beginning, no end—no time.”

He wastes no energy when he walks, talks, or works at some inconsequential occupation—polishing shoes, picking up a stone and removing it from the pathway. As he grows old, the tremors in his hands have increased, the highly sensitive body’s response to the world of noise and pollution. He has often suffered from mysterious illnesses. He becomes delirious, his voice changes, he sometimes becomes as a young child, he asks strange questions, faints easily, particularly when he is near to people he can trust; he often cures himself.
His relationship with nature, trees, rocks, and the earth has special significance; he has the ability to enter into spaces within nature, to feel life move. Lately he has started to speak of the sound that reverberates within a tree, when all outer sound ends.
Animals and birds trust him. I have seen him sit alone in a garden throwing parched rice on the grass; birds pick the rice within a few inches of his body, and some alight on his shoulder. Describing himself, he misquotes Browning: “shy like a squirrel, wayward like a swallow.”
By ten-thirty he is asleep. Just before he falls asleep the whole day and his actions pass swiftly through his mind; in a flash the day and its events and all the yesterdays are quenched. In sleep Krishnaji’s body, like a bird, folds in on itself. He does not like to be woken up suddenly. He says he very rarely dreams. When he arises there is barely a wrinkle on the sheet.

At his public talks (in India) , some of which are attended by about seven thousand people, he still wears a broad, red-bordered dhoti and long, honey-toned robe. Krishnaji walks to the dais surrounded by people but untouched by them. As he sits on the platform, Krishnaji’s presence reaches out and draws his listeners close to him.
He begins to speak. The back is erect, the voice is clear, permitting every nuance to flower. The face is untouched by time. His hands rest in his lap; occasionally they move, assuming symbolic postures, like flower buds opening to light. For almost two hours the vast audience is silent, with hardly any movement. When the talk is over Krishnaji sits still for a minute, then folds his hands in pranams and the crowds surge towards him. His body trembles with the energy that has flowed through it. He reaches out with both his hands and allows them to be held by those that can reach him. Slowly he extricates himself.
Krishnaji gets down from the platform. All the way to the gate, men and women press on the car, touching his hands, putting them to their eyes. A policeman, seeing the pressing crowd, orders them to move. Krishnaji stops him, takes his hand and holds it. The policeman flings aside his baton and prostrates himself at Krishnaji’s feet. Krishnaji lifts him up and, still holding his hand, enters the car. As the car moves, the policeman runs with it, refusing to let go the hand. Children wait at the flat on Peddar Road with a garland of sweet smelling interwoven jasmine and roses, floral pearls, rubies and emeralds. He takes it with grace, wears it round his neck for some moments before giving it to the children near him.

Staying with him in close proximity has always been arduous. He is ablaze, and the bodies of his associates take a little time to get used to his presence. He sometimes questions his friends, demanding that they be attentive and observe. He watches carefully whether they react strongly to people and statements. It is not possible for deteriorating minds to linger round him—one either moves or is left behind. Vast volumes of energy flow; one must be of it or have no place.
His body is frail, but his mind never slackens. He has said that as he grows very old a limitless energy operates through him. The urgency has increased, so has the drive. Nothing seems to tire him. He pushes the body, walking faster, testing himself, so that most people half his age cannot keep up with him. It is only when he is doing nothing, lying in bed, that he looks frail and aged. His hands tremble, his body shrinks. But in discussion, at breakfast or lunch, on his talks, every wrinkle is wiped away. The skin is translucent, it appears ethereal, lit from within.

At ninety Krishnaji continues to travel, to speak, to search for minds that are awake and capable of perceiving with clarity. Such perceptions, flowering without shadow, transform the brain.
In 1980 Krishnaji told me that when he stopped speaking, the body would die. The body has only one purpose: to reveal the teaching.

Epilogue

The story of Krishnamurti has ended. On February 17, 1986, at 12:10 ( midnight) A.M. Pacific Standard Time, he died at Pine Cottage, Ojai, where he had been mortally ill for five weeks with cancer of the pancreas. He died in the room facing the pepper tree, under which, sixty-four years ago, he underwent vast transformations of consciousness.
He was cremated in Ventura, California. His ashes were divided into three parts: for Ojai, India, and England. In India they were consigned to the river Ganga: midstream at Rajghat, Varanasi; at Gangotri, the source of the river in the deep Himalayas; and at Adyar beach in Madras, where they were taken in a slim catamaran over the turbulent waves to be immersed in the ocean.
Krishnaji had said before his death that

the body after death was of no importance. Like a log of wood, it had to be consumed by fire. “I am a simple man,” he said, and like a simple man should be his ultimate journey.
His ashes were brought by plane to Delhi. I received them at the foot of the plane and drove straight back to my home. As we entered the gate, a sudden heavy shower of rain with hail fell. It continued to fall for a few minutes, until the urn had been placed under a banyan tree in the garden. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped.

I had met him at Brockwood Park late in September 1985. He had waited for me in the little kitchen off the West Wing of the old house. He said he had to tell me something very serious. “Since Switzerland, I know when I am going to die. I know the day and the place, but I will not disclose it to anyone.” He went on to say, “The manifestation has started to fade.”

Lost & Found pages about the K 'Process'

( collected from the K biographies written by Mary Lutyens & Pupul Jayakar )

(Nitya's letter to TS leaders :) On the evening of Thursday ( August 17-th 1922) Krishna felt a little tired and restless and we
noticed in the middle of the nape of his neck a painful lump of what seemed to be a contracted muscle, about the size of a large marble. The next morning he seemed all right, until after breakfast, when he lay down to rest. Rosalind went in and found Krishna apparently very ill, for he was lying on the bed tossing about and moaning as if he were in great pain. She
tried to find out what was the matter with him, but Krishna could give no clear answer. He started again moaning and a fit of trembling and shivering came upon him, and he would clench his teeth and grip his hands tight to ward off the shivering; it was
exactly the behaviour of a malarial patient, except that Krishna complained of frightful heat.

Rosalind would hold him quiet for a bit, and again would come the trembling and shivering, as
of ague. Then he would push her away, complaining of terrible heat and his eyes full of a strange unconsciousness. Mr Warrington sat at the
other end of the room, and realized that some 'process' was going on in Krishna’s body, as a result of influences directed from planes other than physical. During the morning things got worse, and when I came and sat beside him he complained again of the awful heat, and said that all of us were 'full of nerves' and made him tired; and every few minutes he would start up in bed and push us away; and again he
would commence trembling. All this while he was only half conscious, for he would talk of Adyar and the people there as if they were present; then again he would lie quiet for a little while until the ruffle of a curtain or the sound of a far-off plough in
the field would rouse him again and he would moan for silence and quiet. We tried our best to keep the house quiet and dark, but slight sounds which one scarcely notices are inevitable, yet Krishna had become so sensitive that the faintest tinkling would set his nerves on edge. Later as lunch came he quietened down and became apparently all right and fully conscious.

The next day, Saturday, it recommenced after his bath, only in a more acute form, and he seemed less conscious than the day before. But Sunday was the worst day and Sunday we saw the glorious climax. All through the three days all of us had tried to keep our minds and emotions unperturbed and peaceful, and
Rosalind spent the three days by Krishna’s side, ready when he wanted her and leaving him
alone when he wished it. Though she is only nineteen and knows little of Theosophy she played the part of a great mother through these three days.

On Sunday, as I’ve said, Krishna seemed much worse, he seemed to be suffering a great
deal, the trembling and the heat seemed intensified and his consciousness became more and more intermittent. When he seemed to be in control of his body he talked all the time of Adyar, Annie Besant, and the members of the Purple Order in Adyar, and he imagined himself constantly in Adyar. Then he would say, ‘I want to go to India! Why have they brought me here? I don’tknow where I am,’ and again and again and again he would say, ‘I don’t know where I am.’ Towards six o’clock when we had our evening meal he quietened down until we had finished. Then suddenly the whole house seemed full of a terrific force and Krishna was as if possessed. He would have none of us near him and began to
complain bitterly of the 'intolerable dirt' of the house, the dirt of everyone around, and in a voice full of pain said that he longed to go to the woods. Now he was
sobbing aloud that he wanted to go into the woods in India.

Suddenly he announced his intention of going for a walk alone, but from this we managed to
dissuade him, for we did not think that he was in any fit condition for nocturnal ambulations.
Then as he expressed a desire for solitude, we left him and gathered outside on the verandah,
where in a few minutes he joined us, carrying a cushion in his hand and sitting as far away as
possible from us. Enough strength and consciousness were vouchsafed him to come outside but
once there again he vanished from us, and his body, murmuring incoherencies, was left sitting
there on the porch.

The sun had set an hour ago and we sat facing the far-off hills (of Ojai) , purple against the pale sky in the
darkening twilight, speaking little, and the feeling came upon us of an impending climax; all our
thoughts and emotions were tense with a strangely peaceful expectation of some great event.

In front of the house a few yards away
stands a young pepper tree, with delicate leaves of a tender green, now heavy with scented
blossoms, and all day it is the murmurous haunt of bees, little canaries, and bright humming
birds. We gently urged Krishna to go out under that tree, and now we were in a starlit darkness and Krishna sat under a roof of delicate leaves black
against the sky. He was still murmuring unconsciously but presently there came a sigh of relief
and he called out to us, ‘Oh, why didn’t you send me out here before?’ Then came a brief silence.

And now he began to chant and it was a quiet weary voice we heard chanting the mantram sung every night at Adyar in the Shrine Room.
We sat with eyes fixed upon the tree, wondering if all was well, for now there was perfect silence, and as we looked I saw suddenly for a moment a great Star shining above the tree, and the place seemed to be filled with a Great Presence and a great longing came upon me to go on my knees and adore, for I knew that the Great Lord of all our hearts had come Himself;
and though we saw Him not, yet all felt the splendour of His presence. Then the eyes of Rosalind were opened and she saw. Her face was transfigured, as
she said to us, ‘Do you see Him, do you see Him?’ for she saw the divine Bodhisattva [aka : Lord
Maitreya]. Never shall I forget the look on her face, for presently I felt that He turned towards us and spoke some words to Rosalind; her face shone with
divine ecstasy as she answered, ‘I will, I will,’ and she spoke the words as if they were a
promise given with splendid joy. Never shall I forget her face when I looked at her; even I was
almost blessed with vision. In the distance we heard
divine music softly played, all of us heard though hidden from us were the Gandharvas [Cosmic angels who make the music of the spheres.]

The radiance and the glory of the many Beings present lasted nearly an half hour and
Rosalind, 'saw' it all; ‘Look, do you see?’ she would
often repeat, or ‘Do you hear the music?’ Then presently we heard Krishna’s footsteps and saw
his white figure coming up in the darkness, and all was over. And Rosalind cried out, ‘Oh, he is
coming; go get him, go get him’ and fell back in her chair almost in a swoon. When she recovered, alas, she remembered nothing, nothing, all was gone from her memory except the sound of music still in her ears.

The next day again there was a recurrence of the shuddering and half-waking consciousness
in Krishna, though now it lasted but a few minutes and at long intervals. All day he lay under
the tree in samadhi and in the evening, as he sat in meditation as on the night before, Rosalind
again saw three figures round him who quickly went away, taking Krishna with them, leaving
his body under the tree.

Krishna’s own written account follows:

Since August 3rd, I meditated regularly for about thirty minutes every morning. I could, to my astonishment, concentrate with considerable ease, and within a few days I began to see clearly where I had failed and where I was failing.

First I realized that I had to harmonize all my other
'bodies' with the Buddhic plane and to bring about this happy combination I had to find out what my ego wanted on the Buddhic plane. To harmonize
the various bodies I had to keep them vibrating at the same rate as the Buddhic, and to do this I
had to find out what was the vital interest of the Buddhic. With ease which rather astonished me
I found the main interest on that high plane was to serve the Lord Maitreya and the Masters.

With that idea clear in my physical mind I had to direct and control the other 'bodies' to act and
to think the same as on the noble and spiritual plane. During that period of less than three
weeks, I concentrated to keep in mind the image of the Lord Maitreya throughout the entire day,
and I found no difficulty in doing this. I found that I was getting calmer and more serene. My
whole outlook on life was changed.

Then, on the 17th August, I felt acute pain at the nape of my neck and I had to cut down my
meditation to fifteen minutes. The pain instead of getting better as I had hoped grew worse. The
climax was reached on the 19th. I could not think, nor was I able to do anything, and I was forced by friends here to retire to bed. Then I became almost unconscious, though I was well aware of what was happening around me. I came to myself at about noon each day. On the first day while I was in that state and more conscious of the things around me, I had the first most extraordinary 'experience'. There was a man mending the road; that man was myself; the pickaxe he held was myself; the very stone which he was breaking up was a part of me; the tender blade
of grass was my very being, and the tree beside the man was myself. I almost could feel and think like the roadmender, and I could feel the wind passing through the tree, and the little ant on the blade of grass I could feel. The birds, the dust, and the very noise were a part of me. Just then there was a car passing by at some distance; I was the driver, the engine, and the tyres; as the car went further away from me, I was going away from myself. I was in everything, or
rather everything was in me, inanimate and animate, the mountain, the worm, and all breathing
things. All day long I remained in this 'happy condition'. I could not eat anything, and again at
about six I began to lose my physical body, and naturally the physical 'elemental' did what it
liked; I was semi-conscious. The morning of the next day was almost the same as the previous day, and I could not tolerate too many people in the room. I could feel them in rather a curious way and their
vibrations got on my nerves. That evening at about the same hour of six I felt worse than ever. I
wanted nobody near me nor anybody to touch me. I was feeling extremely tired and weak. I
think I was weeping from mere exhaustion and lack of physical control. My head was pretty bad
and the top part felt as though many needles were being driven in. While I was in this state I felt
that the bed in which I was lying, the same one as on the previous day, was dirty and filthy
beyond imagination and I could not lie in it. Suddenly I found myself sitting on the floor and Nitya and Rosalind asking me to get into bed. I asked them not to touch me and cried out thatthe bed was not clean. I went on like this for some time till eventually I wandered out on the verandah and sat a few moments exhausted and slightly calmer. I began to come to myself and finally Mr Warrington asked me to go under the pepper tree which is near the house. There I sat
crosslegged in the meditation posture. When I had sat thus for some time, I felt myself 'going out'
of my body, I saw myself sitting down with the delicate tender leaves of the tree over me. I was
facing the east. In front of me was my body and over my head I saw the Star, bright and clear.

Then I could feel the vibrations of the Lord Buddha; I beheld Lord Maitreya and Master K.H. I was so happy, calm and at peace. I could still see my body and I was hovering near it. There was such profound calmness both in the air and within myself, the calmness of the bottom of a deep unfathomable lake. Like the lake, I felt my physical body, with its mind and emotions,
could be ruffled on the surface but nothing, nay nothing, could disturb the calmness of my soul.
The Presence of the mighty Beings was with me for some time and then They were gone. I was
supremely happy, for I had 'seen'. Nothing could ever be the same. I have drunk at the clear and
pure waters at the source of the fountain of life and my thirst was appeased. Never more could I
be thirsty, never more could I be in utter darkness. I have seen the Light. I have touched
compassion which heals all sorrow and suffering; it is not for myself, but for the world. The fountain of Truth has been revealed to me and the darkness has been dispersed. Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated.

On September 2 Krishna was writing letters to Mrs Besant, Leadbeater and Lady Emily.
'' Nitya is writing in some detail the extraordinary experience I had on the night of 20th of
Aug. and the way the two previous days had been leading up to it. As you well know, I have not been what is called ‘happy’ for many years; everything I touched brought me discontentment; my mental condition as you know has been deplorable. I did not know what I wanted to do nor did I care to do much; everything bored me in a very short time and in fact I did not find myself. By
what Nitya has written and by what I have added to it you will see I have changed considerably
from what I was in Australia. Naturally I have been thinking clearly and deliberately about the
message Master K.H. gave me while in Australia. I had begun to meditate regularly every
morning for about half an hour. After a few days of meditation, I began to see clearly where I
had failed and where I was failing and after Aug. 20th I know what I want to do and what lies before me—nothing but to serve the Masters and the Lord. I have become since that date much more sensitive and slightly clairvoyant as I saw you with the President, the other night while I was sitting in the moonlight.
Such a thing has not happened to me for over seven years. In fact for the last seven years, I have
been spiritually blind, I have been in a dungeon without a light, without any fresh air. Now I
feel I am in sunlight, with the energy of many, not physical but mental and emotional. I feel
once again in touch with Lord Maitreya and the Master and there is nothing else for me to do
but to serve Them. My whole life, now, is, consciously, on the physical plane, devoted to the
work and I am not likely to change.
Please tell me, without any reservation, what you think of all that I have written and felt. ''

To Lady Emily he expressed his feelings more intimately:

''I have had the happy fortune of getting back, I
think, into the consciousness of the Master & my old touch with Lord Maitreya. I feel & live in exaltation; not the exaltation of pride. Nitya & Mr Warrington have written too & I have written mine when I was still in the spirit of exaltation & adoration. I
feel like that still when I think about it. All that I have written is absolutely genuine & profound.
I can never be the same. I am not going to stop loving you mother dear ever but my attitude
towards life is changed; there is nothing for me but the ''work''. I certainly have more energy
mental & emotional but not yet physical & that will come. I feel as though I am sitting on a
mountain top in adoration & that Lord Maitreya is close to me. I feel as though I am walking on
delicate & perfumed air. The horizon of my life is clear & the sky-line is beautiful & precise.
So mother you see I have changed & with that change in me, I am going to change the lives of my friends. I want them to climb the same mountain & look at the glories of the Great Ones from there. ... I want you to be up there with me. ... I am going to help the whole world to climb
a few feet higher than they are ... I hope you do not think that I am preaching to you, but since I have changed & now that I consider that I have found myself, I want to help you to realize your own self & become great. You must be for there is nothing else in the world but to tread the glorious and sacred Path & mother dear I am going to help you. There is nothing else to do but become like Them in
all things & to follow & serve Them by serving the world. You don’t know how I have
changed, my whole inner nature is alive with energy & thought & I am sure my ego has come down decidedly. I am slightly clairvoyant.

The Process Intensifies

Lady Emily vividly remembered having breakfast with the brothers the next morning and beginning to talk to K about his experience, whereupon he immediately went off into a dead faint. Nitya told her that K could not talk about it; if anyone mentioned it he just put his head down and became unconscious.

Lady Emily wrote to Mrs Besant ten days
later : ''Krishna seems outwardly little
changed though perhaps more beautiful, but one is conscious at every moment of a controlled (intelligent?) but immense concentrated 'power' flowing from him. His Esoteric Section talk was an immense advance on anything he has given before. He had no notes & spoke for 45 mins, fluently, easily & yet with such tremendous earnestness & force it was like listening to the throbbing of a great machine. ''

The first fortnight in Austria at Sonblick was a real holiday, but by the middle of August K’s ‘process’ started again even more severely.
On August 15 Lady Emily began to write a diary describing these strange evening occurrences:
''On Monday we went for rather a long walk up the mountains into a pine forest. At dinner time he was obviously hardly conscious & almost directly afterwards he went right ‘off’ and the body began to sob & groan. It lasted till 9 o’c. when he came round & went off to bed. But at 12 o’c. he began again till 1 o’c. & once again in the early morning. It is very curious that the vitality of Americans (here, Helen Knothe) seems to supply something that he needs. I asked him if I could not help him but he explained to me that being married would make it 'undesirable'—when in this state he is very particular that everything round him should be of the purest.

