This sketch – see also the end of this post – is of K not long before he passed away
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Continuing this month’s reflections with K – a fertile ground.
From Journal – 9 July 2013
I try not to deny things, and often labour the point, as I write. I have no cotton wool for my precious preserve and self image. In life I struggle along, at basic psychology level, trying to turn to face the music, face the current – the soul’s welcoming.
Now picture the current; the onrush of water in a canal after the heavy lock gate loosens – that surge comes towards me, I look at it directly, stand still, unrestricted; and my breath slows down and opens to the abstract core of the event – its nuance and feeling.
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Pithy tree of Life
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My manner is not firm enough. My manner is conciliatory and seeks to understand, until certain buttons are pushed – then fury. Behind the incipient fury, I cannot be firm. There is fear and vocal paralysis. There is scar tissue – pre-judging – and the damage that does. The human spooks in my nature – spanners in the spokes – are powerful, and only change with painful slowness. They go back further than my conscious reach. They are subconscious.
WHAT IS THE COLOUR OF THIS SITUATION? THIS FEELING? The trigger? Good question! Practice what I preach. Feels dark, somewhere between indigo and brown.
Keeping still with my trigger, is trans-formative: awareness without chat-camouflage. The Light – pale primrose white – enters my dark cave with the Thirty Verses, Quintessence of Instruction. (See earlier post, The Mythology behind the Thirty Verses.) Read them carefully.
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The Ferret and the Himalayas
I finished reading Lives in the Shadow. I guess any luminary or work with the Light carries a quota of Shadow in life. Ramana had his devotees and the cauliflower on his arm. Accept the shadow. I know what mine is.
Krishnamurti’s shadow was his fear of telling the truth – a furtive boyhood thing, as he was punished at school. It grew into paranoia, and the meticulous Rajagopal became a spook. The paranoia grows like a tumour on failure to be truthful to a close friend. Paranoia believes in lies, especially in one’s own. Messengers of light carry big shadows in the bag.
Here is a story, as I see it at present: In the Californian Ohai valley, Rosalind, Rajagopal and Krishna, with young Radha, were a brave and lovely ship a-sail. It took its chances. The ship’s course was inevitable, given the souls they were, their sensitivities and their place and period. The shadow in the combination escalated due to Krishna’s human frailty and messianic mission“I”, which won’t declare itself. He consigned his personal i to the unconscious, he said it has no existence or memory. So it grew in there, unregarded and developing its data base, until the decades of enmity happened – and the vast legal costs – the waste. Different astral bodies inhabited Mr K, like the continents he roosted in.
In 1910 when K was a thin boy in Adhyar, the Theosophist Charles Leadbeater caught sight of him on the beach, perceived a pure ‘egolessness’ in his aura, and groomed the boy to be a Vehicle for the Messiah, Maitreya. In 1928 – his Saturn return – K rejected this role and declared “Truth is a pathless land. I want no followers. Be the disciple of your understanding.”
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GALLERY – I have been a little hesitant in including this 1987 sequence. It seems rather disrespectful, but it tells the truth. I was hopping mad with K in those days, and with the way I felt his Speaker had hijacked my parent and made me mute.
There are ‘i’s of various kinds here, wandering around among the flowers.
some ‘i’s are intolerably heavy
but sometimes in a dream there is room for movement
conflict – trying to be buddha!
trapped in the ‘i’ with hijacked parent & speaker plugged in
retributive ‘i’ – the shadow
serpent, eve, seed
Buddha nature – have another go
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In 1986, when K died, his fear and fantasy around the Rajagopals was unresolved. During the same period and after – due to paternal preachings against the “I” in my childhood – I felt K was my enemy. K remained my “enemy” until I learned about him through reading Mary Lutyens’ books, which Bruce Macrae Smith gave me. What an extraordinary tale! With a joyous appreciation of him, and of my father’s path and its perils, I forgave. I discovered myself.
