Jiddu Krishnamurti Of all the gurus from India made famous the world over, none was as startlingly different as Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was the guru who said that all gurus are worthless, the preacher of the doctrine that all doctrines are traps of the mind. Indian philosophizing is very vast and very tolerant in its many opinions but this was a dazzlingly incomprehensible note indeed. What was even stranger was that he had walked away from his supposed spiritual destiny to tread on completely unique paths. Krishnamurti restored the status of man as an independent being in spiritual matters, contrary to the trend in the world for over two thousand years. The impact of this vast idea is still being felt and indeed may not be worked out even more than negligibly at present. Spiritual matters however had been given a new template in which to work out the karmic drama.

His life-story is so improbable that the worst romance novelist would not have attempted it. Jiddu K was born to Telugu Brahmin parents in 1895. He had a beloved younger brother called Nitya who was to be an early eyewitness to his turbulent life. At the age of 14 Jiddu K was succumbing to the inexorable progress of tuberculosis when he was found walking on the Madras beach by the Theosophical Society's bad boy, C.W. Leadbeater. This man was almost a caricature of the Evil Mage in his flamboyant posturing; being in equal parts a person of genuine esoteric powers, devilish charm, unusual insights into spirituality and the Kundalini - and a charlatan. Madame Blavatsky, founder of the society disliked him - she was too similar in personality - but accepted him into the fold because he was a Church of England clergyman and the propaganda value of such a conversion was too great to pass up. In India, he attached himself to the great Annie Besant and rapidly became the power behind the Theosophical throne that Blavatsky had bequeathed to Besant. He managed to single-handedly tear the Society apart because he had this fondness for young boys that he blandly explained away as a result of having been a Classical Greek in a previous life. When he discovered Jiddu, Leadbeater was attempting to retrieve himself and the Society from this calamitous setback by finding the next Messiah! This scrawny consumptive boy was it! The delicate question whether Leadbeater had another interest too in the boy has always been avoided by biographers.

Jiddu's aura was unusually clean and powerful, a fact that was commented upon for the rest of this life, but it took Leadbeater to notice it. Only Annie Besant's stature and her endorsement of the boy enabled the Society to swallow this unlikely candidate for World Savior. She adopted the young boy and his brother, certainly saving their lives, and put them thru an educational mill that harrowed their sensibilities. Since he was a 'pure soul' he was never left alone for a single moment from the time he had been picked up, evil would choose to attack and taint him in such moments. One can only guess at the torment of such affectionate concern. Besant was Victorian enough to confuse unpleasant experiences with 'character building' and English enough not to care that she was trampling over every cultural sensitivity the boy may have possessed. Any astute psychologist could have foreseen a rebellion but potential messiahs are supposed to be good boys working for the greater glory of the society. In 1911, Jiddu had been sent to be educated in England so that he could present a more polished, cosmopolitan exterior to the circles in which he was expected to move as the Savior. The shy lad was also harrowed by being always propped up on stage besides a Besant who was truly alive only when on a public platform. His reputation as the future Messiah had gone about and people openly gesticulated at him and burst into laughter when they saw him on the street. And there was the constant indoctrination of Theosophy.

It was not all bad. These were years of great spiritual growth. On the exact nature of these experiences, his biographers are of diverse opinions. There is a new school coming up which insists on rather plausible evidence that the young lad had been initiated by the great archetypal energies known as the Masters. Specifically he was being prepared for the infusion of the energies of the future Buddha the Maitreya. It does not help that contemporary witness accounts of these experiences were written in the breathless, miracle-seeking accents of the spiritually over-excitable. It seems safe to infer that his Kundalini energy was activated and that it almost killed him. For a man who lived such a long productive life, Jiddu K was always on the verge of death and in constant superhuman levels of pain. The Kundalini had pierced its way through many charkas and the head for one was always in agony. Jiddu used to refer to "the process" and when it was active his spine used to be on fire and many times he was rendered immobile with the pain. The generally accepted theory is that his body was being prepared for the descent of the divine. His personality became an unusually attractive one; there was a luminous calm about him that photographers loved. He used to dress like a devotee of Saville Row, and the richness of his inner life ensured that the only reading he ever did in later life were newspapers and detective stories!