Yesterday he seemed very happy ...but again at dinner only Krishna’s body was there—& very much tired by any loud talk or voice.
Krishna went to his own room with Nitya & Helen & was ‘off’ again until 9 o’c. This time he
seemed in much less pain & did not groan much, but when he woke up at 9 o’c. he was very
dazed & confused.
Thursday Yesterday was rather a
curious day as at lunch time Krishna was very boisterous & full of jokes. It is very curious to watch the 'phases' through which Krishna passes. Sometimes he is just a
frolicsome boy with apparently not a serious thought in the world. Then swiftly he changes &
becomes the Teacher—stern & uncompromising, urging his pupils onward towards swift
progress. Again he is just tortured with the pain in his spine—not speaking & just wanting
quiet—or most strange of all the figure that comes to dinner—beautiful, with unseeing eyes
mechanically eating his food & shrinking at every sound. Most beautiful of all when he sits in meditation chanting mantrams—his soul going out in worship. These phases succeed each other in such swift succession that it is something of a strain to be always prepared for them.

Last night Krishna was 'away' for just two hours—not in much pain apparently but just
talking vaguely. He said that ''his body must not eat so much at night & must take more exercise''.

August 18. Last night just as he went off Krishna said that they must wake him up at 8.30. Then almost immediately some of the Great Ones came. Nitya apparently saw & heard Them on the balcony in front of Krishna’s room. Nitya says he has never before been so conscious of the presence of Master
K.H. & when they left be felt something of himself go after 'Them' and then he fainted. Krishna was conscious of this & called to him & he came round at once. Apparently, Krishna’s body faints off & Helen & Nitya have to revive it. Sometimes they have to pour water on him but he asked them not to do this if they could help it
as it hurt him so much. Before he came back his 'elemental' (body consciousness) said: ‘Krishna is standing there & laughing. I wonder what he is laughing at.’ Nitya suggested that he should ask him, but he said ‘Oh, no I couldn’t’. …

Sunday. ... When Krishna went up last night he again said they must wake him at 8.30 & then he
said that 'Someone' was coming & asked Helen & Nitya to wait outside. This they did for about
five minutes when they heard him fall with a bang & went in. He seems to have been in great
pain last night & swooned a good many times. He told them at the end that he was too tired for
more to be done, but it would be continued tonight. …

Monday. Krishna 'went a long way off' & the 'little child' came talking of his childhood, his hatred of school etc.

Wed. Yesterday ... Krishnaji went off at the usual hour & suffered terribly. Helen was not very well & the 'physical elemental' seemed conscious of this & tried to control his
groans—but at one time they were so bad that Krishna came back & asked what was happening.
They said nothing & when he had gone (off) again the 'physical elemental' or whatever is in charge of the body was dreadfully distressed at having brought Krishna back & said Krishna had told him to 'control himself' & he had done his best & could not help it.
(The Church bells begin to ring always about 8 o‘c. & their noise causes him agony. Last
night he fainted twice while they were ringing.)
Nitya told me of the message Master K.H. gave him : '' Krishna was wasting energy &
that he ought to read books which would increase his vocabulary but not give him set opinions''.
Nitya understood that these experiences will not be very long continued.

Thursday. Yesterday ... the 'evening performance' was very bad, an hour of concentrated agony. Krishna sent Nitya & Helen out of the room once as it was so bad.
Downstairs we could hear him banging himself on to the floor & his awful groans & it was hard
to keep one’s thoughts resolutely turned away. When I went up afterwards he looked so tired &
his poor eyes all bloodshot. The pain has been chiefly in his head during these days here. …

Friday. The 'evening performance' was again excruciating. He had to send Nitya & Helen out of the room several times & we could hear his poor body falling repeatedly. He lies upon the floor upon a rug but sits up in his agony & then faints away & falls with a bang. Happily he seems to sleep soundly & in the morning he is not too tired. This morning we had a good walk & to see him leaping down the hills so full of grace & beauty & vitality it is almost impossible to believe what his poor body has endured each night.

Sat. Last night was 'bad as usual' but he seemed more controlled & did not have to send them out
of the room. Helen thinks this was because she was more controlled. He told her one night that

if she was so nervous the whole business would have to stop & that her attitude should be 'kind
but indifferent'. Ruth was not well yesterday & we kept her in this house to sleep. She sat below with me while the process was going on, & the 'elemental' seemed at once conscious of a fresh person & asked who was there. …

Sunday. Yesterday the 'evening performance' was more than usually agonizing ... just when he
was at his worst the Church bells rang & caused him such a shock of agony that Krishna had to
come back & apparently consulted with them if anything more could be done to the body that
night. The 'physical elemental' begged them to continue. Afterwards K said ‘That was a very
narrow shave. Those bells nearly tolled for my funeral.’ He seemed very nervous all
the rest of the time & even when I went up afterwards Krishna it saying ‘What is the matter? I feel so uncomfortable tonight.’ [the physical 'elemental'] also told them that Krishna must go out & take exercise even when it rained.

Monday. Last night was very bad. We could hear his dreadful cries & apparently he said ‘It has
never been as bad as this’. After the worst is over he generally has about half an hour when he is a little child again. He then thinks that Helen is his Mother.

On September 7 : a new phase of intensity seems to have begun in Krishna’s nightly
experiences. On Monday [September 3] he suffered terribly or rather the body & was twice sick. On Tuesday he was in great pain all day & was sick again after every meal keeping nothing
down except his evening milk. Wednesday he was told he must eat nothing but fruit & this he
kept down. Thursday he was told to fast all day only drinking water. This reduced him to such a
state of weakness that the evening’s work was wasted as nothing could be done to the poor
exhausted body. He had to be given food & hot bottles to revive him, & when I went to say
goodnight his poor face looked so thin & haggard. …

Krishna was very much annoyed at the waste of time & reproached Nitya & Helen for
letting him fast, but of course they were following his own instructions... Now he is to use moderation—he no longer eats the evening meal, but has his bath while we eat, & then has his food after all is over. They seem to work on him the last two nights with greater concentration & intensity—it has been very awful to hear his cries & sobs. It
sounds like some animal in awful pain. But it is wonderful how quickly Krishna’s body recuperates. Even after that day of fasting when he seemed too weak to move, next morning he walked and played rounders as vigorously as ever.''

The Process continued in a less severe form, until September 20. On that evening K brought through a message from the Master Kuthumi which Nitya who immediately wrote it down:
''Nitya, listen : this is finished here, this is the last night. It will be continued in Ojai. But this depends upon you. You both should have more energy. On what you do in the next month will depend the success. Let everything be consecrated to the success of this. It has been a success here. But Ojai depends entirely on you, there it will be continued with much greater vigour if you are ready. When you leave this place you have to be exceedingly careful. It is like a fresh vase, just out of the mould, and any bad vibration may crack it, and this will mean repairing and remodelling and this would take a long time. You have to be careful; if you fail it will mean beginning everything from the beginning. This house (Villa Sonnblick) is sacred, it should be used for Austria.''

Climax of the Process

After a week in London the brothers sailed for New York on October 22 (1922) and eventually reached Ojai on November 8. ‘Helen was very
miserable when she left us & joined her family,’ K told Lady Emily. ‘I think she
is having a bad time. Good for her though.’ (This last remark, apparently so 'heartless', was characteristic of K: 'to go through a bad time' was an essential preliminary to change and growth; contentment was stagnation which led to mediocrity. (Mary Lutyens' note)
They now went to live in the larger house at Ojai included in the property they had bought in February. They called their new house 'Arya Vihara' meaning 'Noble Monastery'. Since they were extremely short of money, they did all their own cooking and cleaning which K found ‘past a joke’. Eventually they engaged a cleaning woman to come from the Ojai village twice a week, and a gardener.

On November 20, K’s ‘process’ started
again. It was so bad that Nitya became worried, wondering whether everything was as it should be. He naturally turned to Leadbeater for
advice and wrote him an anxious letter.
During the last days in Ehrwald, 'they' tried the experiment of leaving Krishna conscious
while the pain was still fairly strong, but this consciousness was only for 10 or 20 seconds at a time, and as soon as the pain became too intense, Krishna would 'leave the body'.
Seven days ago the process began again only now Krishna is fully conscious and the pain is
growing more and more intense, tonight has been the worst night for pain. I started this letter
while he was suffering and he has just come out of the room after an hour of fierce pain. After the pain is over Krishna leaves the body and the body weeps heartbrokenly with exhaustion. He calls for his mother, and I’ve discovered that he wants Helen, not Rosalind.

Krishna’s 'body' (elemental) repeated this message on the night of 26th, immediately after the process was over for the evening :
‘The work that is being done now is of gravest importance and exceedingly delicate. It is the
first time that this experiment is being carried out in the world. Everything in the household
must give way to this work, and no one’s convenience must be considered, not even Krishna’s. Strangers must not come there too often; the strain is too great. You and Krishna can work this out. Maintain peace and [an] even life.''

K’s torture meanwhile went on unabated – he wrote Lady Emily :
''I am getting more & more irritable & I am getting more & more tired I wish you & the others were here. I feel like crying so often nowadays & that used not to be my way. It’s awful for the others & myself. ... I wish Helen were here but 'they' don’t want anybody to help me along. So I have to do it all by myself. ...
However hard one may try, there is a 'loneliness' - that of a solitary pine in the wilderness.''

By February 7 Nitya told Mrs Besant that ''they had had seventy-six nights of the 'process' without cessation at Arya Vihara. The evening business is more of a strain than it has ever been, now all the excitement and Krishna I think has almost forgotten to smile. ... The
pain is getting more and more intense, though his capacity to bear pain is growing with it.'' ...
Towards the end of February K’s ‘process’ reached a climax which K described to Lady Emily:

''Don’t worry about me, because I think, this all has been arranged, so that I could go through
it by myself. Last 10 days, it has been really strenuous, my spine & neck have been going very strong and day before yesterday, I had an extraordinary evening. Whatever
it is, the ( Kundalini) 'force' or whatever one calls the 'bally' thing, came up my spine, up to the nape of my neck, then it separated into two, one going to the right & the other to the left of my head till they met between the two eyes, just above my nose. There was a kind of flame & I saw the Lord ( Maitreya) & the Master (KH) . It was a tremendous night. Of course the whole thing was painful, in the extreme.''

K was given a message on that evening which he repeated to Nitya who wrote it down
at once :
''My Sons, I am pleased with your endurance and bravery. It has been a long struggle and as far as We have gone, it has been a good success. Though there were many difficulties We have surmounted them with comparative ease. There have been many chapters in the progress of ( mankind's ) evolution, and each stage has its trial. This is but the beginning of many struggles. Be equally
brave, and endure it with the same grace in the future, with the same power and with the same
cheerfulness. Then only can you help Us.
You have come out of it well, though the entire preparation is not over. The part that has
been done is done well and successfully. We are sorry for the pain, long drawn out, which must
have seemed to you apparently endless, but there is a great glory awaiting each one of you. It has been like living continuously in a dark cell, but the sun outside is awaiting you.
My Blessing be with you. Though We have guarded the three 'places' in your body there is sure to be pain. It is like an operation; though it may be over you are bound to feel the effects
afterwards.
Do not go into crowded places unnecessarily, and keep in the open air as often as you can. Go slowly and gently, or you might break the body which has been under a tremendous strain. It must be treated with great care.
Though We may not be so consciously with you remember that you have had the tremendous privilege of many visitations from Us. Though Krishna had occasional doubts and
misgivings We were always watching. Do not worry about that side for We are always with
you. For the next months be happy in the knowledge that you have seen Him, Who gives
happiness to all things, to Us and to you.''

The ‘process’ started again at Pergine on August 21 (1924) and was more agonising than ever.
Instructions were given through K on September 4 that his room must be closed by 3 p.m. and that no one must touch him after that hour and that everything and everyone must be exceptionally clean; nor must he eat before his ordeal. At 6 p.m. he would have his bath and put on Indian dress and go into his chamber. Only Nitya was allowed to go in with him. On the evening of the 24th, K had a presentiment that it was going to be ‘an exciting night’, and sure enough the Lord Maitreya
came and remained with K for a long time and left a message for the whole party : ''Learn to serve Me, for along that path alone will you find me. Forget yourself, for then only am I to be found.
Do not look for the Great Ones when they may be very near you. You are like the hungry man who is offered food and will not eat. The 'happiness' you seek is not far off; it lies in every common stone. I am there if you will only see. I am the Helper if you will let Me help.''

(The process stopped after September 24 and K wrote from India to CWL during the spring of 1925)

''My 'process' is slowly beginning and it is rather painful. The back of my head and the base
of my spine are 'active' once again and when I think or write, it is almost unbearable. The moment I lie down, it’s very painful and when I wake up in the morning, I feel as though it had been going on all the night. It is altogether very curious and I don’t understand it in the least.''

After informing Mrs Besant of Nitya’s departure for treatment at Ooty, K went on to tell her about
''my own pain which was getting worse and worse.
I suppose it will stop some day but at present it is rather awful. I can’t do any work etc. It goes on all day & all night now. Also when Helen was here, I was able to relax & now I can’t. I feel as though I want to cry my heart out but what is the good ? ''

He wrote to Mrs Besant on February 10, recounting a 'dream' he had had: ''I remember going to the Master’s house and asking & begging to let Nitya get well & let
him live. The Master said that I was to see the Lord Maitreya and I went there and I implored
there, but I got the impression that it was not His business & that I should go to the Mahachohan.
I went there. I remember all this so clearly. He was seated in His chair, with great dignity & magnificent understanding, with grave & kindly eyes. I told Him that I would sacrifice my happiness or anything that was required to let Nitya live, for I felt this thing was being decided. He listened to me & answered (non-commitedly?) ‘He will be well.’ It was such a relief and all my anxiety has completely disappeared''.

The Star TS Congress followed on December 28 and at the first meeting under the Banyan tree a dramatic change took place while K was speaking. It came at the end of his talk. He had been speaking about the World Teacher: ‘He comes only to those who want, who desire, who long...’ and then his voice changed completely and rang out, ‘and I come for those who want
sympathy, who want happiness, who are longing to be released, who are longing
to find happiness in all things. I come to reform and not to tear down, I come not to destroy but to build.’ For those who noticed the change to the first person and the difference in the voice, it was a spine-tingling experience. Mrs Besant frequently referred to it thereafter. In the final meeting of the Star Congress she said:
... that event [of December 28, 1925] marked the definite consecration of the chosen vehicle ... the final acceptance of the body chosen long before. ... The 'coming' has begun. ...
And in the Theosophist she wrote, ‘For the first time the Voice that spoke as
never man spake, has sounded again in our lower ways in the ears of the great
crowd that sat beneath the Banyan Tree, it was on December 28 ... and we knew
that the waiting period was over, and that the morning star had arisen above the horizon.’

K himself had no doubts. Talking to the National Representatives at the end of the Star Congress he said:
''You have drunk at the fountain of wisdom and knowledge. The memory of the 28th should
be to you as if you were guarding some precious jewel and every time you look at it you must
feel a thrill. Then when He comes again, and I am sure that He will come again very soon, it
will be for us a nobler and far more beautiful occasion than even last time''.

And on January 5, 1926

''A new life, a new storm has swept the world. It is like a tremendous gale that blows and
cleans everything, all the particles of dust from the trees, the cobwebs from our minds and from
our emotions and has left us perfectly clean. ... I personally feel quite different from that day. ...
I feel like a crystal vase, a jar that has been cleansed and now anybody in the world can put a beautiful flower in it and that flower shall live in the vase and never die.''

A fortnight later he told Lady Emily that he felt now just like a shell—so absolutely impersonal. He used the phrase, ‘I feel somehow so precious now’. He said he was sure ‘the Lord would come more and more whenever there was the
occasion or the special need of Him’.

Leadbeater was no less certain. When we are asked if the World Teacher has come, what do we answer?’ That there was not ‘a shadow of doubt’ that ‘He’ had used
‘the Vehicle more than once’ at the Jubilee Convention, just as ‘He’ had used it
at Benares on December 28, 1911. ‘He’ would continue to use it only intermittently, though more frequently. Besides, ‘He would have to get the Vehicle used to Him’.

On the 11th, Lady Emily noted, ‘Marvellous talk & I am sure the Lord ( Maitreya) was there. K told me afterwards that he had to resist saying 'I' instead of Him.’

The talk on the 9th, the last day of the gathering, was, according to Lady
Emily, the most wonderful of all:
Krishna spoke as never before & one feels now that his consciousness & that of the Lord are
so completely blended that there is no distinction any more. He said, ‘Follow me & I will show you the way into the Kingdom of Happiness. I will give each of you the key with which you can unlock the gate into the garden’—and it was no effort to him to use the personal pronoun ... the face of the Lord shone through the face of Krishna & His glorious aura encompassed us in an almost blinding light.
I noticed an unusual dignity in his appearance. His face had grown strangely powerful and stern, his eyes at times
half veiled as if looking inwards, had an unusual fire, and even his voice sounded deeper and
fuller. The power went on increasing with every word he uttered. ... There was a strange
stillness—nobody moved or made a sound even after it was over. ... The speech you will read,
but I know I shall not find in it a tenth part of what I heard. ... It is not to be
described. What can one say? The Lord was there and He was speaking. I saw Krishnaji and as I was telling him how his whole appearance had changed the evening before he said: ‘I wish I could see it too.’

From the atmosphere of excitement in the Camp it was evident that the great
majority of those present believed they had heard the voice of the Lord Maitreya which, of course, they had been expecting to hear ever since the Convention
opened.
On July 28, Lady Emily
recorded that she knew the Lord was there again at the Camp fire, ‘but this time
with tenderness instead of power. It was infinitely touching and sad. K told us of
his own inner experience, took us into his very heart. He said “You may take my
heart and eat it, you may take my blood and drink it & I shall not mind—because
I have so much, & you have so little.”’

Two days after his arrival in Ojai
he wrote to Lady Emily from Arya Vihara:
''Here I am—without Nitya. We drove up here from Los Angeles with Amma. When we
entered the house, I saw Nitya & felt him almost physically & when I went into the room in

By January 1927, K wrote to tell
Leadbeater, the ‘old business’ of intense pain at the base of his spine and the nape of his neck began again and went on practically all day.

Mary Lutyens was now able to help him to relax when he ‘went off’ in the afternoons. When she first went to him on February 20 the 'body elemental' asked her who she was and then said, ‘Well, if you are a friend of Krishna and Nitya I suppose you are all right.’ He became like a child of about four, though without the restlessness of a child. Although he spoke English he would always call her Amma; he seemed very frightened of K, as of a stern elder brother, and would say things like, ‘Take
care, Krishna’s coming back.’ With K away the body did not seem to be in any great pain, though it was sometimes fractious. K, on his return, had absolutely no recollection of anything the 'child' had said.

