REALITY QUEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 114, 15 May 1936, Page 5

REALITY QUEST.

"WITH A FREE MIND."j j KRiSHNAMURTI'S OUTLOOK, j (' MOST PEOPLE ARE DUMB." (Prom Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, April 22. Clad in faded jeans and a violent blue sweater, Jiddu Krishnamurti, young Hindu philosopher, often called the "Second Christ," walked in the gardens of his villa at Ojai, in the interior of tropical California, and discussed the possibility of his being another Messiah. It will be recalled that Krisnamurti visited Auckland about two years ago. "I may or may not be the second Christ —I don't know," said Krishnamurti, who has been conducting a tenday camp meeting series of gatherings where several thousand Theosophists o-athered at Starland at the society s headquarters. "It really doesn t matter. I don't want people to look up to me, to worship 1116. Most people are dumb, anyway. I don't try to convert them. I only try to wake them up so they can find out what life is really all about." The slight frame of Krishnamurti, who first startled the world at the age of ten years, when an Englishwoman adopted him in India and set him on the lecture platform, shook with fervour as he spoke. "The depression has awakened some people, but many more it lias merely caused to say, 'By Jove, next time I must be more careful!"' he continued in careful London English. "'lt is the fashion to blame the world's current ills 011 economic systems and to look to reforms there for deliverance. I "Deliverance will come only when : people wake up to the colossal ignorance in which they are living. The hasty ! marriages and even hastier divorces abroad in the world, the sex stimulaI tion on ail sides, the futile pleasure.?, [the exploitation of industry which

results in strikes, the exploitation of nations which results in wars —are tjjev not all the results of an ignorance more blighting than illiteracy ?" Fears Exploitation. Krishnamurti declared he broke with the Theosopliical Society some years ago because the society "had too many possessions and members were in danger of becoming a cult." It will be recalled that Dr. Annie Besant, who adopted him, was a pillar of Tlieosophy. "Any j religious group is undesirable because j it divides humanity and eventually ends 1 in group exploitation," he said. "As for religious morality, it is all based 011 fear. The atheist and the church-goer both base their statements 011 benel, not on reality. To find out if there is a ! Deity you must first shed all your egotistical, preconceived ideas 011 the subject and start looking with a free ! mind. Then you will know." Krishnamurti said lie owns and pos-1 sesses nothing. He amended that by smiling: "I have a few clothes." He I has no money, *10 automobiles, no ser-1 vants, declares this world-famous mysti- ] cal figure who draws packed audiences | in every country from China to Brazil.! Even his Ojai villa, Arya Vihara, is bor- j rowed. "Possession is wrong," he maintains. 1 "Everywhere I go things are provided for me —sometimes out of the air, as it j were." He believes another world war j to be inevitable in the near future. "But] the outlook is not altogether hopeless," he explained. "I think the world is slowly becoming more intelligent. Perhaps more people could approach the basic truths through art than any other way. Present-day art has no connection with life, however. All pure enjoyment is art. Some people have the power to express that enjoyment—on canvas, on paper, on an instrument— and some have not. But both can be artists." I Krishnamurti says his name means a "form of Krishna, the Indian Christ, and is the name given every eighth child of Brahmin caste in India." The philosopher was an eighth child. He will leave California in May for a visit to India. "Child marriage in India?" he laughed. "Why, you have it right here in America. The other day I read-of a girl who became a mother a- 13. In India a law has been passed making the minimum age 10."