The Link #24 - 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.

A Meeting with K

I believe it was in 1982, in Switzerland, after a group meeting with J. Krishnamurti. The time had come to say goodbye. I noticed how others were very respectfully taking turns to shake his hand in farewell. For what seemed like an eternity, I was in the midst of a dilemma. On the one hand, there was the wish to touch this being and, on the other, a monologue saying, “What nonsense are you up to... playing the guru game after all, aren’t you?”

And while I was going round like a mouse trapped in a cage – there was only one door, and K was standing by it – suddenly I saw the situation in a sober way: simply a matter of saying goodbye to someone with whom one has spent some time; no fuss, no thoughts of expecting shaktipat (energy transference), or any other gloriously pink astral emotions. I was the last one in the queue, so there was no way out of it.

I walked towards him, shook his hand and said, “Thank you for this time and goodbye.” “Yeees, sir,” he said. That was all, on the outwardly visible level.

In those few seconds, the following also happened: He took my hand in his, and with his other hand, my elbow; it felt as though my whole being and its contents were being shaken into place; a current of a very high speed passed on through my hand to the rest of the body, from head to toe; it was like a good and instant shower of energy.

He looked into my eyes.

I’ve never seen such dark, large and bottomless eyes! For a split second I felt a fear ¬similar to that of falling off a mountain precipice, as though there was a space without end, and invisible – and yet perceived – floods of love were pouring from his eyes. (In view of this, it’s quite interesting that some people call him ‘dry’ and ‘intellectual’.)

I was standing there, hardly prepared for all that, and this little man, who physically did not reach higher than my chest, was definitely felt by me to be about 4 times taller than myself

Because it all happened so quickly, only when I stepped outside the room did I realize what had taken place.

I had witnessed a few similar events in the company of others before I met K, but the delicacy, subtlety, purity and sobriety contained in the nature of this meeting was somehow unique.

He was a rare one!

I’ve read that even though he hardly ever talked about matters of a mystical nature, he himself said that there will not be another like him for several hundred years, the reason for this being the necessity for a body that can withstand the enormous volume of energy similar to that which passed through K’s body.

And my mind at times throws up the question: Does such an encounter leave some kind of a ‘seed’ in one, or is it just another awesome experience?

Maybe I’ll never know, and it probably does not matter either.

Joseph B.
April 2004

Understanding, or Living, the Teachings?

The following comments were inspired by reading the article featured in The Link, No. 23 entitled Are K’s Teachings Ahead of Their Time?

After having read a few articles in different issues of The Link, I have the impression that the goal of many authors is to understand the teachings, and their approach is often very intellectual and complicated.

My approach is simple. Many years ago I used the teachings to understand myself. This understanding is not intellectual, but direct; it occurs through seeing what is happening in one’s psyche when it happens. This seeing comes through a state of awareness when inner and outer senses are open, alert, interested to see or experience what is taking place there and then, no matter whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. From that moment on, if one is alert in daily life, the teachings are no longer so important: ‘what is’ has taken over the teaching job.

As in this awareness thought has automatically calmed down, such a state cannot be found through any activity of thought. There must be no wish to achieve, no motive. One must come upon it. It may help to re-discover one’s senses, which in our culture are so dominated by thought. As a child, one had excellent contact with one’s senses. This re-discovery, like every discovery, happens without chronological and psychological time, without evolution. It cannot be learned and thus become part of our culture. The only thing that can be assimilated is that it is possible to understand oneself, the activities of the psyche, directly by seeing, not by thinking. This discovery can also help us to understand other things: the psychological aspect of thought, the non-existence of future and past, that life takes place in the everlasting now, and so on. And we see that the constant flow through our individual consciousness of information and impressions, sensations, thoughts and emotions makes up the content and quality of our individual life.

In this awareness, seeing or being the flow of information and emotions through consciousness in daily life creates a certain emptying process of the psyche. This happens step by step and layer by layer as deeper layers may come to the surface when the upper layers have been emptied. An emptying of bodily tensions may also be involved. It is not an emptying of consciousness but an emptying of the unconscious psyche. It is a healing process. It takes chronological time without using psychological time. A step may be the seeing, and thus emptying, of a single emotional reaction. The actual content of one’s consciousness and one single point in the unconscious psyche have been changed and often healed without the use of any psychological time, with no involvement of future, becoming or thought wishing to achieve. Thus the psychological timeless state, the now, creates an evolution through chronological time. This may sound paradoxical, but it is not. This state of consciousness is alert but passive; there is no turning of stones, no doing, only seeing. Every movement in this process is a result of something happening and not the result of an act of will. As I see it, as I have experienced it, this is living the teachings. Living the teachings means living in peace with oneself.

