:: October 2005 Volume 4/Number 7

Teacher Profile:
Krishnamurti
Preserving the Legacy

By Juile Deife

One day in 1981, engaged in an enthusiastic conversation with a friend about what we were learning from Krishnamurti’s writings, Think On These Things, I wished aloud, “I would just like to walk the earth he walked on.” Recently I found myself in Ojai doing just that.

The Beauty of Ojai.
Krishnamurti: 3rd Public Talk,
May 18, 1985.

When you see those hills behind there and the blue sky and the line of those mountains against the sky, and see some of the shadows on the sunburned grass and the shady trees, when you look at it, not verbalize it immediately but when you look at it, or see a great mountain full of snow, high peak, and a sky that has never been polluted – when you see the majesty of a mountain, what takes place? Does the majesty of that mountain, the enormous solidity of it, the greatness of it, what happens at that second you see that mountain or that hill and those shadows or this dappled light under these trees? For a second, the greatness of the mountain drives away all our pettiness, all our worries and problems and all the travail of life, for that second. Then you become silent and look. Right?

Derek Dodds, 36, who has been with the Krishnamurti Foundation for six years, appears, an apparition, as I step out of my car, and leads me down the path to the famous oak grove where Krishnamurti held public talks. Dodds is as unlikely a candidate as I once was for a conscious spiritual life; his background is as a gun-toting IRS collection agent. My guide for the day, he inserts a question in a friendly yet inquisitive manner, into the initial conversation: what are my intentions for being here? It’s a question I frequently consider as I walk the grounds today.
There is always a certain distrust of the media, I am used to that, but I am certain Dodds, who is responsible for the publishing responsibilities of the Krishnamurti Foundation, knows of my interest in the history of Krishnamurti, what Oak Grove School is like, and how the archives, the library and the retreat center fit into the overall legacy of Krishnamurti. I’m also here to satisfy my instinct that the yoga community might be interested in a renowned spiritual teacher who made seminal statements about what freedom is, about one who pushed and pushed his audiences to inquire into the nature of freedom, religion, education, fear, the mind, even the relationships between time and thought, thinking these ideas ever more relevant in today’s chaotic and uncertain times. Those were some of the subjects of the public talks he held on these very grounds, as early as 1922. People would come from miles around, camp, spread out on their blankets, listen to Krishnamurti, dialogue with him, meditate and ponder in the oak grove where we now stand, seemingly unchanged by time.
Krishnamurti spent three months in Ojai, three months in England and three months in India each year. I have no idea how to account for the missing three months, other than Switzerland, Holland and Belgium where his talks were always well attended; but he lived a good third of his life here.

Krishnamurti, 2nd Public Talk,
Belgium, June 17, 1956. (edited)

I think this is the whole problem – to understand and free the mind of this constant urge to seek a permanent state. For does not this demand for permanency lead to mediocrity? Surely it is only the mind that is uncertain, that has no continuity in the known – it is only such a mind that is capable of discovery, capable of renewing itself; not the mind that is merely moving from the known to the known. After all, that is what we are doing, is it not? What we want is the continuity of the known – the known experience, the known pleasure. And so long as the mind is seeking that state of permanency, we are bound to create division.

Krishnamurti Schools.

We walk the path from the oak grove as it meanders into an expanse of a soccer field and school buildings housing 220 students, many of them residential international students. The effect of the silence is overwhelming and fills me with deep gratitude and hope. I reminisce about my 18 years of teaching and attempts to create an atmosphere that would contribute to a learning environment conducive to creativity and cultivation of awareness.

Air fragrant with the scent of orange blossoms and ample space for imaginative activities is something most teachers only dream about. Later I meet Mark Lee, the Executive Director of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, who effuses about what a wonderful opportunity it is for teachers to explore themselves and the whole realm of education. “For a teacher, he says, this is big.”
Lee discovered Krishnamurti through books, 40 years ago while teaching in Switzerland and attending Krishnamurti’s talks. Krisnamurti invited him to come to India as an English teacher. ‘Why not?’ Lee asked himself. It was the 60’s and he thought he might be on to something that would help him make sense of life in those changing and turbulent times. Eventually he became the first principal of Oak Grove, the Ojai school which is the only Krishnamurti school, even today, in the Americas.
Initially just two students gathered in Krishnamurti’s living room for the first term; one of them, Lou Zutavern, is an animation artist at Disney today. Even now the school’s enrollment remains relatively small for a private school.

Entire families relocate from all over the country in order for their children to be schooled in such an environment. The school faculty works closely with parents to foster a learning environment supportive of inquiry, of life with all its subtleties, the possibility of complete freedom in which children can grow. Krishnamurti said “the function of education, surely is to eradicate, inwardly as well as outwardly, fear that destroys human thought, human relationship and love.” If children are allowed to explore and inquire, they will do so naturally.

