The Link #22 - Letters to the Editor

While space to include articles and letters in The Link is naturally limited,the editors nonetheless appreciate hearing from as many readers as possible. Having said this, it has become a bit too much for us to engage in correspondence with everyone. We would therefore ask all correspondents to advise us, when writing, whether or not you would permit your letter, or extracts from it, to be published in a future issue of The Link; we would include your name, together possibly with your country, unless you specifically instruct us otherwise.

From the heart of Argentina

I have just read your Newsletter and feel that I must tell you how I have implemented the teachings of Krishnamurti in my own small way. You sound so disheartened that I need to cheer you.

I teach English in a small workshop in the heart of Argentina, and my students and I read and discuss Krishnamurti ’s teachings. These students had never heard about him before, don ’t know much about him, but they have found a voice that rings clear and true in their young adolescent hearts. The readings have assisted them to formulate their own questions regarding their future role in society. They are filled with concern about their country, where corruption has made a stronghold.

I realize that it is difficult, but isn’t that just the reason why we chose Krishnamurti’s teachings and why we do what we do?

Take heart and carry on your wonderful work. Thank you.

Helene Badenhorst
Argentina, December 2001

Whose side is The Link on?

It was sad to read the Autumn/Winter 2001 Link. Not for the content about the World Trade Center attack, but rather for having selected it among many other acts of violence throughout the world, often perpetrated by the USA itself.

When The Link attaches itself to the nationalistic fervor of the times, the hope it provides for a better world diminishes and transforms into despair. By choosing to focus on the WTC tragedy, The Link exposes itself as just another tool of self-preservation for the political and economic elite of the world. It would have been more empathetic to give the less fortunate a platform for their aspirations.

I would be better served by The Link if it sees that human pain is the same all over the world. If this is so, I suggest that The Link become universally inclusive when discussing issues relevant to the human condition, rather than conveying the message that our suffering is greater than that of other people.

What I would like to know is: whose side is The Link on now?

Anonymous, USA

Some reflections on the last issue

It seems that we are reaching a point of big questions about K’s heritage and how everything is going to develop, the school in Brockwood, the teachings, The Link. What are the teachings without K? Can you divorce one from the other? The books are words, expressing only partially what he was, what he lived, what he taught. There was an awareness in K that not the words but love and affection ‘work’. This is why he kept traveling all over the world until the end of his life, instead of relying on the books and videos. His teaching was something to experience, a quality of love, of depth, of understanding, to be experienced in ‘personal’ contact with him (being with hundreds of listeners under a tent was still personal). Even the videos are a pale shadow of that living experience and also K’s words do not ‘work ’necessarily, automatically, because words are not the whole. They are just traces, signposts maybe. Those who already know will understand them, those who don’t, will not.

The essential, a quality of awareness, cannot be learned from books, and K ’s books are no exception to that. The essential can only be lived. But we do learn from people with deep love and spirituality. Not from the words they say but from their whole being, by experiencing their state of consciousness, their way of relating to others,to us, to the world. Their quality of love and intelligence sets us free from conflicts and disharmonies inside ourselves. Once free we can be lights to ourselves. But it’s not a linear, chronological evolution. We may be helping someone else, our child, our neighbour, colleague, husband at one moment and learn from them at another moment. We may be wise, loving in some fields of activity and relationship, and not in others. Good fathers but poor husbands, or the contrary.

There was much to learn from K. Whatever project he supported, he engaged with, would attract many people, lots of energy and money. Maybe parents felt that their children had something essential to learn at Brockwood as long as K went there regularly. It’s not only materially difficult to send our children to a school far away; we might also consider it unnecessary since we might feel that we can convey to our children the essential inner qualities by living these in our relationship with them just as well as the staff in Brockwood could.

But even if we are not able to have this quality that was K’s, even if the school in Brockwood has to be closed, there is still the need of keeping in touch with kindred souls,with friends sharing the same concerns, the same understanding. Spirituality is something to be shared even if there are no rites and no churches. The Link is, in my eyes, a very essential and precious way of connecting people who share something essential.

Cornelia Seeger-Tappy
Switzerland, December 2001

When is one ready?

I am retired from teaching art, anthropology and humanities at a Community College in Illinois. During the last ten years I prepared and offered a course, “The Future of Humanity,” in which I introduced students to K’s teachings as part of the course content. From both my teaching and my personal ‘life-crisis’ experience at age 23, it is apparent to me that there is some point in a person’s life at which one is ready to awaken and question everything anew, and unless one is at that point, any ‘teachings’ will fall on deaf ears. Although a teacher may help instigate such an awakening, it is life itself that brings about that state. But even those who go back to sleep may yet hear another wake-up call later in life.

