KRISHNAMURTI

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 3

KRISHNAMURTI

AH INVIGORATING GOSPEL [Written by “ L.L.H.,” for the 1 Evening Star.’] As Krislmamurti, Indian poet, orator, philosopher, will touch at Auckland towards the end of March, and may even travel so far down as Christchurch, as, further, an endeavour is being made to interest the Broadcasting Board in him with a view to its securing a dominion talk during his stay, perhaps a few passages from his recorded speeches will interest the readers of the ‘ Evening Star.’ Krislmamurti has talked much of “ liberation.” and has very naturally found himself obliged over and over to explain his meaning yet a little further. Here are a few of such further explanations. “ Liberation is not annihilation, on the contrary it is construction; liberation is not negative, hut on the contrary it is positive. It is not entering into a void and there losing yourself, but it is entering into truth, becoming part of the truth, and going out and liberating those who are still worshipping the reflections on the still pools.” One recalls Plato’s cave and all the many teachings of religion and philosophy that the world of sense is but a passing show ; but let us go on. “ Liberation is the consummation of life highly developed, highly cultured, highly evolved. Liberation is the result of the cessation of all desires.” That last statement rather staggers us of the present period, but by desires Krislmamurti means the mere reactions of our thoughts and feelings to external stimuli, which make ns in the old Greek phraseology but “ processions of fate,” each, as-a modern writer puts it,

A piece Of driftwood on the sea of his own passions Helplessly tossed.

Krishnamurti would have us act and not react;.be masters in our own house, in fact, and not the fools of sense. No one, 1 think, has urged more constantly, more strongly than Krishnamurti the uniqueness of each one of us or more insistently bade us stand on our own feet. “In the fulfilment of your individuality,” he says, “is the totality of life.” And lest the statement lead to anarchy time and again he tells-us what we actually are, we the uniquely individual. “In man himself lies the beginning and the end, the source and the goal.” “ Truth is the power within each one of you which urges you on to attainment.” “ That is the task of individual existence, from unconscious, instinctive perfection, through the limitation of self-conscious-ness, of'imperfection, to arrive at pure intuitional perfection.” “ The ultimate purpose of individual existence is to realise pure being in which there is no separation, which is the realisation of the whole. The fulfilment of niaifls destiny is to be the totality.” Life is no fantastic process beginning nobody knows how and climbing higher than its Source; it begins in the reality behind all, even the subtlest, sense illusion, and ends where it began, forced upward by the law of its own nature. One recalls Swinburne’s ‘ Hertha,’ with its magnificent close:

One birth of my bosom, One beam of mine, eye, One topmost blossom That scales the sky; Men equal and one with me, man that ■ is made of me, man that is I.

Lest any fail to catch the real significance of the claim, Krishnamurti states it frankly in the simplest and directest fashion: “As every human being is divine, so every individual in the world should be his own master, his own absolute ruler and guide.” Torrential at times is our preacher’s eloquent denunciation of man’s conscious or unconscious leaning upoip book, creed, church, convention, social formula—anything, so it be but an excuse for not attempting a solution of his life’s enigma.

For thou hast been fed on the food of another, Thou hast been taught by the lips of another, Thou hast been taught to draw thy 1 strength from another, Tflou hast been taught that thy happiness lieth in another, That thy redemption is at the hands of another, That wisdom is in the mouth of an-, other, That truth can only be attained through another. Thou hast been taught to worship the God of another, To adore at the altar of another, To discipline thyself to the authority of another, To shape thyself in the mould of another, To grow in the protection of another. Thou hast been taught to lay thy foundations in another, To hear with the ears of another, To feel with the heart of another, To think with the mind of another. . . .

