( Continuing the selected excerpts from K's Journals)

( Sept 1961, Paris and...how true is his description after 50 + years )

To have such a beautiful day in town seems such a waste; there isn't a cloud in the sky, the sun is warm and the pigeons are warming themselves on the roof but the roar of the town goes without pity. The trees feel the autumnal air and their leaves are turning, slowly and languidly, without care. The streets are crowded with ( tourists & young ) people, always looking at shops, very few at the sky ( as ) they are ( constantly) concerned with themselves, and with what impression they give (although ) envy and fear is always there in spite of their ( intellectual ?) make-up and their polished appearance. The labourers ( & the 'yellow vests' ?) are looking tired, heavy and grumbling. And the ( Seine) river held in by cement and stone seems so utterly indifferent. The ( local ?) pigeons are plentiful, with a strutting dignity of their own. And so... another day passed by on the street, or in the office. It's a world of monotony and despair, with laughter that soon passes away. In the evening the monuments, the streets, are lit up but there's a vast ( existential ?) emptiness and unbearable pain.

Early in the morning, when the sun was just showing itself in a clear sky, there was a flash of 'Otherness', with its benediction and the beauty of it remains. It's not that thought has captured it and holds it but it has left its imprint on consciousness.
Thought will always fail in its attempt to experience
that which is beyond time and space. The brain, the machinery of
thought can be quiet; the very active brain can be quiet; its
machinery can run very slowly. The quietness of the brain, though
intensely sensitive, is essential; then only can thought disentangle
itself and come to an end, Then only can there be innocency, freshness; a new quality (of holistic ?) thinking -and it's this quality that puts an end to sorrow and ( existential ?) despair.

It is peaceful except for the roar of traffic, even though it is Sunday. There's peace beyond thought and feeling. ( This inner ?) Peace is not for sale, a commodity of exchange. Conflict, in every form, must cease and then perhaps it is there. There must be a total negation, the cessation of demand and need; then only does conflict come to an end. In emptiness there is birth. All the inward structure of resistance and security must (spontaneously ?) "die away"; then only is there ( the meditative ?) emptiness. Only in this emptiness is there ( an inner ?) peace whose virtue has no value nor profit.

It (the Otherness ?) was there early in the morning, it came with the sun in a clear, opaque sky; it was a marvellous thing full of beauty, a benediction that asked nothing (from you ?) , no sacrifice, no (self-) discipline, no midnight hour. It was there in abundance and only an abundant mind and heart could receive it. It was beyond all measure. It was a good hour to be quiet, to be meditative. To be (inwardly)
quiet, there must be intensity and meditation, then it is not a
meandering but very active and forceful. Meditation is not a
pursuit of ( a thread of) thought or idea; it is a movement into the unknown.

Intelligence is the sensitive awareness of the totality of life; life with its problems, contradictions, miseries, joys. This (timeless ?) intelligence is not the result of influence and environment; it is not the prisoner of either of them and so can understand them and thus be free of them. ( The self-centred ?) consciousness is limited, open or hidden, and its activity, however alert, is confined within the borders of time;(while) intelligence is not. Sensitive awareness, without choice, of the totality of life is intelligence. This intelligence cannot be used for gain and profit, personal or collective. This intelligence is the psychological destruction of all that has been, that is the essence of intelligence. Without this intelligence every action leads to misery and confusion. Sorrow is the denial of this intelligence.

( ...) Every ( time-binding thread of ?) 'thought' and/or 'feeling' must ( be allowed to) flower for them to live and die; flowering of everything in you, the ambition, the greed, the hate, the joy, the passion; in the flowering there is their death and freedom. It is only in ( the space of inward) freedom that anything can flourish. To allow envy to flower is not easy; it is condemned or cherished but never given freedom (to reveal itself ?) .

It is only in freedom the fact of envy reveals its ( true) colours, its depth & peculiarities; if suppressed it will not reveal itself fully and freely. When it has shown itself completely, there is an ending of it only to reveal another (still deeper) fact, emptiness, loneliness, fear, and as each fact is allowed to flower, in freedom, in its entirety, the ( moral ?) conflict between the observer and the observed ceases; there is no longer the ( self-righteous ?) 'censor' but only seeing.
Freedom can only be in completion (and) there is completion only in ( allowing thought to ?) flower and die; there is no flowering if there is no ending.
What has continuity is ( the self-projection of ) thought in time. The flowering of thought is the ending of thought; for only in death is there the new. The new cannot be if there is no freedom from the known. Thought, the old, cannot bring into being the new; it must 'die' for the new to be. What(is allowed to) flower must (eventually ?) come to an end.

(...) The earth was the colour of the sky; the hills, the green, ripening rice fields, the trees and the dry, sandy riverbed were the colour of the sky; every rock on the hills, the big boulders, were the clouds and they were the rocks. Heaven was the earth and the earth heaven; the setting sun had transformed everything. The sky
was blazing fire, bursting in every streak of cloud, in every stone, in every blade of grass, in every grain of sand. The sky was ablaze with green, purple, violet, indigo, with the fury of flame. Over that hill it was a vast sweep of purple and gold; over the southern hills a
burning delicate green and fading blues; to the east there was a 'counter sunset' as splendid in cardinal red and burnt ochre, magenta and fading violet. The 'counter sunset' was exploding in splendour as in the west; a few clouds had gathered themselves around the setting sun and they were pure, smokeless fire which would never die. The vastness of this fire and its intensity penetrated everything
and entered the earth. The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth. Everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was God ( not the 'god' of man). The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime. The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a
stretch of immediate attention. And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky. You were ( part ) of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word. And as the sun went further down, every colour became more intense and 'you' were completely lost, past all recalling. It was an evening that had no memory.

This post was last updated by John Raica Sat, 20 Apr 2019.

(...) They were small clouds, mere brush strokes with wings,
hundreds of them, filling the western sky. And as you watched them 'you' were lost; they existed and nothing else; not even space and time. There was no thought, no feeling and so no experiencing. The
essence of immaturity is ( the desire for) experiencing. Every form of ( 'psychological' ?) experience is in the net of the past and in the bondage of time.

Seeing is a marvellous thing; you 'see' only when
there is ( inward) emptiness; from emptiness, seeing dissolves space and time is consumed. The horizon, the dancing waters, the ever
flying clouds and the abiding earth were in timeless movement
and the glory of heaven was in that rock, on which a seagull
was sitting.
Now the flying clouds were fading and the moon was casting
transparent shadows. It was a dusty, crowded road, people everywhere; only the poor, it seemed, walked or waited in a long queue for the buses. You walked seeing, observing, listening without a thought and feeling and so you saw everything, leaving no mark, no scratch.

(...) The moon was full and from the long, enclosed
balcony, she was just over the large tree, serene, clear and very
close. There were a thousand shadows, soft and breathless; the
city was silent so early in the morning. A large rat was quietly
crossing the window-sill, pretending that it wasn’t seen. Not a
bird was stirring and the dusty leaves were motionless but the
shadows were whispering. Meditation is a movement in which everything is (contained) for it is nothing (no-thing ?) ; it has no centre and so no beginning and no ending. 'You' cannot enter into that movement; the ( temporal) 'you' must be left in your office, or in your church and temple. You may not enter into that movement with ( your personal) experience and knowledge. There must be no 'you'.

The moon was now behind a house across the way and the shadows were thickening to disappear with the coming dawn. Then the birds began, a chorus of all the birds, shouting, singing, chattering. You listened but you were not there . Strangely you were aware of
everything but 'you'( the self-consciousness ?) were nowhere, you were not (just) 'lost', you had ceased to be, and it was going to
be extremely difficult to 'find yourself' again; you wouldn’t even seek it because it wasn’t worth it. You lived but it wasn’t 'you'
who lived. Living is entirely a different thing, a movement
without measure, an ecstasy that no thought or feeling could
ever capture. A mother came out, carrying a freshly bathed,
combed little girl in her arms and by her side walked an older
girl. This little girl was talking to the braided girl, carried
around the hips of the mother; she talked in a soft voice, with
such pleasure and boundless affection; you felt it, moving you
to tears for it was an affection that had in it the earth, the
heavens and tears. Those three were all life and the immensity of it. They just went by, in the dirty alley and time ceased.