K wrote to Lady Emily:
I am writing this in the Shrine, just after my 'affair' of every day. ...My head has been extra bad, but it’s extraordinary how the body can get used to anything. First day, the day you left, it was on the verge of tears but now it’s quite normal. Great times are ahead of us & you too must be great.''

The next day K wrote a little note
to Mrs Besant : ''More and more am I certain that I am the Teacher and my mind and consciousness is changed. My work and my life is settled. I have reached my goal. You need never doubt or think that I would love you any the less. I love you with all my heart. ... Oh! mother, the fulfilment of many lives has now come.''

On August 2, in a talk entitled ‘Who Brings the Truth’, K gave his first public answer to the question which was troubling so many—did he or did he not believe in the Masters and the rest of the occult hierarchy?

''When I was a small boy I used to see Sri Krishna, with the flute, as he is pictured
by the Hindus, because my mother was a devotee of Sri Krishna. ... When I grew older and met with Bishop Leadbeater and the Theosophical Society, I began to see the Master K.H.—again in the form which was put before me, the reality from their point of view. Later on, as I grew, I began to see the Lord Maitreya. That was two years ago and I saw him constantly in the form put before me. ... Now lately, it has been the Buddha whom I have been seeing, and it has been my delight and my glory to be with Him. I have been asked what I mean by ‘the Beloved’. To me it is all—it is Sri Krishna, it is the Master K.H., it is the Lord Maitreya, it is the Buddha, and yet it is beyond all these forms. What does it matter what
name you give? So you will see my point of view when I talk about 'my Beloved'. I want it to be as vague as possible, and I hope I have made it so. My Beloved is the open skies, the flower, every human being. ... Till I was able to say with certainty, without any undue excitement, or
exaggeration in order to convince others, that I was one with my Beloved, I never spoke. I
talked of vague generalities which everybody wanted. I never said: I am the World Teacher; but now that I feel I am one with my Beloved, I have found what I longed for, I have become united, so that henceforth there will be no
separation, because my thoughts, my desires, my longings—those of the individual self—have
been destroyed. ... I am as the flower that gives scent to the morning air. It does not concern
itself with who is passing by. ... Until now you have been depending on someone else to tell you the Truth, whereas the Truth lies within you. In your own hearts, in your own experience, you will find the Truth, and that is the only thing of value. ... My purpose is not to create discussions on the manifestations in the personality of Krishnamurti, but to give the waters that
shall wash away your sorrows, your limitations, so that you will be free, so that you will eventually join that ocean where there is no limitation, where there is the Beloved.
... Does it really matter out of what glass you drink the water, so long as that water is able to
quench your thirst. ... I have been united with my Beloved, and my Beloved and I will wander
together the face of the earth. ... It is no good asking me who is the Beloved. For you will not understand the Beloved until you are able to see Him in every animal, in every blade of grass, in every person that is suffering, in every individual.

K wrote to
Mrs Besant on August 22
''I am so happy to get your letter, Amma mine. I didn’t know that I had caused a storm by my
speech at the Service Camp Fire. I don’t remember what I said but when the copy comes I will see. I am very sorry that Lady D. and others are upset. She has not said a word to me. I am afraid they all object to think for themselves, it’s so much easier to sit, in comfort, in the thought of others. Life is curious and it’s going to be difficult. It’s all in the day’s work. I am, more and more,
certain in my vision of the Truth. These mountains and the clean air here are wonderful and I have the Beloved with me. More and more, I am certain of my union with my Beloved, with the Teacher, with the life
eternal. As 'Krishna', I do not exist and that is the truth of the matter. I am not going to convert anyone to my way of thinking but I am going to assert the fact, when it is necessary.
My head has been and is very bad but there it is. I am not in the least concerned about it
except that it is rather tiresome''

From a letter to Lady Emily dated December 5, 1928 : ‘Please tell Mary I am not “divine”
but the 'natural flower' of the world. The way she means “divine” is that I am a freak. Perfection is not freakishness. If all the world thought & lived like me it would be lovely & would not come to a standstill.’

K returned to Ojai in October 1931, determined to have a complete rest. He was writing to Lady Emily from his cottage: ''My being alone like this has given me something tremendous, & it’s just what I need. Everything has come, so far in my life, just at the right time. My mind is so serene but concentrated and I am watching it like a cat a mouse. I am really enjoying this solitude & I can’t put into words what I am feeling. But I am not deceiving myself either. I go down to Arya
Vihara to my meals & when Rajagopal & his family come, I shall
have my food on a tray here. For the next three months, or as long as I want to, I am going to do
this. I can never be finished but I want to finish with all the superficialities which I have.''

Another set of first hand details on K's Process from Pupul Jayakar's book of Memoirs on K (1948) :

Late at night we woke to the sound of Krishnaji’s voice calling from the veranda where he slept. His voice sounded frail, and we were bewildered and thought he was ill. After a great deal of hesitation, we went to the doorway that led to the veranda and asked him whether he was unwell. Krishnaji was calling for somebody, his voice was fragile and childlike. He kept on saying, “Krishna has gone away, when will he be back?” His eyes were open, but there was no recognition. Then he seemed to grow aware of us and asked, “Are you Rosalind?” And then, “Oh, yes, yes, he knows about you, it is all right, please sit here, wait here.” Then again after a little while, “Don’t leave the body alone and don’t be afraid.” The voice started calling for “Krishna” again. His hand would cover his mouth and he would say, “He has said not to call him.” Then in the voice of a child, “When will he be back? Will he come back soon?” This went on for a while; he would be quiet, then shout for “Krishna,” then chide himself.
After about an hour his voice became joyful. “He is back, do you see them? They are here, spotless.” His hands expressed a fullness. And then the voice changed, it was again the familiar voice of Krishnaji. He sat up, apologizing for having kept us awake. He saw us to our room and left. The strangeness of it all bewildered us; we were dazed and did not sleep all night. Next morning at breakfast he looked fresh and young. We questioned him as to what had happened. He laughed and said he did not know. Could we describe what had happened? We did so. He said ''we would talk about it some time'', which by then we had come to understand meant that he did not wish to discuss the matter further. The next day we returned to Bombay.
Krishnaji wrote to Nandini and me to join him in Ootacamund. We had just returned from seeing him in Madras. Looking back, it appears incomprehensible that Krishnaji did not consider for a moment whether it was possible, whether the money for the journey and stay in Ooty was forthcoming, whether Nandini could get permission to come. I was free to travel within the constraints of my not very affluent finances, but with Nandini the situation was entirely different. Her estrangement from her husband was deepening; though her husband and his family were quite wealthy, they were orthodox and very conservative. Nandini had no independent means of her own.
But it had been always so with Krishnaji. Once a necessity arose within him and was expressed, it 'happened'—all hindrances were surmountable. And so Nandini, her children, her father-in-law, Sir Chunilal Mehta, and I with my daughter Radhika arrived in Ootacamund in the third week of May. Jamnadas Dwarkadas was to join us in Ootacamund a few days later. We found that Krishnaji had recovered from an illness and had grown a beard while he rested in bed. It was cold, and Krishnaji wore a long, flowing choga of natural wool. The large penetrating eyes, bearded face, and long robes gave him a biblical appearance.

We went with him for long walks, taking shortcuts through the pines. He walked lithely up vertical slopes and it was difficult to keep pace with him. It was the season before the rains, the forests were opaque with rising mists. We walked with Krishnamurti, entering enchanted woods where trees shrouded in rising clouds turned incandescent, as sunlight touched them, to dissolve as mists closed in. On one occasion, climbing up a steep path through the pine trees, we came on three women walking carefully downhill, balancing heavy loads of wood on their heads. Krishnaji stood to one side and watched every movement the women made as they passed him. Suddenly, one felt it—a compassion emanating from him, a tender attention and energy that wiped away the burdens of the women who passed, never knowing what made their loads lighter.
Toward the end of May certain incidents occurred which cast light on the secret mystical life of Krishnamurti.
In August 1922 in Ojai, when Krishnaji was undergoing violent awakening, he had two trusted friends with him. From Krishnaji’s early years, Annie Besant had insisted that two people be with Krishnaji all the time, to protect the body. The protection of the body of the sage when it is undergoing mystical processes of mutation and transference of consciousness, was deeply rooted in Indian mystical tradition. The body at this time is immensely sensitive, vulnerable, and empty of all ego sense.

The need to protect the body had been the main and perhaps the only function of those present while Krishnaji underwent enormous transformations of energy that opened up the previously nonoperative areas of the brain. To give any other significance to Krishnaji’s relationship to these people, as may have been claimed, is not valid. The only valid point is that they were people whom Krishnaji trusted, who would see that no harm came to the body, and who above all would have no strong emotional reactions, fear or otherwise, to what took place.

The incidents at Ooty extended over a period of three weeks, from May 28 to June 20, 1948. They took place in Krishnaji’s room at Sedgemoor. My sister Nandini and I were present. It was embarrassing for Nandini and me. Anyway, there was nothing we could do.
It began on an evening when Krishnaji had been for a walk with us. He started to say that he was not feeling well, and 'could we go home ?'. When we asked whether he wanted to see a doctor, he said, “No, it is not that.” He would not explain further. When we got home he went to his room, telling Friedman that on no account was he to be disturbed; but he asked Nandini and me to come into the room. He closed the door and then told us not to be afraid, whatever happened, and on no account to call a doctor. He asked us both to sit quietly and watch him. There was to be no fear. We were not to speak to him, not to revive him, but to close his mouth if he fainted. On no account were we to leave the body alone.

Krishnaji appeared to be in extreme pain. He complained of severe toothache and an intense pain at the nape of the neck, the crown of the head, and in the spine.

In the midst of the pain he would say, “They are cleansing the brain, oh, so completely, emptying it.” At other times he would complain of great heat, and his body would perspire profusely. The intensity of the pain varied as did the area where it was concentrated. At times the pain was located in the head, in the tooth, the nape of the neck, or the spine. At other times he groaned and held his stomach. Nothing relieved the pain; it came and went at will.
When the 'process' was operating, the body lying on the bed appeared a shell; only a body consciousness appeared to be present. In this state the voice was frail, childlike. Then suddenly the body filled with a soaring Presence. Krishnaji would sit up cross-legged, his eyes closed, the fragile body would appear to grow and his presence would fill the room; there was a palpable, throbbing silence and an immense strength that poured into the room and enveloped us. In this state the voice had great volume and depth.

After the first evening he started going for a walk alone in the evenings and used to ask Nandini and me to come later to the house. In the beginning the 'experiences' started at 6 P.M. and were over by 8:30 P.M., but later they sometimes went on until midnight. On days when he had to meet people , nothing happened. Toward the end the periods grew longer, and on one occasion went on all night. On no occasion did he speak of dirt or express a desire to leave the room as he had done at Ojai, though Sedgemoor was not particularly clean; nor did he speak of disturbing thoughts. On one occasion he asked Nandini to hold his hand, as otherwise he would 'slip away and not come back'.

While he was in the midst of the ordeal, his body would toss on the bed. He would have fits of shivering, would call out for Krishna, and then put his hand to his mouth and say, “I must not call him.” I tried to keep notes of what Krishnaji said in these mystical states. Some of the notes are missing. However, I have reprinted here the notes that do exist and Nandini has helped me reconstruct the rest.

May 30, 1948: Krishnamurti was getting ready to go for a walk when suddenly he said he was feeling too weak and 'not all there'. He said, “What a pain I have.” He caught the back of his head and lay down. Within a few minutes the Krishnaji we knew was not there. For two hours we saw him go through intense pain. He said he had a pain in the back of his neck, his teeth were troubling him, his stomach was swollen and hard, and he groaned and pressed down. At times he would shout. He fainted a number of times. When he came to, the first time, he said, “Close my mouth when I faint.”
He kept on saying: “Amma—oh, God, give me peace. I know what they are up to. Call him back. I know when the limit of pain is reached, they will return. They know how much the body can stand. If I become a lunatic, look after me—not that I will become a lunatic. They are very careful with the body. I feel so old. Only a bit of me is functioning. I am like a rubber toy, which a child plays with. It is the child that gives it life.”

His face throughout the occurrence was worn and wracked with pain. He kept clenching his fists and tears streamed from his eyes. After two hours, he fainted again. When he came to, he said: “The pain has disappeared. Deep inside me I know what has happened. I have been soaked with (spirit?) 'gasoline'. The tank is full.”
He then said he would speak so that he would not think of the pain inside him. “Have you seen the sun and the soft clouds heavy with rain? They pass over the sun and then the rain comes down with a roar on the earth that waits like an open womb. It washes clean. Every flower, every leaf. There is fragrance, a newness. Then the clouds pass and the sun comes out and touches every leaf and every flower. The gentle little flower that is like a young girl that ruthless men destroy. Have you seen the faces of rich men? Hard busy with their stocks and money-making? What do they know of Love? Have you ever felt every limb of a tree, touched a leaf, sat by a ragged child? You know when I drove to the aerodrome, I saw a mother washing the buttocks of a child. It was beautiful. Nobody noticed her. All they know is to make money and cesspools of their women. Love to them is sex. To hold a woman’s hand, when she is not a woman, that is (selfless) love. Do you know what it is to love? You have husbands and children. But how would you know? You cannot hold a cloud in a golden cage.”

He was silent for a time, then said, “This pain makes my body like steel—but, oh, so flexible, so pliant, without a thought. It is like a 'polishing'—an examination.” We enquired whether he couldn’t stop having the pain. He said: “You have had a child. Can you stop it coming when once it starts?” Then: “They are going to have fun with me tonight. I see the storm gathering. Oh, Christos!”
After some time, Maurice brought in some soup and then went out. Krishnaji had the light put on. He had sat up with the legs crossed, body erect. The pain had gone from his face. His eyes were closed. He seemed to grow. We felt tremendous power pour into him. There was a 'throbbing' in the atmosphere. It filled the room. Our eyes and ears were filled with it and with sound, though there was no sound; and every pore of our bodies felt a touch, but there was nothing in the room. Then he opened his eyes and said: “Something happened—did you see anything?” We told him what we had felt. He said: “My face will be different tomorrow.” He lay down and his hand went out in a gesture of fullness. He said, “I will be like a raindrop—spotless.” After a few minutes, he told us he was all right and that we should go home.

June 17, 1948: Krishnaji went out for a walk alone. He asked Nandini and me to wait for him. We sat by the fire and waited. He entered the room as if he were a stranger. He went straight to his table and wrote something in his file. After some time he grew aware of us. He came and sat down near the fire. He asked us what we had been doing and said that he had walked far beyond the Golf Club. There was a flute being played in the distance and he sat silently, listening to it intently. It was only after it stopped that he appeared in that semiconscious state. Twice while we sat there, that tremendous 'Presence' filled him. He grew in stature before us. His eyes were half-closed; his face silent and immensely beautiful.
And then he lay on the bed and there was just the body. The voice that came from it was that of a frail child. The Krishnaji we knew was not there. The body of Krishnamurti started saying that he was very hurt inside, that 'they had burnt him inside'; that there was a pain right through his head. He was shivering and started saying that something had happened on the walk. He turned to us and asked, “Did you see him return?” He could not synchronize his body and mind. At time he felt he was still in the woods. “They came and covered him with leaves.” He said, “Do you know, you would not have seen him tomorrow. He nearly did not return.” He kept on feeling his body to see if it was all there. He said, “I must go back and find out what had happened on the walk. Something happened and 'They' rushed back. But, I do not know whether I returned? There may be pieces of me lying on the road.” Twice he got out of bed and made for the door, but lay down again. Later, he went to sleep. When he awoke, he felt himself and stared at his hands.

June 18, 1948: Krishnaji asked us to come at about seven in the evening. He was out. We waited. He came in some time later. He was again the stranger. He wrote something in the book and then came and sat with us. He said: “Thoughts of my talk in Bangalore are pouring in. I am awake again.” He closed his eyes and sat for some time erect, silent. Then he complained of hurt and went and lay down. He said he felt he was burnt. He was crying. “Do you know, I found out what happened on the walk. 'He' came fully and took complete charge. That is why I did not know whether I had returned. I knew nothing.” A little later, “Then in the emptiness, there was a light and a storm and I was tortured that day in the wind. Do you know that emptiness that has no horizon—no limit—it stretches?” His hand moved to show empty space.
Then a little later: “They have burnt me so that there can be more 'emptiness'. They want to see how much of Him can come.” Then later: “Do you know emptiness? When there is not a thought? When it (the mind?) is completely empty? But, how could you know? It is this 'emptiness' that brings power—this is pure power—like that in a dynamo. You know, on the walk I was in an ecstasy. I have never cried like that. As I walked I met a poor man. He saw me crying and thought I had lost a mother or sister. Then he smiled at me and I could not understand.” Suddenly, he said, “I have a thought—time and emptiness—that’s it. I hope I remember when I wake up.”

He started saying that he could not bear it, that he was all burnt inside, hurt. Then suddenly he sat up and said, “Don’t move,” and again we saw him like the other night. His face was in the dark, but the fire leapt up and his shadow lengthened on the wall. All pain had disappeared from the face. His eyes were closed, his body was throbbing, as if some power was entering his body. His face was pulsating. He appeared to grow and fill the room. He sat without movement for about three minutes and then he fainted. He woke up calm and peaceful.

Although the notes we took on the final night are lost, Nandini and I remember the occasion vividly.
Krishnaji had been suffering excruciating pain in his head and neck, his stomach was swollen, tears streamed down his face. He suddenly fell back on the bed and became intensely still. The traces of pain and fatigue were wiped away, as happens in death. Then life and an immensity began to enter the face. The face was greatly beautiful. It had no age, time had not touched it. The eyes opened, but there was no recognition. The body radiated light; a stillness and a vastness illumined the face. The silence was liquid and heavy, like honey; it poured into the room and into our minds and bodies, filling every cell of the brain, wiping away every trace of time and memory. We felt a 'touch without a presence', a wind blowing without movement. We could not help folding our hands in pranams. For some minutes he lay unmoving, then his eyes opened. After some time, he saw us and said, “Did you see that face?” He did not expect an answer. He lay silently. “The Buddha was here, you are blessed.”
We went back to the hotel, and that 'Silence' came with us and enclosed us for the next few days. We were held by a pervading Presence. Most of the time we were in the room with Krishnaji, we had no part to play; yet our presence seemed necessary. There was nothing personal in him during the incidents—no emotion, no relationship to us. The ordeal appeared physical, and yet the next day left no trace on his face or body. He was aflame with energy—joyous, eager, and youthful. Not a word he said had 'psychological' (personal) overtones. A weight, depth, and strength was present in the silence that permeated the room and the atmosphere on every occasion.
When Nandini and I left Ootacamund, Krishnamurti asked us to “go to Bombay and rest. You have gone through a great ordeal.”