Who can gainsay it? It is even so, for though Jesus the Christ taught plainly that the kingdom was within, our whole environment denies that sturdy gospel; we are verily taught to lean, not to quit us like men and be strong. What do we mean, we ordinary men and women, when we speak of “life”? Truly many very different things. Kishnamurti well knows the' difficulty he is faced with in endeavouring to convey his view to his many hearers. ‘ I am trying,” he says, “ to describe to you in words .something which is beyond words; I am trying to measure the immeasurable.” That is ever the problem of those who would uplift the race, for the less can naturally never understand the greater, and continually life limited takes that which would destroy its limitations for a foe threatening its own destruction. Life as this teacher views it is “ that eternal reality which is not an external truth but which dwells in all things.” “ You say that truth lies outside all tlns_ chaos, this conflict, this struggle, this competitive hatred of peoples. I say, on the contrary, that through tins alone is truth to ‘bo found.” No doctrine of ascetic separation from the world is Krishnamurti’s, no doctrine of escape, but a virile doctrine of embracement ot all that is; of looking upon forms, as Carlyle taught us, till they become transparent and reveal the life within —the breath, the spirit, the eternally existing real, which clothes itself in forms, and uses them, and shakes them from it, but itself ever is; that real which is we. So another Krishna taught in the years agone: Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to he never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaincth the spirit for ever; Death hatli not toucht it at all, dead though the house of it seems. So taught the ancient seers: “ Thou art that.” So read we in our Christian Scriptures: “And the Word was with.

God. and the Word was God. . . . In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Over and over Krislinamurti tries to make his meaning clear: “ Life cannot be separated from thought, feeling, action.” “ Truth, life in its completeness is in all things at all times. It never exhausts itself in the greatest, it is never absent in the least.” “ This ultimate reality exists in each one, though it be but a pin point, which is the universe.” “ Life is that common essence m which all things move and have their being.” A more difficult aspect of Krishnanuirti’s teaching is enshrined in the following saying: —‘‘The whole of existence is contained in a single minute of comprehension.” At first glance it looks like arrant nonsense ; and yet when we consider have we not thrilled to Tennyson’s suggestion about the flower he plucked from the crannies of a wall, that if he could understand what it was, root and all, and all in all, ho would know “ what God and man is ” — ll is,” observe, not “ are,” for Tennyson, too, was a seer. “ There are moments when the flesh is nothing to me,” so runs his witness. “ when 1 feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the Spiritual the only real and true.” And Tennyson’s “ God ” was the philosopher’s “reality”; see his ‘Ancient Sage ’ for a more elaborate forth-setting of his view. Krislmamurti holds that the like “ all in all ” comprehension of one sole experience would rend the veil for us; and again and again he deplores our turning from our opportunity through fear, through habit, through desire of comfort; our refusal of that emotional awareness which completes the intellectual appreciation of experience, and without which intellectual appreciation is, and needs must be, barren. It is not experience that teaches, he has said, but the comprehension, the full “ all in all ” understanding of experience. And the more one dwells upon the question the more one is disposed to think his statement true. Those of us who seek easily-grasped answers to our problems need never come to Krislmamurti with them, for he invariably leads us far above the realm of what Carpenter has called “ the lunatic, wandering mind,” that part of human consciousness which draws quiet accurate conclusions, but does not trouble to determine the bona ficles of the premises from which it draws them. Like every other who attempts or has attempted to express in words on this low level of existence, “ the hidden wisdom,” the inner truths of being, he is baffled by the sheer impossibility of the attempt, and ends as others do and have done by uttering paradox. “ That which is complete cannot progress.” He has told us, be it remembered, that we are the reality, that we are verily complete, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. He tells us that completeness “ is no progress . . . has no direction . . . is ever renewing itself ... is not static . . . is a timeless becoming. It is the tranquility of fullness _. . . it is the peace of perfect emptiness.” “ Truth,” he adds, “ is not progressive . . . it is constant, ever renewing, beyond time and space, birth and death.”

There we may do well to leave him and his message for a time. In our opinion there is no one at the moment speaking to the race so worthy of attention, and if this article arouses in its readers the desire to know more of him and his teaching we shall be glad indeed to have been the means of rousing it. Krishnamurti’s doctrine is no milk for babes, but indeed strong meat for men ; lie preaches no far-off perfectionment, no happenings to be, but the grasping here and now of the divinity that is ours with all that necessarily follows from that Herculean labour. Herculean labour it must needs appear when looked at from our present standpoint, but if we can even in thought transfer ourselves from the below to the above, imagine ourselves not climbing painfully upwards from below, but reaching downwards, manifesting, selfoxpressing—imagine ourselves not helpless creatures but creative gods—-the crushing sense of ultra-human effort will dissolve like morning mists; we shall recall, with greater measure possible of comprehension, _ the saying “ With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” We would venture the suggestion that in these last-quoted words we find the very essence of Krishnamurti’s stirring message to his time set forth.