Krishnamurti: A Problem

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Oh Krishnaji! You led us all to believe in 1926 that we were seeking hapiness, in 1927 liberation, in 1928 truth, and in 1929 uniqueness; in 1930 you shattered our beliefs in reincarnation, masters, saviours, and now you speak of the removal of the "I," of the ego, of a state without birth and death, of life which seems to have a meaning to you, but not to us. And yet you speak of attainment, of a realization, of a culmination. Has your realization, then, a progressive character--progressive in the sense that you have much to say and your message is now passing through a state of incompleteness to completeness?

--"Star Bulletin," September, 1931.

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KRISHNAMURTI: A PROBLEM

VIOLA had gone to Krishnamurti's lecture and we were a male quartet: Toni Bland, Lyall Herbert, Arkwright and myself. We had lingered over the dinner-table, and having adjourned to the drawing-room, had induced Lyall to play us a little Scriabine. He had just got up from the piano when Viola returned.

We were of course anxious to know what she had thought of the lecture, and I jestingly inquired if she'd been converted and become a devotee.

She laughed. " No; I'm only an interested spectator. The female devotees seem to be either those who yearn to be a mother to Him, or, enamoured of his eyebrows and exquisite appearance, who yearn to be something quite different... Then there's the vast host of Indeterminates, trying, in spite

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of inadequate mental equipment, to grapple with the negativeness of his teaching."

"Do you really find it so negative?" Lyall asked.

"Well, for me, he's simply the Apostle of Negation," she replied, "just as Chris was the Apostle of Joy.... Besides, he's such a contradiction: tells people they must think for themselves--splendid, that, up to a point--and then bars all the avenues of individual thought. We're told we can't reach the goal through worship or art or beauty or help from the Masters or ceremonies: why on earth not! Krishnamurti may not need any of these things himself, but what about others! Surely if they choose to seek God through beauty or art or whatever it may be ...? Why, all the old religions and philosophies (which he doesn't seem to have studied, by the way, or if he has, he's chucked them into the dust-bin with the rest)... every teacher from time immemorial has implied that by whatever path Man tries to reach God, he gets to Him! But Krishnamurti not only destroys the path --or paths--but the goal itself. To begin with, you're not to use the word 'God' ...

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Krishnamurti's Ultimate Reality is just a lazy abstraction, sometimes called 'Life,' sometimes 'Truth,' but never conveying any Sense of wonder or delight."

"Ah, you dear ladies," said Arkwright, smiling, "you never were dead struck on abstractions--it's part of your psychology. What you want is a nice personal fatherly God on a nice fat gold cloud, who'll hand out gallons of rich juicy comfort whenever you shout for it."

"That's not what I want at all!" she laughed. "But you must admit that whether you're a Dualist and want a God outside and beyond yourself to reach out to and worship, or you're a Monist and want to realize yourself as the One Self, reason, let alone the heart, demands a goal that's attractive, to say the least! You may think it's cowardly and feeble not to want to stand on a bleak mountain-top, stripped of everything, in an icy gale, while you contemplate a void--but I ask is it worth while? If this 'Completeness' of Krishnamurti's is meant to be synonymous with happiness, what a pallid, puny thing it seems beside the joy that Chris spoke of--and lived... She didn't

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anthropomorphize God, she put the idea of Him beyond the farthest reach of thought, but only to show that all beauty and magic and mystery were just glimpses or reflections of a Reality too marvelous to be contemplated unveiled ... The Master who spoke through her revealed Him as the transcendent Loveliness and Lovableness for which everybody yearns, whether he's conscious of it or not, each in his own terms--and Who responds to each in the terms of his own need. He said: Human intellect can no more understand the Absolute, than the insect under the floor can understand a Master, but this you may know, that He is all Love ... and that Love is the reason for the universe, the reason for your very existence!"

" But Krishnamurti doesn't deny love--at one time he was always talking about it," I objected.

