One of the last things Krishnamurti said was, “Keep the teachings clean and look after the land,” a statement as remarkable for what it leaves out as it is for the two things he mentions expressly. No mention, for instance, of education or of that broad field he cultivated so carefully, and of which he stated so succinctly, You are the World, The Observer is the Observed—the scattered field of consciousness. ‘Keep the teachings clean and look after the land.’ The implications are enormous.
The word dharma is derived from the phoneme dhr, meaning to hold, to maintain, to keep. It signifies, in Hinduism, behaviours considered to be in accord with Rta, the order that makes life and the universe possible. It includes rights, duties, laws, conduct, virtue and the ‘right way of living’. In Buddhism, it means cosmic law and order and is handsomely incorporated in the Noble Eightfold Path with such principles as Right Livelihood, Right Action, Right Attitude—eventually, I believe, Right Meditation.
What strikes one, as one ponders this, is the preponderance, the presence, of the word right and its link to the order of the universe. Without this ‘rightness’ there will be chaos and collapse, and we humans are the means by which it holds together. In other words, there is not only a physical/material order, there is a moral order governing the universe. In our drenched-in-materialism modern world it may be difficult to countenance this, even as a possibility, but ‘keep the teachings clean’ is an obvious point of reference. Nothing stays clean by itself—we have to tend our garden, even brush our teeth—so an application to the task is implied, an application moreover that betokens understanding. We need to “keep moving”, as K would say.
According to traditional thought, svadharma is ‘that action which is in harmony with your true nature’ (svabhava); it is ‘in accordance with your skills and talents’ and ‘that for which you are responsible’ (your karma). This brings it down to the level of the individual and implies that not only as a species (homo sapiens) are we responsible—via ritual, via attunement, via right living—for the maintenance of the cosmic order, we are at the same time, in our personal lives, duty-bound to fulfil our destiny. That which is in ‘harmony with our true nature’ and ‘in accordance with our skills and talents’ may be part of the picture, but it is surely not the whole of it.
Many things happen to us—a chance encounter, a conversation, a new and different work of art—for which we may be totally unprepared but which thrust us willy-nilly into the next phase of our life. What is implied in all this may remain obscure, hidden under layers of accumulated karma, but the feeling, when it happens, is one of release. The opaque prison of our conditioning reveals a hidden skylight—dusty, dirty, cobweb-ridden—but a skylight nonetheless, a light unto the sky. “I am going there,” something within us says.
I never wanted to be a teacher. “There’s always teaching,” a friend of mine said; and another, more bluntly, “Can’t you think of something better?” It was synonymous with drudgery, with recalcitrant students, with the flame of intelligence being gradually dimmed until it ended on the scrapheap of its own exhaustion. A weary, predictable, failed, faltering life. Probably, faute de mieux, marriage and children. Probably, in tandem with that, promotion—a borrowed ambition, falsely fulfilled. This is what they called the real world.
It was clear to me, at the same time, that the world had lost its moral compass. The march of science over the centuries had certainly given rise to a value-free world, but at a terrible price—it was value-less. The bottom had dropped out of Western culture, and the fervid attempts to fill the void resembled nothing so much as a non-stop shopping spree. The Mall was the ever-open, everempty maw, the consumerist monster swallowing its own children. The lost inner meaning of the twentieth century was written in The Waste Land and in Waiting for Godot, in the nightmarish narratives of Franz Kafka and the flayed, distorted figures of Francis Bacon. We were living in a world from which God had fled. It was the end of humanism, as well as faith.
It was into this world that Krishnamurti was born, on 11 May 1895. He did not show much promise as a student, but when in1909 he was ‘discovered’ on Adyar beach by the eminent Theosophist CW Leadbeater who declared that his aura had “not a trace of selfishness”, his life took a totally unexpected turn: he was brought up to be the World Teacher. For some years the Theosophists had been looking for a ‘vehicle’ and they found it in this diffident, rather vacant boy. Though he later dissolved the organisation that had been built up around him, declaring (1929) in his best-known speech that ‘Truth is a Pathless Land’, he never denied that he was the World Teacher. This is stated here as a matter of record.
So far as one knows, only the Buddha and Jesus Christ have been similarly thought of as World Teachers. Their message of universal compassion has elevated mankind, if only partially. The next step, as it were, was to shed light on our darkness, to draw out the potential in human beings—in short, to draw a line under history, which is essentially the history of consciousness, and to bring to the fore the importance of perception. This is synonymous with the awakening of intelligence, which Krishnamurti spent endless patient hours explaining. The gateway to our ‘progress’—the grasping of the ungraspable—lies not through the medium of time and thought (thought-time) but through a direct, immediate perception of the whole in which the part then naturally finds its place. Specifically, thought no longer grasps—it realises its own limitation and falls silent. This is the threshold on which we stand.