In one of his letters to me, K later referred briefly to what had happened. I had asked him one morning what was the reason for the two voices—that of the frail child and the normal voice of Krishnamurti. I said that it looked as if some 'entity' goes out of the body and some entity reenters the body. Krishnamurti said in his letter, “This is not so. It is

More selected excerpts from Mrs Pupul Jayakar's memoirs :

On March 10 (1948 ?) , at one of his last morning discussions, he spoke with great urgency of the need to penetrate the mechanics of his mind:

K: I was thinking this morning if I could understand my own mind and the way it works, I could say to you, look carefully and you can have it. How does my mind work? Yesterday, when I spoke of meditation, was my brain working? If not, then what was working? My answers were logical. How did they arise? What happened? I said that the thought and the thinker were one. What was the mechanism that produced that thought? One can speculate and say it was the 'higher mind' that was using me, Maitreya, that I am a sounding board; that would be a good Theosophical explanation. But that does not satisfy me.
If I could show it to Achyut very clearly, he could have it. What is the thing operating? There is no step-by-step thinking, so what is operating?

Rao: This time I think I understand what Krishnaji is saying: Krishnaji is aware when people who listen to him are with him. But this would be the experience of any genuine person—with Krishnaji it is something more.

K: To know an audience and to adjust, that is simple. Let us go a little beyond

F: You are always new. There must be a creative source operating all the time. What is the nature of this source? You are a trinity. There is Krishnamurti the man, just as he is; then he is the guru, pinching, coercing; then he is truth, the power ‘which is. They are not
separate, but three aspects of the same truth. The question is, who is Krishnamurti?

K: How would I set about getting this thing that is operating?

R: From the first day when you spoke of the 'movement from a pointless point', one saw that this state to you was a moment-to-moment reality. If one can remain there then conflict ends.

K: How does a man transmit the creative touch to another? There is 'something' operating through K which I would like to share. I know it is possible. I feel it is as possible as the sunshine.

F: Are you drawing a current from a source not limited to you? If so, how can we tap the source?

K: I feel it was open to me from the beginning . It has always been there. The distance getting clearer, clearer, closer. I know how it works with me: This morning I woke with a feeling. There was no ‘me’ feeling. Tomorrow morning when I wake up there will be something new. It keeps going on all the time. When I talk it bursts out. There is never a storing up and then pouring out. With most people the storage is always the old. Here there is no storage, no 'safe'. Even if it is true that K was trained, that he is being used by Maitreya, that entity says to you, ‘You should have it.’ Admitting ( the reality of ) all the differences, that ( higher ?) 'entity' says, ‘Come, you can have it.’ He wants you to have it, therefore he abolishes all divisions. I feel that It is operating, I feel the field is open and some are in it.
“What is our problem? I have it, you don’t, and I say you can have it. But if you ask, ‘How have I got it?' then you are lost.
I say to Rao, ‘Go out, try it.’ I remember my first speech at Madurai. Dr. Besant said to me, ‘My dear, your stance was alright, your gestures right, only you were too inexperienced. I know it is possible for you to have it. Go, start, speak, see what happens. Even if you make a mess, remain hesitant. With this you must be completely uncertain.’ I say to you, you have got it. Go open the door.
This is so in my relationships. There is never a sense of coming back to a relationship. There are no anchorages, there is always a moving out. I have been told what I say today is different to what I said earlier and to what I was; and I will be different again. K is like that. K has no fixed points of return.

I met Krishnaji alone after the dialogues ended. He asked me how I was feeling. What had the five weeks of discussion done for me? I replied that I had been left with little self-volition. I was feeling very young within. It was like being reincarnated while still alive. I felt part of something that had to be. Things would 'happen' to me, as they were meant to; there was little I could do.
I also told him of what had happened to me toward the end of the discussions on consciousness. The dialogue had generated an intense watching of the mind during the day; when I fell asleep, the observation continued. One night I had an explosive perception of the thinker and thought as one; there was blazing light and I fell into deep sleep. The second night the same watchful intensity and the perception of the observer and the observed as one, exploding light and deep sleep. The third night there was an instant when all thought was quenched, an immense light and then dreamless sleep.

He heard me speak, but refused to give the experiences any importance. He said, “It is over, move (on ?) .” He then asked me what I was going to do. I said, “I do not know. I feel the urge to write. I also feel like doing nothing.” He said, “Do nothing, see what happens.”

( still in the 50's ) I grew aware of how difficult it was to live close to Krishnaji without growing insensitive. It was like living in front of a laser beam; one could so easily take the intensity for granted and so be scorched and shrivel. To live near him was to live in a field of observation and listening. One had to be immensely awake so that the spine straightened, the mind became alert, the body still. He was watchful of every movement, every thought; the way one walked, the agitated movements of the body, the way one spoke, the pitch of the voice, the silences. He listened to every response—was aware when the mind imitated, when it was alive with insight. Without a word said, one felt the listening and the observing. But the being who was near, who watched, who listened, was without judgment. It was like seeing one’s face in a finely polished ancient bronze mirror.

This post was last updated by John Raica Fri, 02 Nov 2018.

Here are a few randomly selected excerpts from K's letters

From an 1910 letter of the young K -then aged 15- to Annie Besant

(...) It was very beautiful. When we went to our Master’s house, we found Him and Master Morya and the Master Djwal Kul all standing talking, and They spoke very kindly. We all prostrated ourselves, and the Master drew me to His knee, and asked me whether I would forget myself entirely and never have a selfish thought, but think only how to help the world; and I said indeed I would, and I wanted only to be like Him some day. Then he kissed me and passed His hand over me, and I seemed to be somehow part of Him, and I felt quite different and very very happy

(Here are a few excepts from a rather comprehensive K letter adressed to C W Leadbetter on February 1915 :

It is quite a long time since I wrote to you last and I am very sorry. I am afraid I am not at all good at lessons and I have not got the brains for them and so I plod along rather slowly. Miss Arundale, George, Dick, Shiva Rao and I are here. She looks after the household affairs. Shiva Rao teaches me mathematics and Sanskrit, George teaches me English. (...) I know I ought to be interested in the work and all that, but at present moment I am afraid I am not. I am trying hard to do my duty and it is very difficult. I know I will get it all back and serve the Masters and in the meantime it is not easy. I will go on trying hard all the same. George is not very good in health as he had a nervous breakdown and that has rather upset him in many ways. He wants me to get interested in the work all at once and I am afraid he has not got the patience for it. He feels that the Master is not near him and this house is not Master’s house as it ought to be. He thinks I ought to take the lead but I don’t feel like it all and I want to be quiet. He also thinks that he is responsible for my actions and my life here. Do you understand what I mean.

Then comes Lady Emily. I suppose you have heard from other sources all about her and myself. So you know their side and now I want you to know my side. When I first really met her at Varengeville in 1913 during the summer, we met very often while we were playing tennis and during Theosophical talks. I became very fond of her. I told her that I felt like a son to her and that I love her very much. When I came to London I wanted to be with her and all that which you can understand. Then the eternal people, who can’t mind their own business began to talk and made fairly a lot of trouble. Then Mrs Besant came, and she told Lady Emily and me that we must not show our affections openly as it might create trouble. I suppose we two have been selfish but I have been trying hard not to and she is too. You know all about her and me on the other planes and so in a way you know it all but all the same I must tell you. Then her husband who is not specially fond of Theosophy began to say that she ought not to be so friendly with me, as I am an Indian. He is an anglo-Indian and you can understand that. He dislikes Theosophy and thinks it is all bad and the usual nonsense as most people believe when they don’t think about it. So you see how she stands. We have put each other before the work and that has been the difficulty. Now we have realised that the Masters and the work come before everything and we have made up our minds to that and we are trying hard to do it.

Then George thought that I did not love him any more and that has been very hard on me. I want both of them to be very great friends as I love them both very much. She has helped me a very great deal and made me certainly very happy. Then George said that she has done me harm and all that and that is not so but on the contrary she has helped me through hard times and I am very grateful to her. I love in the whole world four people and they are, you, Mrs Besant, George and Lady Emily and that will never change whatever happens. She has not been accepted by the Master last year and it is our fault not to please the Master. She has been trying very hard lately and I hope the Master is pleased with her. She wants that too very much and I hope He is. This year she must be accepted and I am going to help her to the best of my ability and not be selfish. You know I love her very purely and I don’t do anything else but that. I do really love her very much and I want to help her and make her happy. I want your help to this too as in everything.

You are my eldest brother and I want your help. You must help her and me. Lady Emily is here for a week end and I am glad to say she has, I think, been doing what the Master wishes. She is not so selfish as she used to be and I think I am too better in that respect. She does want to do her best and I hope she will succeed. I have been noticing that George and she are alright now. Lady Emily does like him very much and thinks he is a big person and all that. They both are very fine people in their way and I love them very much. George was a bit jealous of her but now, thank goodness, it is all over. I love her very very purely and I am glad that I am not like usual people in that respect. I am not that way and never shall be. Then Barbie and Robert. George likes Barbie very very much and I think she does too. She is the latest fashion and in all the worldly things and I am sorry for that. She does not like Theosophy for the moment, of course, but I know, like myself it will all pass. I believe she is considered very nice looking and all that sort of thing but that’s nothing. Nityam and she were once six months ago very great friends. They loved each other and helped each other along but then George came along and Barbie liked him and poor Nityam became jealous and Barbie in a way dropped him and he feels awfully badly about it. Then Robert. He is just the same and very devoted to me. He is the opposite of Barbie in everything, I think. I like and love him very much. He has got very fine qualities but he is very young and is very boyish. He is very artistic, which is a great thing, I think. Robert and I have got more or less the same qualities and are much alike in many ways. Now I must tell you about Nityam. Poor Nityam, I am afraid is not at all happy. He has been studying a lot and got his eyes in a terrible state. He has been to see the oculist and he says he must not over work and must work an hour a day and not more. Do you see, Mrs Besant wanted Nityam to pass his London Matriculation in July and it is frightfully stiff. So he has been overworking with his tutor in Oxford. He is very poor in health and his eyes are bad, altogether he is in a bad state. Nityam and I are now much more intimate and he tells me all his troubles and that helps him a bit. Of course he is very devoted to you and you could help him much more than anybody and I wish he could see you. He feels very lonely, like most of us do, and there is nobody whom he specially likes or loves and it makes double harder. He is very bitter and hard and cold. He suffers a lot I am afraid and I can’t help him much. He wants somebody to love him first and foremost and to whom he can pour out all his troubles. He wants a mother to love as I have Lady Emily. I am afraid he does not like many people. Like me he is at present not interested in the work but I think it will pass soon. He has grown but he is not at all well for his age. He is now in London as Mr Fleming, a doctor, is looking after him and I think it will do him good. I do hope this letter will reach you safely. You must answer all my things. My dear C.W.L. I love you very much and I hope this will bring us closer together.

This post was last updated by John Raica Sun, 11 Nov 2018.

Continuing the hectic selection of excerpts from K's letter through the years

(To Annie Besant in February 1919).

(...) I cannot tell you what I am feeling at the thought of your coming over here and also at seeing you. It has been more than four and a half years since I last saw you and a great many things have happened since then. You will find a great change in me except in one thing, namely that my devotion and love for your dear self has never changed. Words are so futile and cannot by any means convey what is one’s real feeling although he be a master of words. So mother dearest, I, who am not a conjurer with words as yet, cannot unfold to you on paper, or in words, those thoughts which are constantly in my brain and in my heart. To me it will be a new life, give me a different point of view on life and my aspect on human nature will be so completely changed. You can give me anything that’s enobling and yet be a mother which, in my opinion, cannot be found in modern civilization, especially over here. I can do but mighty little in comparison to what you have done for me, I can and will give you, mother dear, all my pure love and devotion and be a true son on whom you can lean. So much for my innermost thoughts.

( To Emily Lutyens, 1920 )

(...) Suddenly while she was talking, I became unconscious of her & the room & toutes les choses, toutes. It was as though I fainted for a second & I forgot what I had been saying and asked her to repeat what I had been saying. It is absolutely indiscribable mother. I felt as though my mind & soul was taken away for a second and I felt most strange I assure you. Mme de M. was looking at me all the time & I said that I felt very strange & I said ‘Oh! the room is very hot isn’t it?’ For I did not want her to think that I was ‘inspired’ or anything of that kind but all the same I felt really inspired & very strange. ... I had to get up and stand a bit & collect my ideas. I assure you mother it was most strange, most strange. Between ourselves absolutely, in the Theosophical language, there was 'someone' there but I did not tell her.

(To Annie Besant in January 1921

(...) My letter about my education must have made you unhappy. Please mother that was not my intention when I wrote it and it was far from it. If my education was neglected it was not your fault, it was the war and other things and please don’t say that you are sorry as it hurts me profoundly. Nobody in the world could have been more thoughtful and motherly to Nitya and me. What has happened is finished and after all why should I or you worry about it. You have enough as it is, God knows. So please don’t say you are sorry. ... I am going to write the editorial every month and for me it will be very difficult. My French is getting on splendidly and in a few months I ought to be quite good. I go to the Sorbonne and I have taken up Sanskrit which will be useful in India. My one desire in life is to work for you and for Theosophy. I shall succeed. I want to come out to India as Raja will have told you and take my part in the work. Anyhow mother remember that I love you with all my heart and soul and no man can be more devoted to you.

This post was last updated by John Raica Mon, 12 Nov 2018.

Nitya wrote to Annie Besant on March 24 from Ojai in 1924 on their return from Pergine, Italy:

Krishna’s process has now taken a definite step forward. The other night, it began as usual, none of us expecting anything fresh or new. All of a sudden, we all felt an immense rush of power in the house, greater than I have ever felt since we have been here; Krishna saw the Lord and the Master; I think also the star shone out that night, for all of us felt an intense sense of awe and almost fear that I felt before when the star came out. Krishna afterwards told us that the current started as usual at the base of his spine and reached the base of his neck, then one went on the left side, the other on the right side of his head and they eventually met at the centre of the forehead; when they met a flame played out of his forehead. That is the bare outline of what happened; none of us know what it means but the power was so immense that night that it seems to mark a definite stage. I presume it should mean the opening of the 'third eye'.

The following anonymous account of K's stay in Pergine was found among Shiva Rao’s papers after his death:

August 29, 1924: Our life here is one of intense inner activity and almost complete outer inertia. Or that is what it should be and what Krishnaji desires. On previous holidays of this kind, when Krishnaji has collected around him those whom he desired to teach and help and has retired to some quiet spot away from civilization, there has been no concerted plan of action. Krishnaji has of course spoken to each of his followers individually, but never before have the Masters been spoken of to us all collectively, as in our present group, so that every grade and those who were still apart might listen and talk openly about them. We are here for but one purpose, to take definite “steps” and thereby become directly useful to Them. Each one has his opportunity; each one is at a different stage, and therefore capable of serving those above and helping those below.

The regime for the day is, meditation at a quarter past eight, breakfast at eight thirty. A walk down to an open stubble field where we play rounders for an hour or two, and then one hour’s talk under the trees, of the Masters and of how to serve Them. Lunch at 12.30—rest or individual work, if wished, until three; games in the Castle grounds, bath, and dinner at six. After which all separate for the night, some of us going to the Square tower where certain intensive preparation goes on for an hour. Bed at 8.30.

Krishnaji is of course the central figure of each day; of the games, and of the work. Around him everything [is] centred; Krishnaji’s life is one of absolute devotion to the Lord, such passionate worship of the idealistic and the beautiful—and yet he is so perfectly human and so near to his fellow men. No words can depict his character, but he seems like a human creature who has perfected himself to a great extent, rather than a divine being in an imperfect human form. Surely what the Lord will desire, will be a perfect human instrument, so that he can contact humanity on its own level. The divinity He Himself will show forth through the instrument. Never except at the coming of a World Teacher to His world is there such a union between those things which are Divine and those that are human. For usually humanity reaches up to Divinity and the moment it touches it becomes one with it, but in this case Divinity reaches down to a human instrument, uses it, works through it as separate and apart from it, and retires again leaving the instrument still a human instrument. Certainly the evolution of the human instrument is often so quickened that it becomes almost immediately super-human (through this service) but this is a separate process. Man may reach up and become Divine but he cannot use divine powers while he is still human. Whereas the Divine can descend and use human powers, even though he is no longer human.

Today Krishnaji was very alive at breakfast, and as often our conversation was not printable. The morning after a very serious talk or hard evening’s work, Krishnaji will often be most frivolous, making jokes and laughing at them uproariously, with his sudden thundering outbursts of mirth, or prolonged, infectious giggle. These two things are strange about him—first, his capacity to change from the most serious, real and glorious mood, to one of laughter and joking instantaneously; secondly that no joke he utters however vulgar, makes the usual atmosphere surrounding such talk. It seems as though his beauty, his absolute clarity of being, sweeps everything before it, so that he can touch any person, or object or subject, and impart his cleanness to it, endow it with the fresh air of his presence. Krishnaji tried to remember his own experiences. When he and Nitya first saw C. W. L. he showed them pictures of the Master M. and the Master K. H. and asked them which they preferred. When they chose the one of the Master K. H. he said it was as he expected.
When Krishnaji was young the Masters were very real to him, then it was that he wrote “At the Feet of the Master,” afterwards came a period when for him the reality was not so intense, he only believed because of what C. W. L. and A. B. said. Now again the intense realization has returned. Nitya said that our group should make an atmosphere which should “attract” Their attention. He spoke of the various influences at Ojai, on the different nights. That of the Master M. as a power that made you feel capable of anything. That of the Master K. H. as perfect kindness—it was as if honey were entering into you when he spoke. And that of the Master K. H. as absolute cleanness, perfect clarity. Then of the greatest of all influences, that of the Lord, as we also felt at Ehrwald—peace—“the peace that passeth understanding.”

Krishnaji spoke of Adyar as of a mighty power house, where either you became a saint, went mad, or were turned away as useless by an unerring watcher.
I have never seen him so radiantly beautiful as he is at nights, at these times. His eyes laugh with a strange unearthly joy, which is triumphant and yet so gentle. Gentleness and a sweet keen joy robe him, and show in the lines and curves of his face, and an aroma of roses surrounds and envelopes him. At times, he shivers as if cold and at other times he is too worn out, but on these nights, these particular nights of which I speak, the real Krishna, all that makes him what he is in the deepest sense, comes and looks out through his eyes.

September 1, 1924: (...) One of Krishnaji’s theories is that people must surely be able to evolve through joy alone, arriving at Godhead as naturally as a flower opens to the sun. At one time it seemed almost to worry him, that everyone he met had evolved so far by the long devious ways of sorrow, and so few had taken the simple way of joy. I think I have heard him even say that he has never met anyone who evolved through joy alone, nevertheless it is a possibility, which would become very common if only our present civilization were not so complex. “Be natural, be happy.”

Speaking of his two years of training with Leadbeater Krishnaji said he was “bored to tears,” literally. All desires were burnt out; for instance, K and N asked for bicycles; the bicycles were found and a ten mile ride was not only done once but they had to do it every day for two years. Also they expressed a desire for porridge; they had it—but again every day for a year; if they had dirty feet, or as once Nitya threw a stone at a frog, it was “Pupils of the Master do not do these things.” (...) He has had many lives as a woman, and these have left a very strong trace in his character; his exceptional power of intuition makes him unlike most men. At times he can be as cruel as he can be the reverse, but this always for a purpose. One short sharp phrase, which his flashing eyes emphasise to an unbearable degree, that is all. Krishnaji will never offer to talk to anyone, unless an approach is made, and then for the first two or three times that a serious conversation is broached, he is terribly shy.