To try to measure the value of The Link, to look for observable results, is this not a mistake? My point is that to focus on ends is to miss the point of The Link. Is it a recruitment pamphlet to enlist, or a propaganda publication to sway and convince? Or is its function to offer lesser-known talks and dialogues of K, and our responses to them? The Link is, to my knowledge, offered only to those already on the mailing list, and of course we’ve already been introduced to K’s teachings. But we come in contact with those who have not. K: “If there are only five people who will live, who will have their faces turned towards eternity, it will be sufficient.”

I feel that the publication is a vital link between us and that eternity.

Robert Matter
USA, December 2001

Being aware of the observer

The following was a contribution to the online K Study Group of www.kinfonet.org.

When we listen to the teachings, we tend to translate them into a kind of logical model. The thinker is reprogramming himself, and from this programming he understands the world, and may even think that he has changed. But the teachings are not a new set of analytical tools, of course. The essence seems to be a holistic state of mind, a non-verbal insight.

The way I see it, it is the depth of perception that is important. While observing something, one must be aware of the observer. One must understand the fact that when one is looking, one’s whole history, one’s identity, one’s motives are looking. One recognises and registers something and the past reacts.

Seeing all this is not a method, but simply observing facts. If one thinks in terms of methods, it is because one has not discovered for oneself the fact that one is conditioned. When one discovers that it is actually oneself — the observer, the me — that is conditioned, then any attempt on the part of the observer to battle or silence thought is meaningless. The observer is thought.

When one discovers the fact that one is conditioned, then one discards the whole world of masters, enlightenment, ashrams, mantras, meditation practices, and the dos and don’ts. I think one becomes like a passionate experimental scientist. However, part of this is to be absolutely honest with oneself.

If one gets a real glimpse of this constant movement from the known to the known, there is a sudden stop somewhere in one’s consciousness. One is not enlightened but something has happened. It is a new situation. One cannot go on with illusion.

Rasmus Tinning
Denmark, May 2002

A challenge for us all

In Issue 21 of The Link the question of its value to readers was posed. In the same edition, a published speech by Mary Cadogan made the point that K is still not widely known. At a time of serious reflection for the K community, why do we still spend so much time and effort discussing K and the teachings rather than investigating the actual possibility of transformation? Are we serious about the teachings or are we fooling ourselves? During a fourteen-year ‘spiritual search’, K ’s teachings brought into my mind things I had never considered before. Often I did not understand but then life brought its mostly painful lessons and I did. I also experienced ‘spiritual’ occurrences, including Reiki healing and perceiving energy fields. Much of it I may have imagined. I now look at life somewhat differently but there has been no fundamental transformation. My ‘self’ remains intact. For two years, I regularly travelled to the Krishnamurti Information Centre in Knareborough, North Yorkshire. There I had many discussions with the person who runs it and for whom I have the deepest respect. During our discussions she made two honest and profoundly significant statements that caused me to question my own efforts at inquiring. These statements were, “I still operate from the ego centre” and “I have been conditioned by Krishnamurti”. How long does one have to ‘prepare the ground’ before transformation can occur?

Two years ago, while listening to the audiotape version of the book. Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search, by Steven Harrison, in a quiet, reflective moment, I saw very clearly the fact that an ‘I’, an ‘ego', cannot possibly transform itself. At best ,it can only get relatively better. Fundamental change, transformation, can only occur when one is willing to face one ’s own psychological death (“die to the known”). This is the first, last and only step we need take, but most of us seem unable or unprepared to do so. Why? Because, as Harrison pointed out, “nobody wants to be a nobody”. So what will move us to face our psychological death? It seems that pain alone will move most of us. I feel that nearly everyone I have met who has been interested in K has, like myself, been a ‘self’ in search of ever deeper and more meaningful experiences. Furthermore, we all seemed to have come to the spiritual search because we were in conflict and looking for a resolution. The more I inquired, the more I thought I understood, and the more satisfied I became. My personal conflict was alleviated and the pain diminished but so too did my need to continue inquiring.

We can intellectually accept that the ‘self’ is an illusion produced by thought as a survival mechanism. We can believe that we are working on ourselves, preparing the ground for something extraordinary to happen. But there is still effort from a centre,a “doer” doing, and it leaves the ‘self’ intact. Isn ’t this what most of us actually do whilst we talk about deepening our understanding of the teachings? Until we are willing to face and see directly the fact of the illusory ‘self’, our understanding will remain intellectual and no fundamental transformation can possibly occur. K’s teachings are not the intellectual escape that many of us try to turn them into. They are an uncompromising challenge that allows us no resting place or comfort. This may be the reason why his popularity has not grown. All he could do was to keep us continually moving and learning. It is easier and more comforting to read spiritual teachers other than K, to do myriad spiritual practices and become a relatively better ‘self’. To face one ’s psychological death and change fundamentally is not to be played with. Being willing to and actually ‘dying’ psychologically is a profound, final choice for a ‘self ’to make. Are we really willing to go that far?