Lives in the Shadow published five years later, was a further exposure. It was rich, to love K’s truth and be simultaneously heartbroken with his lies. He lost his way with his loved ones, but he went on Talking. The vehicle went on Talking round the world – nothing stops that – and being well tuned. He died feeling isolated. He said in a rather crackpot way that a great force or Master lived in him during his life time, and would not return to humanity for hundreds of years; because no one had understood or was able to practice his teaching in life. He suggested it had all been a wasted effort. This was an arrogant pathos in the old man. He forgot the many he loved and who loved him, behind the Shadow, and who practice his teaching. He is human.
To this day I both love and am irritated by him. It is a mixed and vivid emotion with the pampered Speaker whose influence bombarded my teenage years – (“I ? What can you mean?”). It is full of landscape, light and acceptance. At the 1974 Brockwood gathering (a series of 3 posts), I observed that I and other souls fall passionately and painfully in love with each other around K – the disturbance in his energy-field. I knew the laceration of the nerves. When I – much later – read about his process in the spine and head, everything fitted into place.
The vehicle for World Teacher does not dissolve when he cuts the ribbon of the Order of the Star. It becomes “en-ghosted” and powerful – kundalini discharges through his stem like a marginalised fairy godmother. There were two or more agendas in full flower, from the deep Karmic past. K’s template was Conflict. He spoke always of Conflict and of Fear: and of the tide whose seamless movement in and out, has in it “the essence of conflict, which is peace“. I think he felt that speaking of conflict and fear “together” with his listeners, might dissolve the tendency in himself. I used to believe – similarly – that the transmission through my journal/writing, keeps me out of trouble.
Well, spirituality is not a safe straitjacket! The contact highlights life – sharper and sometimes more distressful than ever. You take it as it comes, or you pile on yet more light, to hide it. I know how easily I hide behind lies and evasions.
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Worshiping a deity and making him cross
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K’s life and failures are an extraordinary and illumining lesson for me. He is among my most precious Stones in philosophy – the love of wisdom. Radha’s book – he was her other daddy – gives his full flavour, tooth and nail – like a Californian orange in the sunshine: and how like him in many ways my daddy was, when I was growing up. I chuckle at the familiar mannerisms. Peter began to follow K’s teaching in about 1961, when K first spoke in London.
K loved children. He was a child himself.
As K grew old, and more shielded by devoted friends and adherents, the fruit turns a little sour – there is a sour vacancy in his eyes, his presence and his vanity. So I am making marmalade!
My parents have a shadow which is very difficult for them both to reach through, and talk of. They are close friends, but the tension is there. I have many things which are desperately hard to say. They wriggle away under a rock when I try to find them.
So K’s life with the Shadow illustrates something we all have, especially when we are trying to grow up and become more human, more open, more truthful. The personal-i is a wounded ferret. She thrives on gaps in consciousness: she slips out of sight – she thrives on my spiritual spells to deny her existence. She is always here, popping up for a good wail, or – her favourite hobby – sewing Shadow coats for unsuspecting folk who try hard.
So this moment itself I wait by her hole – the ferret’s hole – to catch her by the nose and tail. Not punitively: but to see her coming into the light. She is “I” – the toothy predator, like a furry snake. How she shines, silvery on the ground at dawn. At the ferret’s hole, I try to remain attentive – to catch her when she manufactures Shadow and does her Talk-stuff and practices fear. I. I.
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Finding a furry snake … between a waterfall and piano keys.
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Self enquiry awakes response-ability at Home. The quest ultimately dissolves personal i into a wide-angle-lens cosmic I: the un-altered being. Ramana’s teaching of Self enquiry reveals my vasanas. It is their nature to come up: and Self enquiry observes them, like the Buddha does, dispassionately. None of the great Teaching Rivers diverge from the Source.
In K’s Shadow, he grew to resent so much his early teachers and protectors, that he couldn’t see this.
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K2, photo by fosco maraini
Now, as I get my Himalayan glimpse – the Source of the Rivers – my ferret gets the chance to scurry out of sight again. The trick is to hold them both in the view – ferret and Himalayas. The i and the I … “two dudes agree not to fight over the steering wheel” – thank you, Jeff!
Meditation watches the ferret – at any time of the day or night. Watch the road.
