The Open Door

J. Krishnamurti

• Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Uk
• ISBN:
  9781911124139
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Biografías filosóficas

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was an independent spiritual teacher for the rest of his life, writing many books such as Krishnamurti Reader: No. 1, You are the World, Commentaries on living; First series, from the notebooks of J. Krishnamurti.
Mary Lutyens (1908-1999) was a British author best known for her three-volume biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti; the other volumes in this series are Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfilment and Krishnamurti: The Open Door. She wrote in the Foreword to this 1975 book, "This account of the life of the first thirty-eight years of Krishnamurti's life has been written at his suggestion and with all the help he has been able to give me. it shows the circumstances of the unfolding of Krishnamurti's teaching and demonstrates his extraordinary achievement in freeing himself from the many hands that clutched at him in an endeavour to force him into the role of traditional Messiah."
He told his audience, "I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect... I do not want to belong to any organization of a spiritual kind; please understand this."
Lutyens' sympathetic, yet detailed and critical biography is "must reading" for anyone wanting to know more about Krishnamurti.

1

Changing the Brain Cells

By the time K dissolved the Order of the Star in 1929 he had experienced many of the feelings of ordinary humanity. He was to forget these completely; nevertheless they must have remained somewhere in his being for him to have been able to help others by such deep understanding of their problems. He had known homesickness and loneliness when he first came to England; he had known disappointment at failing his matriculation examination three times; he had known the misery which other people’s jealousy can cause, not only to themselves; he had known loss of faith and disillusionment; he had been in love at twenty-six and known the misery of being separated from his love by duty when Mrs Besant sent for him to return to India in 1921; he had known the acute embarrassment of being openly worshipped and also of being laughed at; he had known adverse publicity; he had known intense physical agony; he had known months of grave anxiety over the health of his beloved brother Nitya; he had known the pain of everything he held most sacred being made ridiculous and vulgar; above all he had known devastating grief at Nitya’s death. But no experience had to be repeated for him to learn its full lesson.

When he heard of Nitya’s death in 1925 while on board ship bound for Colombo it seemed for ten days that he was shattered. In the words of Shiva Rao, who was sharing a cabin with him, ‘At night he would sob and moan and cry out for Nitya, sometimes in his native Telegu which in his waking consciousness he could not speak,’ yet when he arrived at Madras twelve days later, another friend recalled that ‘his face was radiant; there was not a shadow on it to show what he had been through.’

Before the end of the voyage K had written: ‘I have wept but I do not want others to weep but if they do I know now what it means. ... I know now with greater certainty than ever before that there is real beauty in life, real happiness that cannot be shattered by any physical happening, a great strength which cannot be weakened by passing events, and a great love which is permanent, imperishable and unconquerable.’¹¹

Throughout the war years K remained at Ojai, giving no talks and seeing hardly anyone except the Rajagopals, who lived with him, and Aldous Huxley and his wife who became great friends. Most days K would go for very long walks by himself. These quiet years were, I believe, of supreme importance to him—a period of gestation which resulted in the flowering of his teaching and the writing which, encouraged by Aldous Huxley, was later published as Commentaries on Living.

By himself at Ojai in 1931 K was writing to my mother, ‘My being alone like this has given me something tremendous and it’s just what I need. Everything has come so far in my life at the right time.’

Everything in his life continued, it seemed, to come just at the right time, at any rate where people were concerned. When he returned to India after the war in 1947, having been away for nine years, he made a new group of friends who were to help incalculably in his work; in the early fifties he made an important new Italian friend, and in 1964 Mary Zimbalist, the widow of Sam Zimbalist the film producer, was to come into his life and be his closest companion and confidante until his death. She was a gentle, elegant, Europeanised American from a well-established New York family. Her father had lived in Paris for some years and she spoke fluent French and seemed at ease in all worlds.