Johan Lem,
January 2004

A Radical Reorienting of the Mind

I have just reread the article in The Link, No. 23, Are K’s Teachings Ahead of Their Time? It is a subject I have often thought about, wondering exactly what kind of effect they will (or may) have on humanity at large. Inevitably, one tends to think in terms of the past and of how long it took the Buddha’s or the Christ’s teachings to percolate. I would say that two hundred years is very modest: it is easily arguable that it took more like a thousand for the effects of these past masters to be felt, a thousand years, that is, before one could actually speak of a Christian or a Buddhist civilization.

They, too, of course spoke of the timeless, of Nirvana and the Kingdom of Heaven, but, especially in the case of Christianity, this was interpreted as an everlasting extension of time rather than the ending of it, which is much more radical. Buddhism did address the timeless and is the closest of the standard religions to K’s teachings.

My own feeling is that the teachings are way ahead of their time because they involve, as the Buddha’s and the Christ’s did in their day, a radical reorienting of the mind itself. Most people cannot cope with this and, among those of us who try, there are more casualties than ‘successes’. This indicates that something very deep is being threatened – perhaps the whole structure of consciousness itself, comprising the unconscious as well as the conscious. When this happens, there is a sense of deep disturbance and it takes some firmfootedness to be able to survive it. It is not as simple as advaita; in some sense, it cannot be construed at all, and that is another of its difficulties. For all the 100 million words, there is not a single one that a person can cling to, which is at the same time their saving grace and their beauty.

A friend asked me recently if the teachings would suffer the same fate as those of the Buddha and the Christ. Or, did they have within them some ‘safety mechanism’ that would always prevent their becoming doctrinal? I tend to think they have, though this is the more arduous, less obvious, path and it takes a wise man to allow it, much less do it! Such persons are rare, in my experience. During the time we were at Brockwood, and for several years after that, there was certainly a sense of ‘something in the air’ which could be broadly characterized as ‘living the teachings’. But it depended heavily on K’s living presence. Since he went, it has been superseded – in the West, at least – by something more ordinary.

I still feel, though, that it is somewhere ‘in the living,’ with all the uncertainty that implies. It isn’t, except marginally and necessarily, in preserving and disseminating ‘the word’. Where it will really take root I don’t know. But, if one looks at it again historically, Buddhism is not Indian, nor Christianity Jewish. Perhaps it needs a different ‘land’, a place that can and will receive the ‘new wine’ in a new, fresh, unthought-of way. I have a hunch about that, too, but it’s a very long shot – seemingly impossible, in fact. But then, so is living the teachings.

Steve Smith,
January 2004

The Simplicity of Awareness

What is there to compare to the beauty and simplicity that is found in K’s message?

Part of this beauty and simplicity is the revelation of thought’s limitation. At the same time is revealed the tenacious persistence of thought to take over the brain and dominate where it has no validity.

May I use as an example something from the wonderful, thought-provoking article by Moacir Amaral entitled K’s Teachings and Scientific Research, published in The Link, No. 23? It is true that science needs a space in which there is silence, humility, and awareness of its limitations in order to “catch up with K’s observations”. I would add to that, “K’s revelations”.

How is it possible to contrast the beauty and simplicity discovered only through awareness with that which has the tendency to destroy it through science’s “linear mode of the intellect”, which is limited to the physical or material world? “The twain shall never meet.” The Academy has its marvelous, very necessary and very appropriate place in our lovely and wonderful, but limited, physical world. Only in seeing this actual and factual limit and making the leap into the freedom that this understanding brings can a transformation in thinking take place. There are no limits in the freedom and the state of being that unfolds through understanding the message brought to us through K. Not that you or I understand; but the understanding itself. And by the way, should we think of it as “K’s message”? For it is clear that the message no more belongs to the man K than it does to you or me. The message is total freedom from all ownership, for in it is no K, no you and no me (as much as we may love K and see the wonder of it).

With all due respect to Gendlin and to Amaral, I ask the question: What is the need for a new term like “felt sense”? What more is needed than the beauty and simplicity contained in the word “awareness”? As we realize the human body is made up of the five senses, doesn’t “bodily awareness” necessarily include all of these working together in harmony for wholeness of health? Can there be much meaning in a “physical experience” without mental awareness? Isn’t it adequate to simply say, “When your awareness of a situation or a person or an experience changes, you change, and therefore so does your life”?

Sally R. Walker,
September 2004