(1961)

( ...) All ( temporal ?) existence is ( involving thought & desire's ?) choice; only in aloneness (all-oneness ?) there is no choice.
Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction,between the inner (desires ) and outer (reality ?) breeds confusion and
misery. To escape from this misery the commitment to various patterns of activities becomes a compulsive necessity. Having ( successfully) escaped, those (activities) become all important and escape is the way of illusion; then fear and anxiety set in.
Choice must always exist as long as there is the 'chooser', the
accumulated memory of pain and pleasure, and every experience of choice only strengthens this ( identitary) memory whose response becomes (self-centred) "thought & feeling".

There were a few clouds gathering around the sun; they were far
down on the horizon and were afire. The palm trees were dark
against the flaming sky; they stood in golden-green rice fields
stretching far into the horizon. There was one all by itself, in a
yellowing green of rice; it was not alone, though it looked rather
forlorn and far away. A gentle breeze from the sea was blowing
and a few clouds were chasing each other, faster than the breeze.

Everywhere there were shadows, quietly whispering to each other.
The moon was just overhead and across the road the shadows deep
and deceptive. A water snake was crossing the road; quietly
slithering across, pursuing a frog; there was water in the rice fields and the frogs were croaking, almost rhythmically; in the long stretch of water beside the road, with their heads up, out of the water, they were chasing each other; they would 'go under' and come up to disappear again. The water was bright silver, sparkling and warm to the touch and full of mysterious noises. Bullock carts went by, carrying firewood to the town; a cycle bell rang, a lorry with bright glaring lights screeched for room and the shadows remained
motionless.

It was a beautiful evening and there on that road so
close to town, there was a deep Silence and not a sound disturbed it, not even the moon and the lorry. It was a silence that no thought, no word could touch, a silence that went with the frogs and the cycles, a silence that followed you; you walked in it, you breathed
it, you saw it. It went beyond you into vast immensities and you could follow it if your thoughts & feelings were utterly quiet, forgetting themselves and losing themselves with the frogs in the water; they had no (self-) importance and could so easily lose themselves, to be picked up when they were wanted. It was an enchanting evening, full of clarity and fast-fading smile.

( The psychologically motivated ?) 'choice' is always breeding misery. Watch it and you will see it, lurking, demanding, insisting and begging, and before you know i, you are caught in its net of inescapable duties, responsibilities ( desillusions & ) and despairs. Watch it and you will become aware of the 'fact' (of its actuality ?) Be aware of the (ongoing inner ?) fact; you cannot change the fact; you may cover it up, run away from it, but you cannot change it. It is there.

If you will let it alone, not interfering with it with your calculated and cunning judgements, it will flower and show all its intricacies, its subtle ways and there are many - its seeming importance and ethics, its hidden motives and fancies. If you will leave the ( unfolding of the inner) 'fact' alone, it will show you all these and more. But you must be choicelessly aware of it, walking softly. Then you will see that ( desire's ?) 'choice', having flowered, dies and there is freedom

'You' are the maker of choice; but when you have ceased (inwardly) to make "choices", out of this 'choiceless' (desire-free ?) state there flowers aloneness (all-oneness ?) . It is always flowering and it is always new. Dying to the 'known' is to be alone. All ( thought & desire's ?) choices are within the field of the known; ( the self-enclosing ?) action in this field always breeds sorrow. There is the ending of sorrow in aloneness (all-oneness).

( From the K Notebook, 1961)

(...) Woke up this morning with a flash of (inward) seeing that was revealing : Our brain register (countless?) memories of outward things, trees, mountains, swift running streams; accumulate knowledge, technique and so on. With the same (accumulative attitude of the ) brain, trained to observe ( and transform the outward reality ? ) we try to look inwardly, trying to recognize (mental) objects or build up ideas which are organized into reason. This (outward look turned inwardly) does not (really) go very far, for it's still within the (limitations of its own (knowledge assisted?) observation and reason. This (self-centred?) inward gaze is still ( on the same qualitative level as ) the outward ( self-centred) look - not much difference between the two. What may appear (in the dualistic perceptive mode ) to be different may be ( holistically-wise?) similar.

However, ( in meditation?) there's an inward observation which is not the outward observation turned inward. The brain and the eye which observe must be completely ( awake & ) alive, but still; they must cease to choose ( to make personal choices ?) and judge ( that which is being observed inwardly ) but be passively aware. Then the inward seeing (aka : 'insight'?) is without the borders ( without the perceptive limitations?) of 'time & space'. In this flash a new perception is born.

(…) All night ( the Process?) was fairly quiet, though the pressure and strain were there, like the sun behind the clouds; but early this morning it began again. It appears that one is awakened merely to register a certain ( transcendental  ?) experience; this morning . One was awakened this morning with a living feeling of joy; it was
taking place as one woke up; this ecstasy was coming from "outside" (oneself?) - not 'self-induced'; it was being 'pushed through the system', flowing through the (physical) organism, with great energy and volume. The ( physical) brain was not taking part in it but only registering it as an actual (ongoing) fact which was taking place. There was, it seemed, immense strength and vitality behind this ecstasy; it was as solid and realas that stream crashing down the mountain-side or that solitary pine on the green mountain slope.

Early this morning there was a benediction that seemed to cover
the earth and fill the room. With it comes an all consuming
quietness, a stillness that seems to have within it all movement.
The "process" was particularly intense yesterday afternoon.
The room became full with that benediction. Now what
followed is almost impossible to put down in words - it was the centre of all creation; a purifying seriousness that cleansed the brain of
every thought and feeling; its seriousness was as lightning which
destroys and burns up; the profundity of it was not measurable, it
was there immovable, impenetrable, a solidity that was as light as
the heavens. It was in the eyes and the eyes could see. The (mind's ?) eyes that saw, were wholly different from the physical eyes and yet they were the same eyes. There was only "seeing", the eyes that saw beyond time-space.

There was an impenetrable dignity and an (inner) peace that was the essence of all movement, action. There was ( that quality of ?) Love that was utterly perishable and so it had the delicacy of all new things, vulnerable, destructible and yet it was beyond all this. It was there imperishable, unnameable, the Unknowing. It was "pure", untouched and so ever dyingly beautiful.
All this seemed to affect the brain - as a terrific storm, or a destructive earthquake gives a new course to the rivers, changes
the landscape, digs deep into the earth, so It has levelled the
contours of thought, changed the shape of the heart.

Here are a few selected excerpts from Sidney Fields memoirs of his long frienship with K

( ...) My brother, John, died early in January, 1972. His death was totally unexpected and a great shock to me. John had been a photographer, a lover of adventure, women and wine, a man of great Latin charm. He had known Krishnaji as long as I had, and had many times delighted him with his stories and personal adventures. Krishnaji had just arrived from Europe and was staying in Malibu at the home of Mrs. Zimbalist. I called him to give him the sad news, saying I wanted to see him, and he asked me to come the following day for lunch.

He greeted me most affectionately. At the dining table I came right to the point: “Has John survived his bodily death in a subtler form? Yes or no?” There was a moment’s silence. “My gut feeling,” I went on, “is that he is here beside me, right now.”
“Of course he is, right here beside you,” said Krishnaji. “He’s very close to you, and will continue being close for some time.”

Two hours later we were still deep into the subject of 'death and the hereafter'. He referred to that part of the 'personality' that survives the bodily death as an 'echo' ( instead of an 'astral body', as the Theosophists call it), the 'echo of the person' who lived on earth, the duration of its life on the other side depending on the strength of the individual’s earthly personality. “Dr. Besant’s echo, for instance, will go on for a long time, for she had a very strong personality.”

“Your viewpoint here is very similar to that of the Theosophists,” I said. “With one important difference,” he replied. “There is no permanent substance that survives the death of the body. Whether the ego lasts one year, ten thousand, or a million years, it must finally come to an end.”

Krishnaji’s remarks during this conversation were among the most revealing and enlightening I had ever heard him make on the subject of death and survival beyond it. At the end of our talk Mrs. Zimbalist remarked that it was a great pity we had not recorded it, for, prodded by insistent questioning and probing on my part, and aided by a sympathetic Mrs. Zimbalist, Krishnaji had explored what to us was a new dimension on this fascinating subject.

Krishnaji has an extraordinary capacity for recall, when he wants to use that gift, and a few days later, he, Alain Naude and Mrs. Zimbalist recreated the entire conversation, this time recording it, with Naude asking Krishnaji essentially the same questions I had asked. It was staged in a much quieter atmosphere, naturally, but Naude’s questions were cool and intellectual. They did not have the urgency and strong feeling of my approach, for I was hurting at the time. Nevertheless, I was fascinated when I heard the recording. It has not been published yet, but those few who heard it have remarked on its great impact. Krishnaji gave me permission to publish it in connection with this memoir (...)

