Theos-Talk Archives (February 2005 Message tt00583)

Hello Erica, 

--- In theos-talk Erica Letzerich wrote:
 
> Annie Besant was for a long period a puppet of Leadbeater

> Krishnamurti was taken away from his family and convinced
> by persons like Leadbeater and Annie Besant

Here you are just repeating an official version which
I've heard many times before but it has many misfits which
Krishnamurti's fans are always trying to ignore.

Besant was a very free-thinking and well-known person even
before she joined TS, her books were prohibited, as HPB
mentioned. She was a natural leader. How could Leadbeater make
a puppet of her? If so, he probably had miraculous powers.
But why he didn't make puppets of other people which were more
dangerous for him? And why, when everything seemed so good
he left for Australia and didn't reap any fruits of his
contrivances? (Except the negative ones which he couldn't
escape) Instead he removed from public activity and plunged
into the research of the masonic and church rites. Doesn't
it seem strange?

Krishnamurti was born in 1895. In 1927, when he still thought
to be himself a guru, he was already 32. He wasn't little boy.
In that age Shankaracharya already wrote all his famous
treatises and left physical body. If up to that age anybody
is still unable to think for himself, we should regard him
a mentally handicapped person. Remember that Leadbeater has
left to Australia in 1914 and couldn't influence directly.
Or, if he could, we have to admit that he had the miraculous
occult powers. Neither Krishnamurti looked as a scared or
controlled person. Roerichs visited him in mid. 1920's, and
they witness that he made an appearance of very important
person, he wanted to build new buildings which he needed for
his work and wanted that Nicolas Roerich assisted him in that
project.

> Geoffrey Hodson description of the great beautiful aura of Hitler

If is a heavy charge and you haven't prove it because his name
was not mentioned in the sources. As a rule, most of theosophists
were against Hitler. Alice Bailey, whose teaching is almost
identical with that of Leadbeater, even was in the list of
personal enemies of Fuehrer which should be immediately
executed when caught. Yet she criticized jewish leaders
severely.

Another consideration is that a man probably can have beautiful
aura and yet be wicked. I'm not sure about it, for I don't see
auras. Somewhere Leadbeater wrote that development of psychic
powers is connected with morality not more than development of
physical power. Remember that Hitler was a good painter and
wasn't a young soul at all.


> And which kind of knowledge you would expect him to express
> when he lost his brother? Detachment, do not suffer because
> death is an illusion?

Precisely. Recently we all could see this attitude of
buddhist inhabitants of Thailand, contrasted with that of
inhabitants of non-buddhist countries also devastated by
tsunami. This is not only example. Several years earlier
russian resquers which worked after an earthquake in India
were surprised by the calm attitude of Indians to death,
though probably it is not so characteristic to them as to
buddhists. So Mahachohan was right when he wrote that buddhism
is the only religion which has taught to despise earthly life.

By the way buddhist approach perhaps contradicts to that of
Krishnamurti "to live in now". "Now" is just an illusion, maybe
greatest of all. In his Harward lectures Dalai Lama mentions
that the moments from future are incessantly becoming moments
of the past, and it comes so that probably there's no any "now".
Though I am not sure that all buddhist schools share this view.

>>Is it an older work?
> I never quote Krishnamurti before he dissolved the order.

This division is too simplified. I think that he had at least
three periods: approx. before 1925, end of 1920's-1940's, and
1950's-1980's. The middle period has some vedantin features,
and might be called "Beloved-period".

"Till I was able to say with certainty, without any undue
excitement, or exaggeration in order to convince others, till
I was one with my Beloved, I never spoke. ...
Hence I am able to say that I am one with the Beloved - whether
you interpret it as the Buddha, the Lord Maitreya, Shri Krishna,
or any other name." ("Who Brings the Truth?", 1927)

1929 was important rather in respect of organization, not views,
which changed slowly from middle of 1920's till that of 1930's.

"For sixteen years you have worshipped the picture which has
not spoken ... Now that picture is beginning to get alive, and
you cannot have anything real, you cannot have anything true,
which is not alive." (Ibid.) So the radical change was surely
before 1929.

> So what you try to say with the above quote, that may be
> Krishnamurti believed to be what he was told to be most
> part of childhood and adolescence.

So why didn't he believe in theosophical conceptions about other
things, like life after death? Probably he even didn't study
them, for during the adolescence he more interested in cars,
races and things like that. Didn't he know about thoughtforms?

"when I was a small boy I used to see Shri Krishna, with the
flute, as He is pictured by the Hindus, because my mother was a
devotee of Shri Krishna. ...When I grew older and met with Bishop
Leadbeater and the Theosophical Society. I began to see the
Master K. H. - again in the form which was put before me, the
reality from their point of view - and hence the Master K. H. was
to me the end. Later on, as I grew, I began to see the Lord
Maitreya. ... Now lately, it has been the Buddha whom I have been
seeing, and it has been my delight and my glory to be with Him."
("Who Brings the Truth?")

It's not a revelation at all for those who have even a faint
conception of thoughtforms.

>> There is a school of thought which has many adherents here
>> which teaches that all the subtle bodies are just "auras"

> And what this has to do with Krishnamurti? Was him promoting
> teachings similar the ones you mention above? Was him promoting
> immortality by obsession of a new body? Or you try to tell me
> that even if he spoke about immortality he was a materialist?

