A Trip in South India

 In early January 1985 I left Yercaud where I was living in South India to travel around 200 miles to Madras, now called Chennai, for a bit of rest and recreation. While there I was going to hear a talk by the philosopher/mystic (I'm not sure if he would accept that description but it suffices) J. Krishnamurti. He was now in his late 80s but still intellectually sharp. I had seen him a few years before as described in my book Meeting the Masters but thought I would like to see him once more before he died which, as it turned out, was not long afterwards. Krishnamurti was one of the very few guru type figures at the time, Indian or otherwise, who impressed me. What he taught was basically a form of Advaita but he spoke from the position of one who had encountered the non-dualistic state at first hand and was not, like many of his imitators, on the outside looking in. I feel he really had merged his mind with the Great Silence and his soul with the spiritual core of life. Not just experienced this as a fleeting state which would then remain an experience and a memory but actually become it or as much as anyone still in a physical body could. I think his position is limited because it misses out on the extra something brought by Christ which you might call the offer of the sanctification of the self rather than its transcendence, but if anyone could be called a second Buddha then I would say Krishnamurti comes closest, certainly in my lifetime. His only rival (unfortunate word - it's not a competition!) in the 20th century would be Ramana Maharishi.

I saw Krishnamurti over two nights. I was with some American friends, Tom and Doris Rostas, who had also ended up in Yercaud on their Indian travels and who had rented a bungalow a couple of miles from the one Michael Lord and I were living in. They had arrived a few months before this trip and we had become friendly in the way people do when those from similar cultural backgrounds meet up in a foreign country. But I liked them apart from that and they were big Krishnamurti enthusiasts. In fact, he was the inspiration behind their spiritual searching. Michael stayed at home. He admired Krishnamurti as a person and spiritual influence but had no interest in his teachings. In those days he was more fully a Christian than me and besides he found K's approach too intellectual. It wasn't intellectual at all really but it can seem like that to a more devotional religious sensibility which Michael had. I was more of a universalist and I still am in a sense though in the overall framework of Christ who stands above and beyond everything else. He is the sun to which all other spiritual approaches are but planets. Planets exist and are good but they are not the sun.

I seem to remember that on the night of the first talk it rained quite heavily which seems unlikely in January in Madras so I may be wrong in that. But anyway the talk had to take place in a large wedding hall rather than in the garden of the bungalow in the Adyar district that K's talks normally were held in when he came to South India, which he did most years in the so-called cold weather. The venue really didn't chime with the talk and at the end of it Krishnamurti, who obviously felt the whole atmosphere was wrong, said that the next night's talk would be cancelled if it couldn't take place outside in the garden. Luckily the weather was good and so the next evening a large crowd assembled in the bungalow's compound. The talks were all free, anyone could come and there was a roughly 50/50 mix of Indians and Westerners there, making several hundred people in all I would say. As Krishnamurti walked slowly out from the house to the slightly raised dais there really did seem to be an atmosphere of peace and serious spiritual enquiry which had been lacking the evening before in the tacky modern wedding venue. He was dressed in traditional Indian clothes with the ochre colouring of the sanyasi, and there was a beauty and dignity about him that reinforced his message of spiritual freedom. Sometimes when he spoke one sensed a slight impatience but when he sat still and said nothing he really did convey the feeling of a man attuned to a sacred inner presence. It was like being taken back to the days of ancient India when the rishis taught in their forest hermitages and the Upanishads were first composed.

This is a link to one of the talks in the garden he give in January 1985. I don't know if it's the one I attended but it may be.

Public talk no 3 Madras 1985

Here is a link to a Q&A session which I also went to a day or two beforehand.

Q&A session

I have to say I can't watch these all the way through now because I do feel a limited one-sidedness to them. This is by no means the whole story. However, Krishnamurti remains someone who cut through so much of the deception and self-delusion that surrounded 20th century spirituality. He was a genuine force for good and enlightenment using that word in its conventional sense.