Mary Zimbalist is the only person mentioned by name at this stage because it was with her at Ojai in February 1980 that the second volume of my book ended. K was to be eighty-five in May that year and was to live another six fruitful years. He was vigorous in mind and body and had recently undergone a psychic experience in India of which he dictated an account to Mary. He had had ‘peculiar meditations’ which were ‘unpremeditated and grew with intensity’, and one night he ‘woke up to find something totally different and new. The movement had reached the source of all energy. ... Desire cannot possibly reach it, words cannot fathom it, nor can the string of thought wind itself round it. One may ask with what assurance do you state that it is the source of all energy? One can only reply with complete humility that it is so.’ On returning to Ojai, ‘after the body had somewhat rested, there was the perception that there was nothing beyond this.’¹²

At thirty-five K had been the most beautiful human being I could imagine, not only in face but in carriage, suppleness and general air of sparkling inner well-being. In old age he can best be described in the words of a man who was for a few years very close to him:

When one meets him what does one see? Truly, to a superlative degree there is nobility, power, grace and elegance. There is an exquisite breeding, a heightened aesthetic sense, enormous sensitivity and penetrating insight into any problems that one might bring to him. Nowhere in Krishnamurti is there the slightest trace of anything vulgar, mean or commonplace. One may understand his teaching or not understand it; one may perhaps criticize this or that in his actions or his words. But it is not conceivable that anybody could deny the enormous nobility and grace that flow from his person. One could perhaps say that he has a style or a class quite above, quite beyond, the common run of man. No doubt these words would embarrass him. But there you are. His dress, bearing, manners, movement and speech are in the highest sense of the word, princely. When he enters a room someone quite extraordinary is there.

K always felt a dissociation between himself and his body. He had a very special responsibility for his body and looked after it as a cavalry officer might have looked after his horse—a simile that appealed to him. He drove it hard, rarely letting it off its yoga exercises (physical ones only) and long afternoon walks, however tired he was. For many years he did Dr Bates’s eye exercises regularly with the result that he never had to wear glasses. He was also extremely strict with his diet. A lifelong vegetarian, though not a vegan, he indulged in no stimulants, not even tea or coffee. The care he took with his clothes was again akin to a cavalry officer’s concern with the grooming of a horse. Wherever he went he wore the appropriate clothes for the country or place he was in so as to fade as much as possible into the background. It was not his fault that because of a natural elegance, a natural good taste in clothes and the figure of a young man he stood out wherever he went.

In his last years K was deeply concerned with how his work was to be carried on after his death. He was insistent that there should be no interpreters of his teaching, that no one should have authority to speak in his name, that no temple or dogma should be built up around his teaching. ‘Truth is not yours or mine,’ he said. ‘It has no country, no race, it has no people, it has no belief, no dogma. I have repeated this ad nauseam.’ But discussion was not interpretation, he averred. ‘Discuss, criticise, go into it. Read K’s books and intellectually tear it to pieces. Or intellectually go with it. Discuss. That’s not interpretation.’¹³

K was particularly anxious that the Foundations he had set up to administer his work should act as one and that the schools he had started in India, England and America should continue to flourish. In his last two years he had become greatly interested in the building of a Krishnamurti adult centre on land belonging to his English school, Brockwood Park, in Hampshire. He wanted it to be quite apart from the school, a quiet place where people seriously concerned with his teaching could go and study it. He also wanted similar centres to be built at Rishi Valley and Rajghat in India.

As K saw violence increasing everywhere in the world, the need for a radical change in the human psyche became ever more urgent before mankind destroyed itself. He was well aware that after all the years he had been speaking to huge audiences in many parts of the world, not one person, certainly not one of those closest to him, had undergone a mutation. Yet if this mutation could take place in only one person, his teaching could go on flowering. He had the idea that the more the members of his Foundations could be brought together and the more they could be with him, the more chance there would be of them working together in harmony as one body.

At the same time during his last six years he wished through discussion to dig deeper and deeper into the significance of life. He welcomed the chance to talk publicly or privately to any man or woman deeply concerned with the problems of living, though he knew it was no good talking to anyone with a didactic or closed mind. Enquiry had to be tentative. For several years he had been holding discussions with scientists and psychologists in the West and with pandits and scholars in the East, both individually and in groups and seminars. He had given newspaper interviews and radio and television broadcasts in several countries but in these it was impossible to touch more than the surface of his teaching. In so many of his interviews it was apparent how anxious the interviewers were to pigeon-hole him, to compare him with some other religious teacher or philosopher. Raymond Mortimer, who never met him, once said to me that he could not be a great religious teacher because he had never read the Gospels!