J. Krishnamurit, 3rd Public Talk,
Ojai, May 18th, 1985. (edited)

Take a small boy or a girl. They have been running about all day long, shouting and, you know, being a little bit naughty. What happens when you give them a lovely complicated toy? Their whole energy is concentrated in that toy. They are not naughty. You know this if you are mothers and fathers.

Krishnamurti envisoned the impact of the school on its young students as a place where they could explore their outer world and the inner worlds, “ their own conditioning and how it distorts their thinking” is how he put it in Think on These Things. “Academic excellence, he says, is absolutely necessary, but a school includes much more than that.” The school, he believed, was a place where the mind could be freed.

J. Krishnamurti, 2nd Public Talk,
Brussels, Belgium , June 17 1956. (edited)

So, can the mind free itself from its conditioning? I know there are those who say it is impossible, because human beings are entirely the result of environmental influences. One man, being brought up as a Christian, believes in the dogmas of Christianity, while another who is brought up as a Communist believes in none of those things – which again shows how the mind is influenced and sets going in a pattern, in a groove, in which it continues to function.

Lee maintains that the Krishnamurti schools (Besides Oak Grove, there are seven in India and one in England, offer a religious education, contrary to the popular notion that they are not religious schools, if you consider the conventional definition of religion. Religion is not dogma, it is a sensitive, aware, considerate, focus among individuals concerning relationships, says Lee. He learned from his years with Krishnamurti that religious life is a serious life, one that is lived deeply and is mindful always of the integral cultivation of mind and the heart. To live otherwise is to be “average,” and we are better than that.

J. Krishnamurti, 3rd Public Talk,
Ojai, 18th May 1985. (edited.)

Our education, televisions, our environment, ambience, all that is making us mediocre. We have read too much of what other people say. The word ‘mediocre’ means going up the hill halfway and never reaching the top.’ Not success, success is utter mediocrity. Sorry to talk emphatically about all these matters. If you don’t want to listen, it’s all right too. These are all terribly serious matters. And we give power to others because we ourselves lack power, position, status, therefore we hand it over to somebody else.

The Library and Archives.

Oak Grove School is everything I had imagined an alternative school could be. But what they’ve done here at the far end of Ojai with the archives/library, on the property where Krishnamurti actually lived from the time he moved here, is much more futuristic.

The new Library and Archives building, a construction designed around a vault which houses irreplaceable and environmentally sensitive documents, could also be called a multi-media state of the art study area. The building itself, is surrounded by orange groves and silence, only a short walk from Pine Cottage where Krishnamurti lived.

Wendy Smith oversees the new library and archival activities. A British woman, with native intelligence and an obvious grasp of the content of every writing and public lecture of her teacher, she is also intimate with Krishnamurti’s personal habits, because of her many years of contact with Krishnamurti directly. She shares how much he enjoyed daily walks and that a photograph of an eagle with piercing eyes hung on the wall facing his bed. He admired the Grand Canyon tremendously, and a photo and tribute to its magnificence graces a wall of the library.

The spacious library room proper, with natural lighting on two sides, hosts shelves of books and an enormous conference table for settling in and spreading out research materials and laptops. Available to the visitor are manuscripts of every talk and every book written by Krishnamurti. Original material is located either in Ojai, England or India, where the various Krishnamurti Foundations, all of which work together transglobally, are currently digitizing the works through state-of-the-art technologies. Off the library a room with six individual screens for viewing talks, awaits visitors.

Winding around the vault area, the guts of the workspace becomes one of shelf upon shelf of three inch magnetic tape on reel-to-reel and other sorts of older technologies, waiting to be transferred to the latest technological formats. A woman in white latex gloves patiently scans original handwritten works, which will be returned to the humidified vault as she finishes each piece. Krishnamurti is seen and heard on screens, words and works analyzed and catalogued for posterity.

Krishnamurti, London,
6th Public Talk, June 26th, 1955

I am not saying anything new. We are only trying to understand how to observe the whole process of consciousness, that which we are. To understand oneself there must be self-knowledge, an awareness in which there is no condemnation, comparison, judgment, just the capacity to be aware, to know the way of our thought, the way of the self; and that needs no authority, surely. If is for you, as an individual, to find out for yourself.

I think there is an activity which comes into being, that is not the result of hearing a few talks or reading some books; it is an activity which comes into being because you yourself have experienced a state beyond the mind. But if you cling to that experience and try to act from it, because you think you have understood something, then it becomes your own impediment.

Smith points out that most of the books are published versions of his talks, that there are only five books that he actually wrote. The last talk was given in 1985 and Smith comments: he talked until the end. Smith, in a way, is a link in the American Legacy.

The Retreat Center.