And here is its 'reader friendly' edited version:

The ('day after'?) K CONVERSATION ( following Sidney Fields' personal interview after the death of his brother John Field (1972)

KRISHNAMURTI: The other day Sidney Field came to see me. His brother John died recently and he was very concerned whether his brother was living in a different level (plane ?) of consciousness; whether there was John as an entity born [in the] next life. And did I believe in reincarnation, and what did it mean. And so he had lots of questions and out of that conversation two things came up. First, 'Is there a permanent ego'? Obviously not. But Sidney said, “Then what is it that I feel, that John is with me? When I enter the room, I know he is there. I’m not fooling myself, I’m not imagining; I feel him there as I feel my sister who was in that room yesterday. It’s as clear, as definite as that.”
I said ''Of course he is there, because when John lived he was associated with you. His presence is with you. When he was living, you might not have seen him all day, but his presence was in that room.

MARY ZIMBALIST: When you say "he was in that room", whether alive or dead, was there something external to his brother that was there, or was it in their consciousness?

K: It is both in his ( personal) consciousness and outside his consciousness. John, who died ten days ago—his atmosphere, his thoughts, his way of behaving still remaining there, even though physically he might have gone.

MZ: Are you saying there is a sort of (psychic) energy which human beings give off?

K: There was a photograph of a parking lot taken where there had been many cars, and the photo showed, although there were no cars there, the form of the cars that had been there. That is, the heat that the car had left came on the ( infrared?) negative.

A: And also one day when we were all living in Gstaad and you left for America your 'presence' was there, extremely strong.

K: That’s it.

A: Your presence was so strong, one felt one could touch you.

K: So ( to make a long story short?) John’s thought or John’s ( mental?) 'existence' is still there.

Z: What do you mean by that, John’s 'existence'?

K:If I live in a room for a number of years, the 'presence' ( the psychical atmosphere?) of that room contained my energy, my thoughts, my feelings. And because John clings to life. John’s desires are there 'in the air' (in the ether?) , not ( just) in the room.

A: Immaterially ?

K: Yes, they are there just like a thought (wave?) .

A: But doesn't this mean that there is a ( spiritual?) being who is self-conscious ( still) calling himself John, who is thinking those thoughts?

K: I doubt it.

A: But this is exactly what the people who believe in reincarnation would postulate.

K: The possibility that John whose physical body is gone, exists in thought.

A: Exists as a thinking entity?

K: As a thinking entity. This is rather interesting—John continues because he 'is' ( impersonating?) the world of vulgarity, of greed, of envy, of drinking, and of competition. That is the common pattern of man. It continues and John may be identified with that, or 'is' that.

A: John is ( incarnating?) the desires, the thoughts, the beliefs, the associations... ?

K: ... of the world.

A: It would be nice if you could explain it a little better. John 'continues' because there is the continuation of the (collective?) 'vulgarity ' in him—the worldly, material associations ?

K: That’s right: fear, wanting power, position. So because that is a common thing of the ( temporal consciousness of the?) world, he 'is' of the world and the world does incarnate.

A: The ( collective consciousness of the ) world does incarnate ?

K: Take the mass of the people. They are ( subiminally?) caught in this stream and that stream goes on. I may have a son who is part of that stream and in that stream there is John also, as a human being who is caught in it. And my son may remember some of John’s attitudes.

A: So, in that sense we see that he can perhaps live forever.

K: Unless he breaks away from it—breaks away from the stream. Unless I am free from it, I will continue representing ( manifesting ?) the whole vulgarity of man.

A: That’s not very clear.

K: Look, sir, the 'me', who is (the manifestation) that current, is bound to continue in that stream, which is the stream of 'me'.

A: Therefore even dead I continue because the 'things' (the collective tendencies?) which were 'me' are continuing  ?

K: In the 'human being'.

A: But is there a conscious 'thinking entity' who immaterially says, “Good gracious, they’ve put that body in the ground but I have consciousness of being alive.” ?

K: Sidney was asking that question. Does John, whose body is cremated, does that ( mental) 'entity' continue to live?

A: Does that entity continue to have the consciousness of its own existence?

K: When you ask whether he is living in a separate consciousness, I question whether he was ever separate from the Stream (of self-interest ?) When John was alive, was he different from this Stream?
The ( Consciousness?) Stream of humanity is ( greed?) jealousy, seeking power, position, cheating, corrupt, polluted. That is the Stream. Of that stream is my brother John. When he existed physically, he had a ( personal) physical body, but psychologically he was of this. Therefore was he ever different (inwardly?) from the Stream?
Therefore what is dead is the (physical) body. But the ( mental ?) continuation of John is part of that Stream. I may like to think of him as a separate ( entity?) because he lived with me as a separate being physically. But my point is, as long as I swim in that stream, am I different? Is the real John different from the ( collective ) Stream (of self-interest ) ?

A: Now, does that ( self-identified?) thought still call itself John?

K : There is only a (spiritually individualised?) 'John' when he is out of the stream.
I can 'incarnate' (spiritually?) if I step out of it. 'Incarnate' in the sense that the ( authentic inward ) change can take place away from the stream. In the stream there is no ( possibility for such?) change.

A: Therefore, if there is an ( timeless ) entity, then it must be out of the stream.

K: When Alain Naudé dies, as long as he belongs to the stream, that ( collective) stream (of self-interest?) and its flow is 'semipermanent'.

A: Yes. It goes on. It’s a ( history in the making?)

K: But if Mr Naudé would say, I will incarnate (spiritually?) now, not tomorrow, which means he will 'step out' of the Stream, he is no longer belonging to the stream; therefore there is nothing permanent.

A: There is nothing to reincarnate. Therefore, that which reincarnates, if reincarnation is possible, is not permanent anyway.

.
K: There is no separate entity. I 'am' the world. When I step out of the ( time-bound consciousness of the ) world, is there a 'me' to continue? So, sir, then what happens? If there is no permanent John or K or Naude or Zimbalist, what happens? You remember, sir, I think I read it in the Tibetan tradition or some other tradition, that when a person dies, is dying, the priest or the monk comes in and sends all the family away, locks the door and says to the dying man, “Look you’re dying—let go—let all of your antagonisms, all your
worldliness, all your ambition, let go, because you are going to meet a light in which you will be absorbed, if you let go. If not, you’ll come back to the stream. So what happens to you if you step out of the stream? The 'stepping out' is the ( spiritual) incarnation. There is a new dimension ( of consciousness) coming into being.
A: Yes.
K: Now, what happens? You follow? Naude has stepped out of the stream. What happens? You are not an artist. Not a businessman. You are not a politician, not a musician, all that identification is part of the stream. Suppose that you, living now, step out of the stream. What happens?

A: Nothing can be said about 'what happens'.

K: You see, sir, none of us step out of the river, and we are always from the river, trying to reach the other shore.

A: It’s like people talking about 'deep sleep' from awakeness.

K: That’s it, sir. We belong to this stream, all of us. Man does belong to the stream and from the stream he wants to experience what is on the (Other?) shore, without leaving the river. Now the (spiritually earnest?) man says, all right, I see the fallacy of this, the absurdity of my position. So the mind says, “Out!” He steps out and what takes place (inwardly ) ? Don’t (try to glibly?) verbalize it.

A: The only thing that one can say about it in terms of the stream is 'silence'. Because it is the silence of the stream, and one can also say it is the death of the stream. Therefore, in terms of the stream it is sometimes called 'oblivion'.

K: To 'step out' of the stream is to step out of this whole (self-centred mentality ) structure. So, the Creation as we know it, is in the stream, but what happens (inwardly) to the man who really steps out of the stream ? When he steps out of it, there is no ( inner or outer) conflict, there is no ( inward sense of ) division. So what is the quality of that mind that has no sense of division? It is pure ( spiritual?) energy, isn’t it? So our concern is ( with understanding) this stream and stepping out of it.

A: That is real meditation, because the stream is not life. The stream is totally mechanical.

K: I must 'die' to the stream, and as I move away from the stream my mind is open. I think that is ( the intelligence of?) Compassion. When the man of the stream steps out and looks, then he has compassion.

A: And love ?