Since 1966 K had not lived at Ojai pending the result of a lawsuit with Rajagopal who, from the time of Nitya’s death, had managed all his financial affairs, edited his books and arranged for their publication as the President of a Trust, Krishnamurti Writings Inc. (KWINC). In the years while the lawsuit dragged on K, when in California, had stayed with Mary Zimbalist in her beautiful house at Malibu and had given his annual talks at Santa Monica. He had dissociated himself from KWINC and set up Krishnamurti Foundations in England, America and India in 1968, ’69, and ’70 respectively. In 1974 the lawsuit was at last settled out of Court; KWINC was dissolved and another organisation, K & R Foundation, of which Rajagopal had control, was formed. This organisation was to retain the copyright in K’s works prior to July 1968.^* A hundred and sixty acres of land at the western end of the valley, including the Oak Grove where K had held annual gatherings since 1928, and eleven acres at the upper end, including Pine Cottage where K had had his mystical experience in 1922, and the larger house close by, Arya Vihara, were conveyed to the Krishnamurti Foundation of America.

Mary Zimbalist, in accordance with K’s wishes (which were always her own too), sold her house at Malibu and built a house at Ojai incorporating Pine Cottage. She was not required to pay for the land but the house would at her death revert to the American Foundation. It was not until March 1978 that the new house was ready for her and K to move into, though K had resumed speaking in the Oak Grove in 1975. At the same time as the house was going up, a primary day school, the Oak Grove School, adjoining the Oak Grove, was started. This was the only Krishnamurti school in the United States.

On returning from India to Ojai in February 1980, K with his tremendous new energy felt that he was not being ‘used enough’. ‘What am I to do here for two months?’ he asked Mary Zimbalist. ‘I am being wasted.’ He felt at times that something was calling him from far away. This was a great worry to Mary.

The Secretary of the American Foundation was Erna Lilliefelt. She and her husband, Theodor, were two others who had come into K’s life at just the right moment. Without them he would hardly have been able to set up the American Foundation in 1969 or start the Oak Grove School. Erna was the linchpin of the Foundation.

K found much to do, as it happened, in connection with the new Oak Grove School, talking to the staff and parents. Mark Lee, an American who had an Indian wife, a paediatrician, was the first Director of the school. He had previously been Head of the junior school at Rishi Valley and had taught at other schools in California, England and Switzerland. Many parents had moved to the Ojai Valley so that their children might attend the school and they played a much greater part in the running of it than if it had been a boarding school, often causing difficulties.

K was certainly not wasted when in March David Bohm went to stay at Ojai with his wife and started holding discussions with him. David Bohm was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, London University. He had been a friend of Einstein and had written books on the quantum theory and relativity. His latest book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in the summer of 1980, propounding a revolutionary theory of physics in accordance with K’s teaching of the wholeness of life, was to be widely recognised for its scientific discoveries. He had attended nearly all K’s talks in Europe and California since 1961 and they had already had many discussions together, but during this 1980 visit eight dialogues took place between them in April. These, together with five others which took place at Brockwood Park in June, were published under the title The Ending of Time.¹⁴ This has proved to be one of K’s most successful publications. The dialogues were edited anonymously, by Mary Cadogan, the Secretary of the English Foundation, who had worked for K since 1958.

Mary Cadogan is herself a successful author,¹⁵ but this was the first book she had edited for Krishnamurti and she was certainly thrown in the deep end. To some people this book reads like a thriller; others find it hard going. It is a conversation with quick questions and responses and does not, therefore, lend itself to quotation. It deals with the ending of thought as well as the ending of time—that is, psychological time and thought which are the past. All that we have learnt, all that we are, the whole content of our consciousness, is the past stored in our memory as thought, and the cluttering up of the brain with the past means that there is no true insight because everything is seen through a cloud of thought which must always be limited by the self. The past as thought, memory, must go for the new to be. ‘That emptying of the past, which is anger, jealousy, beliefs, dogmas, attachments etc. must be done,’ K says. ‘If that is not emptied, if any part of that exists, it will inevitably lead to illusion brought by desire, by hope, by wanting security.’

‘Is it really possible’, K asks, ‘for time to end—the whole idea of time as the past—chronologically, so that there is no tomorrow at all? There is the feeling, the actual reality, psychologically, of having no tomorrow. I think that is the healthiest way of living—which doesn’t mean that I become irresponsible! That would be too childish.’ In going into this question K and David Bohm speak of the ground of all being, which is the beginning and ending of everything, and of the necessity for mankind to touch this ground if life is to have real significance.

If the brain remains in self-created darkness it wears itself out with the resulting conflict. Can such a brain ever renew itself? Can the deterioration of the brain cells and senil...