I took that school just as an example. There are many people who
talk about immortality and auras but are thouroughly materialistic
inside.

> So what you found in the teachings of Krishnamurti? Arguments
> against superstitions created by religions and gurus? You
> emphasize his arguments against any form of psychological
> dependency to a guru or to a group or to an organization. Was he
> wrong? But you do not mention that the key note of his teachings

He said many right things, but most of them are just platitudes.
His adherents emphasize a point that an organization can't lead
to illumination. But the theosophical organizations never had
such objects. Even Order of the Star had no such object and
was intended just to remove the physical obstacles from the
way of a World Teacher. I think that he was right when dissolved
the Order, for this organization created more obstacles than
removed, as it seems, but I think he was wrong when he left TS.
Probably the Order of the Star was the only obstacle which
could really stop the World Teacher :)

Yet I don't condemn him as a person, I simply have strong
philosophical differences with him. But those who can be condemned
are his thoughtless followers who repeat his slogans, praise him
even more than when he was a "World teacher" and make a monster
from a country vicar whom they endowed by contradictive qualities,
like non-existing God, or rather, Satan.

(As far I know, Krishnamurti himself wasn't hostile to leaders of TS)

> By the way tell me which guru can go within yourself and
> transform your nature? Such is an individual task.

We should transform ourselves, but any guru who have reached
buddhic level can come in.

"The Guru is inside you also just as he exists inside the other
person. In the first stage the Guru should be found outside, when
he should find you. In the second stage the Guru is in me, in
you, and in everyone. So at first there is a trial, a test and a
treatment to heal our complexes. Our complexes do not accept some
other person before whom we can make a total surrender.
Theoretically we can accept a teacher in the University sense or
the college sense. But the trouble is to make a total surrender.
Here comes the necessity to make a cut off of our complexes that
exist with our lower nature. Unless we make such a cut off we
cannot have a cut off of our lower nature. The moment we are
prepared then the necessity to cut off complexes goes away.
Unless we make a total surrender of personality to another
person, we will have no chance of crossing the barriers of
vanity. When once we cut off, the lower ego disappears and the
necessity to make a surrender to another person disappears. It
is a real test at the gate. Some people ask, "Is it necessary to
have a Guru? Can't we do it for ourselves?" Years pass and they
die. In the next birth also the same question dwells with them.
The answer is that a Guru is necessary to come out of this
question."
("Lessons on the Yoga of Patanjali" by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya)

It's an Indian outlook. In other words, we have to reach to the
higher nature. The higher nature is impersonal, so it is the same
in all people. But when we are trying to reach "our" higher
nature, shunning from "others" who are "outside", we reach
an individual nature only, for we get to what we think about.
It's like a technical trick, it's easier to find this nature in
some other person, and it is the real use of all devotion, gods
and gurus. I admit that Krishnamurti might reach higher nature,
but this transformation was performed in the earlier period when
he still followed the guru.

> And his teachings in no form contradict theosophy.

"For example, Blavatsky stresses that one cannot pass over even one
step on the path to higher consciousness(2), yet Krishnamurti 
summarily
rejects not only a path of graduated levels in attaining truth(3), but
also the very existence of a higher self to unite with.(4) 
Furthermore,
Blavatsky makes it clear that a Guru plays an essential part in one's
mastery of higher consciousness(5), while Krishnamurti repudiates the
role of a spiritual teacher.(6)

(2) No single rung of the ladder leading to knowledge can be skipped. 
No
personality can ever reach or bring itself into communication
with Atmâ, except through Buddhi-Manas ... SD vol.3

(3) "This idea of a gradual process, this idea of gradual 
psychological
evolution of man is very gratifying... . This gradual concept, which
psychologically is generally called evolution, seems to me utterly
false."

(4) "... We invent the higher self, the supreme self, the atma, and
all the innumerable ideas, to escape from the reality of what we
are--the actual everyday, every-minute reality of what we are."

(5) "...because of that merit, but only because of the Karma 
generated
by it, which leads and guides him in the direction of the Guru who 
will
initiate him into the mystery of Nirvana and who alone can help him
reach his abode." SD vol.3"

(Govert Schüller, "Krishnamurti: An Esoteric View of his Teachings")

Blavatsky was a strong adherent of the progresive path, or lamrim,
and recommended it to the theosophists. There are so called fast
paths, but these are intended for "people of high capacities" which
means that they have already acquired needed qualities in previous
lives, not necessarily in buddhist schools.

I may not agree with some other points of Schüller, but these are
obvious. Yet is would be OK to hold such an opinion inside
Theosophical Society, but many of his followers are too agressive,
intolerant to other teachings and picture theosophists as
hallucinating monsters. And yet leaders of the TS disseminate
his teachings.

> If any technique alone and any guru is supposed be the path for
> the truth all India would be enlightened by now

Not "alone". These are prerequisites but they are not enough.
Free thinking is yet another prerequisite. Those who emphasize
any of them, denying other, are both wrong, IMHO.

Buddhist teachers emphasize combination of method and wisdom,
as they call it, and importance of both absolute and relative
truth. Without the latter we may come to one of the extremes:
negate the earthly life as an illusion or regard it as of
prime importance.