K: So, you see, sir, ( the actual opportunity of the 'self'?) incarnating over and over again, is within the Stream. If I come to you and tell you that my (beloved?) brother died yesterday, and you tell me this. I call you a terribly cruel man. But you are weeping for yourself, you are weeping for the (temporal manifestation of the ) Stream. That’s what ( most) people don’t want to know. I want to know 'where' my brother is ( going after his physical death?) , not whether he 'is' (now a spiritually integrated entity ?) .

This post was last updated by John Raica Sat, 27 Apr 2019.

( Continuing the selected excerpts from K's Notebook ( 1961)

( ...) The road was muddy, deep rutted and full of people; it was outside the town, where slowly a new suburb was being built, but now it was incredibly dirty, full of holes, dogs, goats, wandering cattle, buses, cycles, cars and more people; shops were selling coloured drinks in bottles, shops that had cloth to sell, food, wood for fire, a bank, a cycle-repair shop, and more goats and people. There was still (open) country on either side of the road, palm trees, rice fields, and great puddles of water. The sun was behind the palm trees bursting with colour and
vast shadows and every bush and tree was amazed by the vastness of the sky. Everywhere there was man's activity and nobody bothered to
look at the sky or at those clouds, bearing colour; it was a (magic?) evening that would soon disappear never to appear again and nobody
seemed to care.

The immediate ( needs ) were all important, the immediate that may extend into the future beyond sight. At heart everyone is a 'politician', concerned with the immediate and trying to force all life into the immediate. Round the corner there would be sorrow, but you could end it all if you believed in something ardently or drowned yourself in work or committed yourself to some pattern of thought. But you have tried them all and your mind was as barren as your heart and you crossed to the other side of the road and got lost in the 'immediate'. But, as ever unexpectedly, that 'otherness' came with that purity and strength which no thought could possibly ever formulate and your heart seemed to explode into the empty heavens, with ecstasy. The brain was utterly still, motionless, but sensitive, watching. It could not follow (that otherness?) into emptiness, nor it could 'experience' it , as what it recognized would be ( the memory of ? ) time. So it was motionless, merely quiescent, without asking, seeking. And this 'Totality of Love' entered into everything and was lost. Everything had its own space, its own place, but this (Otherness?) had none and so, do what you will you will not find it. It is not (to be found) on the market nor in any temple; everything has to be 'inwardly) destroyed , not a stone left unturned, no foundation to stand on, and the (state of inner) 'emptiness' must be without a tear, and then perhaps, the Unknowable might pass by. It was there and beauty.

All deliberate (self-projected) pattern of (inner) change is non-change; such 'change' has a (personal) motive, purpose, direction and so it is merely a modified continuity of what has been. Such change is like changing clothes on a doll but it remains, mechanical, lifeless,
brittle, to be broken and thrown away. Death is the inevitable end
of such change. (A holistic inner ) mutation, the total revolution, takes place only when the change within the pattern of (thought & ) time, is seen as 'false' and in its total abandonment (the authentic inner ?) mutation takes place.

Walking on that road in the dark with the light of the city in the clouds, that inviolable Strength comes with such abundance and
with such clarity that it took literally your breath away. All life was
that strength. It wasn't the strength of carefully built-up will, nor
the strength of many defences and resistances; it had
no quality, no description could contain it and yet it was there as
those dark distant hills and those trees beside the road. It was too
immense for thought to bring it about or speculate upon. It was a
strength that had no cause and so nothing could be added to or
taken away from it. It cannot be 'known'; it has no shape, form, and
cannot be approached. Knowing is recognition but (this Inner Strength?) is always new, something that cannot be measured in time. It had been there all day, uncertainly, without insistence like a whisper but now it was there with an urgency and with such abundance that there was
nothing but that. The word 'Love' had a totally different
meaning, walking on that empty road. It came with that
impenetrable strength; the two were inseparable, like the colour of
a petal. The brain, the heart and the mind were totally consumed by
it and there was nothing left but that. It continued, walking alone or walking with others, and it went on during the night until the morning came among the palm trees. But it is there like a whisper among the leaves.

Only in the flowering of thought and so, in the ending thought does Meditation have significance; thought can only flower in (an inner space of) freedom, not in everwidening patterns of knowledge. Knowledge may give newer experiences of greater sensation but a mind that is seeking experiences of any kind is
immature. Maturity is the freedom from all (personal desire for) experience; it is no longer under any influence to be or not to be. Maturity in meditation is the freeing of the mind from (its psychological) knowledge for it shapes and controls all experience. A mind which is a light to itself needs no experience. Immaturity is the craving for greater and widerexperience. Meditation is the wandering through the world of knowledge and being free of it, to enter into the Unknown.

(...) The flowering of meditation is (generating its own ?) goodness. It is the beauty of meditation that gives perfume to its flowering. How can there be (any creative ?) joy in meditation if it is the coaxing of desire and pain; how can it flower if you are seeking it through (thought) control, suppression and sacrifice; how can it blossom in the darkness of fear or in the corrupting ambition
and smell of success; how can it bloom in the shadow of hope and despair? You will have to leave all these far behind, without regret, easily, naturally. Meditation flowers only in the freedom from the known and withers away in the known.

There is a palm tree, all by itself, in the middle of a rice
field; it is no longer young, there are only a few palms. It is very
tall and very straight; it has the quality of righteousness without the
fuss and noise of respectability. It is there and it is alone. It has
never known anything else and it would continue to be that way
until it died or is destroyed. You suddenly came upon it at the turn
of the road and you are startled to see it among the rich rice fields
and flowing water; the water and the green fields were murmuring
to each other which they always have been doing from ancient
days and these gentle mutterings never reached the palm; it was
alone with the high heaven and flashing clouds. It was by itself,
complete and aloof and it would be nothing else.

In that evening light, along that narrow road, the intensity of
delight increased and there was no cause for it. It had begun while
watching a small jumping spider which jumped with astonishing
rapidity on flies and held them fiercely; it had begun while
watching a single leaf fluttering while the other leaves were still; it
had begun while watching the small striped squirrel, scolding
something or other, its long tail bobbing up and down. The delight
had no cause, and joy that is a result is so trivial anyway and
changes with the change. This strange, unexpected delight
increased in its intensity and what is intense is never brutal; it has
the quality of yielding but still it remains intense. It increased without something being done about it; it was, as something outside of you, over which you had no control; you had no say in the matter. In the very increasing of intensity, there
was gentleness. You couldn't cultivate it, even if you wished; it didn't belong to the category of the strong and the
weak. It was vulnerable as love is. The delight with its gentleness
increased in intensity. There was nothing else but that. The coming
and the going of people, the drive in the car and the talk, the deer
and the palm tree, the stars and the rice fields were there, in their
beauty and freshness, but they were all inside and outside this
intensity. A flame has a form, a line, but inside the flame there is
only intense heat without form and line.

The garden had so many flowers, so many colours and each flower
was doing a dance, a skip and a jump and every leaf was astir; even
the little blades of grass on the little lawn were being shaken. And
two old, thin women were weeding it; two old women, old before
their age, thin and worn out; they were squatting upon the lawn,
chatting and weeding, leisurely; they weren't all there, they were
somewhere else, carried away by their thoughts, though they were
weeding and talking. They looked intelligent, their eyes sparkling,
but perhaps too many children and lack of good food had made
them old and weary. You became them, they were you and the
grass and the clouds; it wasn't a verbal bridge over which you
crossed out of pity or out of some vague, unfamiliar sentiment; you
were not thinking at all, nor were your emotions stirred. They were
you and you were they; distance and time had ceased.
It was like a flame that burned its way through everything leaving no mark, no ashes; it wasn't anexperience, with its memories, to be repeated. They were you and you were they and it died with the mind.

It is strange, the desire to show off or to be somebody. You can always pretend, put on a mask, but to be what you are is an extremely complex affair; because you are always changing; you are never the same and each moment reveals a new facet, a new depth, a new surface. You can't be all this at one moment for each moment brings its own change. So if you are at all intelligent, you give up being anything.

You may like to think you are very sensitive and an incident, a fleeting thought, shows that you are not; you may think you are clever, well-read, artistic, moral, but turn round the corner, you find that you are deeply ambitious, envious, insufficient and anxious.
(In fact) You are all these things, turn by turn, but you want to be something continuous, permanent, profitable, pleasurable. So you run after that, while the many other "you"'s are demanding their fulfilment. So your (consciousness ?) became a battlefield and generally ambition is gaining, with its envy and fear. The word 'love' is thrown in to hold the family together but you are
caught in your own commitments and activities.

