I’ve talked quite a bit about Jiddu Krishnamurti in my work. It’s hard not to when I’m explaining how the moment of my kundalini awakening happened. The risks I run in talking about him too much are making a guru of him and giving a reason to ignore me as a wannabe Krishnamurti. And I could be doing both, you don’t know, which is why we say you must find out for yourself what is true. By “we” I mean Krishnamurti and me.
Crap. I’m doing it again.
Well, not exactly. See, Krishnamurti only went so far in all of his talks, right up to the line of “Find out for oneself.” I step over that line into, “Here’s some of what happens next, some of which might not apply to you, and some of which is universal.” Because of this, I maintain that Krishnamurti’s delivery of Truth was, and remains, the most exact verbalization, uncontaminated by culture or speaker. Yes, including my own.
So, why do I do it? Why do I go where Krishnamurti rightly refused if it pee-pees in the pool a little? Because he proved with his lifetime of precise delivery that the ratio of people who will understand and be transformed to those who won’t does not change with the amount of quality information given.
The self wants to live even when given no wiggle room. His listeners may not have pretended to have all the answers, like we do nowadays, but they remained in perpetual discussion and often drifted away seeking answers. He didn’t entertain what happens next and he didn’t take on people’s psychological baggage in an intimate way. He didn’t promise anything and didn’t want followers, which rubbed against the grain of his day, and so, as he lamented on his deathbed, not one person who listened in all his years understood. This is not to say that no one took away any wisdom from his talks that they would consider beneficial—but Truth is not for the taking, it is for the being.
Krishnamurti’s critics said he was a great intellectual, nothing more. A great intellectual? This man who, as a child, was feared to be mentally handicapped? They didn’t get it, either. They didn’t want to. Nobody does, and that’s the point.
Talking about “what happens next” is usually a ploy used to lure in seekers with the promise of answers and future goals. As you know, I don’t do that. I am cautious and always circle back to the fundamental point. But we live in a world now where people use, and expect to hear, words like “kundalini,” “chakra,” and “psychic.” Krishnamurti steered the conversation away from sensational aspects of awakening that inevitably drew interest because they sounded like intriguing mystical attainments. There was a thirst for knowledge about them. Since then, that thirst has been quenched by pretenders and one-eye open/still half-asleep people. These words are in the lexicon; practically everyone has some definition for them in mind. The air of mystery has left the room. Now, we want to know how to master them so we can use and/or teach them. Spirituality is nothing if not a status symbol suckling at the teat of commercial enterprise.
What I’m telling you is this: Whatever you’ve heard about, or experienced of, psychic and spiritual awakening, there is only one healthy, meaningful way for what’s true about them to come alive in you, and it has nothing to do with mastery or learning tricks. When the self is no more, Truth is there, and so all that is right and true falls into place, activates, comes alive, whatever terminology you like. Therefore, Krishnamurti was correct: see the futility of the seeker, understand it so thoroughly that the seeker is no more, and whatever is true reveals its reality in and as you. For the self, psychic powers and the such are a distraction.* In Truth, they serve a purpose.
This change with the times isn’t limited to spirit talk. If you want a close analogy, think of the classic magician executing a perfectly wondrous stage show to the delight of the naive crowd. They lose themselves in the mystery of the spectacle. As time goes by, the crowd gets hip to the tricks and so now magicians have to work harder at the element of surprise. They have to deconstruct their magic trick as they’re performing it, explaining to the audience how it’s done as they’re doing it, only to reveal by the end that some other truly mysterious trick has taken place while the audience was being hypnotized with rational explanations. The audience gets roped in by their own sense of equality as magicians because they know how the trick they think they’re seeing works, then voila! The real trick they never saw coming, because they’re not magicians, wows them.
You want to know what happens after the self dies? With No-Thing up my sleeve, I’ll tell you. But the trick is, it doesn’t matter because you’re stuck with the same dilemma as not knowing: you must disappear for magic to happen. Krishnamurti and I perform the same magic trick, so to speak. It’s just that my audience is more sophisticated in what they think they know and presume they are, so while I have more work to do, I also have more material to work with.
Now that the human brain has run in circles with its alleged spiritual knowledge on a global scale, in a rational world, will it finally be able to see the futility of its action?
Just how in love with illusions are we?
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* This does not necessarily include people born psychically alive in whatever way that they are. For them, it’s not a distraction in the sense that they are seeking to attain psychic gifts, mastery, and so on. But, like anything else, it can become one when it becomes their identity and their answer.