Friday, January 5, 2007

Well well.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was a very vain man. A cheater. A hypocrite. Pretentious and dominant. Morally disputable. Intolerant. With a huge ego.
As a young boy in India, from a very poor family, he was discovered and launched as the new Messiah by a notorious paedophile called Charles Webster Leadbeater. Pampered suddenly with best education available Krishnamurti was catapulted into a world of extremes. No wonder he became unbalanced and distorted. He created a huge following worldwide and even today many people are inspired by his lectures. However, those people are usually not aware of who Krishnamurti really was. If a self proclaimed enlightened person teaches high morals to his many disciples while at the same time sanctioning the abortion of his mistress who is the wife of his best friend because a child with her would damage his reputation with his followers, we may wonder how white the sugar is.
Wonder about the sincerity of the lectures he gave insisting on love and compassion while himself dumping opportunistically his best friends for material reasons.
But then at the same time we wonder if the importance and the value of his lectures have anything to do with the fact that he secretly loved to live in extreme luxury.
Does a guru or a prophet need to live up to his own preaching?
Maybe after time has passed, the human sides of a prophet or a guru will be forgotten and only what is essential remains and is remembered.
What do we know of the private life of Buddha? It is forgotten.
What do we know about the private life of Jesus? Not much and what we know is romanticised many years after his death. In the case of Jesus, even today, many people get upset and in denial when they learn an unsettling aspect of Jesus’’ private life: his involvement with Maria Magdalena.
This is why people like Buddha and Jesus have been growing into holy icons. Their human side has been eliminated.
Krishnamurti passed away only 20 years ago and too much is still known about his awful private life for him to become a holy person yet.
Nevertheless, he has been presenting many fabulous perspectives on life and it is worthwhile to read his lectures.
One of the concepts he has introduced is the “choiceless awareness”.
When living a spiritual life, practising meditation, living consciously, as pure as possible, the level of awareness goes up.
Much more of the reality around the person appears in the consciousness and is being realized. This is confusing because we have the tendency to always have an opinion about what we have become aware of. Even often a judgement or a condemnation. Now when the consciousness has much more to digest because the level of awareness has been going up, it will become rather busy in the mind. Aware of so many things and all needing an opinion and a standpoint. If we nevertheless manage to do this, we become like the judge of reality. Much will be condemned and eliminated or abandoned and a little will get a favourable judgement and can stay.
This will make the person sit on a high pillar above human reality and up there it is cold and lonely.
Krishnamurti advocates to become more conscious through meditation and a pure way of living but to be choiceless. With this he means not to have a specific opinion on what one has become aware of.
Other wise men, like Swami Chinmayananda, call this “unattached awareness”. One becomes aware of something and limits it simply to only this awareness. The awareness is not followed by developing an opinion.
This sounds simple but it is very difficult to do.
Take for instance Alfredo Gonzales, the brother of our friend Gumaro Gonzales. Alfredo lives in the second part of the rancho at Punta Boca del Salado but his heart is not really into it. His heart is with Catarina who lives in town and with her he spends much of his time. He has more or less abandoned his rancho and the animals notice this. Like the two dogs: often they are without food and even water for days. There is a water well near Alfredo’s house with plenty of potable water but he has lacked to protect this well against flooding during rains and it is not covered to avoid dirt and objects to fall into it. When there was this horrendous hurricane last September, his well got filled with water and mud of the riverbed in which the rancho is located. The well became a sandpit. Now the tremendous job has to be executed to dig out the sand from the well. This is being done by hand. Alfredo puts on some old clothes and a sombrero, climbs down into the well with a shovel while his brother in law Leonardo, assisted by his sons and friends, lowers a bucket. Alfredo fills the bucket with sand and Leonardo hauls the bucket up to empty it in a wheelbarrow. This goes on for maybe an hour when other things need their attention. The project to empty the well of the sand and make it a nice and clean source of good water again is going on for weeks now because it is only once in a while they get to it.


So, what do we think of Alfredo and his flooded well?
Nothing. We just see and that is all.

*********************************************

To learn more about Jiddu Krishnamurti, click on:
http://www.kfa.org/
http://www.kinfonet.org/
To read more about the private life of Krishnamurti, these two books are recommended:
"Star in the East: Krishnamurti, the invention of a Messiah" by Roland Vernon.
ISBN 0971078688
"Lives in the shadow with J. Krishnamurti" by Radha Rajagopal Sloss. ISBN 0201627019

To learn more about Charles Webster Leadbeater, click on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Webster_Leadbeater

To learn more about Swami Chinmayananda, click on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinmayananda

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a great story. What a great lesson. Too many times we lose the message because we cannot see past the messenger.

If a beautiful woman tells a man many excuses why she is not treating him or loving him the way he wants her too, he forgives her over and over because all he sees is the messenger.

If a plain woman tells a man many times how much she loves him and needs him and will care for his well being, he will not listen because all he sees is the messenger.

Was Jesus in love and did he have sex with Mary Magdalene?
Was the great guru forgetting to practice what he preached and taught?

In the end isn't the message the most important. After all they are all humans and no human can be perfect.

As for Alfredo, he is causing his family some extra trouble but he is in love. His family will not disown him for this because they have known what kind of man he was all their lives.

His animals may have more of a case for hating and disowning their missing caretaker. Their lives are at stake and they cannot take care of themselves. Especially those chained to their existence.

Anonymous said...

I say there is no permanent source that can give one
understanding. You know, to me the glory of man is that no one can save him except himself."
Krishnamurti

ken

Anonymous said...

K. claims were unrealistic, that´s why there was a huge abyss between his real life and his bussiness life. The worst of K. was not his real life but his teachings.

Unknown said...

Krishnamurti slowly alters ones brain structure until one becomes just another SHIFT SHAPING REPTILE (frothing at the mouth). The only way out is for one to commit suicide - which will extinguish all THOUGHT. Believe me - I spent years exposed to this FALSE PROPHET. Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation [John 3: 16].
PEACE BE WITH YOU
MICKY

Unknown said...

Krishnamurti slowly alters ones brain structure until one becomes just another SHIFT SHAPING REPTILE (frothing at the mouth). The only way out is for one to commit suicide - which will extinguish all THOUGHT. Believe me - I spent years exposed to this FALSE PROPHET. Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation [John 3: 16].
PEACE BE WITH YOU
MICKY