Please read Glossary of My Terms to be able to follow this post.
I was drawn to Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986) and Ramana Maharshi (1879 – 1950); because they were plainly in a special condition; heart-seated, clear that neither doctrine nor intellect was applicable to finding liberation from earthware.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
In 1979 I was in Mumbai, staying at my parents’. It had become plain that an accountancy career was not for me. But having still little idea of what work would fulfill me I was feeling gloomy. One day my parents went to listen to Krishnamurti speaking publicly, and I went with them. The man produced a discourse and engaged with persons who had questions. Many crows were in the grove in which he sat; they cawed incessantly. I comprehended very little. However, I felt lifted. I went again another day. At the end of that session the organisers invited for a chat, persons interested in involvement with the work of the Krishnamurti Foundation. I went along and a few days later had opportunity to read from K’s discourses when he was in his middle years. This material was very different to anything I’d encountered before. I read only a little and felt energised. Thereafter I went to the Krishnamurti boarding school in Varanasi, where I contributed some English teaching in return for board and lodge. It was a nourishing experience. Compared with the schools I’d attended, the relationship between the teachers and pupils was friendlier, an altogether pleasanter atmosphere. After a month I wanted to stay on, but Helper pulled against it.
When I returned to England, K was at the Krishnamurti boarding school in Hampshire (Brockwood Park). I got myself included in a group discussion with K to extend over a few days. On the first day I developed a reservation about K’s interventions, found the discussion unrewarding, and did not participate in the subsequent sessions. Thereafter I read more from K’s books and records of his conversations with students, teachers and others. I also attended one of the large gatherings at the school that lasted a few days. K sat on a podium and embarked on discourses, lastly responding to some questions that had been submitted in writing.
To this day nothing has detracted from the impression I obtained, as did all who encountered K, that he dwelled in a condition removed from the ordinary. This was owing to, aside from the extraordinary circumstances of his life, his full and resonant descriptions of that special condition, his bearing and visage. K would describe his condition as being in the world but not of it; a condition in which the heart was full and the mind empty. More than one item sets his teaching apart from Gnosticism. One is that doctrine, ritual, practice of any kind can only detract from the attainment of liberation; another, that tutelage is not only sterile but counterproductive.
Following the Brockwood Park gathering I attended, I began to have certain notions. I undertook a careful reading of a few of K’s published talks and question and answer sessions. This resulted in a firming of the notions, which are shared below. More videos and reading and musings later my confidence in these notions is high.
K always referred to the propensities of the mind as ‘conditioning’, and throughout his life addressed himself to its – total – neutralization. Conditioning is not something that is structural, dyed in the wool. It is observable without too much difficulty, that the ego is hard-wired into humans, as every other creature. To have spoken of the egoic proclivities as conditioning and endlessly addressed himself to their – total – dissolution, was a curious project.
While holding that the mind / thought is the obstacle to illumination, K endlessly invoked thought process. His modus operandi was talking and writing, which – as night follows day – sets the mind turning. Furthermore, he endlessly urged listeners to “enquire”, “go into it” … enquire how, if not with thought ??
K did much public quaffing of beauty in Nature, portraying it as a quality in itself – a misrepresentation. Furthermore, he said little, if anything about the colossal cruelty in the animal kingdom, his frequent references to ‘Nature’ smacking of unqualified regard.
Engagement with psychoanalysts is something K appears to have evaded. Let’s look at his account of a discussion he titled ‘Psychoanalysis and the Human Problem’ https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/series-ii-chapter-40-psychoanalysis-and-human-problem Examining the applicability of psychoanalysis to ” the Human Problem ” is an absurdity … would you examine the suitability of a combine harvester for mixing a cocktail ?
Early in the above account K slips in that the discussant was “a psychologist and an analyst”. The discussant’s representations are odd for an ‘analyst’ (the term is not inclusive, referring to only those who’ve undergone a psychoanalysis training, which is at considerable remove from the training of a psychologist). The psychologist cum hypnotist says, “There is certainly something in what you say but as analysts I don’t think we are prepared to go so deeply into the whole causation of human misery.” In fact, to psychoanalysts the human condition is less than rocket science; further, its mitigation is not their trade. ‘Whole causation’ is not analyst-speak; it is most certainly K-speak. K had discussions with a Dr Shainberg, referred to somewhere as a psychoanalyst. ‘Doctor’ Shainberg professed an assortment of trainings, including psychoanalysis … there is scope for skepticism about the suitability for psychoanalysis, of multi-pursuit mental health professionals. At any rate he was in his own words a “practising psychiatrist” . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzQF09RhlaU&list=PL1n30s-LKus4ipHYdBpKt1-AdSN181Lc0
Disorder’ is a word much used by psychiatry, tacked onto the locus of a symptom – ‘eating disorder’ for instance. K availed of this practice to fashion for himself a passport to psychology discussion, being the term ‘psychological disorder’. He was poorly equipped for such discussion, evading as he did the unconscious. For psychology ‘Psychological disorder’ is a use-less term; and for the lay person a misleading one. Let’s look at K’s exchanges with a psychiatrist and three others in a discussion titled ‘Roots of Psychological Disorder’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoMS5b2MLRc K is confused about psychotherapy. Also, he introduces a concept, ‘conditioning to suffer’, which he proceeds to obfuscate. The concept itself could do with examination.