So to be (inwardly true to ?) 'what you are' is an extremely arduous affair; if you are at all awake, you know all these things and the sorrow of it all. So you drown yourself in your work, in your belief, in your fantastic ideals and meditations. By then you have become old and ready for the grave, if you are not already dead inwardly. To put away all these things, with their contradictions and increasing sorrow, and be (inwardly ?) nothing is the most natural and intelligent thing to do. But before you can be (as ?) nothing, you must have unearthed all these hidden things, exposing them and so understanding them. To understand these hidden urges and compulsions, you will have to become aware of them, without choice, as with death; then in the pure act of seeing, they will wither away and you will be without sorrow and so, be 'as nothing'. To be 'as nothing' is not a 'negative' state; the very denial of everything you have been (identified with ?) is the most positive action. This denial is (an act of inner) freedom. This positive action gives energy, while the mere ideas dissipate energy. Idea is ( thought's projection in ?) time and living in time is disintegration, sorrow.

(...) There was a large opening in the thick closely-planted
casuarina grove beside a quiet road; towards the evening it was
dark, deserted and the opening invited the heavens. Further down
the road there was a thin-walled hut, with palm leaves woven
together for its roof; in the hut was a dim light, a wick burning in a saucer of oil, and a man and a woman sitting on
the floor eating their evening meal & chatting loudly, with
occasional laughter.

A few days' old calf was being led by a woman, followed by the mother softly assuring the baby. A flock of white birds with long legs were flying north, their wings beating the air slowly and rhythmically. The sun had set in a clear sky and a rose-coloured ray shot across the sky, almost from horizon to horizon. It was a very quiet evening and the lights of the city were far away. It was that little opening in the casuarina grove that held the evening, and as one walked past it, one was aware of its extraordinary stillness; all the lights and glare of the day had been forgotten and the bustle of men coming and going. Now it was quiet, enclosed by dark trees and fast-fading light. It was not
only quiet but there was a joy in it, the joy of immense solitude and
as one went by it, that ever-strange ( visitation of the) 'Otherness' came, like a wave, covering the heart and the mind in its beauty and its clarity. All (sense of?) time ceased, the next moment had no beginning. Out of emptiness only is there love.

Meditation is not a play of imagination. Every (self-projected?) image,
word or symbol must come to ( its natural?) end for the flowering of meditation. Thought is ( the creator of its own ?) time, and (the mental) symbols, however ancient and/or (intellectually?) significant, must lose their grip on thought. Then, thought has no (time-binding?) continuity; it is then only from moment to moment and so loses its mechanical insistency; thought then does not shape the mind and enclose it within the frame of ideas and condition it to the culture & the society, in which it lives. The whole of (the time-bound ) consciousness is residual, ( opportunistically?) changing, modifying or conforming, and (a profound qualitative) mutation is only possible when (thought's projected ?) 'time' and 'ideas' have come to an end.

This 'ending' is not ( the result of) a (deliberate) conclusion, nor is it an idea to be denied or accepted. It is to be understood through a self-knowing (in real time ?) for the (temporal ?) 'self' is ever changing, never constant. This 'self-knowing' ( done properly???) liberates the mind from the 'known'; for to live one's entire life in the activities of the known (ultimately ?) breeds endless conflict and misery. Meditation is not a 'personal' quest for Reality. Meditation frees the mind from the narrow, limited (self-centred) existence to the ever-expanding, timeless Life.

(...) They were small clouds, mere brush strokes with wings,
hundreds of them, filling the western sky; the sea was covered
with small, dancing ripples and the sun was setting, a gigantic
red globe, splendid. But it was those little clouds, with wings,
that gave enchantment to the evening; they were just a whisper
of clouds, breathlessly flying north, all going north; each was
enclosed in its own space, in its own beauty and they
conquered space in their flight. As the sun went
down into the sea, they took on its colour; some deep rose,
some light pink and others white. And they were flying; they
had the beauty of all the earth and heavens; they were delicate,
newly born but with that energy that destroys space (distance ?) . And as you watched them and the rippling waters 'you' were not there;
they existed and nothing else; not even space and time.

They were flying in the light of colour and there was
emptiness. Seeing is a marvellous thing; you 'see' only when
there is emptiness; from emptiness, seeing dissolves space (distance ?) and time is consumed. The horizon, the dancing waters, the ever
flying clouds and the abiding earth were in timeless movement
and the glory of heaven was in that rock, on which a sea gull
was sitting. It was a dusty, crowded road, people everywhere; only the poor, it seemed, walked or waited in a long queue for the buses. You
walked seeing, observing, listening without a thought and
feeling and so you saw everything, leaving no mark, no scratch.

Meditation is a movement in which everything 'is' (contained) for it is nothing; 'you' cannot enter into that movement; the (temporal?) 'you' must be left in your office, in your church, or in the temple. You may not enter into that (universally open ?) movement with (your past ?) experience and knowledge. There must be no 'you'. The moon was now behind a house across the way and the shadows were thickening to disappear with the coming dawn. Then the birds began, a chorus of all
the birds, shouting, singing, chattering. You listened but you
were not there; you saw the palm tree awakening but you were
not there and with the setting moon the light from the east
began to cover the earth. Strangely you were aware of
everything but 'you' (the particular consciousness ?) were nowhere, you were not 'lost', you had ceased to be, and it was going to
be extremely difficult to find yourself again; you wouldn’t seek
to find it because it wasn’t worth it. You lived but it wasn’t 'you'
who lived. Living is entirely a different thing, a movement
without measure, an ecstasy that no thought or feeling could
ever capture. A mother came out, carrying a freshly bathed,
combed little girl in her arms and by her side walked an older
girl. This little girl was talking to the braided girl, carried
around the hips of the mother; she talked in a soft voice, with
such pleasure and boundless affection; you felt it, moving you
to tears for it was an affection that had in it the earth, the
heavens and tears. Those three were all life, neither east nor
west, and the immensity of it. They just went by, in the dirty
alley and time ceased. The sun was touching the tree tops, so faintly, so delicately that the leaves were trembling. The scent of flowers in the next garden became stronger and the colours vivid, brilliant but you could never come back...

( More selected excerpts from K's Notebook (1961)

Why is it that there is deterioration- inwardly as well as
outwardly. Time brings destruction to all mechanical
organizations; it 'wears out' by use and disease every form of
organism, but why should there be deterioration inwardly,
'psychologically' (within the human psyche?) ? Seeing (the inward ) fact that we deteriorate is all important and not the 'why and wherefore' of it. The (inward truth behind this ) fact is that human beings are (still ?) violent; conflict, inside and outside the skin, is part of our daily life – ambition (competition & ) and success. Seeing this 'fact' and not the cunning explanation and the subtle words, puts an end to deterioration.

( Inwardly speaking ?) choice is one of the major causes of decline, and it must wholly cease if (the deterioration is?) to come to an end. The desire to fulfil (oneself) and the satisfaction and sorrow that exist in its shadow, is also one of the factors of deterioration.

Woke up early this morning, to experience that benediction.
One was (almost?) "forced" to sit up to be in that clarity and beauty. It gave shelter, protection like the tree overhead whose leaves gave shelter against the strong mountain sun and yet allowed light to come through. All (authentic) relationship is (offering ) such protection in which there's freedom, and because there's freedom, there is shelter.

Woke up early this morning with an enormous sense
of power, beauty and incorruptibility. It was not an experience that was past, but something that was actually taking place. One was aware of something utterly incorruptible, in which nothing (no-thing?) could possibly exist that could become corrupt, deteriorate.
It was too immense for the brain to grasp, to remember; it could
only register, mechanically, that there is such a "state" of
''incorruption''. Experiencing such a state is vastly important; it was there, limitless, untouchable, impenetrable. Because of its incorruptibility, there was in it beauty. It was a life in which nothing could perish. Death is incorruptible but man makes of it a 'corruption' - as, for him, life is.With it all, there was that sense of power, strength as solid as that mountain which nothing could shatter, which no prayer, virtue could ever touch. It was there, immense, and the eyes, the breath were of it. It must have gone on for a certain period. Why should all this (Presence of the Sacred ?) happen to us? No (verbal?) explanation is good enough, but certain (contributing ?) things are fairly clear:
1. One must be wholly "indifferent" to It coming and going.
2. There must be no desire to continue the 'experience' or to
store it away in memory.
3. There must be a certain physical sensitivity, and a certain indifference to (the personal) comfort.
4. There must be a self-critical & humourous approach.

