Jiddu Krishnamurti lived from 1895 to 1986, and is regarded as one of the greatest philosophical and spiritual figures of the twentieth century. Krishnamurti claimed no allegiance to any caste, nationality or religion and was bound by no tradition. His purpose was to set humankind unconditionally free from the destructive limitations of conditioned mind. For nearly sixty years he traveled the world and spoke spontaneously to large audiences until the end of his life in 1986 at the age of ninety. He had no permanent home, but when not traveling, he often stayed in Ojai, California, Brockwood Park, England, and in Chennai, India. In his talks, he pointed out to people the need to transform themselves through self knowledge, by being aware of the subtleties of their thoughts and feelings in daily life, and how this movement can be observed through the mirror of relationship.
j.krishnamurti the book of life
There are two types of learning: psychological and physiological. The mind never learns psychologically. It has learned, and with what it has learned, it meets the challenge of life. It is always translating life or the new challenge according to what it has learned.
Who are we? Why are we here? What is the significance of life? How can we live life to the fullest? These are just a few of the many existential questions that we face as humans on earth. Many of us desperately search for answers to these hard-to-answer questions.
If you want to look at life truthfully, learn to free yourself of grand theories and instead attempt to explain things in totality. This is hard since many people consider themselves part of an ideology or religion and we tend to force situations into our narrow worldview.
But in life, there is no lasting security. The author says that life is short, and all of us are essentially alone. Not even the people closest to us can give us that security because they are also alone.
The problem is, we spend so much time following examples of other people that we miss the significance of what life truly is. Life is personal to each one of us. And the truth is, no other authority can help us with our intimate experience.
Lives of Alcyone, or The Lives of Alcyone, was the title given to the books derived from a series of articles published in The Theosophist beginning in April, 1910. The series was entitled "Rents in the Veil of Time," and each article had a subtitle like "The Lives of Alcyone" or "The Lives of Orion."
Alcyone was the "star name" given to young Jiddu Krishnamurti by Charles Webster Leadbeater, author of these articles. Leadbeater used his clairvoyant abilities to examine the past lives of Krishnamurti and others, going back as far as 22,662 BCE. Most of the people purportedly surrounding Alcyone during these past lives had reincarnated to be present with him in his life as Jiddu Krishnamurti. Each past life was presented in the form of a narrative describing personalities, relationships, and deeds. The individual characters were assigned names from astronomy or mythology, which were carried across all the interlinking narratives. Geographic settings varied from Atlantis to India to South America and other sites of ancient civilizations, which were described graphically. Leadbeater was well aware of the dramatic qualities of his narratives, as he provided a list of "Dramatis Personae" with each story.
Many of the star names and stories were also used in Leadbeater's 1913 book Man Whence How and Whither. Publication of these articles and books brought excitement and energy to the Theosophical Society based in Adyar, but also much criticism. Members plunged into study of karma and reincarnation, but were distracted by the promises of clairvoyant vision. People in other branches of the Theosophical Movement were appalled at this side-trip away from the teachings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and into the cult of personality.
It was then that Mr. Varley asked if something could not be found out concerning the life that he then lived. Bishop Leadbeater' s reply was that he did not quite know that he was authorized to do that kind of work with such occult power as he had, but that he would ask his Master. He did so then and there, and the Master gave his permission.
Then began a work which was continued on several afternoons and evenings, when Bishop Leadbeater investigated clairvoyantly the lives lived by Mr. Varley, following all of them life after life up to the present incarnation. As Bishop Leadbeater described what he saw, Mr. Varley took down rough notes, and immediately afterwards wrote out as much as he could recollect of what was described. (1. The Theosophist, April 1912. The lives of Erato, as published in The Theosophist are not in the words of Mr. Varley himself. His transcription was not considered sufficiently literary, and so Mr. E. A. Wodehouse re-wrote them. I prefer Mr. Varley' s simpler manner, as more suggestive.) This is the first of the series of lives investigated. Later the name Erato was given to Mr. Varley.[2]
When she was at Adyar as a young woman in 1910-1911, Clara Codd assisted with the preparation of materials for this book. In her autobiography, So Rich a Life, she gave this account of the work:
In another stage of production, charts were drawn to reflect the relationships. Some of these were published. An artist painted representations of some of the leading characters in the Lives, and these were printed in the final book. They were also available as glass "magic lantern" slides.