I am not willing to face my own psychological death at present because this ‘self’ wants to continue experiencing. I still live in a thought-produced conceptual world, being driven by fear, continually trying to ensure my own security. Only when the pain of living in my conceptual world grows too great to bear am I moved to inquire further. At least I am finally being honest with myself. Are you?

Geoff Mincke
Switzerland, April 2002

A meeting with the eternal

Many years ago I was walking down the street in a quiet area of the town. It was sunny and the gardens were green. There was a certain awareness and sensitivity. Then,suddenly, as though new senses were opening, the presence of the eternal was there.

The word ‘eternal’ was not the outcome of conclusive reasoning or evaluation, as when you look at the skies and think “this universe must be infinite and must have always been there” and then see it according to the conceptual conclusion. It was rather like tasting honey and later calling it ‘sweet’for the sake of communication. Nevertheless, the mind could exclaim with wonder: “Goodness me! There is something that corresponds to the word ‘eternal’!”

The body was like a fish in this ocean of multi-directional energy and indestructible, immense space, something self-sustained, completely independent and containing every sound and being. ‘My’ identity was that and, therefore, no fear. I was not feeling ‘high ’and it was not an ‘experience’. (Only on that day did I see what Krishnamurti meant by the mind-boggling statement that you cannot experience Truth.) It was not a momentary flash of ‘insight’ or a psychosomatic, merely personal intensity; it was a ‘standing outside ’of that field, as the word ‘ecstasy’ implies. ‘I’ felt like a baby learning to crawl, to walk. My ‘identity’ could move from being responsible as a ‘body-person’ soberly relating to another (much more sober, sane, factual than in the ‘normal’ state) to being that endless expanse of living space. And it was there the whole day.

For a moment a fearful thought arose: “What if it will disappear?” The answer was instantaneous: “It is obvious that it has always been here and it will always be here and everywhere, regardless of whether the perception of it closes its doors or not”. The following day it was ‘gone’.

Seeing that it was not the result or creation of an ambitious ego and that it had nothing to do with ‘me’, there was no regret or despair upon its ‘ending’. The ‘me’ naturally confessed its ‘impotence’ in the face of this immensity and ‘prostrated’, not emotionally but as a matter of fact, before it.

Yes, it was a rare jewel,the only eternal jewel, unending Life itself... Perhaps it was a gift. And yet at times I wonder: “What was the point, significance of one day lived in Eternity followed by its ‘disappearance’? Was there anything of lasting value in this event? Perhaps, perhaps not”.

As for its ‘re-appearance’, as far as I know the mere memory of it and the efforts motivated by this memory can never re-discover or re-produce it. It is not a product. The event cannot be used. And yet there it was! But now that ‘I’am back, I cannot help asking myself on occasion: “This interest you have in knowing yourself,i s it not motivated by this remembrance?” I would say no... It is more like what K once said, to the effect that a really interested man who approaches life simply and is aware of suffering asks whether there is a different way to live.

J.B.
Denmark, December 2001

Staying with it

My wife and I went for a walk in the fields close to where we live. There was a matter which we needed to talk over, a matter of some difficulty between us.

From the start of our relationship, we had been able to talk things over,even when the subject was quite volatile, and often went walking to do so. We both had studied some of Krishnamurti’s teachings and had been involved with a dialogue group, based on the notion of dialogue put forward by David Bohm, which ran for about 3 years.

We felt together in talking things over as we walked. The matters being talked over were of the nature of threatening the basis of our situation together and so the level of energy was high. We stayed with the feelings and continued to talk.

After a certain time we felt that we had looked sufficiently at the subject and that we would now leave it. We had enjoyed each other’s company and attention and felt close despite the unresolved difficulty.

At this point we tried something different from what we might usually have done. Very often, after such a talk, we might have gone on to ordinary subjects, and then when we got home would each have got involved with our own activities. This time we suggested that we might simply stay with each other, but without picking up the previous subject or any subject in particular.

Very soon we looked at each other and were both aware of something unusual. We were aware of a sense of high energy and alertness, but not towards any particular subject. There was a sense of beauty, of no fear, of possibilities. It felt fresh, new, light-hearted. We were both really quite taken by this feeling.