To bring, via consciousness, the entire human species to this existential moment is what he came to do. It is not something that can be worked up to, striven for, envisaged or imagined. It is here-and-now—or it is not. But, somehow, everything depends on it—without this clarity, we are doomed. No outward action is adequate. To bring this home, in terms of consciousness, is the whole import (and impact) of the teachings. It is also why the teachings are dharma. They are ‘right’, just-so, immarcessibly, imperishably true.
I was living with friends in Montreal when I first heard tell of Krishnamurti in person. We travelled to New York to hear him speak. He sat bolt-upright on a straight-backed chair, in a blue suit, impeccably dressed. It was as if the ancient oracle spoke. His statements came from a deep well—unprepared, resonant, rich with meaning, “Prosperity without austerity leads to violence.” The evidence lay all around.
A chord had been struck, but the follow-up was not obvious. Nor was my life, at that time, very stable. The following year, in the summer of 1969, I came to India for the first time. It was the revelation of a new dimension, like visiting a place of which one hardly knew the name. I felt it as soon as I stepped off the plane. I think this question of dimensionality is vital.
I lived for six weeks, and later for a whole year, in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. It was there, perhaps, that I began to feel that education could have some meaning beyond an amiable transmission of knowledge. I was not yet ready to go the whole hog and drop the idea of transmission altogether, but I taught at the school. It is a good school. One thing that distinguishes it from other schools is that it had no examinations, internal or external. Most schools do have examinations, and the change in the atmosphere is palpable as soon as the ‘exam season’ comes along. Anxiety increases by leaps and bounds, stress-related behaviours emerge, and examinations and exam-taking become prime topics of conversation. It is a well-to-be avoided state of affairs, but very few schools manage to avoid it.
To paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita, “When unrighteousness flourishes and adharma is rife, I am born again and again.” Thus speaks the Blessed Lord, Sri Krishna, in his conversation with Arjuna.
J Krishnamurti lived once only, uniquely. His teachings are not like any others’. But he initiated a chain reaction in consciousness, the reverberations of which are constant and unfathomable. Even much of the upheaval we see around us may be attributable to his continuing ‘effect’. Certain it is that consciousness needs a shakeup and that nothing new can come about without a dismantling of the old. Are we ready for it, are we strong enough for it? Actually, it is touch-and-go. And, Krishna’s being ‘born again and again’ may be transferred, existentially, to the moment’s being born—ever-young, ever-fresh—to the individual’s being born. Incarnate now!
This revelation bears directly on the topic of dharma and svadharma. The rightness and righteousness of the dharma of the teachings isn’t something that can be learnt and stored: it is not the outcome of the past at all. Thought begets time and time begets sorrow, and once we are taken over by them, we are caught. There is no escape within this loop. That is why perception is so important, why, indeed, it takes on a moral tone. We cannot live, as we have done, by the past, following ancient injunctions and laws. It is not commandments and obedience that matter—which is itself a psychosocial model from the past—but clear, fresh thinking and original insight. Only these can take us through the current miasma.
To incarnate now is to touch the cosmic order, which is moral and spiritual as well as material. It is to find again one’s proper place in the universe, the rounded space in an angular world. Indeed, the world itself may lose its angularity once it is seen for what it is—a construct. It may loosen its terrible hold on us. For the darkness we live in is of our own creation though it goes back for millennia. Like time itself, we have built and believe in it—just as we believe in the afterlife, in reincarnation and a continuing time-existence. We are the prisoners of our own scope and the willing slaves of our own ignorance.
Krishnamurti, as the World Teacher, has shown us the extent and the depth of our entanglement, using the light of rationality when that would do, and inviting us, at the same time, to take the existential leap beyond the boundaries of our own making. It is an ongoing, moment-by-moment invitation. It is not in high heaven, or even deep in earth. It is exactly where we are. And, it is who we are.
This congruence of perception and identity, this ‘ever-newness’ of the entity, is in itself a step beyond time. We are prone to think even of the timeless in terms of time—as something remote, ethereal, impossible—whereas it may not be like that at all: it may be closer than our own breath. The very ‘push’ of thought may take us past it.
Other than stating what it is not, the timeless has no relationship to time. It simply is. And, as it is, it is also what is—the underlay, the source, of consciousness as well as its substance in daily life. There is not the source and the content: all is one. Our sense of the ‘new dharma’ depends on this perception, which may make it difficult if the terms are not clear.
After years of travelling and ‘experiments in living’ which included a variety of communities—alternatives, quite common at the time, to the bourgeois nuclear family—I arrived at Brockwood Park in 1975. Krishnamurti didn’t like the word community which, to him, implied exclusivity. But community speaks to communication and, at a deeper level, communion. This obviously lay at the heart of Brockwood’s intentions.