September 8, 1924: Lady Emily, Cordes and I sat in Krishnaji’s room. Krishnaji being in the one below. The time was about a quarter to seven, and all was the same as on ordinary nights, except for a magic silence that came down on us. Somewhere in the tower Nitya, Rama Rao and Rajagopal were chanting, and incense wafted in through the cracks on the door. We all felt His Presence, how would even the dullest fail to recognize the ineffable peace that pervaded the building. We sat “silent and rapt” for an hour.

September 14, 1924: This afternoon instead of playing the usual “volley-ball,” we all lay out on the rocks which surround the Square Tower. Krishnaji squatted on the rocks with Rama Rao, examining a small yellow snail with great interest. Once before some years ago, I remember being with Krishnaji when he discovered a colony of ants and spent the whole morning feeding them with sugar, stirring them up and watching them carry eggs and rebuild their home. At Ehrwald last year, he was lying amongst the long grass and flowers, when a butterfly settled on his hand, and soon he had one or two poised on his finger. His delight was unbounded. He has a love of all creatures great and small, indeed anything that is beautiful or natural interests him; he will chase a grasshopper following its movements and noting the colour of its wings; or with his customary “I say!” will stand almost enraptured before a beautiful scene. “Just look at that lake, it’s so smooth, like ice—and dark green. See the reflections in it? Oh-ee you should see Lake Geneva—so blue.”
Krishnaji reads a small passage out of “The Gospel of Buddha” in meditation each morning. He is indeed a devotee, and the very sound of the name of the Lord Buddha, seems almost to make him tremble with a feeling of utmost worship. There was one sentence today, in which the Lord Buddha said, that the disciple who lives in the world must be like a lotus. In India, the lotus, symbolizes purity. Its ability to blossom fully while rooted in a muddy, slushy pond signifies the human ability to flower in purity and rise out of any condition however dark and sullied.

Krishnaji was speaking to me this afternoon. He spoke of the Lord Buddha and that state of existence which is absolutely without self. He is thinking much of being absolutely impersonal these days, and already he seems to have dived deep into that clear well which is unsullied by the mud of self. As he spoke of the Lord Buddha, a new world lay stretched before one, in which all personal love and ambition died away and became as naught, only an impersonal, tremendous unshakeable love remained. The full realisation of life without self only came to Krishnaji while he was at Ojai, and even he finds it almost impossible to describe. He spoke of how when all the Masters were assembled together, the coming of the Lord Buddha was like the north wind, so free from anything even resembling self. He said: “Whenever I see the picture of the Lord Buddha, I say to myself, I am going to like it.”
The image of the Lord Maitreya has been appearing to him on several occasions. At Pergine on the last appearance He was to give Krishnamurti a message—“The happiness you seek is not far off; it lies in every common stone.” In another message, He conveyed “Do not look for the Great ones when they may be very near you.”

Continuing the selected excerpts from K's letters

The following one is dating from the summer of 1925, soon after Nitya's death:

"Experimenting with myself, not very successfully at first, trying to discover how I could detach myself and see the body as it is. I had been experimenting with it for two or three days—it may have been a week—and I found that for a certain length of time I could quite easily be away from the body and look at it. I was standing beside my bed, and there was the body on the bed—a most extraordinary feeling. And from that day there has been a distinct sense of detachment, of division between the ruler and the ruled, so that the body, though it has its cravings, its desires to wander forth and to live and enjoy separately for itself, does not in any way interfere with the true Self"

From a letter the young K was writing to CW Leadbetter in February 1927:

I know my destiny and my work. I know with certainty that I am blending into the consciousness of the one Teacher and that he will completely fill me. I feel and I know also that my cup is nearly full to the brim and that it will overflow soon. Till then I must abide quietly and with eager patience. I long to make and will make everybody happy.

This post was last updated by John Raica Wed, 14 Nov 2018.

Apparently unrelated to the above posted selections from K's letters , the following lines are coming from WT Stead's 'Letters from Julia' ( dating from 1897). Of course, we could forever quibble on what is the Soul and whether
such a thing really exists , but an open listening beyond the crystallised meanings of the words, might prove to be of help in our 'pathless' search for Truth :

"(...) I wish to point out to you how that revival can be brought about. All that is to be told would take a long time. But there are some things which can be said quite briefly, which you will see are not all your ideas. The worst evil of the present day is not its love of money, nor its selfishness. No, but its Loss of the Soul. You forget that the Soul is the thing. And that all that concerns the body, except so far as it affects the Soul, is of no importance. But what you have to realize is that men and women in this generation have lost their souls. And this is a terrible truth. It is not what we used to think of losing the Soul in hell, after laying aside the body. It is a thing not of the future only, but of the present. Your Soul is lost now. And you have to find it. When I say lost, I mean it. You have lost it as you might lose a person in a crowd. It is severed from you. You are immersed in matter and you have lost your Soul. And the first, the most pressing of all things, is to find your Soul. For until you find it you are little better than an active automaton, whose feverish movements have no real significance, no lasting value. The Loss of the Soul, that is the Malady of the Day; and to find the Soul is the Way of Salvation.

The finding of the Soul is the first thing and the most important thing. You will never find it unless you give yourself time to think, time to pray, time to realize that you have a soul. At present,all is rush, and jump, and whirl, and your Soul gets lost, crowded out of your life. You have so many engagements that you have no time to live the Soul-life. That is what you have to learn. No doubt your work is important, and duty must be done. But what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul? The way the Jubilee helps is that the ordinary man has discovered that there is something he seldom thought of which he now sees is most important. He has at least got a glimpse of the Soul of the Nation, and sees the greatness of the sight. Now teach him that it is even more important to find his own soul - the lost Soul which he has crowded out of his life.

Now I will go to speak as to how to find the Soul. There is only one way. There is no chance of salvation if you never give yourself time to think on things that are timeless, that transcend time, that will be when time shall be no more. You have no time but for the things of time which perish with the using. And if you would find your Soul you must give time to the search. You say you have no time. But you have time to make money, to amuse yourself, to make love, to do anything that you really want to do. But your Soul - that is a thing you do not care about. And so you have no time for the Soul. You are getting less and less spiritual. The old ordinances, the services, the prayers, the meditation, the retreat, these gave you time. But one by one they all go - these oases where you could rest and meet your Soul. And you have 'materialized' yourself even with the fretful struggle against materialism. For what is more important than struggling to stem evil is to save your Soul, to hold it and not let it go.

What seems to me quite clear is that the indifference to the Soul is caused by not understanding that the Soul is the Real Self, the only part of you which lasts, the Divine in you, which you are sacrificing to the things of the day. What you do not understand is that it is through the Soul alone that you can commune with the Spiritual World that is all around you. And the Spiritual World includes all the world excepting the perishing things of time. For the Soul alone communicates with the Real World. It is through the Soul you obtain inspiration. The Soul links you with the Universe of God, with the Soul of the World. And when you lose touch with your Soul you become a mere prisoner in the dungeon of matter, through which you peer a little way by the windows of the senses. This is a little different to what materialized religions say now. And therein lies the difference. For what I say is that the Soul has Divine powers, but if you will but find your Soul, and develop its Divine potency, there is opened before you a new Heaven and a new Earth, in which Absence is not, nor Death, and where the whole Universe of Love is yours.

The doorway into the Infinite is the Soul, and the Soul is lost.
When you have no time to think, no time to pray, you have no time to live. Therefore you must before all else make time. Oh, my dear friend, why are you so sceptical? You waste more time in brooding over the Past which you cannot recall, or in anticipating the evils of the Future which you may never meet, than would help you to possess your Soul in the living Present. What you do not seem to see is that the Soul is not a mere abstraction. It is the Power which enables you to do all things. I speak the most sober and literal truth, when I say that if you did but possess your Soul and exercise its powers, Death or separation in this world would cease to exist for you, and the miseries which haunt the human race would disappear. For the whole of the evils that afflict society arise from the lack of seeing things from the standpoint of the Soul. If you lived for the Soul, cared for what made the Soul a more living reality, and less for the paraphernalia of the body, the whole world would be transfigured; you have got a wrong standpoint and everything is out of focus. I do not say neglect the body. But make its health and ease only the means to the end. The body is only a machine. The work that it does ought to be for the Soul. What you do now is to make the machine everything. It consumes on itself its own force. The wheels go round, but nothing moves. And in the whirl of the wheels the Soul is lost.

I must repeat once more - you must find time to live. At present you have lost your Souls even partly by the strain of trying to find them. I mean that much of the so-called 'religious' life and works, while good in their way, constitutes no small addition to the preoccupation of time which renders the Soul-life impossible. It is possible to lose your Soul in Church as well as on the Stock Exchange. If you have not leisure to be alone with your Soul - it does not so much matter whether the rush and whirl and preoccupation is ecclesiastical or financial - the Soul is lost, and there is nothing to do but to find it again. You may sum up what I have to say in one or two words. What I wish you to do is to make the Soul the centre, and make time to use the Soul, which alone can do all things.

This post was last updated by John Raica Thu, 15 Nov 2018.

In the summer of 1913, the young K ( then 18) decided to start writing his autobiography. He gave it the title “Fifty Years of My Life,” intending as the years passed to “add fresh incidents, and by the year 1945 I shall have justified the title.”

"The happiest memories of my childhood centre round my dear mother, who gave us all the loving care for which Indian mothers are well-known. I cannot say that I was particularly happy at school, for the teachers were not very kind and gave me lessons which were too hard for me. I enjoyed games as long as they were not too rough, as I had very delicate health. My mother’s death in 1905 deprived my brothers and myself of the one who loved and cared for us most, and my father was too much occupied with his business to pay much attention to us. I led the usual life as an ordinary Indian youth until I came to Adyar in 1909.

Adyar was of special interest to me as my father used to attend the conventions of the Theosophical Society there. He also held meetings in our house at Madanapalle for the study of Theosophy and I learnt about Adyar from my mother and from him. My mother had a puja room where she worshipped regularly; in the room were pictures of the Indian deities and also a photograph of Mrs. Besant in Indian dress sitting cross-legged on a 'chowki' or small platform on which was a tiger-skin.
I was generally at home while my brothers were at school for I suffered much from fever—in fact almost every day, and I often went into the puja room about noon when she performed her daily ceremonies. She would then talk to me about Mrs. Besant and about Karma and reincarnation and also read to me from the Mahabharata and Ramayana and from other Indian scriptures. I was only about 7 or 8 years of age, so I could not understand much, but I think I felt much that I could not actually understand.

Writing of my mother reminds me of some incidents which are perhaps worth mentioning. She was to a certain extent psychic, and would often see my sister who had died some two or three years before. They talked together and there was a special place in the garden to which my sister used to come. My mother always knew when my sister was there and sometimes took me with her to the place and would ask me whether I saw my sister too. At first I laughed at the question but she asked me to look again and then sometimes I saw my sister. Afterwards I always could see my sister. I must confess I was very much afraid, because I had seen her dead and her body burnt. I generally rushed to my mother’s side and she told me that there was no reason to be afraid. I was the only member of the family, except my mother, to see these visions, though all believed in them. My mother was also able to see the auras of people, and I also sometimes saw them. I do not think she knew what the colours meant. There were many other incidents of a similar nature which I do not now remember. We often talked about Sri Krishna to whom I felt specially attracted and I once asked her why he was always represented as being blue in colour. She told me that His aura was blue but how she knew that I do not know.

My mother was very charitable. She was kind to poor boys, and gave food regularly to those who were of her own caste. Each boy came to our house on a special day in the week, and went to other houses on other days. We had daily a number of beggars who often came from some considerable distance to receive rice, dal and from time to time clothes.
Before coming to Adyar my brothers and I attended many schools, the pleasantest of which was the school in Madanapalle. I first went to this school when quite a child, for I was born in Madanapalle. My father being a government officer, he was continually being transferred from one place to another, and so our education was much interrupted.
After my mother’s death, matters were worse, for there was really nobody to look after us. In connection with my mother’s death, I may mention that I frequently saw her after she died, I remember once following my mother’s form as it went upstairs. I stretched out my hand and seemed to catch hold of her dress, but she vanished as soon as we reached the top of the stairs. Until a short time ago, I used to hear my mother following me as I went to school. I remember this particularly because I heard the sound of the bangles which Indian women wear on their wrists. At first I would look back half-frightened and I saw the vague form of her dress and part of her face. This happened almost always when I went out of the house

Writing to Mrs. Besant in a beautiful script, the young Krishna described the ceremony of acceptance (in the Great White Brotherhood) on January 3, 1910:

"My dear Mother,
It was very beautiful. When we went to our Master’s house, we found him and Master Morya and the Master Djwal Kul all standing talking, and they spoke very kindly. We all prostrated ourselves, and the Master drew me onto his knee, and asked me whether I would forget myself entirely and never have a selfish thought, but think only how to help the world and I said indeed I would, and I wanted only to be like him someday. Then he kissed me and passed his hand over me, and I seemed to be somehow part of him, and I felt quite different and very very happy, and I have had that feeling ever since. Then they all three blessed me and we came away. But next morning in the Shrine Room when I thanked him again, I felt his hand press strongly on my head again just as in the night."
Your loving son,
Krishna

( Pupul Jayakar's note:) It was said later that Krishna and Leadbeater were out of their bodies during two nights and a day, coming back into them occasionally for some nourishment. Krishna lay on Mrs. Besant’s bed, Leadbeater on the floor. On January 12 they emerged from the room to find some of the elders of the Society awaiting them.
Amongst them was Krishna’s father, Narianiah, and his brother Nitya. Krishna wrote to Mrs. Besant immediately, describing the mysterious happenings:)

"When I left my body the first night, I went at once to the Master’s house and I found Him there with the Master Morya and the Master Djwal Kul. The Master talked to me very kindly for a long time, and told me all about the initiation, and what I should have to do. Then, we all went together to the house of the Lord Maitreya, where I had been once before, and there we found many of the Masters—the Venetian Master, the Master Jesus, the Master the Count, the Master Serapis, the Master Hilarion and the two Masters Morya and K. H. The Lord Maitreya sat in the middle and the others stood round Him in a semi-circle. Then the Master took my right hand and the Master Djwal Kul my left, and they led me in front of the Lord Maitreya, you [Mrs. Besant] and uncle [Leadbeater] standing close behind me. The Lord smiled at me, but He said to the Master: “Who is this that you bring before me?” And the Master answered: “This is a candidate for admission to the Great Brotherhood.”

Then the Lord turned away from me and called towards Shamballa: “Do I this, O Lord of Life and Light, in Thy Name and for Thee?” And at once the great Silver Star flashed out over His head and on each side of it in the air there stood a figure—one for the Lord Gautama Buddha and the other, the Mahachohan. And the Lord Maitreya turned and called me by the true name of my Ego, and laid His hand upon my head and said: “In the name of the One Initiator, whose Star shines above us, I receive you into the Brotherhood of Eternal Life.”

[The next night they were taken to visit Sanat Kumar.]

..."for He is a boy not much older than I am, but the handsomest I have ever seen, all shining and glorious, and when He smiles it is like sunlight. He is strong like the sea, so that nothing could stand against Him for a moment, and yet He is nothing but love, so that I could not be in the least afraid of Him."

Krishna's reply to AB on April 5, 1910:

" I am trying to make my consciousness the same all the time, but I am not always quite sure of it yet. I am working always for what is wanted for the second step, but it will take some time. I think, I have not much doubt or superstition, but it is very hard to get rid of the delusion of self, but I will do it. I do not quite know how yet, but somehow it shall be done."

Some fifty years later the physicist George Sudarshan asked Krishnaji about the authorship of At the Feet of the Master. Krishnaji replied, “The man who wrote the book has disappeared.” He refused to say anything further about it.

The contact between Mrs. Besant and Krishna could only be maintained through letters. Krishna wrote to her every week describing his studies, his dreams, his problems. He started collecting money for Mrs. Besant’s work in India and promised to contribute 2s 6d a week from his pocket money. During a visit to a dentist in the last week of August 1912, a mild application of cocaine to his wisdom tooth led to an extraordinary dream that night of the Lord Maitreya. He described the dream in a letter to Mrs. Besant

" I remembered being in a room above an E. S. room with Clarke. There was an E. S. meeting which Mother held. The meeting was over and Clarke and I went upstairs into my room. My window looked into the E. S. room. I went to the window casually and saw a person in the E. S. room. I was rather startled at first, because I saw that every person was out after the meeting and I had myself locked the door. I felt rather uneasy about it and was rather afraid but, I said to myself “what is there to be afraid about?” Therefore, I called Clarke and went down. I walked down rather quickly and when I was at the bottom, I looked up to see Clarke, but he was not there. I heard a sort of noise and I saw as follows: A form seemed to come out of the Lord Maitreya’s picture and those of the Master’s. I saw a man’s legs and only up to his neck, as I could not see whose face it was as it was covered with a sort of gold cloth. I knew who the person was as he had long hair and pointed beard and I wanted to make sure and I said very humbly & the words are exact. I said “Is that You, my Lord?” ...He took away the cover from His face and I knew for certain, it was the Lord Maitreya. Then, I prostrated myself and He stretched His hand over me in blessing. Then He sat on the ground cross-legged and I also sat down cross-legged on the floor. Then He began to talk to me and told me things which I do not remember. Then I prostrated and He was gone.

A few hours later I and an Indian boy friend were walking along a road and on both sides there were mountains and rivers and I saw a man walking towards us, he was tall and well built. As the form approached us I knew who it was and told my friend to go away. My friend said he wanted to see who it was. By this time, the form was very close to us and I was going to prostrate myself when He put up His hand not to do it. My friend was behind me. The Lord turned to my friend and said to him “What do you want here?” My friend did not answer Him. Then the Lord said to him again “if you do not want anything, you had better go away.” My friend still stood there without answering. Then the Lord lifted His hand and pointed it towards my friend and as I was close to His hand, I heard a sort of rumbling noise as if a train had passed by. I turned towards my friend and I saw him slowly falling down. My friend was motionless as though he was dead. Then I prostrated, and the Lord Maitreya said “That boy of yours is rather inquisitive” and I could not answer Him and I was sorry that I brought my friend along.

PRIVATE : The Lord told me that I was getting on well and something else which I do not remember. I remember the Lord very clearly. His face was like a glass covered with a thin piece of gold; in other words, as Mother said, like ripe corn. His face was radiant and luminous.
He was very kind to me. He once or twice put His hand over my shoulder. We talked for a very long time. At the end, I asked him “Is there any order my Lord?” and He said, “you need not be so formal.” Then I prostrated once more. He said, “we shall meet often.”
I felt as though I could talk with Him for ever and I saw Lord Maitreya’s form disappear. Then I awoke and it was half past five. Then also, I wrote out all this... Krishna.

