Jiddu Krishnamurthy – His Thought and

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTHY – HIS THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

Jiddu Krishnamurthy heralded as an Avatar is acclaimed as a World-Teacher by Mrs. Annie Besant. He is affirmed as a disturber of complacency, a subtractor of everything which stands between man and his maker who is man himself, a destroyer of agreeable illusions, by Claude Bragdon.

J.K. is unique amongst the world’s great religious teachers. He is unique because his greatest teaching is summed up in a remark he once made, “the teacher is not important, throw him overboard.” In his expression ordinary words acquire a sudden glow of hitherto unsuspected meanings. His startling perception of the depths of meaning in simple words conveys the meaning to the listener with a disturbing impact. Brevity is really the soul of wit with him. His expression is a welcome relief from the wordy, long-winding, diffusive style and the stuff of most of the philosophers.

His philosophy is great because it is ed by his fearless, almost heroic, strength of character. One can perceive it in his uncompromising act of dissolution of The Order of The Star and in his intrepid outright rejection of all traditions. He is an inexorable enemy of all time-honoured traditions since they are all time-cursed turning themselves into cages for man.

About the religious parasites, the Priests, Babas, Swamis, he says, “As the animals in the circus are trained to act for the amusement of crowds, so the individual, through fear, looks to these spiritual performers, the so called Priests and Swamis, the dispensers of spurious spirituality. Their main function is to entertain, they invent rituals, disciplines and worships, which may look beautiful, but soon degenerate into superstitions and knavery under the cloak of service”. Commenting on these words, J.K.’s admirer and scholar, Rene Fouere says, “Harsh as these words are, they show the utterly uncompromising attitude of the Indian sage who is loyal to Truth and refuses to be loyal to anything else”. Truth for him is Life in the present, is eternity which for him is Happiness, is Love, is Freedom, is the present Moment. Rituals and ceremonies are dangerous distractions drawing man away from the only thing that matters, man himself and his Life in the present.

We fail to see the significance of the present moment as we enjoy a chronic habit of living or lazying in the sweet cob-webs of past memories and future hopes reducing the present to an unavailing nullity. His message comes as a ray of light into these misleading webs. There is no gulf between himself and his message. He says, “In the light of what I live, my words are true”. It is perhaps such statements that made Henry Miller say, “there is something about Krishnamurthy’s utterances which makes the reading of books seem utterly superfluous”.

J.K. is a philosopher with a passionate love and concern for the human beings. His heart beats with warmth and tenderness for man’s ignorance, helplessness and tragedy. He suffers with them. The unblessed and cheerless lives of beggars and orphans, the unloved people, the desolate people, cause agonizing sorrow to him. People come to him to be saved. They want him to make them happy. He knows that no one can truly make them happy. Man is his own saviour. Take the question “What is wrong with us”? He answers that “We have forgotten to love. We have built walls of separation”. Love and affection have faded out of the hearts of men. Their place is usurped by false hollow love and savage lust.

As a unique philosopher, his way of expression is audaciously and confidently free from all traditions, ideals, superstitions, falsifying and hasty judgements and suppositions. “Not only does he address the modern man in a modem language, but he is the only Indian teacher who is completely free from all traditions, eastern and western,” says Rene Fouere. One can see that his denial of traditions reaches its acme when he says that there is no God. For him, man become perfect is God. God is a state of Consciousness to be attained by man. That being the case, belief and disbelief are meaningless. He tells us, “The communist does not accept God, you accept that there is God. There is not much difference between you and the person who denies God. Both are the result of a conditioned mind”. The minds of people, overloaded with personal and traditional ideas and superstitions, cannot see the Truth. They are dead minds “embalmed in prejudice”, to use Krishnamtuthy’s striking phrase. He says, “To see things as they are, cease to look at them through the eyes of yesterday”.

Man can perfect himself through “total awareness” and “freedom from the known”, two of Krishnamurthy’s key phrases. Man’s perfection or emancipation comes when he realizes the “no-mind”. Normally our mind is cluttered or stuffed with the debris of thoughts, fears, hopes, cravings, memories, prejudices, ego and intolerance. When this debris is cleared off by a kind of psychological surgery; the mind becomes empty, completely still. This empty mind is the “no mind”. It has attained “the freedom from the known”, from the debris of the mind which is the known. Then “total awareness” comes to it. Krishnamurthy lays great stress on the integrating and healing action of awareness. To him it is the golden key to the kingdom of happiness and freedom. Aldous Huxley, an admirer of J.K., calls this no-mind “virginity of mind”. Krishnamurthy calls it “clarity” which is not of the mind, but of the no-mind. In that sense it is spiritual. Huxley says that “total awareness starts with the realization of my ignorance and my impotence”. Then humility steps in showing the way to realize all higher things. 

No teacher, no guru can teach us total awareness and freedom from the known. This points to the non-guru. Like the no-mind, non-guru is the guru made empty of all the qualities of the guru, his greedy designs, his intolerant ego, his noxious prejudices, his love of ease, his abominable self-seeking aims, his unprincipled love of money, power and enjoyment, his motives of indoctrination and his baneful influence. These are the qualities of all of us including the gurus, some qualities held in check and some let loose. J.K. always stresses the point that man is his own maker, his own guru. Just as the no-mind is my own mind made empty, so non-guru is myself (not somebody else from outside) made empty of all the harmful qualities of the guru or the debris ofthe mind. The goal of life, according to J.K., is Truth which for him means Freedom, Happiness, Harmony, Love, Life, not as we know and experience them, but as they are known and experienced by the deeper mind or the no-mind with its total awareness, by a soul like J.K., by a Mother Teresa, by a Florence Nightingale. It is indisputably evident that man, with his present mind, cannot resolve the depressing problems he has himself created. The mind, J.K. says, cannot “fundamentally change itself by analyzing, evaluating and condemning.” The mind is    self-centered always thinking around ‘me’ and ‘mine’ causing more and more unhappiness. It is the fast-breeding source of problems. The no-mind alone with its real purified qualities of Love, Freedom and Happiness, can solve the problems and put an end to their breeding process. Change your way of thinking and attain the no-mind, unless you change, no science, no politics, no religion, no God, can save you–so rings J. K.’s admonition. His message comes couched in simple unadorned language free from all allusion to mythology and technical jargon. He shows the hidden and unknown side of things. He has the ability to give us a glimpse and a taste of the Truth. Such language, says Henry Miller, is “naked, revelatory and inspiring”.

To estimate what J.K. has done, here are the words of E.A. Wodehouse “It would befound that J. K.  had done something no less epoch-making and far-reaching, in his own sphere, than the revolution wrought by Einstein in the domain of Physics”.

Books of reference: The Mind of Krishnamurthy, edited by Luis S.R. Vas.