Phil, it appears that our impressions about Jiddu Krishnamurti are similar. I was always fascinated by this "benediction" or "otherness" he used to encounter. It seems to be different from the non-dual stuff (the observer is the observed - which he also mentions, of course), and non-dual folks rather wouldn't say anything about the "otherness". And he had a deep reverence for this. He was afraid to say anything about it, because he felt that thoughts and desires can only spoil the experience and even block him from receiving it. But it seems to have been his most important spiritual experience.

I always felt a certain "personal" quality of this otherness, for example, he clearly says that despite of its immense destructive/creative power, it treats him with gentleness. Very true about infused contemplation.

I have the same question as you: did he opened up and responded to this otherness fully? Or maybe by being too afraid to "spoil" it, he somehow closed himself to the mystery of Divine/Human? This is a thing only between Krishnamurti and the Lord. But it's a beautiful sign that the Trinity can choose to reveal herself to anyone and that we are free to make of it what we decide and choose. I like your expression that the Presence "delighted" in him...

After I freed myself from Krishnamurti's influence (it was after a year of "devotion" to him), I became angry at him, because of his critique of holy traditions and of teism particularly. He could've been very harsh - I think he shouldn't have.
I also don't like that he refused to say "I", and always this "one thinks, one feels..." bullsh... It's like he didn't have an "I". I read somewhere, that in one of his quarrels, he shouted at a person: "I have no ego!" This is really amusing, and I say it often as an anecdote. "I" have no ego... Yeah, sure.

A passage from his Notebook:

"In the gardens [of the Vila Borghese], right in the middle of the noisy and smelly town, with its flat pines and many trees, turning yellow and brown and the smell of damp ground, there, walking with certain seriousness, was the awareness of the otherness. It was there with great beauty and tenderness; it was not that one was thinking about it - it avoids all thought - but it was there so abundantly that it caused surprise and great delight."

And:

"That presence which was at il I. [a place where he stayed] was there, waiting patiently, benignly, with great tenderness. It was like the lightning on a dark night but it was there, penetrating, blissful."

He also experienced kundalini pressures and pains sometimes in a dramatic way:

"Woke up in the middle of the night shouting and groaning; the pressure and the strain, with its peculiar pain, was intense. It must have been going on for some time and it went on for some time after waking up."

And:

"The pressure and the strain of it was there, very strongly, yesterday afternoon and this morning. Only there was a certain change; the pressure and the strain were from the back of the head, through the palate to the top of the head. A strange intensity continues. One has to be quiet only for it to begin."

Yesterday he also describes a kind of seeing I've been experiencing since Friday morning, when the 6th chakra opened completely:

"One was looking not with eyes only but with one's whole head, as though from the back of the head, with one's entire being. It was an odd experience. There was no centre from which observation was taking place. The colours and the beauty and lines of the mountains were intense."

Sounds like we have the same book, Mt.

There are some beautiful descriptions of his encounters with mystery, Other-ness, and nature, especially considering that this was a private journal. His allusions to "the process" were especially interesting to me, as could relate very much to the kinds of ordeals he described.

I share your sentiments about his avoidance of using "I" and some of the harshness with which he critiques other religions. On the other hand, some of those critiques are very valid -- especially of dogmatism, moralism and the like. K was no friend of fundamentalism, pietism, and other such nonsense. He wasn't especially enamored of Eastern meditative approaches, either, especially those that used methods and techniques to attain higher states of consciousness. His is a very pure apophatic mysticism, probably closer to Thervada Buddhism than anything else. As you know, some considered him to be Maitreya, the second Buddha, of sorts. Very interesting guy! The Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, was strongly influenced by his writings.

I have this huge biography of K, and one of my favorite stories is his recounting of how several men picked him up at an airport and were driving him to a retreat center in the mountains, where K was to present several lectures. On the way, these men were going on and on about awareness, but failed to notice that they ran over a goat with the car!!! K noticed, obviously, and found the whole thing a prime example of how an inordinate use of words and ideas can blind us to reality.