Excerpts from K's Letters to Nandini written between June 1948 and March 1960

Be supple mentally. Strength does not lie in being firm and strong but in being pliable. The pliable tree stands in a gale. Gather the strength of a swift mind.
Life is so rich, has so many treasures, we go to it with empty hearts; we do not know how to fill our hearts with the abundance of life. We are poor inwardly and when the riches are offered to us, we refuse. Love is a 'dangerous' thing, it brings the only revolution that gives complete happiness. It is a state of being in which all man’s problems are resolved. What a lovely place the earth could be, for there is so much beauty, so much glory, such imperishable loveliness. We are caught in pain and don’t care to get out of it, even when someone points a way out.
Nothing can spoil love, for all things are dissolved in it—the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. It is the only thing that is its own eternity.

Be open. Live in the past if you must, but don’t struggle against the past; when the past comes, look into it, not pushing it away nor holding to it too much. The experience of all these years, the ache and the joy, the sickening blows and your glimpses of the separation, the far-away sense, all these will add enrichment and beauty. What is important is what you have in your heart; and since that is overflowing, you have everything, you are everything.
Be alert to all your thoughts and feelings, don’t let one feeling or thought slip by without being aware of it and absorbing all its content. Absorbing is not the word, but seeing the whole content of the thought-feeling. It is like entering a room and seeing the whole content of the room at once, its atmosphere and its spaces. To see and be aware of one’s thoughts makes one intensively sensitive, pliable, and alert.

To see “what is,” is really quite arduous. How does one clearly observe? A river when it meets an obstruction is never still; the river breaks down an obstruction by its weight or goes over it or works its way under it or around it; the river is never still; it cannot but act. It revolts, if we can so put it, intelligently. One must revolt intelligently and accept “what is” intelligently.
One gets power to see clearly through the intensity of attention; you will see it will come. One has to act; the river is never not-acting, it is ever active. One must be in a state of negation, to act; this very negation brings its own positive action. I think the problem is to see clearly, then that very perception brings its own action.
One must be very clear within oneself. Then I assure you everything will come right; be clear and you will see that things will shape themselves right without your doing anything about it. The right is not what one desires.

We want to make relationship manageable. So it loses its fragrance, its beauty. All this arises because one does not love, and that of course is the greatest thing of all, for in it there has to be the complete abandonment of oneself.
It is the quality of freshness, of newness, that is essential, or otherwise life becomes a routine, a habit; and love is not a habit, a boring thing. Most people have lost all sense of wonderment. They take everything for granted, this sense of security destroys freedom and the wonderment of uncertainty.
We project a far distant future, away from the present. The attention to understand is always in the present. In attention there is always a sense of imminence. To be clear in one’s intentions is quite an arduous task; intention is as a flame, ceaselessly urging one to understand. Be clear in your intentions and you will see, things will work out. To be clear in the present is all that one needs, but it is not quite so easy as it sounds. One has to clear the field for the new seed and once the seed is planted, its own vitality and strength creates the fruit and the seed.

Very few are aware of their inward setbacks, conflicts and distortions. Even if they are aware they try to push them aside or run away from them. Don’t you do it. I don’t think you will, but there is a danger of living with your thoughts and feelings too closely. One has to be aware of one’s thoughts and feelings, without anxiety, without pressure.

I was thinking how important it is to be innocent, to have an innocent mind. Experiences are inevitable, perhaps necessary; life is a series of experiences, but the mind need not be burdened with its own accumulative demands. It can wipe off each experience and keep itself innocent—unburdened. This is important, otherwise the mind can never be fresh, alert and pliable.

It is always difficult to keep simple and clear. The world worships success, the bigger the better; the greater the audience the greater the speaker; the colossal super buildings, cars, aeroplanes and people. Simplicity is lost. The 'successful' people are not the ones who are building a new world. To be a real revolutionary requires a complete change of heart and mind, and how few want to free themselves. One cuts the surface roots; but to cut the deep feeding roots of mediocrity, success, needs something more than words, methods, compulsions. There seem to be few, but they are the real builders—the rest labor in vain.

To be alone is essential for man to be uninfluenced, for something uncontaminated to take place. For this aloneness there seems to be no time, there are too many things to do, too many responsibilities and so on. To learn to be quiet, shutting oneself in one’s room, to give the mind a rest, becomes a necessity. Love is part of this aloneness. To be simple, clear, and inwardly quiet, is to have that flame.
To live simply, uninfluenced, though everything and everyone is trying to influence, to be without varying moods and demands is not easy, but without a deep quiet life, all things are futile.

The mountains must be alone. It must be a lovely thing to have rain among the mountains and the rain drops on the placid lake. How the smell of the earth comes out when it rains and then there are the croakings of many frogs. There’s a strange enchantment in the tropics, when it rains. Everything is washed clean; the dust on the leaf is washed away; the rivers come to life and there is the noise of running waters. The trees put out green shoots, there is the new wild grass where there was barren earth; insects by the thousands come out from nowhere and the parched earth is fed and the earth seems satisfied and at peace. The sun seems to have lost its penetrating quality and the earth has become green; a place of beauty and richness. Man goes on making his own misery, but the earth is rich once again and there is enchantment in the air.

How little attention we pay to things about us, to observe and to consider. We are so self-centered, so occupied with our worries, with our own benefits, we have no time to observe and understand. This occupation makes our mind dull and weary, frustrated and sorrowful, and from sorrow we want to escape. As long as the self is active there must be weary dullness and frustration. People are caught in a mad race, in the grief of self-centered sorrow. This sorrow is deep thoughtlessness. The thoughtful, the watchful are free from sorrow.

How lovely a river is. To sit on the bank of a river and let the waters flow by, to watch the gentle ripples and hear the lapping of the ripples on the bank; to see the wind on the water making patterns; to see the swallows touching the water, the water catching insects; and in the distance, across the water, on the other bank, human voices or a boy playing the flute, of a still evening, quietens all the noise about one. Somehow, the waters seem to purify one, cleanse the dust of yesterday’s memories and give that quality to the mind of its own pureness, as the water in itself is pure.

To be really alone, not with yesterday’s memories and problems but to be alone and happy, to be alone without any outward or inward compulsion, is to let the mind be uninterfered. To be alone. To have a quality of love about a tree, protective and yet alone. We are losing the feeling for trees, and so we are losing love for man. When we can’t love nature, we can’t love man. Our Gods have become so small and petty and so is our love. In mediocrity we have our being, but there are the trees, the open heavens, and the inexhaustible richesof the earth.
You must have a clear mind, a free untethered mind; this is essential, A subtle mind is a slow, hesitant mind; not a mind that concludes, judges, or formulates. This subtlety is essential. It must know to listen and to wait. To play with the deep. This is not to be got at the end, but this quality of the mind must be there from the very beginning. You may have it, give it a full and deep chance to flower.
To go into the unknown; to take nothing for granted, not to assume anything, to be free to find out, and then only can there be depth and understanding.Otherwise one remains on the surface. What is important is not to prove or disprove a point, but to find out the truth.

Continuing with significant excerpts from Pupul Jayakar's remarkable book K - A BIOGRAPHY:

From the mid-1950s Shankar Rao Deo became a familiar figure at Krishnaji’s talks; every winter he would visit Varanasi and stay at the Sarva Seva Sangh headquarters, which had been built at the entrance to Rajghat. With Rao Sahib Patwardhan, I had often visited him there and had found him engaged in shram dan—the gift of work, which along with the gift of land, was part of the teachings of the hermit Vinoba Bhave. We would find Shankar Rao sitting for hours with a winnowing fan, picking tiny stones out of rice.
Shankar Rao used to come to hear Krishnaji’s talks; he would attend the discussions and sometimes meet K alone. Krishnaji would banter with Shankar Rao, make him laugh, point to the river and the trees, speak of beauty, love, and the nature of compassion, and overwhelm him with affection. Shankar Rao would listen, powerfully attracted by Krishnaji, yet his whole background rebelled against K’s words. He was incapable of comprehending Krishnaji’s insistence on the need for love, beauty, and sensitivity. Krishnaji’s attitude to the sense and to desire perplexed him. “Listen to desire as you listen to the wind amongst the trees,” said Krishnaji. The Gandhian, nurtured on ideas that demanded the destruction of desire, did not know where to turn or what to say. Shankar Rao found it difficult to reconcile Krishnaji’s teaching with Gandhian ideals.

In the small discussions the nature of being and becoming were explored. Germinating in the dark recesses of the mind, “the desire to become is the soil in which sorrow takes root.” The mind, to be free, has to see itself as the result of time Self-knowing is the understanding of becoming in oneself. The religious revolution is the ending of becoming.” On his evening walks on the Worli beach he spoke of the act of listening as “unpremeditated and uncalculated. It is an action of truth, for in it is total attention,” and of silence as “the source of all creation.”

“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 if 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.”

This post was last updated by John Raica Tue, 20 Nov 2018.

More selected excerpts from PJ's K biography

On November 22 1959 Krishnaji went to Madras, where he was to hold seven discussions. Professors, students, and professionals, as well as members of the Theosophical Society, attended the discussions, which were held under ancient rain trees. The scent of pine, the thunder of falling mountain springs, the astonishing green of young paddy, and an ancient sense of pilgrimage permeated his words. They had a translucence, a lucidity and purity; insights sparkled, the sensory perceptions were tender with creation.

“What I would like to communicate to you is a total self-abandonment on the instant. For abandonment you need passion. Do not be afraid of the word. For, in seeing this, we may solve the one central problem ‘of me and my urges.’ ”

“By some miracle, by some way of looking at the clouds, some instant of cleaving perception, could one see? Could the mind be extraordinarily sensitive to every movement of thought and feeling?
“The timeless is whispering around every corner, it lies under every leaf. It is open not to the dehydrated human being who has suppressed himself and no longer has any passion. But to the mind, which is in a state of meditation, moment to moment.”

“The self, the ‘me’ is restless. Roaring down like a river, living, moving, being. Self-knowing is extraordinarily swift in its perceptions. Accumulation of knowledge gives birth to the ‘me.’
”

The fear of complete loneliness, isolation, of not being anything, is the root of self-contradiction. Creation is in ending, not in continuity. If there is a living coming to an end from moment to moment, there is an extraordinary state of being nothing. Of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement and dropping over the edge, which is death. I want to know all about death, because death may be reality, God, that extraordinary something that lives and moves.”

Continuing the excerpts from Mrs Pupul Jayakar's remarkable book
K- A Biography

I first met Krishnamurti in January 1948. I was thirty-two years of age and one Sunday morning I went to see my mother, who lived in Malabar Hill, Bombay, in an old rambling bungalow roofed with country tiles. I found her with my sister Nandini getting ready to go out. They told me that Sanjeeva Rao, who had studied with my father in King’s College, Cambridge, had come to see my mother. He saw that even after several years of mourning, she was still in great sorrow at my father’s death. He had suggested that she might be helped by meeting Krishnamurti. I had nothing to do that morning, so I accompanied my mother. When we reached Ratansi Morarji’s house on Carmichael Road, where Krishnamurti was staying, I saw Achyut Patwardhan, standing outside the entrance. In recent years he had become a revolutionary and freedom fighter, but I had known him since we were children at Varanasi in the 1920s. We spoke together for a few moments before we went into the sitting room to await Krishnamurti.

Krishnamurti entered the room silently, and my senses exploded; I had a sudden intense perception of immensity and radiance. He filled the room with his presence, and for an instant I was devastated. I could do nothing but gaze at him. Nandini introduced my tiny, fragile-bodied mother and then turned and introduced me. We sat down. With some hesitation, my mother began to speak of my father, her love for him and of her tremendous loss, which she seemed unable to accept. She asked Krishnamurti whether she would meet my father in the next world. By then the intensity of heightened perception his presence had first evoked had started to fade, and I sat back to hear what I expected to be a comforting reply. I knew that many sorrowful people had visited him, and I assumed that he would know the words with which to comfort them.

Abruptly, he spoke. “I am sorry, Madam. You have come to the wrong man. I cannot give you the comfort you seek.You want me to tell you that you will meet your husband after death, but which husband do you want to meet? The man who married you, the man who was with you when you were young, the man who died or the man he would have been today, had he lived? Which husband do you want to meet? Because, surely, the man who died was not the same man who married you.”

I felt my mind spring to attention; I had heard something extraordinarily challenging. My mother seemed very perturbed. She was not prepared to accept that time could have made any difference in the man she loved. She said, “My husband would not change.”
Krishnamurti replied, “Why do you want to meet him? What you miss is not your husband, but the memory of your husband.” He paused again, allowing the words to sink deep.
“Madam, forgive me.” He folded his hands and I grew aware of the perfection of his gestures. “Why do you keep his memory alive? Why do you want to recreate him in your mind? Why do you try to live in sorrow and continue with the sorrow?” I felt a quickening of my senses: his refusal to be kind in the accepted sense was shattering. My mind leapt to meet the clarity and precision of his words. I felt that I was in contact with something vast and totally new. Though the words sounded harsh, there was gentleness in his eyes and a quality of healing flowed from him. He held my mother’s hand while he was speaking.
Nandini saw that my mother was disturbed. She changed the conversation and she told him that I was a social worker interested in politics. He was grave as he turned to me and asked why I did social work. I responded by telling him of the fullness of my life. He smiled. It made me feel uneasy and nervous. Then he said, “We are like the man who tries to fill water into a pail that has holes. The more water he pours in, the more it pours out, and the pail remains empty.”
He was looking at me without intruding. He said, “What is it you are trying to run away from? Social work, pleasure, living in sorrow—are these not all escapes, attempts to fill the void within? Can this void be filled? And yet, to fill the void is the whole process of our existence.”

I found his words very disturbing, but felt they had to be explored. To me, action was life; and what he said was incomprehensible. I asked him whether he wanted me to sit at home and do nothing. He listened; and I had a peculiar feeling that his listening was unlike anything I had ever perceived or experienced. Then he smiled at my question, and the room filled. Shortly after that we left. Krishnamurti said to me, “We shall meet again.”

The meeting had left me very disturbed and after a few days I asked for an interview. For two days before our interview I planned what I would say to him and how I would say it. When I walked into the room I found him sitting straight-backed and cross-legged on the floor, dressed in an immaculate white kurta that stretched to below his knees. He sprang to his feet, his long, petal-like fingers folded in greeting. I sat down facing him. He saw I was nervous and he asked me to sit quietly.
After a while I began to talk. I had always been sure of myself, so though I hesitated, I soon found that I was speaking normally and what I had planned to say poured out. I spoke of the fullness of my life and work, of my concern for the underprivileged, my desire to enter politics, my work in the cooperative movement, my interest in art. I was completely absorbed in what I had to say, the impression I was trying to create. After a few moments, however, I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not listening. I looked up and saw he was gazing at me; there was a questioning in his eyes and a deep probing. I hesitated and grew silent. After a pause he said, “I have noticed you at the discussions. When you are in repose, there is a great sadness on your face.”

I forgot what I had intended to say, forgot everything but the sorrow within me. I had refused to allow the pain to come through. So deep was it buried that it rarely impinged on my conscious mind. I was horrified of the idea that others would show me pity and sympathy, and had covered up my sorrow with layers of aggression. I had never spoken of this to anyone—not even to myself had I acknowledged my loneliness: but before this silent stranger all masks were swept away. I looked into his eyes and it was my own face I saw reflected. Like a torrent long held in check, the words came.
I remembered myself as a young child, one of five children, timid and gentle, bruised at the slightest harshness. Dark of complexion in a family where everyone was fair, unnoticed, a girl when I should have been a boy, living in a large rambling house, being alone for hours, reading books that I seldom understood. I remember sitting on a long veranda facing ancient trees; listening to legends of ogres and heroes, of Hatim Tai and Ali Baba—the oral tales of this ancient land told by the white-bearded Muslim tailor Immamuddin, who sat with his sewing machine all day long on the veranda. I remembered hearing Tulsidas’s Ram Charit Manas* sung by Ram Khilavan, the blind punkah coolie who fanned us, and the fragrance of cool, wet khus mats on a summer day. I remembered going for walks with my Irish governess, learning of plants and the names of flowers; delighting in the history of British kings and queens, Arthur and Guinevere, Henry the VIII and Anne Boleyn; never playing with dolls, seldom with other children. I remembered being afraid of my father, yet secretly adoring him.

I remembered going to England, to college and the stimulation of the mind; meeting my husband, the return to India, marriage and the birth of my daughter Radhika.
Inevitably, I soon refused the role of a housewife. I plunged into social work, played bridge and poker for high stakes, lived at the heart of the social and intellectual life of Bombay. Then another pregnancy; in the seventh month an attack of eclampsia brought violent convulsions and total blindness.
I remembered the bewildering anguish of darkness and the explosive storms of color: cerulian blue, the color of the neelkantha bird, the color of blue fire. The brain ravaged by the body’s convulsions; the ending of the heartbeats and the death of the unseen baby; the heavy death silence of the womb. Sight returning through a mist, as gray dots, converging to create form.

My mind paused, words ended, and I looked again at the beautiful stranger. But the racking pain of my beloved father’s death soon awakened in me, and again there was tearing, unendurable agony.
Words would not end. I spoke of the many scars of living, the struggle to survive, the growing ruthlessness, the slow hardening, the aggression and ambition. The drive in me, demanding success. Then another pregnancy, the birth of a little girl, beautiful of face, but deformed. The drowning in anguish and again the death of the child. Eight years of barrenness of mind, heart, and womb; and then death.
In his presence the past, hidden in the darkness of the long forgotten, found form and awakened. He was as a mirror that reflected. There was an absence of personality, of the evaluator, to weigh and distort. I kept trying to keep back something of my past, but he would not let me. Now, in the compassionate field, there was a quality of immense strength. He said, “I can see if you want me to.” And so the words which for years had been destroying me were said. Saying them brought me immense pain, but his listening was as the listening of winds or the vast expanse of water.

I had been with Krishnaji for two hours. As I left the room my body felt shattered, and yet a healing had flowed through me. I had touched a new way of observing, a new way of listening, without reaction, a listening that arose from distance and depth. While I was speaking he appeared aware not only of what was being said—the expressions, gestures, attitudes—but also of what was happening around him—the bird singing in the tree outside his window, a flower falling from a vase. In the midst of my outcry he said to me: “Did you see that flower fall?” My mind had stopped, bewildered.
I had been listening to Krishnamurti for several days. I went to his talks, attended the discussions, cogitated, discussed what he was saying with my friends. On the evening of January 30, when we had all gathered around him at Ratansi Morarji’s house, Achyut was called to the telephone. He came back, his face ashen.
“Gandhiji has been assassinated,” he said. For an instant, time stopped. Krishnaji had become very still. He seemed to be aware of each one of us and our reactions. Among us, a single thought arose: Was the assassin a Hindu or a Muslim? Achyut’s brother Rao asked, “Is there news of the killer?” Achyut said he did not know. The consequences that would follow if the killer were a Muslim were clear to all of us. We rose silently, and one by one left the room.
The news that Gandhi had been murdered by a Brahmin from Poona swept the city; anti-Brahmin riots broke out in Poona. You could hear the whisper of relief from the Muslim residents. We listened to Jawaharlal Nehru’s anguished voice addressing the nation. The country seemed paralyzed. The unthinkable had happened, and for a brief moment men and women searched their hearts.