"Ah, at one time, perhaps--but not so much now; and even when he does, the love he speaks of strikes one as so impersonal and vague as to be almost afraid of itself. What a different sort of feeling one had when Master Koot Hoomi said: The love that I feel for each one of you, that is God.... and again:

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Love and Truth are the keynotes of the universe --and Love is Truth and Truth is Love ... that's not much like Krishnamurti's: Truth can bring no comfort.... How can you reconcile the two points of view!"

"Do you particularly want to!" asked Lyall.

"I don't, personally, Fifty Krishnamurtis couldn't biff the idea of the Masters that we got from Chris, and before that from J. M. H. ... I'm thinking of the poor wretches who were trained on similar lines, perhaps, but may not have quite our bulldog tenacity for holding on. They've been taught, too, that the Masters are their Elder Bothers, lovingly trying to guide them into 'union with the Infinite at ever higher and higher levels ...' as old Leadbeater says somewhere. And then Krishnamurti comes along and tells them that Masters are only crutches; so they chuck away their crutches, totter a few steps, perhaps, in search of his 'Liberation,' and fall to the ground. Does he offer to give them wings instead of crutches, or even to show them how to grow wings for themselves! Not he! He isn't enough of a psychologist to tell them where to begin. He'd prescribe

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the same recipe all round: What I have done you can do. ... no account taken of individual limitations of Karma or grades of evolution or anything. Chris--she knew that no two people can he handled the same way; that was the secret of her success with individuals; she never handed out castor oil indiscriminately to the whole class." We had to laugh, but Viola, pacing up and down the room in her boyish fashion, was full of the indignant sympathy which the lecture seemed to have aroused in her.

"It's all very well to laugh. ... I daresay it is good to force people to stand on their own feet and do their own thinking," she pursued. "But how many of those who've listened for so long to the voice of Authority booming at them from the T.S.(1) are capable either of individualistic thought, or have got the discrimination to sift the grain from the chaff in Krishnamurti's teaching! You should have seen the expressions on some of their faces at the lecture, as they tried so hard and so conscientiously to follow the World Teacher to his austere heights of glory, and found--at any rate if they were honest with

1 T.S. stands for Theosophical Society.

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themselves--that there wasn't any glory there for them--only emptiness! You could see from the baffled look in their eyes the hell they're going through--especially those women. He's taken everything from them-reincarnation, survival, meetings with their loved ones after death, the Masters' help and compassion--why, the whole spiritual structure of their lives--and given them nothing in return but a nebulous state of consciousness that doesn't make the slightest appeal to the heart or the imagination."

"I can't entirely agree---" I began, but she ignored me, and continued to champion those whom she evidently considered were the greatest sufferers.

"They're floundering hopelessly in the void, poor things! Too docile and obedient to deny Krishnamurti completely and stand for the old ideals; quite unable to grasp what he's driving at and get any real satisfaction from it; and lacking the initiative to strike out on lines of their own.... They're wondering if what they were taught before was only a lovely fiction: that's the spectre they have to face in their sleepless nights, and a pretty ghastly one it is, too. Nothing

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more devastating than to tell a person that what he believes isn't true. Even a man who only believes in himself goes to bits when that belief's shaken…. If the early teaching was a fiction, what are they to do now! Krishnamurti has destroyed all their old landmarks; if they venture to use or to think in any of the old terms, they get rapped over the knuckles. They cry to him in the hope that he's still got something up his sleeve--something still unexpressed in his teaching that'll allow them to reconcile the old with the new--and they're frustrated at every turn: what's to become of them?"

"Someone else will probably turn up," suggested Bland, "who'll try and restore their belief in the Masters."

"It may be too late: perhaps they won't be able to respond. They'll be too battered, some of them too old. You can't shatter the beliefs of years without damaging the very power of belief in itself--I feel pretty certain of that. Sometimes I wonder if even the Masters Themselves don't feel a little sad when they see the gulf Krishnamurti has put between Them and those whose footsteps They were once able to guide. ... And now," she

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added with a sudden change of mood, "having talked your heads off, I'm for sandwich!" She waved to us ironically and went out.