I was also deeply touched by K's Notebook when I first read it back in the early 90's. Shortly after that, I moved to Ojai and had some interesting encounters with the Krishnamurti world. At the same time I was corresponding with Bernadette Roberts and reading her books. This was a time of profound spiritual transformation for me and K and BR were influential in that regard.

In retrospect, I think they were both talking about the same thing. K's lyrical descriptions and BR's analytical thoughts were two ways of looking at the same thing, but from different worlds. K's "otherness" and BR's "no-self" are both pointing to a primarily sensory state where cognition is virtually absent. With BR, her bliss states resolved into the no-self state, but K's kept recurring. I may be simplifying a bit, but I don't see any conflict between the two views.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Larry,

Hi, Larry:

I also see no conflict between the two, and I also see some similarities between BR's no-self and K's "no-observer" state. He often says that only when there's no "you", you can be silent, humble and so on.

But I'd not agree with you that their experiences were the same or even similar, behind the verbal differences. It seems to me that they were quite different.
It struck me that BR doesn't write about love at all. She says (p. 114):

Who can understand what it means to learn that the ultimate reality is not a passing moment of bliss, not a fleeting vision or transfiguration, not some ineffable, extraordinary experience or phenomenon... The expectation of the grand finale being one of love and bliss is a failure to realize that such responses are the responses of self to its own experiences, while what Is does not respond to Itself in any similar fashion."

And K sometimes sounds similar, but there are also passages like this:

"But the otherness is without relationship to anything and all thought and being is a cause-effect process and so there was no understanding of it or relationship with it. It was an unapproachable flame and you could only look at it and keep your distance. And on waking suddenly, it was there. And with it came unexpected ecstasy, an unreasonable joy; there was no cause for it for it has never been sought or pursued. There was this ecstasy on waking again at the usual hour; it was there and continued for a lengthy period of time."

and:

"Of a sudden it happened, coming back to the room; it was there with an embracing welcome, so unexpected. One had come in only to go out again; we had been talking about several things, nothing too serious. It was a shock and a surprise to find this welcoming otherness in the room; it was waiting there with such open invitation that an apology seemed futile. Several times, on the Common,** far away from here under some trees, along a path that was used by so many, it would be waiting just as the path turned; with astonishment one stood there, near those trees, completely open, vulnerable, speechless, without a movement. It was not a fancy, a self-projected delusion; the other, who happened to be there, felt it too; on several occasions it was there, with an all-embracing welcome of love and it was quite incredible; every time, it had a new quality, a new beauty, a new austerity."

This strucks me as something completely at odds with BR, and closer to what Christians report. K says that the otherness is not a self-projected delusion, that it is ultimately real, but at the same time there is "an all-embracing welcome of love" to it. I don't think we can find that in BR's descriptions. K admits that he experienced to be loved by the otherness, although he didn't seem to have responded to it with a similar love. It's also worth noticing how "personal" the otherness seems to appear in the passage above. And K wasn't a sentimental writer who would "personalize" this reality - in fact, he would rather "depersonalize" it!

Perhaps my subjective impressions got the best of me on this one. But BR showed that ecstasy could be a bridge to the no-self state while K seemed to be stuck at that place. Ecstasy is really a wonderful thing and something that is not let go of easily!

Personally, I don't think that K was stuck at any place, although from a Christian perspective I might say that he refused to go an entirely new journey, which would be the personal relationship with this powerful and loving otherness.

Btw, I have to check it but I think that even when he was in his 80s he would still have those "ecstasies" which would mean that he was "stuck" for several decades in something that BR so easily transcended. Why is that? BR doesn't seem to me more attentive and willing to let go than K. So I think these are just different experiences, although they have common non-dual, metaphysical and apophatic thread.

I used to think myself that ecstasy and bliss are somehow "lower" stage and that they have to be transcended into pure, indefinable state which is not qualifiable as blissful or ecstatic or anything. But I changed my mind after some experiences I share also on this forum. Now I think that we are created to experience divine happiness, bliss, joy and love, and they just cannot interfere with heightened awareness.