We got back to the house and sat facing each other. We talked about what we were experiencing. It lasted about ten minutes or so. My wife felt as if she was a new person, for once in her life quite fearless.

I felt that I was looking at someone I had only just met. There was a wonderful freshness and sense of freedom and possibilities, not anything specific, and no fear!

John Creighton
England

Life is not the problem

Five or six years ago,suddenly and rather dramatically — overnight — I became severely disabled physically through illness. I had been leading a very busy and meaningful life. Having grown up rejecting anything and everything that felt false, I had many profound realisations and considered that there was no falseness left in me — until I was no longer able to recognise myself in this enormous state of incapacity. The realisation that I did indeed identify with my physical body and its capabilities was stunning. And it felt as though it was the most shocking, but obvious of human self-images. How many of us walking around expect to be walking around tomorrow? And how many of us are relying on that physical capability for our sense of well-being? It is something that we take completely for granted. But also the thought that we might become severely disabled is probably terrifying for most of us who are physically able. Once I had seen that I held this image, I was left literally not knowing who I was. This was incredibly liberating and exciting, but must have sounded quite odd to the numerous people I spoke to about it.

However, this recognition of self-image did not reveal itself on its own. The beginning of the illness brought great fear and anxiety — not knowing if I was disabled for life, or for ten years, or whatever. It also brought frustration and confusion and a longing for what had been .The body was in crisis, but so too was the mind!

Yet despite all of these feelings I was aware also of a much deeper feeling,of utter calm and well-being. When I listened to and felt this feeling I was amazed to find that it was there regardless of the physical condition. Was this possible, then,that despite the incapacity, despite the possibility of it lasting a lifetime, despite the practical problems that it brought — and, most illuminating, despite the frightened and chaotic activity of thought — it didn ’t matter? I thought, “Oh my God! This is it! I am at peace with myself, because if this doesn’t matter, then of course nothing else that could happen to me does. And, perhaps even more importantly, neither could any thought that thought could invent!”

I was not able to name this feeling of extraordinary peace, but it felt as though I had made the most staggering discovery; a terribly exciting “secret ” that was both liberating and humbling. After this shift in perspective (which has left me radically changed) I was eager to find out if there was anyone in the world who would understand this amazing phenomenon — the experience of unshakeable “confidence” in the face of complete uncertainty, creating an entirely different relationship to thought. Now, never having been of a “spiritual seeking” mind, I found J. Krishnamurti under “Philosophy” in the local library. And I immediately thought, “This man knows what he is talking about”. Life is not the problem. The events of life that happen to us are not the problem. It is our response to the things that happen to us that causes the problem. And it is the compulsion to want to “control” life, to resist “what is” that is preventing us from seeing this.

And, of course, despite this wonderful discovery, the mind can and still does generate this urge to resist (will),fear for the future, and frustration over what isn’t. But no matter, I can now see it instantly for what it is — merely a mechanical process that doesn ’t deserve the time of day!

Anonymous
England, January 2002

How are you disseminating K?

I am moved t0 write a letter now because, having discovered K’s teachings by accident, having soaked myself in them for the last three years, having become totally convinced of their overwhelming importance to mankind, I would like to see the message spread. In the last issue of The Link you start by saying “We are questioning The Link.” And you go on to print the talk by Mary Cadogan where she explores the future of Krishnamurti organisations and also questions the emphasis and direction of the work.She states that K, if he were with us, would be “questioning, questioning, questioning ” and that he did not regard anything as set in stone. Quite right.

What follows is not a criticism of what has been. The trustees have discharged their functions admirably as custodians of the archive, in preserving the teachings in accessible form, and in maintaining the work begun in the schools. But from the point of view of spreading the message, it seems to me, coming as I do from a totally different cultural background, that they are casting much of the seed on barren earth and, more importantly, that there is a whole world of fertile ground that the seed is not reaching. K was brought up and educated in England by a family who belonged to a privileged class. He lectured to groups of people who had the leisure and money to go and hear him. He frequently characterised their attitudes as bourgeois. He was aware of this. In India (Commentaries on Living, Second Series in particular) he shows that he was aware of the very poor and talked in private to ordinary people,including disillusioned Marxists, nationalists and sannyasis. In England,his audience was always bourgeois, most of them university trained (or brainwashed). I do not regard any of this as opinion.The facts are a matter of history. The bourgeois attitudes persist and this has consequences.

Mary Cadogan bemoans the fact that commercial publishers, apart from Shambhala, have lost interest in the titles. They are in business to make a profit, not spread messages. The twist they give to the ones they publish is subtle but I would like to point out two of the more obvious factors. Firstly,they encourage the cult of personality by insisting on a cover photo. Secondly, they include complimentary blurb, usually bringing in the words “great spiritual teacher”.

