{"id":32,"date":"2021-03-19T05:49:31","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T05:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/welcome\/?page_id=32"},"modified":"2021-03-19T05:49:43","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T05:49:43","slug":"what-krishnamurti-means-to-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/k-world\/what-krishnamurti-means-to-me\/","title":{"rendered":"What Krishnamurti means to me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diane L. Eck’s views on Krishnamurti and his teachings after her encounter.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The questions Krishnamurti asked were not about the world and its injustices, they were questions about me and my habits of apprehending the world. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In November I met J. Krishnamurti, a man who didn\u2019t fit any category at all. He was giving a series of daily talks at Rajghat in Benaras. Not only was he not a Christian, he was not a Hindu, not a Buddhist. That was just his point. \u201cTruth is a pathless land,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.\u201d He didn\u2019t say, \u201cFollow me.\u201d On the contrary, he said, \u201cI desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect.\u201d He did not care for the labels of any religion. Indeed, he observed the way in which we fearfully, anxiously, shape our whole lives by religious, political, cultural, and personal labels and names \u2013 all of which function as a buffer zone of security between ourselves and the experience of life.<\/p>\n

Krishnamurti posed my first real encounter with the \u201cotherness\u201d of a world view. No one in my world had ever asked about the value of labeling, judging, discriminating, and categorizing experience or suggested that by doing so we distance ourselves from experience. We call it a beautiful sunrise on the Ganges and don\u2019t ever really see it because we have dispensed with it by giving it a name and label. Perhaps we write a poem about it to capture it in words or take a photograph of it and feel satisfied that we \u201cgot it.\u201d We name so-and-so as a friend or an enemy. The next time we encounter that person, the pigeonhole is ready. Are not our minds perpetually busy in these maneuvers? I must admit, at twenty it had never occurred to me to ask such questions. And what about religion? Is it just a name? I had to ask myself about being a Christian. Did the label provide me with a shelter or barrier to shield me from real encounter and questioning? What did I have invested in this name? Everywhere I turned I saw question marks.<\/p>\n

It is possible, however, that Krishnamurti\u2019s ideas would have meant little to me had not Krishnamurti himself been so arresting. Never had I experienced the quality of presence \u2013 I suppose now I would say \u201cspiritual presence\u201d-that he brought into a room. It is what I then called his \u201cexistentialism,\u201d for want of a better word. He spoke without notes, simply, directly, and he continually named and challenged the nature of our attention to him. Were we taking down notes? Why? Were we hoping to seize what he had to say? Were we comparing his ideas to those of Teilhard de Chardin or Zen Buddhism? Were we judging his thoughts with our likes and dislikes? Why couldn\u2019t we just listen? Is simple presence and attention so impossible? The questions Krishnamurti asked were not about the world and its injustices, they were questions about me and my habits of apprehending the world. Though I had read some of Paul Tillich\u2019s work the year before and had especially liked The Shaking of the foundation, this was the real shaking of the foundations for me.<\/p>\n

Krishnamurti and Patwardhan were important to me precisely because they were what Christains might call \u201cwitnesses\u201d to their faith; they somehow embodied their faith in their lives. In retrospect, it is somewhat embarrassing to articulate this as a discovery, but as a 20 year old it came as news to me: Christians didn\u2019t have a corner on love, wisdom, and justice. Christains were not the only ones nourished by faith and empowered by their faith to work to change the world. I knew nothing of the Hindu devotional traditions of bhakti<\/em> then but I met people \u2013 like Krishnamurti and Patwardhan \u2013 whose very lives were a message of God-grounded love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diane L. Eck’s views on Krishnamurti and his teachings after her encounter. The questions Krishnamurti asked were not about the world and its injustices, they were questions about me and my habits of apprehending the world. In November I met J. Krishnamurti, a man who didn\u2019t fit any category at all. He was giving a … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":29,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions\/34"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbody.com.np\/center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}