Between May and November Krishnaji spoke with us—once a week with the staff, once a week with the students, and once a week with the community at large. Since there was some vague idea of incorporating adults, it was originally called the Krishnamurti Education Centre, but the exigencies of a growing student body quickly ensured that it became a school, that it established itself in the world as a school. All new enterprises, businesses, foundations face the possibility of not surviving, and it is thanks to the dedication of the staff—especially the initial three (Dorothy and Montague Simmons and Doris Pratt)—that it was well-stocked and flourishing when I arrived.
Brockwood provided three things I was looking for—an intentional community with a spiritual basis, a group of people with whom one had a ‘wavelength’, and a means of earning a livelihood. The latter was meagre, to say the least, but like everyone else I accepted it. Being a full-time teacher also went with the job, along with other responsibilities, but I pitched in—we all did—and was soon at home.
This sense of feeling or being at home is crucial. Most schools are cold, bleak institutions and uncannily align themselves with the definition of being an extension of ‘the military-industrial complex’. They are. But in summer, when Krishnaji gave public talks at Brockwood, the whole place was transformed once again into a country seat, a Hampshire manor, of which Jane Austen could be proud. It had none of the reek and nervous tension of a school as, indeed, it did not during term-time. Students as well as staff felt it was their home.
This ties in with the sense that these schools—all these schools— are places where care and affection are paramount, where the human individual counts—not the numbers—and where one is given permission to be oneself. While most schools condition, subtly or grossly, here the attempt is made to unravel conditioning, to see it for what it is and to go beyond it. In this sense, the timeless is always present.
The Buddha-Christ-‘Maitreyic’ consciousness was synonymous with the consciousness of J Krishnamurti. At no point did he need to ‘stretch’ for it: it flowed easily through him in daily life. What manifested outwardly as a separate human being did so only in the eyes of others; in his own view, he was never separate. The fact is, we are so inured to feeling separate that we can scarcely imagine, let alone live, a different state. Yet the daily presence of this singular man brought home to us—with or without words—that such a state is, indeed, quite natural, that it is, in fact, the Natural State. The total relaxedness of his body as well as the resonant peace of his mind proclaimed wordlessly that division was false. It was no concept, no ideological imposition: it was here-and-now reality; it was what is.
I became a teacher by default. I found that I could do it, that there was more to it than met the eye, and that the field of learning was limitless. This brought a quality of excitement to it—the excitement of ‘newness’, not novelty. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the team-taught courses of the early 1980s which began to forge a link between the teachings and academics. The shift of emphasis was wholly beneficial. These courses—One Man, One Earth, Modern Movement, etc.,—went under the title of General Studies, but by implication and often expressly they dealt with the ‘matter of consciousness’. This is the substratum of our thought and action, the general ground from which they arise. It is living and moving, not static as we assume, and the fact that we are not alive to its movement is part of our ‘sorrow of ignorance’.
These courses, while attempting to redress this balance, did wonders for us as ‘teacher-learners’. It also alerted me to the fact that the learn-it, teach-it approach is false. It is part of the timeworn view of things: replication, repetition and the persistence of what was. Hierarchy and authority are germane to it.
But learning is linked to limitlessness, and limitlessness partakes of the timeless. This is the fulcrum, the moment, of release. But it depends on the balance, the ‘rightness’ of things. If there is chaos and disorder there is no release, there is no basis for liberation and release; hence, the importance of dharma, of rightness, of our needing to maintain a steady course. The psychological revolution of which Krishnamurti speaks has nothing immature about it; it is not bomb- and bottle-throwing, it is not even ideational. It lies much deeper than thought and word, and it cannot be accessed by the mind as we know it. This mind, this conscious mind, must die to itself; it must cease to exist as a separate entity. Only then can one enter the Ocean.
These things, of course, are easily said; they are much, much harder to realise. But there are pointers, and even a little understanding helps. We should not mix K up with other teachers and teachings, but understand him on his own terms. This is part of the dharma of the teachings. We should live our understanding, however small, and refuse to proselytise or preach. We should give importance to attention, even consciously, as attention or observation is the key that may open the door to another dimension and, hence, to a new and different way of living.
There is nothing arbitrary or haphazard about transformation. Although it is in the natural order of things—organic—it has be worked for step by step, day by day. There are no handouts or lottery winners. It is part of the dharma of the teachings that they are supremely rational. Without that, we couldn’t be involved at all; we couldn’t even ask to be involved.
It was my svadharma to be a teacher. It carried no illusions of changing the world nor even improving it very much. But perhaps the very ordinariness of it, the lack of display and self-importance and the imperative to think of others, were quiet lessons in themselves. Perhaps one shed a little pride. If Krishnaji’s humility is anything to go by, it has been a sufficient, and necessary, learning.