Ultimately, what counts for me is the outcome of the experience - life of love and service to others. BR and K seem to show good fruit of their spirituality, and the details depend on our perspective, faith, framework etc.

In a few places in his published notebook, K gives us a glimpse of his own spiritual practice:

quote:

Meditation without a set forumula, without a cause and reason, without end and purpose is an incredible phenomenon. It is not only a great explosion which purifies but also it is death, that has no tomorrow. Its purity devastates, leaving no hidden corner where thought can lurk in its own dark shadows. Its purity is vulnerable; it is not a virtue brought into being through resistance. It is pure because it has no resistance, like love. There is no tomorrow in meditation, no argument with death. The death of yesterday and of tomorrow does not leave the petty present of time, and time is always petty, but a destruction that is the new. Meditation is this, not the silly calculations of the brain in search of security . . .

That's all closer to Zen than anything else, I believe. A detached, observing awareness! Even his descriptions of encounters with Mystery have this aloof, detached quality about them; there is no worship or adoration, no commitment or investment of himself. K observes and sees, but to whom does he belong? To what or whom is he committed to the laying down of his life? What of the integration of one's reflective and volitional potentialities with this pre-reflective state?

It seems that K was a great disappointment to the theosophists who discovered him and provided so generously for his formation. This article by a theosophist goes into all that, to some extent, even providing accounts of lives that were negatively affected by his teaching. I don't blame K entirely for that. His is a teaching that is not for beginners, but he wasn't always sensitive to considering others' developmental states. So pure and uncompromising is his apophatic approach that it seems he cannot bring himself to affirm the formative necessity of kataphatic spirituality. Yet he himself spent years immersed in this, communing with "ascended masters," performing certain disciplines, practicing kriyas, etc. When "the process" finally blew open his third eye and crown, an infrastructure was in place to help hold him together -- and, even then, not without ongoing pain and struggle. Why would he discourage such formation in others?

So K, for me, has both wheat and chaff, which must be carefully sorted through. My primary interest has been in what he describes as "the process" and how it's affected him, as I relate much to his experience. It's also become clear to me, however, that the kind of faith perspective one embraces and is held by influences the ongoing integration of "the process." K's aloof, detached awareness and the priority he gives to non-reflecting consciousness indicates something of a faith perspective at work in his life, for the type of meditation he practices does entail decision -- countless ones, indeed! -- to "just look."

That's very insightful, Phil, and I agree with you about K.

You mentioned de Mello as influenced by K. It reminded me of one Polish writer who was also greatly influenced by K, which end up very bad.
It's an interesting story, so I decided to share this with you, because I used to read a lot of this guy. But his story may be also a part of another topic, which is kundalini and madness...

This Polish writer was called Edward Stachura, and he died in 1979 at age 42. He was always very in love with Nature and very sensitive, probably, emotionally unstable. But towards the end of the 70s, he became more and more interested in Eastern mysticism and K. He underwent a deep spiritual transformation, after which he wrote to books: "Fabula rasa" and "Behold". First is a dialogue between himself, Edward Stachura, and someone he called Nobody-Man. The second text is a set of wisdom sayings, in which he often paraphrases his "brothers" - the Brother Awakened (Buddha), the Brother Son of Man (Jesus) and the Brother Old Child (Lao-Tse).

ES also described shortly his own transformation in "Fabula rasa". I translated it:

"And let us say something that may help to guide many people in the dead of night. There had been a few months of unprecedented, exquisite gentleness, clarity, normality before this absolutely unexpected, great, miraculous day, when he felt clearly that he was surrounded by something immense, soft, light, transparent and pure; as if he got into some sort of ineffably soothing embrace, not confining his movements in any way; as if he was walking in the air. It was an entering, a getting into enliving atmosphere of pure observation. All-embracing, impartial, non-judgmental seeing of oneself “lasted” for few days. Those days were filled with such amazing, dazzling joy that he had never experienced before. It was discovering the obvious in himself. During the nights he was tormented by very vivid nightmares. Those were what left of his Self which panicked, trying, being at pain to hide itself in his dreams from this observation. But it was also there. And it did nothing – just looking; not measuring, not judging, just impartially looking. This went on for few days. Until a moment came (a moment at which one goes out of time once and for all), when absolutely unexpectedly he saw everything; sitting, as if he was not there, in his room, on a chair by the window, with one glance of nobody’s eyes he penetrated the whole boundless universe to the core, from one end to the other. “An infinite split of second”. And then he saw the most amazing night, truly black, cloudless and starless! The first night of the universe, the hearth of the sun (this he understood not immediately, but when he closely examined that). And then he saw the day, his body and the rest. Everything was as if the same as before, but absolutely different, new, virginal. And since then he has lived in this eternal virginality, being this eternal virginity."

He didn't practice meditation. He just "observed" following K's instructions. After two years of living in this state of no-self, teaching, meeting his fans, writing things that people didn't want to publish, because in Poland nobody knew about Zen or Krishnamurti, he had some kind of psychotic breakdown. He didn't have a history of mental illness. But I suppose opening of 6th and 7th chakra may've contributed to this psychotic episode.
He was ran over by a train (he didn't remember how that happened), and lost his right hand. The he recovered and he lived for several months with his mother, but he suffered from depression and side-effects of drugs. Finally he killed himself in the July 1979. Before his death he was writing a diary with his left hand, and I translated some interesting parts of it for you. I wonder if what he experienced were purely psychosis or maybe a psychosis along with some kind of dark night or other kundalini phenomenon:

"Two years ago, at the beginning of 1977, I painlessly lost Everything. Soon I received a new Everything. I was on top of a high mountain. It lasted for two years. Then one wrote “Fabula rasa” and another text: “Behold”. I say “one wrote”, not “I wrote”, because it was as if it wasn’t me writing, but someone else. He called himself Nobody Man. I was him and wasn’t him at the same time. I can’t explain it otherwise. In the end of March 1979 and in the first days of April unbelievable things started to happen to me. During this a train ran over me. I lost Everything again, but so painfully. And it's been like that for two months now."

And later he describes his breakdown:

"I went completely alone through horrible things; I don’t know if I’ll be ever able to describe them, but I know what I’ve been through physically and psychologically. I think that there’s no point in describing in detail that I was crucified, and how real it was, and how horribly it hurt; that I was literally dying and resurrecting several times; that I spoke in voices of different people, that I went mute twice, and how real that was, that I was divided into a left and a right part, and how it hurt, that I was changed into half-woman, half-man, and how real that was; that I spoke to someone powerful, incredibly powerful and intelligent, and that I begged him to make me mute, because I couldn’t stand talking to him, though it was euphoric; that I begged him to kill me, and that he helped me to die manipulating my breath, my mouth, my nostrils and my ears and so on, it seemed to go on and on without an end, but I know it ended because now I don’t experience that. All those things belong to what the doctors called a delusional-hallucinatory syndrom."

He was able to reflect on his own illness:

"Too much unhappiness for one weak, poor man. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s possible to suffer more than one can bear. I lost my senses, I lost my right palm, I lost my mind, I lost taste for living, I lost all joy, I lost power in my legs, I was filled with psychological fear and physical pain, and despite of this all – I am still here. Not as a someone crazy, because I regain my sense a bit. Is it make me better or worse? A crazy person doesn’t know that he is crazy, so he is not crazy for himself. I saw many crazy people like that at the hospital. They are out of it. Their madness doesn’t hurt them. They are not scared what other people, like me, are scared of – that madness may return. I would lie if I said that I don’t think often about suicide as a liberation from my hell. But I constantly hear and see the words of the one whom Nobody Man used to call his brother in the nameless Father: let the one who seeks, does not let go of his seeking, until he finds. So I don’t kill myself. So I seek, even in this state, I don’t let go of seeking. (...) But is that possible to find this highest peace, this union with the Nameless already in this life? (...)