Confusion: K ventures that the way psychotherapy is practised is crucially flawed, “not holistic”; it proceeds via the client’s personal issues and history though what would be curative is a movement away from these. The psychiatrist fails to point out that psychotherapy is sought for – only – such difficulties as impede normal functioning … the woes constituting the human condition are not the province of psychotherapy; they are the stamping ground of entities like Confucious, G Buddha, Norman Vincent Peale (and yes, J Krishnamurti-!). Assisting a sufferer of claustrophobia to use lifts and the metro, a compulsive hand washer to do only hygiene related washing, a serial rapist or murderer to desist, requires working with items specific to the individual. Analogy : a broken leg is peered at very closely (x-rayed) and fixed … the patient is not sent away with a prescription for flying lessons on basis that eliminating walking will in itself result in the healing of the injury.
Conditioning to suffer : At 28:45 K brings back a thesis he’d touched on earlier, that humans are afflicted with a conditioning to suffer. But he’d also pointed to the involuntary and complete erasure of the memory of distress (physical and emotional) from events like child-birth, toothache, his own operation … which indicates a propensity to not suffer. A defensible perspective is that we forget the pain of any injury that has healed, be it physical or non-physical (failure, loss, rejection, trauma) … Novak Djokovic is not plagued by matches he lost. So when K says “conditioning to suffer” we must deduce that he is thinking of common anxiety. There is a stronger case for seeing this as stemming from the survival imperative than from a suffering wish.
Lastly, K was very invested in his appearance. Much contrivance was evident in long hair swept up to cover baldness. At some point he appeared to have taken to coloring his eyebrows … a shade of brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFWBaBdH2qw) His apparel was unfailingly impeccable, of splendid fit, likely custom-tailored. Odd behavior for a man who held himself out as a living example of one devoid of ego. And while he emphatically urged the effacement of The Teacher (himself), he appears not to have shrunk from having his striking visage on the cover of some publications.
The phenomenon of K is consistent with earthscheme … a “World Teacher” who spent a long life captivating millions, and leaving them in a muddle sugared with invocations of nature’s ‘beauty’.
Ramana Maharshi
He came into gnosis at an early age. Arriving in Tiruvannamalai (South India) before he was twenty, he remained there for the rest of his life. His lifestyle was simplicity … not a trace of sartorial desires.
RM felt that anything words could convey was inferior to what might be received by someone through just being in his presence in silence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVYv9ktilQw . This chariness around words was entirely congruous with a heartnosis-like condition.
RM’s message was “The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise the Self. There is nothing else to do.” An interpretation of this – rather than the literal meaning – has much resonance for one who has had a taste of gnosis … the Self here is in the register of infinite ease and love, in which all preoccupations are absent.
Tiruvannamalai is situated at the foot of Arunachala. ‘Aruna’ means red, bright like fire, the fire of wisdom. ‘Chala’ signifies hill. RM was deeply drawn to this hill, referring to it as the spiritual heart of the world … of this I cannot make head or tail.
So, can heartnosis be facilitated by an other ?
Late in his life when JK was asked whether he knew of anyone who had shed their ‘conditioning’, he replied, emphatically, “Not a single person.”
Did anyone who availed of RM’s presence and or advocacy find the illumination RM enjoyed? Some who were significantly helped appear in the considerable material on the internet, but no-one who’d found total release from the human condition – that is not to say ofcourse that no-one had. Also, RM did convey that progression towards that condition could straddle more than one life.
JK and RM were not – in their lives as JK and RM at least – assisted into their conditions by anyone. JK was discovered by virtue of his aura when he was twelve, by Charles Leadbeater, Theosophist … he was already in a special condition. Later in life he experienced a deepening of that condition. RM had, when he was sixteen, an experience he felt was ‘akrama mukti’ (sudden liberation). The biography Sri Ramana Vijayam, describing the period a few years before this liberation, quotes RM, “Some incomplete practice from a past birth was clinging to me. I would be putting attention solely within, forgetting the body. Sometimes I would be sitting in one place, but when I regained normal consciousness and got up, I would notice that I was lying down in a different narrow space”.