This column will change your life:
The guru who didn't believe
in gurus
'The Theosophical
Society decided Jiddu Krishnamurti was the messiah who would save humankind. Awkwardly, Krishnamurti came to believe this was bunkum'.
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
The world of
"spiritual teachers" has more than its share of charlatans and
buffoons. But it's hard not to respect Jiddu Krishnamurti,
the Indian-born mystic who died in 1986. As an adolescent, he was taken under
the wing of the Theosophical
Society, whose leaders decided he was the new World Teacher, the messiah
who'd save humankind. Awkwardly, however, Krishnamurti came to believe this was
bunkum. In 1929, aged 34, he called a meeting of the organisation created to
prepare the planet for his arrival – and disbanded it. Organised religion,
spiritual gurus: he rejected it all. "Truth is a pathless land," he
famously declared: if you're following someone else, you'll never find it.
It's amusing to imagine the crestfallen expressions on his acolytes' faces,
much as one relishes the thought of modern-day conservative Christians meeting
the penniless, dark-skinned Jewish socialist who founded their faith.
Krishnamurti went on
to give countless talks at which he frequently implied that his audience
shouldn't be wasting their time listening to spiritual talks. But perhaps the
most striking was a 1977 lecture in California. "Part-way through
this particular talk," writes Jim
Dreaver, (don't miss this post, CB) who was present, "Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned
forward and said, almost conspiratorially, 'Do you want to know what my secret
is?' " (There are several accounts of this event; details vary.)
Krishnamurti rarely spoke in such personal terms, and the audience was
electrified, Dreaver recalls. "Almost as though we were one body we sat
up… I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining
and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation." Then
Krishnamurti, "in a soft, almost shy voice", said: "You see, I
don't mind what happens."
This line is a litmus
test. Try it on your friends! The new-agey ones may nod knowingly, but many
will find it objectionable. It evokes the self-help cliche of
"acceptance", which sounds like a counsel of despair. Surely the
greatest breakthroughs of human history – the end of slavery, votes for women,
the eradication of polio – wouldn't have happened if people had simply elected
not to mind? The advocates of acceptance reply that it isn't
the same as resignation. To "accept" the way things are is to
stop resisting reality; to stop using positive thinking to try to pretend
things are different. Put like that, acceptance seems like a precondition for
change, not an obstacle to it.
But Krishnamurti's
words go deeper. The trick, I think, is to take his comment not as an
instruction about how you ought to think, but a bare description of a
psychological truth: if you didn't mind what happened, then you'd
never have any problems. That's undeniable: "having a problem" and
"minding something" are the same. It's a restatement of the Stoics' insight into
human distress: no event can trigger upset without a belief that it's
undesirable. ("Things themselves have no natural power to form our
judgments": Marcus Aurelius.)
It needn't follow that you should never mind what happens. Instead, it's a
wake-up call, a reminder of how problems arise: by minding. Personally, most of
what makes me anxious or annoyed is indescribably more paltry than slavery or
pandemics. It's bad drivers, noisy neighbours, imagined slights. It's a
liberation to remember that there's an alternative: often, one can choose not
to mind instead.