I pretend I am walking home. The house, barely 50 yards from the library/archives, is now the retreat center with a rose garden and immaculate lawns, tall lushy pines and laundry air-drying outside a kitchen window open to the breeze. I reflect on my conversation with Mark Lee. He said that Krishnamurti would often say to those around him in preparation for his eventual departure “I’m dead. What are you going to do?”

A young gentleman from Hong Kong is disturbed momentarily by our presence as we enter the room. So we move to the kitchen, which is reserved for the preparation of vegetarian only meals, by all guests. Space, quiet, writing desks, and outside there are porches and the smell of fresh laundry. Who couldn’t find a little inner freedom here, if that were ones intention.

The Man.

Krishnamurti left the body here in Pine Cottage in 1986. People such as Mark Lee and Wendy Smith are living testaments to his life, influence and interactions with others. Lee remembers wrestling with a problem in his pranayama practice, which he eventually brought to Krishnamurti for advice. He says that Krishnamurti never taught specific practices, but if someone brought problems with practices to him, he might comment on them and help them.

Lee also knows first-hand that Krishnamurti practiced yoga asana two hours each morning followed by his meditation practices and that Krishnamurti learned the asana practices first from Mr. Iyengar and then later from Desikachar, both of who came to Switzerland to instruct him. Yet, he never gave instruction with asana practices unless someone asked for his input.

J. Krishnamurti, 3rd Public Talk,
Ojai, May 18th, 1985.

So we are going to talk over all these matters, including meditation, perhaps yoga too. Everybody seems to be terribly interested in yoga. They want to keep young and beautiful. Yoga has now become a business affair like everything else. There are teachers of yoga all over the world, and they are coining money, as usual. And, yoga at one time, I’ve been told, by those who know about this a great deal, it was only taught to the very, very, very few. Yoga doesn’t mean merely to keep your body healthy normal active, intelligent. But also it meant, the meaning of that word in Sanskrit means ‘join together’. Joining the higher and the lower. I don’t know who joins it, but that’s the tradition. And also there are various forms of yoga. But the highest form is called raja yoga, which is the king of yoga. There that system or that way of living was concerned not merely with the physical well-being, but also much more strict psychologically There was no discipline, no system, nothing to be repeated day after day.

So to have a very deep, orderly moral ethical life not just merely takes various postures but to lead a very moral ethical, disciplined life, that was the real meaning of the highest form of yoga. Thereby you kept the body healthy. What was of primary importance was to have a brain, a mind, a well-being, that is clear, active, not in the sense of movement, but in itself active, alive, full of vitality. But now it has become rather shallow, profitable and becoming mediocre. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?

In my limited experience, spiritual teachers who have reached the point of having a large following, share certain characteristics. Krishnamurti is one of those great teachers who possessed charisma and the ability to communicate complex and often new ideas to a large audience.

An active broad and inquisitive mind toward topics outside the focus of work and teaching is also common. Krishnamurti was fascinated with automobiles and new technologies. He enjoyed television and movies; the last movie he watched was ET (westerns were a favorite genre, because of the nature scenes, he said). Detective novels were a part of his literary diet.
While according to Lee, Krishnamurti was not necessarily interested in politics, the politicians were of interest to him. Krishnamurti enjoyed watching Jimmy Carter on television and following what Carter was doing through the news; he commented to Lee that Carter was “a moral man.” He was also complimentary of the early Gorbachev.

Lee mused that they tried to have new people daily to lunch because of Krishnamurti’s insatiable appetite for learning directly from people of all vocations. The lunch guest one day was a gentleman who managed groves. He and Krishnamurti discussed at great length the economics of the business, the fertilizers, the water supplies, the markets, all to the amazement of those present.

When these teachers have passed on, there is a legacy. In Krishnamurti’s case, the legacy is available for all who want to explore the depth and breadth of his teachings. The Library and Archives are open to the public. The retreat center exists for the purpose of serious students of Krishnamurti’s teachings to come and spend time in study and reflection. The school accepts applications for students and teachers.

I walked the ground that Krishnamurti walked. The question that has only grown larger in my mind is: what is the intention?

J. Krishnmurti, 6th Public Talk
London., June 26th, 1955. (edited)

I think it is important to find out for oneself what it is that we are seeking, and why we are seeking it. If we can go into this rather deeply I think we will discover a great many things involved in it. Most of us are seeking some kind of fulfillment. Being discontented, we want to find contentment, - either in some relationship, or by fulfilling certain capacities, or by searching for some kind of action that will be completely satisfying. Or, if we are not of that disposition, then we generally seek what we think is the truth, God, and so on. Most of us are seeking, searching: and if we could each find out for ourselves what it is that we are seeking, and why we seek, I think it would reveal a great deal.

 

Original transcriptions provided by the
Krishnamurti Foundation of America.
Find out more at www.kfy.org

 

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