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Born in Madanapalle on 11 May, 1895, he was over ninety,
yet as he continued to talk, with the same vigorous perspicacity,
there had been a hope he might remain with us for some time
yet, and so the news of his passing, on 17 February, 1986,
at Ojai, was felt as a shock.
For an obituary in such a journal as this, it is not necessary
to go over the chronicle of his external life, which is
well known to readers, and I would like to take the occasion
to voice some thoughts relative to that aspect of his story
that most concerns Theosophists. When he was only fourteen,
first Leadbeater and then Mrs. Besant said he was to become
the World Teacher, overshadowed by Maitreya, that is, the
Buddha to be. To begin with, he seemed to go along with
their way of thinking, but as he matured, he began to show
scepticism concerning the build up of which he was the centrepiece.
Those organising it were, in his eyes, making themselves
ridiculous by public proclamation of the initiations everyone
had passed and self-appointment as his Apostles. He had
to tell them he did not want Apostles and did not accept
them. That hurt. Yet it should have been clear, long before
that point was reached, that their pompous trumpetings concerning
the Coming were an embarrassment to him. When he dissolved
the Order of the Star which they had formed for him, it
caused dismay. Could Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater, when they
thought they recognised in him the World Teacher, have been
mistaken?
Not necessarily. There is another view possible, which
was first put to me in Paris, in a French group of students
of The Secret Doctrine, Mahatma Letters and Krishnamurti
writings, and subsequently by the late Professor Jones,
Principle of' the Phonetics Department of University College,
London and friend of Swami Oomananda and Bill, the "Boy"
in The Boy [140] *and the Brothers, that Leadbeater and
Mrs. Besant were right, in the first moment in which they
recognised him as who he was, and wrong in practically everything
they did in consequence. I still remember the verve with
which, during one of our talks in his study, Professor Jones
expostulated, they (Leadbeater and Besant) spent years of
their lives telling everybody, "He is going to give
us all a new teaching," and as soon as he began to
give a teaching that was new, exclaimed in horror, "This
is not what we taught him to teach."
The fact is, he has given a teaching; whether inspired
by Maitreya Buddha or merely out of his own insight matters
little. The teaching in there, and it is new. What he has
given us is a technique for dealing with our faults, or
rather, the psychological knots which prevent us from living
with ourselves and with other people. He has pointed out
that to say, "I am this, I should be that", for
instance, "I am selfish, I should be unselfish",
sets up within one a duality, such that, trying to be animated
only by motives that are unselfish, one in a sense pretends
to oneself that one is not what one is, lives a lie, so
that any crisis that shows one the vice has not been eradicated
throws one back, and there is a feeling of failure. His
dictum, "See the fact, don't act on the fact; the seeing
is the action, the whole action", is new. Those who
have read his answers to questioners will have noticed he
could be sharp with the pompous, but was extraordinarily
nice with the woman who said (I risk quoting this from memory
since I would have to go through all of his books again
to find it), "I am petty. All my concerns are petty.
What should I do about it?" His advice was, "Don't
do too much about it. In the seeing of the pettiness is
that which is not petty." She would do well merely
to continue to note the forms the pettiness took, as they
cropped up. (Had she tried to become profound, she would
have become artificial.) Previous disciplines have always
prescribed action upon the fact (Morya and Koot Hoomi can
be exempted because they do not advise psycho-[141]-logically);
hence those "spiritual" problems that too often
lengthen the path instead of shortening it, causing neuroses
and falls. Krishnamurti has shown us how to deal with what
is wrong without getting the back-kick. His advice, to stop
short with the seeing (which takes some discipline to do,
so conditioned is one to do otherwise) gives instant liquidation
of the problem. That is liberation.
Source
Originally published in Theosophical History 1/6
(April 1986): 140-142. Reproduced with the permission of
the author.
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