When I left the second talk I went straight to the railway station to catch a train further south to Thanjavur. Michael, with whom I ran a small guest-house in Yercaud, had no interest in Indian temples so if I wanted to visit any of them I had to go alone. He did come to the Meenakshi temple in Madurai with me on one occasion but was more engaged by the temple elephant than he was by the temple itself with its elaborate rituals and exuberant architecture representing the whole of life in all its multitudinous expression.

A Gopuram or Temple Tower

A Magnificent Hall in the Meenakshi Temple, Madurai

I reached Thanjavur very early in the morning, probably around 5 AM. I said goodbye and thank you to some Indian fellow travellers who had kindly insisted on sharing their breakfast with me at 4.30, not a time I normally eat, and set off into the town, assuming it would be several hours before the temple I wanted to visit was open. As I walked into town I noticed in the still dark sky there stood the Southern Cross which I had never seen before. I didn't know much about astronomy in those days but this was obviously that constellation. For some reason it gave me quite a thrill. It was almost like being in a different world or breaking open a completely new dimension of this one. In my mind the four compass points have great spiritual significance and represent archetypal states of consciousness. Seeing the Southern Cross like this felt as though I was entering into real "southness".

When I arrived at the temple I found I could go right in. There were a few people about but not many so I could explore it without the great crowds that would turn up later. I was there as the sun rose at about 6 AM and shortly after that I was offered (lucky me) a second breakfast of idlis which are a kind of steamed rice and black lentil cake usually eaten with coconut chutney and accompanied by sweet milky South Indian coffee. I'm not normally one for spicy food in the morning but I am fond of idlis.

The Thanjavur temple is 1,000 years old and was called by its builder Rajarajeshvaram which roughly means the temple of the god of the king of kings. No false modesty here. It is dedicated to Siva and is now known as the Brihadisvara or temple of the great lord. It is a very elaborate and beautiful temple in the South Indian style. There are some splendid carvings and a Nandi bull representing Siva's mount.

Whenever I visited a Hindu temple I felt a strange ambivalence. There is definitely something powerful there, even a sense of the sacred, certainly of the mysterious. However, I do not get the atmosphere of holiness you might get in a cathedral. This is a pre-Christian approach to God and I would say that other elements have been mixed in over the centuries. The South Indian temples are architectural marvels that can stand beside almost anything human beings have created but I am not convinced of their actual spiritual value in this day and age. Perhaps if one is born a Hindu one can respond at a deeper level but to me they are a mixture of darkness and light that combine elements of the sacred and sometimes a bit of the demonic too. That makes them fascinating from the supernatural perspective but something to be cautious of from the spiritual.

Krishnamurti and the temples of the south are two extremes of Indian spirituality. One, austere, pure, wise, world rejecting in some ways, the other bursting with life in every way and on every level from the sublime to the occasionally gross though all enveloped in a sense of cosmic oneness and with an embrace of the whole of creation. Krishnamurti may have been brought up and educated in a Western milieu but in essence he was the product of thousands of years of Indian spiritual consciousness going right back to those Upanishadic sages. He represents the search for the Absolute in itself while the temples stand as testimony to the expression of the absolute in the phenomenal world.

A Question on Krishnamurti

I received this question about J Krishnamurti whom I regard as one of the pre-eminent spiritual figures of the last century even if I don't agree with him on everything. His philosophy seemingly had no room for God but I would argue that he had a specific role to play which consisted of purifying the spiritual field of much past error and false ways of thinking about both God and spirituality. Moreover, his idea of the sacred can be construed as a way of describing the essence of God that is free of any ideological trappings or religious sentiment.


Q. Could you comment on the following quote by Krishnamurti? ‘”When you call yourself an Indian or a Christian or a Muslim or a European you are being violent because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any religion, any political party or any country.”

It did make me consider that perhaps we should attempt to transcend labels completely in the way that he is advocating here. After all Jesus was not a Christian and I am finding that there are fewer labels that are any more divisive than the label 'Christian.' I often wonder if it has ever been that any two human beings on the planet have ever totally agreed on a shared definition of what that means?! Inevitably, there must be some very subjective elements to the definition of anything and leap of faith to cover the distance between the islands of two conscious human souls attempting to share a perception of a thing.