Isn’t possible to actively go out to meet death? Wouldn’t it be only normal in my situation? Would it be an act of madness or something natural, spontaneous even? What to do? To live, not being alive, nor dead, or to die... and, who knows?"

He started to think about suicide. The pain was particularly acute in comparison to the bliss of enlightened state he lost:

"Nobody-Man disappeared. My great Comforter disappeared. The one who was fearless and who knew everything, disappeared. (...) But it’s as if disappeared also the one to whom Nobody-Man dictated two texts: “Fabula rasa” and “Behold”. Edward Stachura who negated himself. Who burnt hundreds of letters and hundreds of photographs, and threw out notebooks with addresses, and gave away all his possessions, and left his house, with the doors wide open, and throw out the key, and oh, my dear God... Who was left? Who am I? I feel like a son of perdition. Maybe it’s a blasphemy. I don’t know who I am, I don’t know why I suffer so horribly, I don’t know how long it has to last."

And this is the end of his last poem which he wrote before killing himself:

"I’m dying
(...)
because there’s no help for me here
because I cannot love with human love
because noli me tangere
because I’m so tired, so unbelievably exhausted
because I have suffered greatly
because I wasn’t spared even madness
because everything hurts so horribly
because I’m suffocating in this cage
because I stood at the beginning, and the Father drew me to himself and I will stand at the end and I won’t taste death..."

Polish scholars were wondering what was the meaning of all this. Personally, I think that the process of opening higher chakras might have brought forward mental illness, because it shook his unstable personality structure, and ego collapsed temporarily. He doesn't describe any kundalini symptoms per se. It sounds very much like spontaneous Zen kensho/satori experience. The experience that was lost after two years. My Zen teacher told me that some of his students lost satori state too, and they wanted to commit suicide because of that. I think Edward Stachura did. But there was probably also biological aetiology of his condition.

Those are only few passages, but I'm curious what you think of this all, and do you know any similar stories. I think that Friedrich Nietzsche experienced powerful kundalini awakening which he described in his "Ecce homo", and this was shortly before his breakdown, so I think the one might have caused the other. I remember what Aldous Huxley said (was it he?), that while the mystic can swim in the waters of unconscious, the madman drowns in them.

Sometimes these spiritual breakthroughs are a double edged sword. I've seen it happen. The breakthrough is full of bliss and insight - an enormous high that can last quite a while. And then the spiritual pride kicks in. The problem is that the unitive mode is not entered gracefully and some of the ego apparently remains. The ego bemoans its loss of dominance and that is experienced as suffering. What could have been the beginning of a long and fruitful spiritual journey is seen as a darkness full of terror.

ES may have benefited from a spiritual guide close by for perspective and comfort. He got spiritually ambitious and tried to be a guru before his spirituality matured, and tragedy occurred.

I agree with your point about spiritual awakening being a "double-edged sword," Larry. Some writers have even speculated that some cases of bipolar disorders might have a connection with spiritual awakening -- gone badly.

It's hard to know what happened in the case of Edward Stachura. That's certainly a sad story. A heightened awareness state without intellectual apprehensions of Truth and volitional experiences of Love can leave one in a profound state of aridity and emotional flatness. Awareness alone is insufficient to provide one with a sense of meaning in life, and without such, there's little joy to be found.

The major problem in all of this is that the metaphysical dimension of our nature has been severely wounded! That's why, as w.c. has noted so many times, present moment awareness can't be sustained for very long; it becomes imbalanced, weakens, and deteriorates. When the kundalini process becomes awakened, we really see just how damaged we have been! Without faith in a Higher Power and integration of the soul in Christ, we could not suffer for long the burden of our brokenness.

It's interesting what you write, Phil, about bipolar disorder and spiritual awakening. In fact, when I've been skimming through ES's texts, I found that he described his life previous to his enlightenment as "ups and downs" to which he apparently used to and was able to express in his poetry and novels. I don't think he had a bipolar disorder, because he functioned pretty well, but his affectivity might have been prone to damage, and when kundalini broke through the 6th chakra, the disorder manifested in intense episode.

