Imagine you had a powerful organization of about 45,000 members built for you to lead. What if that organization had the following "Declaration of Principles"
- We believe that a great Teacher will soon appear in the world, and we wish so to live now that we may be worthy to know Him when He comes.
- We shall try, therefore, to keep Him in our minds always, and to do in His name, and therefore to the best of our ability, all the work which comes to us in our daily occupations.
- As far as our ordinary duties allow, we shall endeavour to devote a portion of our time each day to some definite work which may help to prepare for His coming.
- We shall seek to make Devotion, Steadfastness and Gentleness prominent characteristics of our daily life.
- We shall try to begin and end each day with a short period devoted to the asking of His blessing upon all that we try to do for Him and in His name.
- We regard it as our special duty to try to recognise and reverence greatness in whomsoever shown, and to strive to co-operate, as far as we can, with those whom we feel to be spiritually our superiors.
What are you going to do and most importantly WHY?
I'm a person who is used to reading anything I can get my hands on since childhood. Now the media is publishing less and less valuable. content But that doesn't mean I don't come across some wonderful surprises to read away from keyboard. That's how I was introduced to Jiddu Krishnamurti. I had heard the name Krishnamurti beforen and I had heard people I respect speak very highly of him. Eventually my curiosity fueled reading led me into reading and I could confirm all the great things I've heard.
Jiddu Krishnamurti was encountered by Charles Webster Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society at a very young age and he was taken in by the society and was given the best of care and opportunity to grow. I didn't reach much on the internet. What I read AFK described a very powerful incident in J.Krishnamurti's life. He lost his brother at a young age. He cared about his brother very much and the loss obviously made him sad. These things are not really out of the ordinary. But its the way people deal with things at the edge of their lives that truly reveal them and honestly speaking, it's not the tragedies that really screw up our lives. I could relate very well with the next part of the story.
Jiddu while going through his grief came across a funeral. Somebody had left the world and the dead was being carried away. At that point Jiddu realized something profound yet simple. He noticed that he doesn't give a damn. He had no grief towards the person who died and was being carried away and the people who were crying and grief stricken shed no tears for the brother that Jiddu lost
Some SJW would make this an opportunity to call for some collective weeping. Fortunately we don't have much of that here. This is a very powerful realization that I too had gone through in my teenage years although it was more of a matter of getting grounded and thinking in terms of computer algorithms. But the syntax was much similar. Human suffering is pretty much of a self delusion and so is happiness. You can can take the wheel and control your experience and you might even be able to transcend. It is you who is feeding and maintaining your suffering. If you cut a finger, that pain is real. But when a model is crying and throwing an angry fit over a broken nail, that's suffering. For something darker, you can think about all the violent crimes happening all over the world which also happen to be pretty much at an all time low. Don't miss the video.
I quickly knew that this is a truly wise person with real understanding of the world. When I made an #introduceyourself post titled A Gateway to my mind: 3 hours of me trying to convey the stuff going in my mind to the world I was told that my views of the world are much similar to Advaita Vedanta and I've previously been told that my posts express a lot of non-dualism teachings of the east. But when I dig deep I look at them like a Libertarian looking at Republicans. There are vital fundamental differences.
The best spirituality I've found in modern days actually came to me in the form of Relational Quantum Mechanics
You can read a somewhat long post with few necessary videos here
I will drop some more helpful reading links below:
http://www.jayarava.org/texts/kaccanagottasuttam-landscape.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
http://web.pdx.edu/~pmoeck/lectures/mermin_amjphys1998.pdf
http://diamond-sutra.com/
Hopefully you'd read the texts and expand your minds. Now back to J. Krishnamurti.
As a person who like to summarize things and consolidate knowledge I'd skip some parts and talk about The World Teacher. Behind the scenes Krishnamurti was brought up in a way that he was a coming of another Jesus Christ or something similar. Depending on the personal beliefs of the members of Order of the Star in the East and Theosophical Society which shared many members, Krishnamurti was the spiritual leader of their vision. To some he was Maitreya , to some it was the second coming and to some it was their version of the great messiah. An entire following was built in expectation of his coming and eventually Jiddu Krishnamurti was finally set to be formally introduced and accepted into the role he was secretly -and near the end not so secretly- groomed for.
This is a person who was about to be literally treated a Christ by a well funded global following. This was the status of Sai Baba or even Dalai Lama handed over to a person's lap who was fully capable of handling it all. It wasn't an achievement but a tribute. This is nothing like the life of any spiritual leader who made their name. They made it and Jiddu was simply given that. What did he do?
He gave a speech at the very climax of the entire phenomenon and in the brief time I spent reading about the person, it became pretty much the best first impressions of a person I've ever experienced it. For someone who has been around me it might even look like just narcissism from my end. Either way, here we go.
"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies."
Then he dissolved everything that was built for him and Charles Webster Leadbeater himself claimed that "the Coming has gone wrong". Personally I'd say they had it coming from any real teacher fit to teach a god damn thing on anywhere in the universe. When people ask about religion and spirituality I can now point them to this incident and this quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti. The moment I read this quote was one of the most ecstatic moments of my life. I was that happy and that respectful.