A. What Krishnamurti is saying here is that if you identify yourself too much with a particular background you are creating division between yourself and the rest of humanity, and division leads to conflict. However I think he is mistaking patriotism for nationalism. Also, context is important. He grew up at a time when there was great division in India between Hindu and Muslim, often ending in violence as at the partition after independence between India and Pakistan. This was also when the English tended to look down on other nationalities, and most people thought themselves superior to other groups. It's not like that now so his point is less true even if it is the case that, from the highest standpoint, oneness is the underlying reality.

His basic point is that you should identify yourself with the inner spiritual reality not any external thing, and that I think is true. This can be taken too far and become unbalanced but it is surely the case that to define oneself is to limit oneself. But still, that doesn't mean that all externals are equally true and equally false. Some are truer than others. And we do, after all, all have an outer form as well as an inner being. The former must be in the right place and not usurp the place of the latter, but that doesn't mean it should be denied or rejected.

Q.  Surely Krishnamurti is either right or wrong. If he's right then the correct view is to transcend a self-label of Christianity and focus on the cohesive value of focusing on values and behaviours but not labels. But if he is wrong we need to self-label as Christian and encourage others to do so also even though this will inevitably seriously ruffle the worlds feathers! A self-label of Christian is almost universally despised, feared or rejected in anger by modern people. Krishnamurti’s quote on the other hand is something I have showed to people and they have immediately seen a truth in it. Religion being necessarily perceived as divisive and like something that is very dangerous and to be handled with extreme care or ideally not at all. And to be fair to secular people the reality of human history has given us ample reason to now view religious ideologies with a great deal of suspicion. People are too frightened to see that the divisive aspect of religion is only one side of it and there is great truth there as well.

A. Actually it is possible for Krishnamurti to be both right and wrong and I think he is. It depends on how you look at things. Firstly, everybody who believes anything self-identifies as something. It's impossible not to. You could say that Krishnamurti was a Krishnamurti-ite, and, as a matter of fact, his followers do often rather act like that. His view reflects his rootless background. He was born a Hindu but taken up by the Theosophists as a youth and then raised in their system which he reacted to by rejecting wholesale. Theosophy had certainly taken on a lot of nonsense at the time he rejected it even if its fundamentals remain interesting. He then travelled all over the world but had no fixed home so you can see that his philosophy is partly reflected in his life. This doesn't make it wrong, and you could say the life was the result of the philosophy, but you could also see an influence the other way. Anyway, it can  sometimes be a little one-sided I think. A necessary corrective to the other point of view that says you have to be a Hindu, Christian or whatever but it is assuming that the Hindu, Christian or whatever is attached to his beliefs and cannot see that they are only tools enabling you to get a grasp on reality. That is very definitely the case for many people but it need not be the case. For instance, I do not identify as a Christian in the conventional sense but I think the teachings of Christ are the highest teachings and contain more of truth than any other. I try to follow them. But I cannot identify with the external body of Christianity as it is today. Maybe I could have done so in the Middle Ages but not now.

It's a question of changing perspective and each side needs the other to be whole. Each is incomplete without the other. We need each approach as a corrective to the extreme of the other which is why I say it is possible for K to be both right and wrong. It all depends on how you hold your view. If you are a Christian which is more important, your Christianity as a religion or your church or your love of God? Do you see the difference? It's a matter of inner and outer. Are you attached to the outer as a form or do you see it as an opening to the inner which is always the main thing.  That said, some outer approaches certainly do better reflect the reality of the inner, and are more able to guide one and attune one to it.  A rose is a truer reflection of beauty than a dandelion even though both are beautiful flowers.

So I would say Krishnamurti is right but can be taken to extremes and then he becomes wrong. Always spirituality is concerned with inner attitude  and the state of the heart rather than mental conceptualising. A doctrinaire Christian who nevertheless genuinely loves God is much closer to him than a philosopher who sees that identifying with a system keeps you bound but has no real love or humility in his heart.