Larry, I agree that lack of spiritual guidance might have greatly contributed to ES's breakdown, and I think you may be right that his enlightement needed further practice and grounding - like e.g. koans in Rinzai Zen, or other practices. He also used to get angry at people during meetings with his fans, when they refused to "understand" his non-dual teaching. But it seems to be the case of BR too, doesn't it?

I wonder what it means that awareness of the present moment "becomes imbalanced, weakens, and deteriorates". Is it like a continuous process? Maybe W.C. could enlighten me a bit in this matter?

And the fragment of "Ecce homo" by Nietzsche I mentioned. Willigis Jaeger interprets this as a Zen kensho, I'd see kundalini process in it - because the energy feelings are clearly present. Nietzsche had this towards the end of his life, but probably had this also before, which might have influenced his philosophy of the Immense, of the present, eternal moment and Zarathustra's philosophy of power, life, joy etc. It's an example of kundalini, however, without traditional ethical principles.

F. Nietzsche, "Ecce homo"

"Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down, that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form, I never had any choice. A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears, now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of one's skin creeping down to one's toes; a depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a necessary color in such a superabundance of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that arches over wide spaces of forms—length, the need for a rhythm with wide arches, is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension ... Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity ... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor, everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (—"Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth. Here the words and word-shrines of all being open up before you; here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak—"). This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years in order to find anyone who could say to me, "it is mine as well."

Well, Nietzsche was obviously wrong saying that his contemporary do not experience that - it seems to be pretty common, of course, among people following a spiritual path.

The rest of story is known: Nietzsche identified with Dionysius, the god of living and dying Nature, of ecstatic oneness of life, but the mystical indentification yield to psychotic blurr of boundaries and ego inflation. Finally, Nietzsche broke down in Turin, seeing someone cruelly beating up his horse, and lost contact with reality. Did kundalini caused this? we'll never know...

Mt:

In other threads past we've talked about how it is impossible to reside fully and continually in the present moment, even in the so-called enlightened state which is still subject to fallenness and mortality. As such, the present moment is but an inflection of the Eternal Presence in which the soul only participates; hence the way in which the "enlightened" always disappoint once we meet them, especially if they are touted as being divine-like. IOW, their own fallenness comes through in terms of any real relationship they may have with their disciples, or at least those close enough to really know the guru personally.

So in this way we're saying pure, undisturbed abiding in the present moment is impossible for human beings, as such a state requires being continually upheld via the Eternal Presence, and that much is impossible to bear, or survive, in this lifetime.

Yes, I remember you saying that on the Divinity and Consciousness thread, and I agreed that, as master Joshu said, "even this old monk [himself] is not always in this clarity". Ken Wilber also says that he never met anyone who is constantly in the non-dual awareness. So it comes and goes, I guess, and your explanation is reasonable. I also think that the inability not to sin (although it's often claimed by the enlightened ones) is due to the fact of our fallenness, which can be healed only via theosis and transformation in Christ.
But I understood Phil's words as if the very state of enlightenment, instead of deepening in time, weakened or deteriorated due to some reasons I don't fully understand. Do you share this opinion?

Willigis Jaeger wrote that maybe those Zen masters who supported WWII in Japan, like Yasutani and Harada, and even D.T. Suzuki, did that because their satori faded towards the end of their life. But why was that? Why did it not deepen? And Jaeger also adds something which is completely contradictory, namely, that satori per se wouldn't prevent them from supporting the war, because from the pov of emptiness, it doesn't matter who is alive and who dies. Wow... I mean, that sounds terrifying to me. And Jaeger isn't clear about satori - is it love because you feel one with everyone, or is it possibly cruel indifference, since there is "no-one" dying and living anyway?

I've never heard about deteriorating or losing enlightenment in time, so I'm curious
What are your experiences with that, except for "coming and going" of the Present Moment awareness?