But even if one had all these (already figured out ?) they are not enough. Something totally different is necessary or nothing (not-a- -thing) is necessary. 'It' must come and you can never go after It, do what you will. You can also add (5) (the selfless?) Love to the list but 'It' is beyond Love. One thing is certain, the brain can never comprehend it nor can it contain it. Blessed is he to whom it is given. And you can also add ( to the short list above ?)
(6) a still, (& naturally) quiet brain.

(...) Yesterday, driving (slowly ?) through the narrow (Saanen) valley, with a mountain stream noisily making its way beside the wet road, there was this benediction. It was very strong and everything was bathed in it. The noise of the stream was part of it and the high waterfall which became the stream were in it. It was like the gentle rain that was coming down and one became utterly vulnerable; the body seemed to have become light as a leaf, exposed and trembling. This went
on through the long, cool drive; all talk became monosyllabic; the
beauty of it seemed incredible. All the evening it remained and
though there was (some casual ?) laughter, the solid, the impenetrable seriousness remained.

On waking this morning, early when the sun was still below the
horizon, there was the ecstasy of this seriousness. It filled the heart
and the brain and there was a sense of immovability.
To look is important. We ( generally) look out of our
immediate necessities (or we look forward?) to a 'future', coloured by the past. This (self-centred ?) look is as bound by time-space as is our brain. We never never see beyond this limitation; ( in fact ?) we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the (mind's?) eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love. Then there is a benediction which no 'god' can give.

( More selected excerpts from the K Notebook (1961)

( ...) Woke up this morning, rather early, with a sense of a mind that had penetrated into unknown depths. It was as though the mind
itself was going into itself, deeply and widely and the journey
seemed to have been without movement. And there was this
experience of immensity in abundance and a richness that was
incorruptible. It's strange that though every (such) 'experience' is utterly different, it is still the same movement; though it seems to change, it is still the changeless.

Walking in the deep shadow of a mountain, beside a
chattering stream, in the intensity of the process, one felt utterly
vulnerable, naked and very open; one hardly seemed to exist. And
the beauty of the snowcovered mountain, held in the cup of two
dark pine slopes of curving hills, was greatly moving.
Early in the morning when the sun was not yet up and the dew
on the grass, still in bed, lying quietly, without any thought or
movement, there was a 'seeing' - not the superficial seeing with the (physical) eyes but seeing through the 'eyes from behind the head'. The (physical) eyes and ( the 'eyes'?) from 'behind the head' were only the instrument through which the immeasurable past was seeing into the immeasurable space that had no time. And later, still in bed, there was a seeing in which all life seemed to be contained.

(...) Woke up very early in the morning; That which is a Benediction
and That which is Strength were there and the brain was aware of them as it is aware of a perfume but it was not a sensation, an emotion; they were simply there. Do what one will, they will
always be there; there was nothing one could do about it.
There was a talk this morning and during the talk, the brain
which reacts, thinks, constructs was absent. The brain was not
working, except, probably, for the memory of words.

(...) Yesterday we were walking along the favourite road beside
the noisy stream, in the narrow valley of dark pine trees, fields with
flowers and in the distance the massive snowcovered mountain and
a waterfall. It was enchanting, peaceful and cool. There, walking,
that Sacred Blessing came, a thing that one could almost touch, and
deep within one there were movements of change. It was an
evening of enchantment and of beauty that was not of this world.
The Immeasurable was there and then there was stillness.

This morning woke up early to register that the 'Process' was
intense, and through the back of the head, rushing forward as an
arrow with that peculiar sound as it flies through the air, was a
'force', a 'movement' that came from nowhere and was going
nowhere. And there was a sense of vast stability and a "dignity"
that could not be approached. And an austerity that no thought
could formulate but with it a purity of infinite gentleness. All these
are merely words and so they can never represent the 'real'; the
symbol is never the real and the symbol is without value.
All the morning the process was on and a cup that had no height
and no depth seemed to be full to the overflowing.

(...) We were talking and a little bit of the stream between the trees
was pointed out. It was an ordinary sight, an everyday incident, but
as one looked, several things took place, not any outward incidents
but a clear perception of what is absolutely necessary for (spiritual?) maturity :

1. A complete (inward) simplicity which goes with humility in the quality of being




2. Passion - with that intensity which is not merely physical.




3. (the sense of inner?) Beauty -being sensitive to that
   beauty which is beyond and above thought and feeling.




4. (Selfless?) Love - the totality of it, not the (sensuous?) thing that knows jealousy, attachment, dependence; not as divided into carnal and divine, but the whole immensity of it.




5. And (not in the least ?) a ( meditating?) mind that can penetrate without (personal?) motive into its own immeasurable depths; that has no barrier, that is free to wander without time & space.

Suddenly one was aware of all this and all the implications
involved in it; just in the mere sight of a stream between decaying
branches and leaves, on a rainy, dismal day.

(…) As we were talking about something that was not too serious, out of some unapproachable depths suddenly one felt this immense flame of power, destructive in its creation. It was the power that existed before all things came into being; it was unapproachable and by its very strength one could not come near it. Nothing (else seemed to) exists but that one thing. Immensity and awe.
Part of this experience must have "continued" while asleep for
on waking early this morning it was there and the intensity of the
process had awakened one. It is beyond all thought and words to
describe what's going on, the 'strangeness' of it and the 'love' & the
beauty of it. The strength and the purity of It is beyond and above all (mental ?) faculties of man.

(…) It was a cloudy day, heavy with dark clouds; it had rained
in the morning and it had turned cold. After a walk we were talking (casually?) but more looking at the beauty of the earth, the houses and the dark trees.
Unexpectedly, there was a flash of that unapproachable power
and strength that was physically shattering. The body became
frozen into immobility and one had to shut one's eyes not to go off
into a faint. It was completely shattering and everything that was
didn't seem to exist. The immobility of that strength and the
destructive energy that came with it, burned out the limitations of
sight and sound. It was something indescribably great whose height
and depth are unknowable.

Early this morning, just as dawn was breaking, with not a cloud
in the sky and the snowcovered mountains just visible, woke up
with that feeling of impenetrable strength in one's eyes and throat;
it seemed to be a palpable state, something that could never not be
there. For nearly an hour it was there and the brain remained
empty. It was not a 'thing' (an experience?) to be caught by thought and stored up in memory to be recalled. It was ( present?) there and all thought was dead.
Thought is only useful in the (physical?) realm; but thought could
not 'think about it' for thought is (of) time and That was beyond all time and measure.

(...) Meditation, in the still hours of early morning was the unfolding of beauty. It was total negation of everything 'known', not as a reaction but a 'denial' that had no cause; it was a movement in complete freedom, a movement that had no direction and dimension; in that 'movement' there was boundless energy whose very essence was stillness. Its 'action' was a total (mental ?) inaction and the essence of that inaction is freedom. There was great bliss, a great ecstasy that perished at the touch of thought.

(...) To look with (the background of) thought and to look without thought are two different things. To 'look with thought' at those trees by the roadside and the buildings across the dry fields keeps the brain tied to its own moorings of time, experience, memory; the machinery of thought is working endlessly, without rest, without freshness; the brain is made dull, insensitive, without the power of recuperation. It is everlastingly responding to (life's) challenges but its response is (often ?) inadequate and not fresh. To 'look with thought' keeps the brain in the (mental) grooves of habit and recognition; ( eventually ?) it becomes tired and sluggish living within the narrow limitations of its own making. It is never
free. This (inner) 'freedom' takes place when thought is not looking. When ( the thinker & its ?) thought does not look, then there is only pure observation, without the mechanical process of recognition and
comparison, justification and condemnation; this 'seeing' does not
fatigue the brain for all mechanical processes of time have stopped.

Through complete rest the brain is made fresh, to respond without
reaction, to live without deterioration, to die (to its past ?) without the torture of problems. To look without ( 'thinker's ?) thought is to see without the interference of time, knowledge and conflict. To see without the mechanism of thought is total seeing, without particularization and division; seeing without thought does not put the brain to sleep; on the contrary, it is fully awake, attentive, without friction and pain. Attention without the borders of time is the flowering of meditation.