I see Krishnamurti as someone who performed a valuable service in the 20th century when we had gone too far to one side of the matter. But now when we have lost nearly all sense of religion there is a risk of going too far to the other side so he is not so useful in this sense even if ultimately he is right. The Masters I spoke to were not, as far as I could see, Christians or Buddhists but then they knew truth directly. They did not need any help to see it. On this Earth the vast majority of us do need help and if it is not one thing it will be another. A universalist form of Christianity seems pretty good to me. I mean by this an approach that sees the uniqueness of Christ but can also accept that other religions are valid approaches to God too if their inner essence is adhered to rather than their outer form.

Religion is only divisive if people make it so. At the same time, Christ did say he came to sort out the sheep from the goats and you have to divide, or be able to discriminate, between truth and falsehood. Not everything is equally true or equally good, and sometimes you have to call a spade a spade and condemn what is wrong or misguided or downright bad. One of the great recent successes of the devil is to persuade people that judgment is wrong in the name of a spurious unity or fairness. Spirituality requires the most rigid discrimination if it is to accord to what is real.

The Spiritualisation of Matter

I've written the last few posts as a corrective to the tendency of some non-dualists to dismiss the relative world and everything in it, up to and including the personal God or Creator, as unreal or illusion because there's no doubt that Western followers of this teaching often misunderstand it. Part of that is actually down to the teaching itself which, by its emphasis on the absolute, can encourage people to think they are nearer the goal than they really are, causing them to believe they can jump stages or that stages don't even exist. In fact, as I have said before, many non-dualists are a bit like materialists in that they deny part of reality. In the case of the materialist what is denied is the absolute. In the case of the non-dualist what is denied is the relative or at least its authentic nature. The wise spiritual aspirant seeks to integrate relative and absolute or spirit and matter, and so does not just deny self but uses it to go through it which he does by various means including meditation and prayer, and not excluding service, sacrifice and surrender. If all goes well this leads eventually to identification with the Universal and sanctification of the individual. The theoretical non-dualist, on the other hand, bound to his ideas of non-duality, just dismisses the individual self as illusion, rejecting it as something non-existent. But, of course, he can't really do this because the self is there and so he ends up in a mind created non-dualistic thought form. He is unlikely to realise this as his mental attitude has left him with no way out because of his denial of all but the non-dual absolute, and so it will require the hard knocks of life, either this or a future one, to bring him to his senses. He may believe himself to be enlightened or to have gone beyond ignorance or however he wants to phrase it, and he may acquire followers who believe that of him too which will inevitably bolster him in his conviction, but what starts in the head stays in the head. That is to say, the very self that is being denied. True spiritual knowledge comes from the heart and will only start to blossom when the heart centre is awakened which it can only be through the means I have given above.

The composer and occultist Cyril Scott wrote a book, quite well known at one time, called The Initiate in the Dark Cycle. This formed part of a trilogy which purported to tell the story of a real Master who lived and worked more or less openly in the Western world in the 1920s and ‘30s. I think Scott was being a bit mischievous and made the whole thing up in order to get a point across, but I don’t think he made it up from nothing. I read these books as works presented as fact but which were actually fiction albeit based on certain facts because I think Scott really did have some contact with Masters even if the one who was the hero of his books was his own invention. Be that as it may, much of this third book in the series deals with reactions to Krishnamurti’s, at the time, dramatic rejection of his Theosophical upbringing, and to discussion of what he was teaching in its place. This is identified as advaita, and the reason I mention the book here is because there are some interesting remarks made by the Masters in this book about advaita. They describe it as one of the most easily misunderstood spiritual paths, not suitable for the Western world in the present cycle, partly because of the need for a fully realised guru, and say that Krishnamurti’s version is likely to lead his followers nowhere except hypocrisy and self-delusion. Krishnamurti’s personal level of attainment is not disputed but his teaching methods are. I don’t entirely go along with this because I think Krishnamurti was a much needed spiritual purifier, but it may be that that is how the Masters eventually used him once they saw the direction he had taken. What I do find instructive is how these remarks can be applied even more to modern non-dualistic teachings which do not come from teachers of Krishnamurti’s level of attainment and so don’t even have the force of his spiritual realisation to back them up. For it is a fact that the same words will vary in their spiritual impact depending on the level of consciousness they are coming from. Words spoken by a genuine enlightened soul will have much greater inner resonance and transformative power than those same words spoken by an ordinary teacher. Incidentally, this is partly why spiritual teachers who have not attained enlightenment but who speak as though they have are guilty of a form of blasphemy. They are defiling holiness with ego.