On February 1 a hushed audience gathered to hear Krishnaji speak. He was asked a difficult question: “What are the real causes of Mahatma Gandhi’s untimely death?”
Krishnamurti replied, “World events are not unrelated incidents; they are related. The real cause of Gandhiji’s untimely death lies in you. The real cause is you. Because you are communal, you encourage the spirit of division—through property, through caste, through ideology, through having different religions, sects, leaders. When you call yourself a Hindu, a Muslim, a Parsee, or God knows what else, it is bound to produce conflict in the world.”

For days after that we discussed violence, its root and its ending. For Krishnaji nonviolence as an ideal was illusion. The reality was the fact of violence, the rising of perception that understood the nature of violence and the ending of violence in the “now”: the present of existence in which alone action was possible.
In the talks that followed he spoke of the everyday problems that face humankind—fear, anger, jealousy, the fierce thrust of possession. Speaking of relationships as the mirror for self-discovery, he used the example of husband and wife, the most intimate relationship and yet often the most callous and hypocritical. Men looked with embarrassed eyes at their wives. Some traditional Hindus walked out of the talks, unable to understand what the relationship between husband and wife had to do with religious discourse. Krishnaji refused
to move from “what is,” the actual. He refused to discuss abstracts like God or eternity while the mind was a whirlpool of lust, hatred, and jealousy. It was at this time that some of his audience began to feel that he did not believe in God.

In mid-February I went to see him again. He asked me whether I had noticed anything different in my thinking process. I said I was not getting as many thoughts as I did before. My mind was not as restless as it used to be.
He said, “If you have been experimenting with self-knowing, you will notice that your thinking process has slowed down, that your mind is not restlessly wandering. Try working out each thought to its completion, carry it right through to the end. You will find that this is very difficult, for no sooner does one thought come into being than it is pursued by another thought. The mind refuses to complete a thought. It escapes from thought to thought.” This is so. When I have tried to follow a thought, I have always noted how swiftly it eludes the watcher.
I then asked him how one could 'complete a thought'. He said, “Thought can only come to an end when the thinker understands himself, when he sees that the thinker and the thought are not two separate processes. That the thinker is the thought, and the thinker separates himself from thought for his self-protection and continuance. So the thinker is continually producing thought which is transforming and changing. Is the thinker separate from his thoughts?” There were long pauses between his sentences, as if he expected the words to journey far and deep.

I asked, “But when consciousness is filled with prejudices, desires, memories, can it then understand thought?”

“No,” he answered, “for it is constantly acting on thought—escaping from it or building on it.” Again he was silent. “If you follow each thought to its completion, you will see that at the end of it there is silence. From that there is renewal. Thought that arises from this silence no longer has desire as its motive force, it emerges from a state that is not clogged with memory.But if again the thought that so arises is not completed, it leaves a residue. Then there is no renewal and the mind is caught again in a consciousness which is memory, bound by the past, by yesterday. Each thought, then to the next, is the yesterday—that which has no reality.“The new approach is to bring time to an end,

I did not understand, but came away with the words alive within me.
Nandini and I sometimes took Krishnaji for evening drives to the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, or to Worli beach. At times we would walk with him, finding it difficult to keep pace with his long strides. Other times he would walk alone and return after an hour, a stranger. During the walks with us he would occasionally speak of his youth, his life in the Theosophical Society, and his early days at Ojai, California. He told us of his brother Nitya, of his companions Rajagopal and Rosalind and the Happy Valley School. Often when he spoke of the past his memory would be precise, accurate. At other times he would grow vague and say he did not remember. He was quick to smile, and his laughter was deep and resonant. He shared jokes, he asked us questions of our childhood and our growing up. He also spoke of India, eagerly seeking our views on what was taking place in the country. We were hesitant and shy; a sense of mystery and his overwhelming presence made it difficult for us to be casual with him, or to speak of trivialities in his presence. But his laughter brought him closer to us.

On some days we discussed thought. He would ask, “Have you watched the birth of a thought? Have you watched its ending?” Another day he would say, “Take a thought, stay with it, hold it in consciousness, you will see how arduous it is to hold one thought as it is to end thought.”
I told Krishnaji that since I had met him, I had been waking in the mornings, without thought, but with the sound of birds and the distant voices of the street flowing through my mind. Hesitatingly, we invited him to my mother’s house for dinner.
He came smiling, wearing a dhoti, a long kurta, and an angavastram, and was received with flowers by my tiny mother. She had never had a formal education, but her natural elegance of mind, her grace and dignity, made it possible for her to meet and speak with Krishnaji. She was the widow of a senior Indian civil servant. While living with my father she had shared in his intellectual and social life, had met scholars and social workers, and was herself an ardent social worker. Tenacious and shrewd, my mother had broken free from tradition early in her married life. She spoke English with ease, entertained with élan, and cooked delectably. In my childhood we had two cooks, one for vegetarian Gujarati meals and another trained in Western cuisine; a Goan butler waited at table. My father’s death had broken her, but my mother’s house continued to be resonant with laughter, in which Krishnaji joined. He soon felt at home, and came frequently to dinner. By the end of March we could speak to him with ease; yet after each of his talks and discussions we grew intensely aware of the distances that separated us and the mystery that we could neither touch nor fathom.

Toward the end of March I told Krishnaji of the state of my mind and the thoughts that pursued me; of the moments of quietness and bursts of frenzied activity; of days when my mind was caught in the pain of not becoming. I was distracted by this constant jumping backwards and forwards of the mind.
He took my hand and we sat quietly. Finally, he said, “You are agitated. Why?” I did not know, and sat silently. “Why are you ambitious? Do you want to be like anyone you know who has got on?”
I hesitated and then said, “No.”
“You have a good brain,” he continued, “a good instrument that has not been used rightly. You have a drive that has been wrongly directed. Why are you ambitious? What is it you want to become? Why do you want to waste your brain?”

For some time he remained without speaking, letting what lay dormant within me reveal itself. Then he asked, “Have you ever been alone, without books, the radio? Try it and see what happens.”
“I would go mad, I cannot be alone.”
“Try it and see. For the mind to be creative, there must be stillness. A deep stillness that can only come into being when you have faced your loneliness.
“You are a woman, and yet you have a great deal of the man in you. You have neglected the woman. Look into yourself.”
I felt a stirring deep within me, the crumbling of the many crusts of insensitivity. I felt again the tearing anguish.
“You want affection, Pupul, and you do not find it. Why do you put out your begging bowl? You have not asked for it. You have smothered it. Yet the begging bowl is always there. If your bowl was full you would not need to hold it out. It is because it is empty that it is there.”

For an instant I looked at myself. As a child I wept so often. As an adult I permitted nothing to hurt me. I turned from it fiercely and attacked. He said, “If you love, then you do not demand. Then if you find the person does not love you, you will help the other to love, even though it is someone else.”
I saw myself with clarity—the bitterness, the hardness. I turned to him. “It is too horrible to look. What have I made of myself?”
“You are not solving the problem by criticizing yourself. There is no flowing richness in you, otherwise you would not need sympathy or affection. Why have you no richness? Look, this is what you are. You do not condemn a man who has a disease. This is your disease. Look at it calmly and simply, with compassion. It would be stupid to condemn or justify. To condemn is another movement of the
past to strengthen itself. Look at what takes place in your conscious mind. Why are you aggressive? Why do you want to be the center of any group?
“As you look at the conscious mind, slowly the unconscious will throw up its intimations—in dreams, even in the waking state of thought.”
We had been talking for over an hour, but that span was meaningless. In his presence there was a shrinking of one’s sense of time as duration. I spoke to him of the changes that were taking place in my life. I was no longer sure of myself or my work. Although desires and urges still arose, they had no vitality.
I told him I realized that a great deal of the work I was doing was based on self-aggrandizement. It no longer seemed possible for me to enter political life. My social life was also changing radically. Of all things, I could no longer play poker. I had tried to play, but found that the intention to outwit the other players was lacking. Unbidden, I had moments of awareness in the middle of playing poker that made bluffing impossible. Krishnaji put back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

I told him that at times I felt an immense inner balance, like a bird playing with the wind. All desire dissolved in this intensity, spent itself. At other times I was swamped in becomings. My moorings were going and I was adrift. I did not know what lay ahead. I had never felt so unsure of myself.
Krishnaji said, “The seed has been planted, allow it to germinate—let it lie fallow for a while. This has been quite new to you. Coming to it with no preconceptions, no notions, no beliefs, the impact has been direct, the mind now will need rest. Don’t push it.”
We sat quietly. “Watch yourself. You have a drive few women possess. In this country men and women peter out so easily, so early in life. It is the climate, the way of living, the stagnation. See that the drive does not drop away. In freeing yourself from aggression, don’t become innocuous and soft. To be free from aggression is not to become weak or humble.”

Repeatedly, he was to tell me, “Watch your mind, let not a thought escape, however ugly, however brutal. Watch without choosing, weighing, judging, without giving direction or letting thought take root in the mind. Watch relentlessly.”
As I left the room he rose to see me to the door. His face was in repose, his body slim, uprising like a deodar tree. For an instant, overwhelmed by his beauty, I asked, “Who are you?” He said, “It does not matter who I am. What you think and do and whether you can transform yourself is alone important.”
As I journeyed home I suddenly realized that, in the many conversations I had had with Krishnaji, he had never said a word about himself. There had been no reference to any personal experience, not a single movement of the self had manifested itself. It was this that made him a stranger, however well you knew him. In the midst of a gesture of friendship, casual conversation, one felt it—a sudden distance, silences that emanated from him, a consciousness that had no focal point. And yet in his presence one felt the bounty of an infinite concern.

( Continuing the selected excepts )

November 22 1959 , Krishnaji went to Madras, where he was to hold seven discussions. Professors, students, and professionals, as well as members of the Theosophical Society, attended the discussions, which were held under ancient rain trees.

What I would like to communicate to you is a total self-abandonment on the instant. For abandonment you need passion. Do not be afraid of the word. For, in seeing this, we may solve the one central problem ‘of me and my urges.’

He spoke of (perceiving ) a tree with its trunk, its roots, its branches, its leaves, as a totality, and asked, “By some miracle, by some way of looking at the clouds, some instant of cleaving perception, could one 'see'? Could the mind be extraordinarily sensitive to every movement of thought and feeling? The timeless is whispering around every corner, it lies under every leaf. It is open not to the dehydrated human being who has suppressed himself and no longer has any passion. But to the mind, which is in a state of meditation, moment to moment.”

In another discussion he said, “I think it would be marvelous if without words one could convey what one really feels about the problem of existence. I wonder whether it is not possible to go beyond the frontiers which the mind has imposed, beyond the narrow limits of one’s heart and to live there; to act, feel, think; while carrying on one’s own activities?”

When questioned on the need for regular practice, he said, “Practice for ten thousand years, you will still be within the field of time, of knowledge.
The self, the ‘me’ is restless. Roaring down like a river, living, moving, being. Self-knowing is extraordinarily swift in its perceptions. Accumulation of knowledge gives birth to the ‘me.’

Questioned on death, he spoke of “death and life walking together.” The fear of complete loneliness, isolation, of not being anything, is the root of self-contradiction. Creation is in ending, not in continuity.

“If there is a living coming to an end from moment to moment, there is an extraordinary state of being nothing. Of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement and dropping over the edge, which is death. I want to know all about death, because death may be reality, God, that extraordinary something that lives and moves.”

“There are no answers to life’s questions. The state of mind that questions is more important than the question itself.If it is a right question, it will have no answer, because the question itself will open the door. But, if it is a wrong question, you will find ways and means to solve the problem and so remain in bondage. For he who asks the question is himself the bondage.”
.
“I have nothing to offer,If you are listening, you are already in that state.No guru is going to tell you that you are doing well. That you may go to the next examination. You are listening to yourself and that is an art.

Can the mind, without motive, let go? That is real renunciation. Keep the mind clean, alert, watchful, observe every thought, see its significance without motive, urge, or compulsion, then there comes an energy that is not your own, which descends upon you. There is a limitless being, and in that energy is reality.

We are not concerned with being, but with having been and becoming. There is an active present, a state of being, a living, active state.”
He spoke of listening as a state of comprehension, of being, in which all time was included.

On January 10 he spoke of sorrow. To end it, sorrow has to be embraced, lived with, understood; one has to become intimate with sorrow. Running away from sorrow is what one knows; it is an escape from it. Understanding of sorrow is an explosion, a revolt, a tremendous discontent in everything. To understand death and sorrow one must have a burning urge, an intensity, and face the fact. Death is unknown, as sorrow is; but to know the nature, the depth, the beauty, and loneliness of sorrow, is its ending. “Benediction comes when there is a state of nonreaction. It is a benediction to know death because death is the unknown.”

Seeing the intense, sorrow-laden, tormented faces in his audience, he spoke of learning to play with a problem. “Unless you can play, you will never find out. If you don’t know how to smile, not only with your lips but with your whole being, with your eyes, your mind, and heart, then you don’t know what it is to be simple and take delight in the common things of life. Unless you are capable of laughter, real laughter, you don’t know what sorrow is. You don’t know what it is to be serious.

Speaking of meditation, he said, Life is an extraordinary thing—we call the 'past' the time before, and the 'future' as the time after; can one go into it through the present? Truth has no future, no past, no continuity. Meditation is the state of living in which the frontiers of the mind break down. There is no self, no center, and, therefore, no circumference.”

He explored the nature of negative thinking:
Whatever is born of a mind that is completely empty, is creation. Out of that arises negative thinking. Such an approach, based as it is on attention, can have no measure. The mind that goes into itself deeply enters on a pilgrimage of enquiry from which there is no return.

To open the door to the eternal, the journey into the (temporal ?) 'self' is the only way.

Continuing with the selected excerpts from PJ's biography of K

K: How does a man transmit the creative touch to another? There is something operating through K which I would like to share. I know it is possible. I feel it is as possible as the sunshine.

Q: Are you drawing a current from a Source not limited to you? If so, how can we tap the source?

K: I feel from the beginning it was open to me. It has always been there. The distance getting clearer, clearer, closer. Why doesn’t X get this? Would you have it if you kept near K all the time? I don’t think so. I want to see how it works. I know how it works with me. This morning I woke with a feeling. There was no ‘me’ feeling. Tomorrow morning when I wake up there will be something new. It keeps going on all the time. When I talk it bursts out. There is never a storing up and then pouring out. With most people the storage is always the old. Here there is no storage, no safe. K wants you to have it. How is it to be done? Even if it is true that K was trained, that he is being used by Maitreya, that entity says to you, ‘You should have it.’ Admitting all the differences, that entity says, ‘Come, you can have it.’ He wants you to have it, therefore he abolishes all divisions. I feel that it is operating, I feel the field is open and some are in it.
I say you can have it. But if you ask, ‘Have I got it? And what is the test? And is there a test? How can I know that I have it?’—then you are lost. For there is no test. It is this asking for more that is the blockage. I say to Rao, ‘Go out, try it.’

I remember my first speech at Madurai. Dr. Besant said to me, ‘My dear, your stance was alright, your gestures right, only you were too inexperienced. I know it is possible for you to have it. Go, start, speak, see what happens. Even if you make a mess, remain hesitant. With this you must be completely uncertain.’

I say to you, you have got ( the key to ?) it. Go open the door.
This is so in my relationships. There is never a sense of coming back to a relationship. There are no anchorages, there is always a moving out.
“I have been told what I say today is different to what I said earlier and to what I was; and I will be different again. K is like that. K has no fixed points of return."

I met Krishnaji alone after the dialogues ended. He asked me how I was feeling. What had the five weeks of discussion done for me? I replied that I was feeling very young within. It was like being reincarnated while still alive. I felt part of something that had to be. Things
would happen to me, as was right and as they were meant to; there was little I could do. Toward the end of the discussions on consciousness the dialogue generated an intense watching of the mind during the day; when I fell asleep, the observation continued. One night I had an explosive perception of the thinker and thought as one; there was blazing light and I fell into deep sleep. The second night the same watchful intensity and the perception of the observer and the observed as one, exploding light and deep sleep. The third night there was an instant when all thought was quenched, an immense light and then dreamless sleep. He heard me speak, but refused to give the experiences any importance. He said, “It is over, move (on ?) .”
I said, “ I feel the urge to write. I also feel like doing nothing.” He said, “Do nothing, see what happens.”

Here is an excerpt from a K letter to Emily Lutyens in 1942

" I don’t think any evil can be overcome by brutality, torture or enslavement; evil can be overcome by something that’s not the outcome of evil. War is the result of our so-called 'peace' which is a series of everyday brutalities, exploitations, narrowness and so on. Without changing our daily life we can’t have peace, and war is a spectacular expression of our daily conduct. There’s no final answer in violence, whoever wields it. I have found the answer to all this, not in the world but away from it. In being detached, the true detachment which comes from being ( open ?) to love and understand. This is very strenuous and not easily to be cultivated."

And this a 'bonus' Q & A from a K talk in London UK

Q: I’m afraid of death. Can you give me any reassurance?

K: You are afraid to let go of all the things you have known... You are afraid to let all that go, totally, deep down, right from the depths of your being, and be with the unknown – which is, after all, death.. Can 'you', who are the result of the known, enter into the unknown which is death? If you ( really ?) want to do it, it must be done while living, surely, not at the last moment... While living, to enter the house of death is not a 'morbid' idea; it is the only ( psychological) solution. While living a rich, full life – whatever that means – or while living a miserable, impoverished life, can we 'know' that which is not measurable, that which is only glimpsed by the experiencer in rare moments?... Can the mind die from moment to moment to everything that it experiences, and never accumulate?"

This post was last updated by John Raica Sun, 02 Dec 2018.

Excerpts from K's letters ( written in the 50's ?) to a young friend:

(...) To have a quality of love about a tree (which is) protective and yet alone. We are losing the feeling for trees, and so we are losing love for man. When we can’t love nature, we can’t love man. Our Gods have become so small and petty and so is our love. In mediocrity we have our being, but there are the trees, the open heavens, and the inexhaustible riches of the earth.

You must have a clear mind, a free untethered mind; this is essential, If the mind does not face its own self-created problems, it is not a clear, deep mind. To face its own peculiarities, to be aware of its urges, deeply and inwardly, to acknowledge all this without any resistance, is to have a profound and clear mind. Then only can there be a subtle mind, not merely a sharp mind. A subtle mind is a slow, hesitant mind; not a mind that concludes, judges, or formulates. This subtlety is essential. It must know to listen and to wait. This quality of the mind must be there from the very beginning. You may have it, give it a full and deep chance to flower.
To go into the unknown; to take nothing for granted, not to assume anything, to be free to find out, and then only can there be depth and understanding. Otherwise one remains on the surface. What is important is not to prove or disprove a point, but to find out the truth.