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And watch the spiritual camouflage! Be cosmic-carrot mindful: the interior stars in the stem, as gravitational centre ground. The carrot is not in the sky, but in the Earth: and orange like California oranges and the Sun.
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Consulting the ‘secret dakini orace’ uncovers my thought – a present moment – in picture form. This one shows an armouring, a goal and a letting go. The cosmic carrot has the chakras on it: kundalini’s wheels. Taking up Arms is the god Krishna, about to rescue the dharma.
dakini oracle “cosmic carrot”
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And “Cutting Through” is a way also of going through, with relative ease. Or being passed through …
Canal Lock Gate
It is hard to see through
our wounds tending to meet each other.
Love waits
for waters each side to level,
the deep gate to open
for the passing through
deliciously.
from “Homer Rows” 2004
Have faith in and value the effort which living takes, along the canal – don’t worry about all the creative projects I am not doing. Remember – I have a limited idea of cosmic time, depth and management. I am the small dent in the rim of the jug, through which it pours.
I achieved two more drawings of Ramana yesterday (i.e. 8 July) – with great difficulty – and the post about the Thirty Verses delighted a few readers. Alan of course was thrilled. The thirty verses themselves are SO BEAUTIFUL. I feel more “certain” or sure of my home ground, when working with the Ramana elder window and its teaching. This is not surprising, as the only position of authority I ever held, was Hon.Sec.Treasurer of Ramana Foundation in the 1990s, and editor of Self Enquiry. With this role, I was ignorant and bossy.
The difficulty with spiritual teaching, is carburettor management. Little i gets a rest when big I flows: but afterwards, the engine is flooded. This leads to depression or inflation.
Centre Sefiroth in tree of life, with tarot keys on the paths. Tifareth(Beauty) is the conscious Self or observer. The path connecting Yesod (personal self, Foundation) to Hod (mind, splendour) is coloured orange, and has on it the tarot key The Sun.
Tifareth in the heart of the Tree – the Sun growing oranges – receives and feels EVERYTHING.
Facing Fear … a big fish is swimming up, which I have refused to deal with. It is the attitude of we humans to our various Nemeses. Consider this, as if I wanted to attack Iraq, faced my fear, and then took wise counsel not to. Consider this, like all the meddling in the middle east – what we brits and eus and uses raised against us, and among itself internecinely, because we could not see the picture, we just saw the oil and the wealth rising and started to engineer barricades and frontiers among the old desert tribes.
Doesn’t this happen in any relationship ?
Watch the attitude. And make peace here to begin with, by being conscious. Various wild cards drift among my inner cities. Recognise them. Then there is dignity.
There is an interior condition of co-existence which does not snag and snarl. Remember in my body which is alchemy, the sunlight, the Hermit’s black dragon, the chyle, the red and white soldiers, the arterial roads and the cities. It is all the play and tension of life, the truly broad band, the ferment perpetually, through my body’s standwave, as the same ferment in all places. (Perpetual Intelligence = Key 20, red cross). Look at my box-side placards of Fear. I fantasize my End, my closed-upness. What a fake thought, a fantasy, that is! Stand up tall, and leave the coffin.
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Krishnamurti all his life, faced and discussed Fear. He acted from fear when he and Rajagopal fell out – it was deeply rooted, and deeply painful for them both. But his way of observing Fear, is my Lighthouse. Fear blinkers me in friendships, but I try to remember K’s view, and to face the music. The observer is the observed.
There was a wonderful beauty in K’s early life and mature manhood, and it isn’t altered by the more crooked landscape it became. When I saw him in ’74, he was already bent a little to one side, as if by the denial of his shadow in California, and the strange way that he was cruel to it. The shadow built up substance each side of the pond, as KWINC and Krishnamurti Foundation consolidated their separate boxes of enlightened non-organization, argument and admin.
We humans face our species-poison, every which way. And yet the weather today is clear and beautiful.
The insight when it opens, is the river, the river, the river, the teeming magnificence of the Light and Shadow and all the baggage: and ways to navigate, in the stern-spine: the tiller of the contemplation, the rock and the sway, the flood and flotsam, the Darkness shot with stars.
