Let’s take a trip to Ojai, California.
This unleashed a series of events that would transform Krishnamurti’s life — Annie Besant and Leadbeater claimed that they had discovered the heralded World Teacher; they took the young man under their wing, even legally adopting him, and carefully indoctrinated him in the doctrines of Theosophy. Eventually, Krishna would rebel against the Order of the Star in the East. This organization had created and encouraged the myths surrounding his role in the Enlightenment of Man and Womankind. Rejecting the role of spiritual teacher, for the rest of his life, he lectured about the ruse of surrendering to the guru.
Since I first learned about him in the 70s and 80s, Krishnamurti always left an odd, unbalanced taste in my mouth. It was not his argument or his eloquence. On the surface, I could find no fault in that. It was the way people used him. Most of these followers, if pressed, could thread their way to the end of an argument, but It was just too easy to say, in a slightly superior tone, “Read Krishnamurti. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walk away. They weren’t blatantly stupid and arrogant. For the most part, they just wanted to have sex with whomever they wanted or eat whatever their tastes dictated, except for the strict vegetarian who ruined his marriage to a lovely Italian woman who couldn’t give up sausages. She told me she tried, but her husband wouldn’t tolerate a mixed-cuisine marriage. (By the time of their divorce, she also had a Green Card.)
It was impossible to convince this anti-authoritarian faction that the statement, “The guru says that you can’t trust the guru,” is an argument from authority that should be rigorously applied equally across all the guru’s statements. When you rely on the guru to tell you that you can’t trust the guru, your decision not to trust the guru still relies on basic trust. The skepticism may have real teeth (and I think it does), but I will insist on other avenues of verification, which of course merits me the label of materialist.
Why is Krishnamurti so persuasive and appealing? First of all, what is his argument? I just did a thought experiment, not entirely rigorous but still revealing. I picked up Krishna's First and Last Freedom and began to read. After three paragraphs, enough to catch the thread of his argument in its context, I randomly turned ahead some pages, and continued to read from the top of the first paragraph that caught my eye. I was shocked. It made perfect sense. I wasn't jarred by any abrupt shift in the argument; the tone, even the sentences, maintained a conversational flow.
I might conclude that Krishna used an argument that can be succinctly stated in the three paragraphs, which he repeated and riffed over and over, but that would not do justice to his rigorous self-examination or his eloquence. I went back to First and Last Freedom, and read through the chapters carefully and was moved by the intelligent, even forceful way he invites each of us into his analysis, which included a thorough examination of our belief systems*, our prejudices, our sensory experience, and our past memories.
He was exhaustively thorough and doggedly insistent. He could be compassionate as well as angry or dismissive without apology. But in my view, the analysis is always kept at arm’s length, or perhaps I have not read him as carefully and thoroughly as I should. He emphasizes repeatedly that our immediate experience must be viewed and evaluated within the context of our relationships, with ourselves, our past, our environment, as well as with our family and friends. He was obviously a man who investigated the prison of his own delusion. Leadbeater and Besant were grooming him for the unique role as avatar for the Coming Age, but he never gets very personal or vulnerable about his own experience.
It is ironic that the man who preached that the guru is untrustworthy himself became a guru. As much as Krishna might protest, the path to a normal life must have been difficult when he uncovered the sham that his karma had singled him out. I think he actually tried to be normal, but circumstances created a pampered life. To bolster my case that he was nothing more than a real human, he had a long-term lover, the wife of a close associate. Of course, he lied about it, claiming to be celibate — which leads me back to my initial problem with his analysis. “Trust me to tell you not to trust me” is the brick wall you hear in the conversation of an abusive lover.
I haven’t answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just joined Krishnamurti and pointed out some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
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*"Belief is the central problem in the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.”
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture. XII: Belief, p. 295