(...) The sun was going down, a great big orange balloon, in great splendour and alone. It is strange to be alone (all-one) - not cut off (of everything &) lonely, but to be (inwardly) alone without thought, without (mental) associations, without the relationship of memory. Every influence, known and hidden, is understood and so put aside and thus be alone. This is really (the nature of selfless ?) love. The hermit and the monk are never alone (inwardly) in their retreat; they are still (carrying along ) the (reassuring ?) burden of the (knowledge of the ) past, their traditions, their experiences and knowledge; they are never alone (all-one ?) They (may ? ) have changed their names and their clothes but the 'all-oneness' is not near them. And yet you must be (inwardly) alone, not influenced, not seeking, not resisting (what is ?) .

You can build a (convenient ideogical) 'wall' around yourself, of beliefs, of knowledge, of incessant activities but that 'wall' makes of you a ('conscience' ?) prisoner, everlastingly enlarging and decorating the prison. You can’t invite the Immeasurable into the prison (of the known ?); what you invite will be your own ideas, projections, images; you can battle with them or embrace them but you are still within the walls. ( The perception of the truth of) this fact alone brings that (intelligent & compassionate ?) energy which will break down the walls.

There is a bliss in this 'aloneness'; it is not an (empty) void, a dry aridness of 'no thought'; to be alone (inwardly all-one ?) without ( one's self-centred ) thinking is not a desert of nothingness. It (the Bliss ?) is there, but you will come upon it only when (the self-centred) thought comes to an end and with it (the self-centred ?) feeling. You cannot buy it at any (Swiss ?) chemist nor at any altar, and without it there is no Love.

This post was last updated by John Raica Fri, 10 May 2019.

(...) We are taken up with the immediate challenges of life and with the immediate reply to them. This immediate answer to the immediate call is (the very essence of) worldliness, with all its indissoluble problems and agonies; the intellectual answers with (a plan of) action born of ideas which have their roots in time and the thoughtless, amazed, follow him, while the rest follow the (ages old) pattern of 'like and dislike', of prejudice and malice. And every argument and gesture is the continuity of despair, sorrow and confusion. There is no end to it.

To turn your back on it all, calling this activity by different names, is not to 'end' it. It is these immediate (mechanistic?) answers to a series of immediate calls that have to come to an end. Then you will answer from the (inward ) emptiness of 'no time' to the immediate demand of time or you may not answer at all which may be the true response. The final answer is beyond the immediate.
In the 'immediate' is all your hope, vanity and ambition, whether
that immediacy is projected into the future of many tomorrows or
in the now. This is the way of sorrow. The ending of sorrow is
never in the immediate response to the many challenges (of everyday life). Its ending lies in seeing (the inward truth of) this 'fact'.

The palms were swaying with great dignity, bending with
pleasure in the westerly breeze from the sea; they seemed so far
away from the noisy crowded street. Against the evening sky, they
were dark, their tall trunks were shapely, made slender with many
years of patient work; they dominated the evening of stars and the
warm sea. They almost stretched their palms to receive you, to
snatch you away from the sordid street but the evening breeze took
them away to fill the sky with their movement. The street was
crowded; it would never be clean and its walls were made filthy with the announcements of the latest films or plastered with the names to whom you must give your vote, or with the party symbols; it was a sordid street though it was one of the main thoroughfares.

A little further on was the sea and the setting sun. It was a round red ball of fire and it made the sea and the few clouds red. The sea was without a ripple but it was restless and dreamy. Along that sordid street, with people pushing into you, meditation was the very essence of life. The brain so delicate and observant was completely still, watching the stars, aware of the people, the smells, the barking of the dogs.

As one walked along the street of few palms, the 'Otherness'
came like a wave that purified and strengthened; it was there like a
perfume, a breath of Immensity. It was there, sharp
and clear, without any vague possibility, unhesitating, definite. It
was there, a holy thing and nothing could touch it, nothing could
break its finality. The brain was aware of all these things and of the sea, but the brain had no (personal?) relation to any of these things; it was completely empty, watching, observing out of this emptiness. The 'otherness' was pressing in with sharp urgency. It was there with the finality of death which no reason could dissuade. As it had no roots and relation, nothing could contaminate it; it was indestructible.

The complete stillness of the brain is an extraordinary thing; it is highly sensitive, vigorous, fully alive, aware of every outward movement but utterly still. It is still as it is completely open, without any hindrance, without any secret wants and pursuits; it is still as there is no conflict which is essentially a state of contradiction. It is utterly still in emptiness;
this 'emptiness' is not a state of vacuum, a blankness; it is energy without a centre, without a border. Walking down the crowded
street, smelly and sordid, with the buses roaring by, the brain was
aware of the things about it and the body was walking along,
sensitive, alive to the smells, to the dirt, to the sweating labourers but there was no centre from which watching, directing, censoring took place. During the whole of that mile and back the brain was without a movement, as 'thought and feeling'.

The crowded plane [to Madras] was hot and even at that height,
about eight thousand feet up, it never seemed to get cool. In that
morning plane, suddenly and most unexpectedly the 'Otherness'
came. It is never the same, always new, always unexpected; the
odd thing about it is that thought cannot go back over it, reconsider
it, examine it leisurely. Memory has no part in it, for every time it
happens it is so totally new and unexpected that it does not leave
any memory behind it. For it is a total and complete happening, an
event that leaves no record, as memory. So it is always new,
young, unexpected. It came with extraordinary beauty, not because
of the fantastic shape of clouds and the light in them nor of the blue
sky, so infinitely blue and tender; there was no reason, no cause for
its incredible beauty and that is why it was beautiful. It was the
essence of all life that has been and that 'is' and that will be, life without time. It was there and it was the fury of beauty.

(Continuing with the selected excerpts from K's Notebook 1961-62. Incidently, here's an authentic anecdote mentioned by Mrs Zimbalist in her 'Memoirs': when in the mid 70's she asked K whether he remembers anything about this remarkable Journal, he answered 'I did not write that book' (sic!)

(...) In the midst of the evening light as the hills becoming more
blue and the red earth richer, the 'Otherness' came silently with a
benediction. It is marvellously new each time but yet it is the same.
It was immense with strength, the strength of destruction and
vulnerability. It came with such fullness and was gone in a flash;
the moment was beyond all time. It was a tiring day but the brain
was strangely alert, seeing without the 'watcher', a seeing out of emptiness.

(…) Walking and talking, meditation was going on below the
words and the beauty of the night. It was going on at a great depth,
flowing outwardly and inwardly; it was exploding and expanding.
One was aware of it; it was happening; one wasn't 'experiencing' it,
experiencing is limiting; it was taking place. There was no (personal?)
participation in it; thought could not share it for thought is such a
futile and mechanical thing anyhow, nor could emotion get
entangled with it; it was too disturbingly active for either. It was
happening at such an unknown depth for which there was no
measurement. But there was great stillness. It was quite surprising
and not at all ordinary.

The Otherness was there, with clarity and precision; and the waking up was deliberate, to be aware with full consciousness of what was taking place. Asleep, it might have been (translated as?) a dream, but being fully awake, this strange and unknowable Otherness was a palpable reality, a fact and not an illusion. It had a quality of weightlessness and impenetrable strength. Again these words
lose all their meaning when the Otherness has to be
conveyed in words; words are (mental?) symbols but no symbol can ever convey the (living?) reality. It was there with such incorruptible strength that nothing could destroy it for it was unapproachable. You can approach something with which you are familiar, you must have
the same language to commune, some kind of thought process,
verbal or non-verbal; above all there must be mutual recognition.
There was none. On your side you may say it has this or
that quality, but at the moment of the happening there was no
verbalization for the brain was utterly still, without any movement
of thought. As the Otherness is without relationship to anything (temporal?) and all thought and being is a cause-effect process, there was no 'understanding' or (mental?) relationship with it. It was an unapproachable flame and you could only look at it and keep your distance. And on waking suddenly, it was there. And with it came an unexpected ecstasy, an unreasonable joy; there was no cause for it for it has never been sought or pursued. This ecstasy was there on waking again at the usual hour and continued for a
lengthy period of time.