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boat yoga spine crab
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Then my body relaxes, and there comes a natural Yogic slow breath, like the sea.
Ramana Maharshi never said to force things. Of course we as human life carry almost more poison than we can bear. Yet still we are life, and we remain consciously alive, if we just manage not to set up riot shields against things we fear, and create enemies. Krishnamurti taught me that I am what I consider to be “the world”. It begins here, not out there. Facing the fear is Liberation – the cup turning over: raising the glass. This has a knock-on effect through my interior cities – the organs of life.
The fears are legion – including armies of harpies, judgements, lacerations and so on. In the middle ages, penitents had no alternative but to lash their own backs. Have I not seen time and time again, that what I fervently know is right, I most often fail in? And don’t we see teachers with their private difficulties? Isn’t it the fate of idealists, and of priests and politicians?
Evolution is slow. It isn’t easy to trust it. The one all encompassing lifetime on the job, is a particle in a string of raw pearls.
My vital energy is often in a depleted state, either that or “normal”. It doesn’t go manic, these days. Sometimes it stresses out, adrenally, or when trying to troubleshoot. The energy bank is not a graph which determines my health. I see now, that when I have no energy, it means my body and psyche need to rest, and have no choice. A real soldier isn’t rushing around with shield and spear. A real soldier stands at ease, and guards. A soldier observes the field, like a lion after his nap.
To sum up: refrain from making enemies. The great beauty of K’s liberation when he was young, would be and is a life long intense struggle: the upkeep with his body. That is the way it interacts with earth-beings. So he had to speak and speak and travel and create schools to educate young children – the urgency in his eyes and fluttering hands. He needed to work it out, again and again and again, through the inertia.
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K with pupils at Rishi Valley school
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Well this is all interesting and unexpected, and reassures me because it rose without my volition but of its own accord with my willingness to face a certain machine and not run away again. When it rises of its own accord, it is the Magid, with a higher, deeper view of the country.
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Dakini oracle 34 THE LINEAGE TREE, with Unicorn to the right and Heart Drop to the left, doesn’t show any wild cards rushing around. Heart Drop illustrates the ancient, flowing, white-sand hinterland to the stupa and the ruby. The Lineage Tree is the buddha’s rainbow body – the Self. The Unicorn in the tree is sanctuary.
Often when we consult the Magidim or the Oracle, we don’t see the Truth, but what we wish to see and hear. … like the Theosophists with K. On the other hand, the still, small voice in the well which is peace, tends to reveal a True condition below any surface melodrama.
Reading about Krishnamurti – the Mary Lutyens books now – is illumining. It was as much my spiritual path as my father’s. It formed my thought. It presented the Vedas and Ramana and Buddha in a language of here-and-now intense enquiry … outside the puja parlour. K’s meditation was to walk in the country or by the sea; to explore the deep sculpture of his sacrament – the thought – sacred beyond any definition. He was set up by the Theosophists for thousands, millions, to flock to hear and read him: and so he cast off the knitting and became the needles.
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The dakinis of Buddha in tree, unicorn in tree and heart-ruby in front of a Tibetan stupa, are the Battery of the soul, lit up.
This post is inspired by K, and also by things which other bloggers write, along similar lines. The lighting up of the battery (see comments on The Lighthouse Keeper part One), diminishes the small-i of its own accord. Give attention to the current rather than to the so called problem and its literature. All problems lead to the Current, which is why teachers and sages ask for questions, to get them going. It is why K travelled around the world to give talks, rather than stay quietly in one place. Great souls include the currants in their cake!
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K at a last talk in Saanen
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Attention, as K might say, is to the river of life, among whose waters the small troubled “i” floats.
Many years ago, my father caught sight of K with a little old lady in a sari. She was distressed. He – himself a little old man – took her to a window seat, sat her down with him, with his arm around her, and ignored everyone else. He encircled and heard her with his merry brown eyes, his gentle laughter and his total, eager attention. This says it all.
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“Krinsh” with little Radha, 1934
These 3 sketches are of K not long before he passed away
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For other posts on K, see under Categories in the sidebar – ‘Krishnamurti and Coastal Path’.
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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.
This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.
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All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/
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