Adyar Theosophists speculated about the current-life personalities of the "star names." A magazine review hinted that "Ulysses" in the November, 1917 issue of The Theosophist was Henry Steel Olcott.[12] Each time a name was revealed, people reread the previous "lives" to add context to the stories; so-and-so was married to so-and-so! College student Fritz Kunz commented on the star names in his letters to his sisters. He wrote in a 1910 letter to Alma:
My only evidence that Orion is Basil [Hodgson-Smith] is that he shows the characteristics of that character, and this life carries out the idea to a certain extent. I have a very powerful bit of inductive evidence. The only dates calculated are those of Mr. Leadbeater, Orion, Alcyone and a certain J.V. The close relation of Orion and Sirius as these dates show carry out what I know to have been their close relation in the past.[14]
Some "named" members were very open about their past-life identity. Marie Russak Hotchener signed articles and letters with her moniker "Helios." Having a "star name" became a badge of honor - a symbol of in-group status, even though that was never Leadbeater's intention. Envy and jealousy arose. Members whose lives had not been occultly investigated would ask Leadbeater to "read" their Akashic records, and to tell where they fit into the tables and charts. Finally he declined to pursue any more past-life researches.
The case of Clara Codd is a good example. Amusingly, Bishop Leadbeater allotted to her, as a reincarnating ego, the name of the constellation Pisces, the Fishes, making play of the fact that a cod is a kind of fish. Anybody who cares to trace the lives of Pisces, in the extensive tables given in The Lives of Alcyone, who find that the character with that name always had a different marriage partner in every life. Others might return to former partners, but Pisces always turned each time adventurously to somebody new.
Krishnamurti was born in India. In April 1909 Krishnamurti first met Charles Webster Leadbeater, who claimed clairvoyance. Leadbeater had noticed Krishnamurti on the Society's beach on the Adyar river, and was amazed by the "most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it." In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the Theosophy organization behind it. Krishnamurti said he had no allegiance to any nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life travelling the world, speaking to large and small groups and individuals. He wrote many books.
At Ojai in August and September 1922, Krishnamurti went through an intense 'life-changing' experience. This has been variously characterised as a spiritual awakening, a psychological transformation, and a physical reconditioning. The initial events happened in two distinct phases: first a three-day spiritual experience, and two weeks later, a longer-lasting condition that Krishnamurti and those around him referred to as the process. This condition recurred, at frequent intervals and with varying intensity, until his death.
Self-knowledge comes into being through the responses we have to life. How we respond, internally or externally, in every moment is saying something about who we are. We put our will towards the things that we want.
Even though Bruce loved this kind of heady philosophy, he very much lived in the reality of the present, and was trying to accomplish specific goals in his life. Bruce was actively trying to integrate these ideas of the yielding will, taking natural action, the sense of stillness, and the void.
Most importantly, it's about realizing that everything we do and say matters, which is basically the definition of a meaningful life. We are networked with, in a relationship with, everything and everyone else that exists, and what we are the world is too. So if we are greedy and fearful and violent and selfish, then that's exactly what we will perpetuate in our daily lives.
Our problems cannot be solved by minds of the same quality as those that created them. As we'll discuss later, all thought is conditioned, and since life is always new - always refreshing and renewing itself - we can never bring our old patterns of thinking to bear on existing problems and expect them to be effective. Life continues to flow and evolve, and we must evolve alongside it.
Life is what's known as a wicked learning environment, where formulas and recipes fail as change is introduced. Life moves ever forward, and the correct answers we have today will not be true tomorrow. As life changes, we must change too. We are co-creators with evolution, and "that's the way it's always been done" is no longer good enough, if it ever was. 2ff7e9595c
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