“A Love Affair Revisited”
‘…
Between the idea/And the reality
Between the motion/And the act
Falls the shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception/And the creation
Between the emotion/And the response
Falls the shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire/And the spasm
Between the potency/And the existence
Between the essence/And the descent
Falls the shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
…
(T.S. Eliot: from: The Hollow Men, 1925, In: The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot; pp85-6; Bloomsbury, London, 1977).
Why, after so many years have passed, do I still burn with rage at Jiddu Krishnamurti and his deceit? It has been 27 years since I first read Radha Rajagopal Sloss’s book, “Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti”. I picked it up again just a few days ago, only to find that the anger still burns as it did all those years ago. What accounts for such a response after so long a time has elapsed? Only love. A love thwarted, it seems, can account for such strong feelings after so long a stretch of time. I didn’t just listen (and follow) this man. I loved him. A strange thought after so long, and one only comprehensible in terms of the deepest desire to change. I wanted to be him. To walk – not alongside him – but in his shoes, in his very skin. I tell myself it was for the love of truth…but is that so? Or is the motive darker yet, some Freudian delayed love of a father who left when I was still a young child? I think not, though my own father did die just a year before I read this book (although, yet again, Krishnamurti had died some 5 years previously whilst I was still in India after attending the ‘final talks’ in Madras in 1986). That my own father had lied and cheated on my mother (she returned the ‘compliment’ complete with a child of her illicit union) and left home (left me) before I reached the age of five could have played a part in my own later infidelity and deceit towards my first wife, but I don’t believe that is – of itself – sufficient reason for my rage. However, something of both of these things undoubtedly plays a part in this reaction. I fell in love with the image of truth that I required of others, of relationship, and of my own spiritualised longing for something decent to hold to (somewhat like Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who, seeing his own reflection in a pond, fell in love with himself). Like Narcissus too, I didn’t hear the voice (Echo) of truth, calling to me, behind the image of myself as that, so it went unanswered (becoming just an echo) across all the intervening years. I loved truth, after all the lies, all the deceitful behaviour towards others, all the self-deception; I fell for the image I believed was now me. It was better than what had gone before it, passing oneself off as something/someone one wasn’t. However, the image that I saw reflected back to me in this still pond was not only my own. It was, of course, Jiddu Krishnamurti too, the pure man, who – from childhood – had been groomed (because of his supposedly pure ‘aura’ spotted by the Theosophist, Leadbeater) to become the ‘Vehicle,’ the embodiment of truth. No blemish. Unlike me, us, the ‘Claytons’ followers (who of course weren’t), he was the perfection, the one who had slipped through intact, unstained by those around him (including the very Theosophists who had tried to train him for the role of the ‘World Teacher’, the ‘Vehicle for the Maitreya”).
I believed that he was truth incarnate. It was this Christ-like purity that I loved, fell in love with. Something untainted by the filth that I knew those of this world were stained by (including particularly myself). In there, too, somewhere, was the ‘father’ who never left, never ceased to love us, his children.
What a mess. No wonder the anger is still there when I attempt to lift the covers on this!
Perhaps this explains something. Perhaps it explains the whole thing. I’m not sure. However it sheds light in its unveiling, removing or reducing the shadows somewhat.
I could never love the Christ of the Christian dogmas, for he had been turned by his followers into a god (the God), but to me he only made sense as a man, a sage, a wise man, the man Jesus was/is still, none-the-less. For a while the Prophet Muhammad stepped in to fill this need, but he too, of late, has become mired in god-like status by the fools who see him only reflected in their fundamentalist “Pools” and fall in love with this “perfect” image. Never-the-less, he was – first and (if not foremost) fundamentally a man. An exceptional man, but a man. It was this that to some extent attracted me to Islam perhaps, that this man, whilst being a prophet of God, could still be a man. The ‘Insan i Kamil’ (the ‘Perfect Man’) allowed this, insisted on this humanity, allowing it to come through the image, at least for some. Only the cry, the need, to perfect, to polish out all the imperfections that reside in the human heart, turns the man into a god-man.
And therein the trouble begins. We, as human beings, becoming aware of our fallibility turn ourselves (and our gaze) outward in order to find an exemplar, an example that shows us that it is possible, this impossible journey, task.
Krishnamurti lied. Indeed, one of his earliest supporters, in her old age, Lady Emily Lutyens (the Theosophist and wife of Sir Edwin Lutyens who designed New Delhi who was also the mother of Mary Lutyens, JK’s biographer) said that he was ‘…a congenital liar’ (Lives in the Shadow, ibid, p249). He cheated by having a long-term illicit (because hidden) affair with the wife (Rosalind Rajagopal) of one of his closest friends and earliest collaborators, Rajagopal, and ‘conspired’ with her to end resultant pregnancies. In the end, after all the years of publically advocating the urgency of radical individual change in the way we humans live and relate to one another and the world around us, and through his supposed personal demonstration of the possibility of living in such a manner, to ‘live in the moment’ free from our ‘conditioning’ etc., he fell into the folly of believing in his own ‘myth’; he fell in love with the image he saw reflected back to him in the “pond” of his own adoring followers.
Where is the lesson – if there is one – in all of this? What is my lesson?
It seems that – in this unrelenting search for the perfection of “truth”, the undiluted truth, and nothing but the truth – one can lose sight of the fact that truth must be lived, and it is in this act of living that the so-called purity becomes diluted. One may seek for the essence, but often, through the exegeses of living, we lose that pure-force, and – at times – are left with little to show for our efforts but the dregs. Is this the essence of it all? Is ‘life’ always going to reduce down to this, “We tried” and that’s all? Is this like that Bumper Sticker one used to see on the back of cars: “Christians aren’t perfect: just forgiven”?
I don’t believe so. I prefer to believe that – in these acts of living out the ‘truth’ as we apprehend it – we bring colour, diversity, richness, and, yes, shadow to life. These are our contributions to the ongoing act of creation which never ceases, never sleeps. The richness of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s contribution cannot therefore be diminished or overlooked just because he failed in his bid to perfect the life. It should, however, be “contextualised.” It was the life of someone who was a man first, living as all men do, with many of the failings and foibles that ‘flesh is heir to,’ like the rest of us. In the end it was through the very echoes that he did hear that he was led astray when he attempted to protect this image that he was seeing and hearing reflected back from all those around him.
In times past Kings would often maintain in their Courts a ‘Court Jester’ just to help them to avoid this trap. Someone whose job it was – through all the flattering and fawning noise and the images of their supposed ‘Kingship’ fed them by those that surrounded them at court – to challenge this very image by highlighting their human foibles and failings, turning them into humour through parody.
We overlook such things at our cost.
Tracks in a Pathless Land 