In later years Jiddu K would make a great case that he never had read any scriptures and all his words came out of personal experience. While it is true that he used to speak about things that were never found in the conventional literature of spiritual experiences, it is hugely improbable that the Theosophists did not fill him up to the brim with their eclectic and bewildering doctrines. After all he was to take over the Order of the Star, an elite group within the society, which would then propagate the new Messiah's work and bring about the salvation of the world. And his remarks about Mahatmas and Teachers and Avatars indicated he had at least some idea of what Theosophy expected of him. In 1925 he was deemed ready to be officially proclaimed as the savior of the world - by which time he had had enough. He used the Theosophical platform to denounce all notions of Teachers and saviors and Mahatmas and esoteric doctrines and societies for the propagation of the propagation thereof. In 1929 he formally dissolved the Order of the Star, set up for the express purpose of facilitating the messiah's work. As a grim Leadbeater wrote to a stunned Besant, "The Coming has gone wrong."

It is worth noting that what transpired in 1929 with Jiddu was the mirror opposite of what had happened with Besant in 1891. For she had also equally shocked and devastated her faithful - the atheists, the Freethinkers, the National Secular Society, the socialists by proclaiming her conversion to Theosophy! Fabian Colleague G.B. Shaw described this sudden flowering of faith as a calamity - "as if some one had blown up Niagara or an earthquake had swallowed a cathedral." And now thirty-five years down the line another hilarious, incomprehensible and newsworthy apostasy had taken place, only this time she was being rejected instead of rejecting as she had always done. Being a great believer in karmic payback Besant must have seen this defection by Jiddu as some sort of closing of the circle. Jiddu after all was only echoing Shaw's bullying teasing of her, "Why do you need to go to Tibet for a Mahatma? Here and now is your Mahatma. I am your Mahatma." - except that Jiddu would have said there is no need for any Mahatmas at all.

This note of spiritual anarchy resonated and reverberated with many thousands of people and indeed may be regarded as a prescient forecasting of the New Age, where people ardently desired spiritual experiences without having it tied to any doctrine, institution or creed. Jiddu had not rejected the individual spiritual life - only any notions to straitjacket it and render it under the control of another, even a Mahatma. Till he died in 1986, this man who had rejected the role his Society sought to impose upon him became one of the planet's greatest iterant preachers. His books are actually transcripts of his lectures; Jiddu was honest in stating that if he had tried to write down what he said it would not have happened. It seems he was empty before his talks and then something would flow through him, some power of eloquence and spiritual insight that captivated his listeners - when it did not bewilder him. Jiddu avoided the guru trap relentlessly but people, being only human after all, did everything they could to cast him into the role - to the extent of following him from city to city to hear him talk.

His doctrine or teaching as such does not exist, for each talk was spontaneous. It is analogous to a Taoist or Zen approach to life, insisting on direct perception of reality with constant awareness and not allowing words and thoughts to clutter up the perception of the truth. Jiddu's ideas also insisted on a serious approach to spiritual matters, a dropping away of frivolity that does not sit too well with our sensate approach to all things. He also indicated that spiritual evolution is never finished but a matter of constant maturation, of regeneration, even mutation perhaps. And there is no rational way to approach any of this, no system to follow, no guru to obey, no experiences to desire or strive for. So Jiddu K became an influential figure whose thought seeped into many systems and impacted many thinkers but it resisted codifying and transformation into a doctrine of its own.

Jiddu Krishnamurti died in 1986.

His Teaching
The core of his teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said, "Truth is a pathless land." Man cannot come to it, he insisted, through any dogma, practice, or technique. The symbols, ideas, and beliefs that Man has constructed as a fence of security are concepts only, the causes of problems which create a false sense of individuality, dividing one person from another. The uniqueness of a human does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all. Thought is time, and time is the psychological enemy of man, Our actions are based o n knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will seed the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation, which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind. Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

- Rohit Arya

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