All the truth of change is seen when there’s only “what is.” The “what is” is not different from the thinker. The thinker is that “what is,” the thinker is not separate from that “which is.”
It’s not possible to be at peace if there’s any kind of want, any hope for some future state. Suffering follows if there’s any want, life is generally full of want; even to have one want leads to endless misery. For the mind to free itself from that one want, even to know that one desire needs attention, and that is quite an affair. When found, don’t let it become a problem. To prolong the problem is to allow it to take root. Don’t let it take root. The one want is the one and only pain. It darkens life; there’s frustration and pain. Just be aware of it and be simple with it.

Through this estate runs a stream. It is not quiet water running peacefully to the big river, but a noisy cheerful stream. All this country around here is hilly, the stream has many a fall and at one place there are three falls of different depths. The higher one makes the noise, the loudest, the other two are not voluble but are on a minor key. All these three falls are spaced differently, and so there is a continuous movement of sound. You have to listen to hear the music. It’s an orchestra playing among the orchards, in the open skies, but the music is there. You have to search it out, you have to listen, you have to be with the flowing waters to hear its music. You must be the whole to hear it—the skies, the earth, the soaring trees, the green fields and the running waters, then only you hear it. But all this is too much trouble, you buy a ticket and sit in a hall, surrounded by people, and the orchestra plays or someone sings. They do all the work for you; someone composes the song, the music, another plays or sings, and you pay to listen. Everything in life, except for a few things, is second-, third-, or fourth-hand—the Gods, poems, politics, music. So our life is empty. Being empty we try to fill it—with music, with Gods, with love, with forms of escape, and the very filling is the emptying. But beauty is not to be bought. So few want beauty and goodness, and man is satisfied with second-hand things. To throw it all off is the real and only revolution, and then only is there the creativeness of reality.

It’s strange how man insists on continuity in all things; in relationships, in tradition, in religion, in art. There’s no breaking off and a beginning new again. If man had no book, no leader, no one to copy, no one to follow, to example, if he was completely alone, stripped of all his knowledge, he would have to start from the very beginning. Of course this complete stripping of himself must be wholly and fully spontaneous and voluntary, otherwise he would force himself into some kind of neurosis. As only a few seem to be capable of this complete aloneness, the world carries on with tradition—in its art, its music, its politics, its Gods—which everlastingly breed misery. This is what is happening in the world at the present time. There is nothing new, there is only opposition and counter-opposition—in religion the old formula of fear and dogma continues; in the arts there is the endeavor to find something new. But the mind is not new, it is the same old mind, ridden with tradition, fear, knowledge, and
experience, endeavoring to search the new. It is the mind itself that must denude itself, wholly, for the new to be. This is the real revolution.

More selected excerpts from K's Letters to a young friend

(...) Life is so rich, has so many treasures,but we go to it with empty hearts; we do not know how to fill our hearts with the abundance of life. We are poor inwardly and when the riches are offered to us, we refuse.

Love is a state of being in which all man’s problems are resolved So few of us are capable of love, so few want love. We love on our own terms, making of love a marketable thing. We have the market mentality and love is not marketable, a give-and-take affair. We go to the well with a thimble and so life becomes a tawdry affair, puny and small. . We are caught in pain and don’t care to get out of it, even when someone points a way out.
I don’t know, but one’s aflame with love. There is an unquenchable flame. One has so much of it that one wants to give it to everyone and one does. It is like a strong flowing river, it nourishes and waters every town and village; it is polluted, the filth of man goes into it but the waters soon purify themselves and swiftly move on. Nothing can spoil love, for all things are dissolved in it—the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. It is the only thing that is its own eternity.

The trees were so stately and strangely impervious to man’s tarred roads and traffic. Their roots were deep down, deep in the earth, and their tops stretched to the skies. We have our roots in the earth, which we have and must have, but we cling or crawl on the earth; only a few soar into the skies. They are the only creative and happy people. The rest spoil and destroy each other on this lovely earth, by hurt and likewise gossip.

To see “what is,” is really quite arduous. One gets the power to see clearly through the intensity of attention; you will see it will come. One must be in a state of negation, to act; this very negation brings its own positive action. I think the problem is to see clearly, then that very perception brings its own action.
One must be very clear within oneself. Then I assure you everything will come right; be clear and you will see that things will shape themselves right without your doing anything about it.

I hope you have had a good night, pleasant sunrise out of your window and you were able to see the evening stars peacefully before you went to sleep. How little we know of love, of its extraordinary tenderness and “power,” how easily we use the word love, but how little we know of it, its vastness, its deathlessness, its unfathomability. To love is to be aware of eternity.

We project a far distant future, away from the present. The attention to understand is always in the present. In attention there is always a sense of imminence. To be clear in one’s intentions is quite an arduous task; intention is as a flame, ceaselessly urging one to understand. Be clear in your intentions and you will see, things will work out. To be clear in the present is all that one needs, but it is not quite so easy as it sounds. One has to clear the field for the new seed and once the seed is planted, its own vitality and strength creates the fruit and the seed.

It is always difficult to keep simple and clear. The world worships success, the bigger the better; the greater the audience the greater the speaker; the colossal super buildings, cars, aeroplanes and people. Simplicity is lost. The successful people are not the ones who are building a new world. To be a real revolutionary requires a complete change of heart and mind, and how few want to free themselves. One cuts the surface roots; but to cut the deep feeding roots of mediocrity, success, needs something more than words, methods, compulsions. There seem to be few, but they are the real builders—the rest labor in vain.

How clear the blue sky is, vast, timeless and without space. Distance and space is a thing of the mind; there and here are facts, but they become psychological factors with the urge of desire. The mind is a strange phenomenon. So complex and yet so essentially simple. It is made complex by the many psychological compulsions. It is this that causes conflict and pain, the resistance and the acquisitions. To be aware of them, and let them pass by and not be entangled in them, is arduous. Life is as a vast flowing river. The mind holds in its net the things of this river, discarding and holding. There should be no net. The net is of time and space, it is the net that creates here and there; happiness and unhappiness.

The desire to fulfill is very strong in people and they pursue it at any cost. This fulfillment, in every way and in any direction, sustains people; if fulfillment fails in one direction, then they try in another. But is there such a thing as fulfillment? Fulfillment may bring a certain satisfaction, but it soon fades away and again we are on the hunt. In the understanding of desire the whole problem of fulfillment ceases. Desire is effort to be, to become, and with an ending to becoming the struggle to fulfill vanishes.

The mountains must be alone. It must be a lovely thing to have rain among the mountains and the rain drops on the placid lake. How the smell of the earth comes out when it rains and then there are the croakings of many frogs. There’s a strange enchantment in the tropics, when it rains. Everything is washed clean; the dust on the leaf is washed away; the rivers come to life and there is the noise of running waters. The trees put out green shoots, there is the new wild grass where there was barren earth; insects by the thousands come out from nowhere and the parched earth is fed and the earth seems satisfied and at peace. The sun seems to have lost its penetrating quality and the earth has become green; a place of beauty and richness. Man goes on making his own misery, but the earth is rich once again and there is enchantment in the air.

How little attention we pay to things about us, to observe and to consider. We are so self-centered, so occupied with our worries, with our own benefits, we have no time to observe and understand. This occupation makes our mind dull and weary, frustrated and sorrowful, and from sorrow we want to escape. As long as the self is active there must be weary dullness and frustration. People are caught in a mad race, in the grief of self-centered sorrow. This sorrow is deep thoughtlessness. The thoughtful, the watchful are free from sorrow.
How lovely a river is. A country without a rich, wide, flowing river is no country at all. To sit on the bank of a river and let the waters flow by, to watch the gentle ripples and hear the lapping of the ripples on the bank; to see the wind on the water making patterns; to see the swallows touching the water, the water catching insects; and in the distance, across the water, on the other bank, human voices or a boy playing the flute, of a still evening, quietens all the noise about one. Somehow, the waters seem to purify one, cleanse the dust of yesterday’s memories and give that quality to the mind of its own pureness, as the water in itself is pure. A river receives everything—the sewer, the corpses, the filth of the cities it passes, and yet it cleanses itself within a few miles. It receives everything and remains itself, neither caring nor knowing the pure from impure. It’s only the ponds, the little puddles that are soon contaminated, for they are not living, flowing, as the wide, sweet-smelling flowing rivers. Our minds are small puddles, soon made impure. It’s the little pond, called mind, that judges, weighs, analyzes, and yet remains the little pool of responsibility.

To go into the unknown; to take nothing for granted, not to assume anything, to be free to find out, and then only can there be depth and understanding. Otherwise one remains on the surface. What is important is not to prove or disprove a point, but to find out the truth.
All the truth of change is seen when there’s only “what is.” The “what is” is not different from the thinker. The thinker is that “what is,” the thinker is not separate from that “which is.”
It’s not possible to be at peace if there’s any kind of want, any hope for some future state. Suffering follows if there’s any want, life is generally full of want; even to have one want leads to endless misery. For the mind to free itself from that one want, even to know that one desire needs attention, and that is quite an affair.

Continuing with the selected excerpts from Mrs Pupul Jayakar's remarkable K Biography ( taken out of the temporal context they seem to have a more profound impact on the listening mind)

In December 1964 I was in Madras, staying at Vasant Vihar. Krishnaji very often had supper with us. Achyut Patwardhan, Madhavachari, Nandini, and Balasundaram were present. A discussion began after supper. I asked, “What is the one action necessary for there to be a breakthrough in the mind? The exploration that had to be done, has been done. There is self-knowing awareness, the eyes are open, the ears listen, the mind is awake. Yet there is no totality of perception and compassion. One total action appears needed to break through.”

Krishnaji felt it was a good question and we should go into it, discuss it. The next night, we tried to discover what is that one action. Krishnaji said, “Perception—can perception and the movement of the heart be one?”
“Perception that is rich with essence—how does it arise?” I asked.
Krishnaji said, “It must be an act of tremendous simplicity.” He was quiet. The very discussion created an atmosphere of energy in the room. Like a flame, it seared through the corridors of consciousness. There was deep, limitless silence. My body could not bear the intensity in the room and sought the support of the wall. Krishnaji sat erect, his back straight, his head unmoving. We sat, and time ceased.

(...) For us (the members of KFI) in India, 1967 was a year of gloom. Krishnaji appeared agitated and critical. There was a sense of flux in his words; a feeling was evident that major changes were in the offing. Addressing the Foundation for New Education in Bombay on February 9, 1967, Krishnaji had spoken with passion of his apprehensions regarding the Foundation in India.

“I want to say certain things, and what I am going to say is in no spirit of criticism or condemnation. I really do not have, in my heart or mind, any sense of judgment. So, that must be clearly understood from the beginning.
“I have been talking now for over forty-five years. Rishi Valley and Rajghat came into being with one intention. These two places were to have been the center of the teachings and, if I may use the word without being misunderstood, holy places. I think it about time we took stock of what is actually happening; whether these two places are the centers of the teachings. And whether there is that sense of ‘otherness’ in these two places.

“I have used an expression which may have given rise to misunderstanding. I have said that the schools ‘must be saved’ as an oasis in this country; saved from the chaos that is going on all around. Because I really feel most profoundly and I get rather stirred up about it, so forgive me if I speak hesitatingly, I feel that the flowering, after all these years, is still not taking place.
“And, I may never come back, I may die. If I do come back, as I was telling Mama [Madhavachari], it will be for a short time, not for these five months at a time. Physically I cannot do it any more, because I am not sleeping very well and I am getting too tired.

“So, you will have to consider that I am gone. Anything can happen. I can die. The decision may be taken, not by anybody else but by me, alone, never to return, or to return for very short periods. I do not know what is going to happen in the future, and I really mean this.
“So, can these two places be saved? You understand? Not saved from Balasundaram (who was then Principal of the Rishi Valley School) , or someone else, or from corruption or things like that, but saved as an oasis?
“As I was telling Kittyji this morning, and also Pupul at lunchtime, we have to do something very very drastic. I do not know what you are going to do. My days are limited, probably ten years more or less, and I want to concentrate everything I have and not waste my energy. I am speaking sanely, unemotionally, not sentimentally.

“So, what are we going to do to ‘save’ these places? Please understand what we mean by that word ‘save.’ To save in the sense of making them [an] oasis in this mad world. And, if I do not come back, if I die, what is going to happen? After forty years, what have we produced? You all have given a great part of your life to this—and what has happened? If you say, ‘we are doing our best’ or ‘we are doing everything we can,’ then somehow that is not good enough any more. I am not saying what you are doing is right or wrong. I do not feel that way, but what are we going to do?”
(There was a long pause).

“The same thing has happened at Ojai. You may know that there is a disturbance between the K. W. Inc. as it is now, and myself—and there is trouble. We all started out together to build something deep, something lasting, something worthwhile there as well as here. But there it is not flowering either.
“So, what can we do here? What can we do to save these places so that they become an oasis for these teachings? How can we make it into something really worthwhile? I have talked to Mama (Madhavachari) many times about this, for several years, and I say to myself now, ‘What are we going to do?’ ”
Madhavachari was interrupting Krishnaji with explanations and excuses, but Krishnaji was not prepared to listen to him.
“I understand all that you are saying,” he continued. “We have discussed this together several times at Rajghat, at Rishi Valley. For seven years now, we have discussed this. I am asking what are we going to do now? Forget the past, forget that I said this and you said that, forget that ‘we are doing our best.’ The only question is, ‘What are we going to do?’
“Take it, Mama, I may die tomorrow, I don’t intend to, but if I die, what will happen? Will you carry on just as before? Put it to yourself, Mama.”
Madhavachari said, “I think when a great crisis like that comes...”
“It ( the great crisis) is here, Mama.” Krishnaji said.

(...)

One night at supper, at which Nandini, Asit Chandmal, and I were present, Krishnaji started talking about the Theosophical Society and Annie Besant. This was the first time in twenty-one years that he had spoken to us at length of the Theosophical Society.

Krishnaji was exploring the mystery that surrounded the discovery of the boy, Krishnamurti. He was probing delicately, tuning the ear to intimations and insights that might arise in discussion. His statements on the Theosophical Society were clear and precise. He made no comment as to whether they were true or illusion. Sensing the “otherness” in Krishnaji, we listened, asking few questions and letting him speak.

Krishnaji said that the Masters had told C. W. Leadbeater to find a boy who was a Brahmin, who came from a good family, and who had a “face as described.” It was the duty of the Theosophical Society to protect the body of the child, and to provide an atmosphere of complete security for two years. If the body was prepared and ready, Lord Maitreya would give the boy the 'mind'. When Leadbeater saw Krishnamurti on Adyar beach, he perceived that there was no selfishness in the boy’s aura.

Krishnaji asked himself how it was that the boy remained unaffected; he then advanced several theories to explain how the boy remained untouched. Was it that, through birth and rebirth, the child had evolved to perfection? Or had the Lord Maitreya protected the body till it was mature? Had the boy been born without a formal character or personality, allowing him to remain vague, untouched by his earlier years

He then spoke of the Theosophical Society hierachy—the highest was the “Lord of the World,” then the Mahachohan, then the Buddha. The Bodhisattva Maitreya was considered equal to the Buddha. Below them were the Masters; each with a different name—one a Tibetan Lama, another an Indian aristocrat, another a Polish count.
The boy, who was totally innocent and unaffected, still had to be protected so that evil could not touch him, could not enter him.
Mrs. Besant had insisted that two initiates accompany Krishnaji all the time. She said, “Since you are always alone within, you must never be physically alone.” There was a reservoir of the good in the boy that should not be contaminated. He said he needed protection even in 1969, for his character was still unformed. “The other night, while meditating, I could see that the boy still existed exactly as he was, nothing had happened to him in life. The boy is still as he was. The body still needs to be protected from evil.” He paused again, and said, “I still feel protected.”

He then spoke of the early years, when the boy Krishnamurti’s body had to be completely protected and given security for two years; but the mind was not to be touched, for “the Lord would give him the rest.” There were long silences between his sentences. K said the body had to go through a lot of pain because there were still imperfections in the brain.
Asit Chandmal asked, “How does the good allow evil in the form of a human being to come near?”
“I can’t push away anybody or anything,” K said. “I can’t say ‘go away’; it has to leave me. Isn’t it strange that it does?” He then asked, “What is the force which completely protects something so that it is innocent and unaffected? You must be extremely careful if you open the door; evil or good can enter. Evil finds it easy to enter, the good much more difficult. Evil is not the opposite of the good,” he repeated. “There is no relationship between the two.”

Krishnaji then went on to speak of the initiations he had gone through in the Theosophical Society. According to the secret doctrines of the Society there were three initiations. After two, things could still go wrong. But, after the third, the being could not be affected by anger, sex, money. They were all too trivial.
It was nearly midnight before Krishnaji went to bed.

In his public talks and discussions he raised a fundamental question: Is there such a thing as an individual, or is man merely a movement of the collective? Krishnaji said that to be an individual, there had to be a revolution in the collective (consciousness ?) as revealed in knowledge and tradition. And so man had to discover his own incorruptibility.

“It is necessary to ask questions to which there are no answers. So that the question throws man back on himself and the way the structure of thought operates. The hand that seeks to throw away or reject is the same hand that itself holds.”

Later, during a walk in Bombay, he said that “the act of seeing and listening activates the senses. Seeing, without the word as thought intervening, creates energy.”
He also spoke about the urgency “to know the self as it is, not as one wishes it to be, which is illusion, an ideal and fictitious. It is only that ‘which is’ that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be. The understanding of what you are—ugly, beautiful, wicked, evil—understanding without distortion is the beginning of virtue. Virtue alone gives freedom.”

We talked over the ancient role of the Brahmin; his gift of teaching had to be a free gift. As a Brahmin, he would not accept dakshina, charity. He felt he had a right to be supported by the state. Poverty was his birthright; so was learning.

Indian myth delighted Krishnaji. He often made me repeat the legend of Narada, the semicelestial musical mendicant who traveled ceaselessly, carrying the gossip of the world of the gods from one god to another. Narada, anxious to learn the secret of Maya, came on Vishnu as he rested in a grove of trees. After the salutations were over, Narada asked the god of the blue waters the secret of his maya—the web of illusion that covered the world of man and his actions. Vishnu agreed to teach it, but told Narada that as he was thirsty, would he first fetch him some water. Narada wandered into the forest seeking a homestead. After some time he came to a house and knocked at the door. It was opened by a ravishingly beautiful young woman who smiled at him with her large lotus eyes as she turned to fetch the water. Narada was infatuated, and lingered for days in her company.

Time passed. Narada married his love and, as year followed year, children were born. Narada lived in bliss with his wife and children. A year came when it rained incessantly, the waters of the rivers overflowed their banks and a gigantic flood swept away Narada’s house and the surrounding trees. Holding his wife by one hand, clutching a child with the other and with yet another child perched on his shoulder, Narada waded through the waters to reach higher ground. But soon the waters reached his chest, and then his chin. One by one the children who clung to him were swept away, until only his wife remained. It was night and the darkness added to the terror that engulfed him; the waters continued to rise and his wife, unable to hold on to his arm, was separated from him and the waters claimed her. Then Narada, alone, lifted his arms and cried out to the gods. Suddenly, a voice was heard. “Ten minutes have passed. Where is my glass of water?”

This post was last updated by John Raica Sat, 08 Dec 2018.