Let me repeat here that the purpose of this series of articles is not to deny the basic principle of non-duality, but to point to some of the potential flaws in an exclusively non-dualistic approach to the spiritual path. These arise chiefly from excessive focus on one of the two poles of manifested reality to the neglect of the other, which is why I said in the book of which this blog is an extension that there was a secret beyond non-duality and that it was duality. What I meant by this slightly facetious remark is that consciousness alone is not the goal, which is to say you will not reach the goal by focusing on pure consciousness alone. As most non-dualists take their inspiration from advaita let me express this in terms of Indian philosophy. Realisation does not just come from the knowledge of Siva. It comes from the union in the disciple of Siva and Sakti where Siva is pure awareness and Sakti is the divine energy hidden in form and working through it. So it is not being alone that you should aspire to but the union of being and becoming, spirit and matter, life and form, absolute and relative, universal and individual. And this is done by accepting not rejecting, by accepting the totality of your being and raising it up into the light. This is the spiritualisation of matter and is the real task required of the disciple. You do not make base metal into gold by throwing away the base metal but by purifying and refining it to the point at which real transmutation can take place. Likewise you do not awaken spiritually by denying your soul but by perfecting it, purifying it and then, only when all that has been achieved, offering it up in sacrifice.

Duality is a fundamental principle of the universe and exists for a reason. Everything comes from the interplay between the two poles which are two and, at the same time, one. We need to transcend our current identification with form, that is true. We need to see duality as the expression of the One Reality, that is also true. But we do this through fully integrating the two poles of existence not by denying the creative potency of one of them. Non-dualists are not wrong to see consciousness (the Father, Siva) as the root of existence but the Father can only be known by the Son who is born from the union of Father and Mother in the secret place of the heart.

Krishnamurti

This question fits in well with the last couple of posts so I include it here.

Q. You praise Krishnamurti in your book but a lot of people think that he somehow went wrong and that his teachings might come from a high state of consciousness but are of little practical use and could actually have a negative impact in that they just set the bar too high. What do you say?

A. I understand what you say and I don’t think it advisable to read only Krishnamurti and, as a consequence, reject everything else. I think you need a broader overview to begin with to get the best out of him. But, if you have a proper grounding in traditional spiritual teachings, he can be very illuminating in that he clears away all superfluity and sweeps aside the later accretions of those who echo the great Masters without having scaled their heights. The diamond-sharp discrimination he brings to bear on spiritual matters is very refreshing. However he can also seem to be asking us to leap over a high wall while forbidding the use of a ladder or even the attempt to climb. The reality is that to get from A to Z you must pass through the intervening letters of the alphabet. The spiritual path has stages which can't be ignored. From the starting position of a normal person it is impossible to reach enlightenment in a single leap. The unripe ego cannot transcend itself without purifying itself in the fires of spiritual discipline and uplifting itself through prayer and meditation.

But, despite Krishnamurti’s possible shortcomings as a teacher, I do think he has manifested the truth in its purity more than anyone else in the latter half of the 20th century. Maybe he had a peculiar mission and was meant to act as a new broom. He has many modern imitators but none of them has his depth of insight or clarity of vision or, for that matter, his purity of soul.

What distinguishes Krishnamurti from most of those who have followed on from him is his love of God. That may seem a strange thing to say given his stance but, although he may not have spoken of it in that way, it is revealed in his sense of the sacred and his uncompromising desire to protect the truth from corruptions inflicted on it by those who know it only from the outside looking in.

I have no doubt that Krishnamurti was sent by the Masters and served them faithfully, and one of the ways he did so was to purify the spiritual atmosphere of his day which had become heavily clouded with astral glamours and psychic illusions. By rejecting the Masters as they were presented he paved the way for a truer understanding of what they actually are. They were behind him and inspiring him, but as spiritual essences rather than the magical super-personalities they had been turned into by some of those who came before him.