Now K did everything he could to discourage the cult of personality and always insisted that the speaker was not important but that his words were a mirror in which the listeners could see themselves. And he disliked the word spiritual. The word has associations with all the illusions of traditional religious practice and immediately creates the false dualism of material/spiritual.

Does it matter? May I give anecdotal evidence of why it matters? Very few people I know have even heard of Krishnamurti but they do come into my rooms and see the books on the shelves. “Oh, Krishnamurti,” one of them said. “That’s that funny little Indian guru, isn’t it?”

She is a Green and had seen the ad for Brockwood Park which appears in Positive News, together with the ads of other “funny little Indian gurus”, replicas of Hindu deities, Maitreya’s miraculous appearance, “aids” to meditation, a Sex and Spirit conference, etc., etc. Would K have sanctioned such an ad?

The only other person I know who has heard of Krishnamurti has a similar working-class background to my own, but his partner was an actress whose rich aunt, back in the Thirties, knew Krishnamurti well. So he’d heard all about him.

“What d’you mean Krishnamurti, mate,” he said, when I admitted to reading his books.

“They ’re just a lot of upper-class cranks.”

These two people,and many others like them, will never read Krishnamurti. If they did, they would discover for themselves that he rejects all authority, all method, and insists that truth is a “pathless land ”.

The next consequence of bourgeois attitudes is the importance attached to academia, also given prominence in the last issue of The Link. I am not criticising this per se. If academics can spread the message, let them do it. But I do question whether or not it is indeed the fertile ground that your contributors claim it to be. K was fully aware that universities all over the world are the same: “The teachers are pompous, intriguing for better positions and salaries. They impart certain knowledge and techniques which the clever ones quickly absorb; and when they graduate,that is that.”

Now, more than ever, they are concerned with specialisation and grades. The pushing parents are concerned with status and salaries. And the rationale behind the mushroom growth is that by fragmented knowledge and reform of institutions, the chaos of the world will be brought to order. No, said K. It won’t. It will only change when there is a fundamental revolution in the human psyche.

Well, that’s the easy bit, saying what not to do.

In order to change direction and emphasis, the trustees and any readers of this letter will have to be convinced that there are men and women of all ages out there who are ready for K’s message and would greet it with enthusiasm, just as I did. There are. And strangely enough, the fact that there are is a product of the very system that grades and tests and which is founded on comparison, greed and envy. Because, for every success, there is a failure. Granting that many of the failures are short on capacity, there are many more who are not — they simply refused to tolerate the crass discipline and competition of the system.

Among these are men and women sickened by consumerism, the growth of GNP which despoils the planet, the violence underlying the machinations of government, the false values of the media, the bribes of the gurus, the illusions of the priests, the screams for entertainment and the sad, twisted little lives their friends and families live, we all live, by our lack of relationship. They are sickened by it and they say, “No. Not like that. Not any more.” The last thing they want is Authority but they need K ’s message. To point. To show them the door they have to go through. And it is these men and women who have the passion and the intensity to live and spread the message. They have what we used to call “iron in the soul”. That ’s old-fashioned. I don ’t like it very much. Perhaps Jayakar ’s quote at the end of Mary Cadogan ’s address is better: “The understanding of the teachings demands muscle and tone and an extension of the horizons of the mind. It is a tough, relentless pursuit.” And the message will spread, as the great messages have always spread, by word of mouth. Not by computers and web sites and videos and CD-ROMs. The people I ’m thinking of don ’t have any of this rubbish, anyway.

May I please give a simple illustration of this point. In America,in the 1800’s, there was a man called Thoreau. He ’s dead. Now why on earth should ordinary people,who have never been to a university, and who live in rural West Wales in 2001, know anything about Thoreau? You can ’t buy his books in Ottakars or Smiths. I ’ve checked. But they do know about him. There are battered old Everyman editions of Walden, copies picked up in junk shops and jumble sales that travel round from hand to hand, from home to home. There is no photo. We don ’t know what he looked like, no publisher’s blurb, no cult of Thoreau. But they talk about it because it’s real. The sensitivity to Nature, the glimpses of freedom. Not freedom from. Freedom.

So I want there to be a K book like that. So that it will pass from hand to hand. The nearest thing I have come across is The Book of Life. Great title but it needs to be half the size and cheap, and the word meditation must not appear on the cover. That would put most of the people I know right off. Meditation is for people who have swapped the greed for money for the greed for moksha. Not us. They have to learn what K meant by meditation first. Let him tell them. In his own words.

John Claydon
Wales, January 2002