" I guess friend Krishnamurti's tickled her up some," said our American, sympathetic though a trifle amused.

"So it would seem," I assented.

"Well, when you've just lost your Guru and your dearest friend," Herbert protested, "it's not exactly the moment to go and hear Krishnamurti belittling both Masters and personal survival."

"Yes, but what none of you realize," Toni said gravely, "is that although Viola may have lost her clairvoyant facilities, she's very mediumistic. Mentally sensitive to surrounding conditions, she is impelled to express the collective thoughts and feelings of those unfortunate women who cannot or dare not express them for themselves."

"Good for you!" Arkwright concurred.

"Personally, I've always taken a particular interest in Krishnamurti's development," I remarked. "That he should have started as a Dualist and then become a Vedantic Monist or Advaitist, is most intriguing. Pity he's

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watered down his Advaitism, though, instead of going the whole hog. Merely to tell us that Truth is happiness, or even eternal happiness, isn't enough. The real Advaitist says that Truth is the Absolute-Existence-Knowledge Bliss---"

" Ah, if he'd said that," Toni broke in, "the whole impression might have been very different. But to say, for instance, Truth can bring no comfort without at once qualifying the statement, is simply to upset people and leave them dissatisfied. He who knows himself to be that Absolute Bliss doesn't need consolation, and that's the whole point!"

"I wonder," mused Lyall, "If he realizes it is Advaita he's teaching!"

"Search Me!" from Arkwright.

"He seems so afraid," Lyall elaborated, "of people finding any point of contact between his philosophy and their own beliefs, that I'm a bit doubtful."

"Whether he realizes it or not, the fact remains," I said. "as I can easily prove to you." I took up the little pile of Star Bulletins I had collected, and chanced to alight on some of the very sentiments which

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had roused my wife's indignation. "Listen to this:

"Spiritual attainment does not lie in the following of another, whether leader or teacher or prophet ... That following of another is a weakness ... A mediator is but a crutch ... Truth does not lie in distinctions, in societies, in orders, in churches....

* * * * *

" As I am free of traditions and beliefs, I would set other people free from those beliefs, dogmas, creeds and religions which condition life."

I went to my bookshelf and got down Vivekananda's lectures on Vedanta, and read out:

"Nothing makes us so moral as Monism ... When we have nobody to grope towards, nobody to lay all our blame upon, when we have neither a devil nor a personal God to lay all our evils upon--then we shall rise to our highest and best. ... Pilgrimages and books and the Vedas and ceremonials can never bind me... I am the Blissful One."

I turned again to the yellow magazines, and read further passages:

" ... The 'I' is the limitation of separateness ... by continual concentrated effort, every moment of the day, you must remove this wall of limitation, and thus establish yourself in true freedom of consciousness. That is immortality

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…That is to be beyond time and space, beyond birth and death ...."

I reverted once more to Vivekananda:

"Hear day and night that you are that soul (or One Self), Repeat it till it enters into your very veins. ... let the whole body be full of that one idea--'I am the birthless, deathless, blissful, ever glorious Soul.' "

After that we compared numerous other passages. For instance : I maintain that man is fundamentally free (Krishnamurti). We are free-this idea of bondage is hut an illusion (Vivekananda). Happiness lies in the Extreme of detachment (Krishnamurti). Be not attached (Vivekananda). And so on and so forth.

" Well, I guess that's pretty conclusive." said Arkwright at length.

" The trouble is," Lyall contributed, "that Krishnamurti hasn't the knack of really getting his ideas across. He may know what he means himself, but doesn't convey it to others, I'm afraid only people who've been properly taught by a Guru beforehand can really grasp what he's talking about."

"Precisely," said Arkwright. "The rest of them comprehend the knocking-down process right enough, but when it comes to what

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he's handing them out in place of it, it's a very different proposition. We know what he's after because we've studied Advaita with J. M. H."

" Who also said--don't forget," I insisted, "that it was not a suitable philosophy to be broadcast as the only means to Liberation."