(…) There is a long-stemmed weed, grass of some kind, which
grows wildly in the garden and it has a feathery flowering, burnt
gold, flashing in the breeze, swaying till it almost breaks but never
breaking, except in a strong wind. There is a clump of these weeds
of golden beige and when the breeze blows it sets them dancing;
each stem has its own rhythm, its own splendour and they are like a
wave when they all move together; the colour then, with the
evening light, is indescribable; it is the colour of the sunset, of the earth and of the golden hills and clouds. The flowers beside them
were too definite, too crude, demanding that you look at them.
These weeds had a strange delicacy; they had a faint smell of
wheat and of ancient times; they were sturdy and pure, full of
abundant life. An evening cloud was passing by, full of light as the
sun went down behind the dark hill. The rain had given to the earth
a goodly smell and the air was pleasantly cool. The rains were
coming and there was hope in the land.

(…) Of a sudden it happened, coming back to the room; it was there
with an embracing welcome, so unexpected. One had come in only
to go out again; we had been talking about several things, nothing
too serious. It was a shock and a surprise to find this welcoming (Presence of?) 'Otherness' in the room; it was waiting there with such open invitation that an apology seemed futile. Several times, on the (Wimbledon) Common , far away from here under some trees, along a path that was used by so many, 'It' would be waiting just as the path turned; with astonishment one stood there, near those trees, completely open, vulnerable, speechless, without a movement. It was not a fancy, a self-projected delusion; the other (person) , who happened to be there, felt it too; on several occasions it was there, with an all-embracing welcome of love and it was quite incredible; every time, it had a new quality, a new beauty, a new austerity. And it was like that in this room, something totally new and wholly unexpected. It was ( of a spiritual ?) Beauty that made the entire mind still and the body without a movement; it made the mind, the brain and the body intensely alert and sensitive; it made the body tremble and in a few minutes that welcoming Otherness was gone, as swiftly as it must have come.
Neither thought or feeling, in their wildest endeavour could build up these ( strange?) 'happenings'. They are too immeasurably great,
too immense in their strength and purity for thought or feeling;
these have roots and they have none. They are not to be invited or
held; the 'thought & feeling' cannot invent or contain the Otherness. It 'is' by itself and nothing can touch it.

Sensitivity is wholly different from refinement; sensitivity is an
integral state (of being?) , refinement is always partial. There is no partial sensitivity, either it is the state of one's whole being, a total consciousness or it is not there at all. It has the quality of (perceptive?) precision, no overtones of romanticism and fancy. Only the sensitive (mind?) can face the actual, without escaping into all kinds of conclusions, opinions and evaluations. Only the sensitive (mind) can be alone and this 'all-oneness' is destructive. This sensitivity is stripped of all pleasure and so it has the (gentle?) austerity of seeing and understanding. The way of refinement is endless; it is the outcome of choice, conflict and pain and there is always (in the background?) the (refined?) 'chooser', the ( knowledgeable ?) censor. And so there is always ( a dualistic) conflict and contradiction and pain. Refinement leads to isolation, self-enclosing aloofness, the separation which intellect
and knowledge breed. Refinement is ( still a ) self-centred activity, however 'enlightened' aesthetically and morally. There is great satisfaction in the refining process but no joy of depth; it is superficial and petty, without great significance. Sensitivity and refinement are two different things; one leads to isolating death and the other to life that has no end.

(...) The village men were walking behind along the narrow path beside the river, strung out one by one, and somehow they were part of the ( consciousness of the?) man walking in front; there were eight of them and the old man walking directly behind was coughing all the time while the others were more or less walking silently. The man that was in front was aware of them, of their silence, their coughs, their weariness after a long day; they were not (mentally ?) agitated but quiet and if anything cheerful. He was aware of them as he was aware of the glowing river, of the gentle fire of the sky and the birds coming back to their home; there was no 'centre' from which he was seeing, feeling, observing; there was no thought but only these things. They were all walking fast and time had ceased to be; those villagers were going back home to their hovels
and they were part of the man who was going with them - not that
he was aware of them as being a part. They were flowing with the
river, flying with the birds and were as open and wide as the sky. It
was a 'fact'( of life ?) and not imagination; imagination is a shoddy thing and the 'facts' (of life?) are a burning reality. All those nine were walking endlessly, going nowhere and coming from nowhere; it was an endless procession of Life. Time and all (personal?) identity had ceased, strangely.
When the man in front turned to walk back, all the villagers,
especially the old man who was so close, just behind him, saluted
as though they were age long friends. It was getting dark, the
swallows had gone; there were lights on the long bridge and the
trees were withdrawing into themselves. Far away a temple bell
was ringing.

(…) There is a little canal, about a foot wide, that goes between
the green fields of wheat. There is a path along it and you can walk
along it for quite a while, without meeting a soul. That evening it
was particularly quiet; there was a fat jay with startlingly bright
blue wings that was having a drink in that canal; it was fawn
coloured, with those sparkling blue wings; it wasn't one of those
scolding jays; you could approach it fairly close without being
called names. It looked at you in wonderment and you looked at it
with exploding affection; it was fat and comfortable and very
beautiful. It waited to see what you would do and when you did
nothing, it grew calmer and presently flew away without a cry.
You had met in that bird all the birds ever brought into being; it
was that explosion (of Love ?) that did it. It just happened with an intensity and fury whose very shock stopped all time. You went along that narrow path, past a tree which had become the symbol of a temple, for there were flowers and a crudely painted image ; the tree was splendid, full of leaves, sheltering many birds; the earth around was swept and kept clean; they had built a mud platform around the tree and on it was the stone image, leaning against the thick trunk. The leaf was perishable and the image was not; it would endure, destroying minds.

(...) The early morning sun was on the water, shimmering,
almost blinding the eyes; a fisherman's boat was crossing that
brilliant path and there was a slight fog among the trees, on the
opposite bank. The river is never still, there is always a movement,
a dance of countless steps and this morning it was very alive,
making the trees & the bushes to look heavy and dull, except the birds which were calling, singing, and the parrots as they screeched by. It was early but all the birds had been out long before the sun was on the water. Even at that hour the river was awake with the light of the heavens and meditation was a sharpening of the immensity
of the mind; the ( totality of the ?) mind is never asleep, never completely unaware, (although) patches of it are sharpened by conflict and pain, ar made dull by habit and passing satisfaction. But all these darkened (mental) passages left no (free inner) space for the totality of the mind. These became enormously important and always breeding more immediate significance and the Immensity is put aside for the little, the (needs & problems of the?) immediate.

Meditation is not the way of the machine; it can never be put together to get you somewhere; it is not the boat to cross to the other side. It is an endless movement whose action is not of time. All action of the 'immediate', of (thinking inwardly in terms of) 'time' is the ground of sorrow; nothing can grow on it except conflict and pain. But meditation is the awareness of this (psychological) 'ground' and never letting a seed take root, however pleasant and however painful.
Meditation is the 'passing away' of ( the worldly ?) experience. And then only is there (the inner ) clarity whose freedom is (expressed) in 'seeing'. Meditation is a strange delight not to be bought on the (New Age?) Market; no guru or disciple can ever be of it; all ( desire of?) following and/or leading have to cease as easily and naturally as a leaf drops to the ground.
The Immeasurable was there, filling the little space (of the room?) and all Space; it came as gently as the breeze comes over the water but
thought could not hold it and the ( active memory of the?) past -(aka ?) 'time', was not capable of measuring it.

(…) Across the river, the smoke was going up in a straight column;
it was a simple movement bursting into the sky. There wasn't a
breath of air; there wasn't a ripple on the river and every leaf was
still; the parrots were the only noisy movement as they flashed by.
Even the little fisherman's boat did not disturb the ( tranquility of the ) water; everything seemed to have frozen in stillness, except the smoke. Even though it was going so straight up in the sky there was a
certain gaiety in it and the freedom of total action. And beyond the
village and the smoke was the glowing sky of the evening. It had
been a cool day and the sky had been open and there was the 'light'
of a thousand winters; it was penetrating and expansive; it
went with you everywhere, it wouldn't leave you. Like perfume, it
was in the most unexpected places; it seemed to have entered into
the most secret corners of one's being. It was a light that left no
shadow and every shadow lost its depth; because of it, all
substance lost its density; it was as though you looked through
everything, through the trees on the other side of the wall, through
your own 'self'. Your (inner?) 'self' was as opaque as the sky and as open. It was intense and to be with it was to be passionate, not the passion of feeling or desire, but a passion that would never wither or die. It was a strange light, it exposed everything and made vulnerable,
and what had no protection was Love. You couldn't be what you
were ( before?) , 'you' were burnt out, without leaving any ashes and
unexpectedly there was nothing (not-a-thing) but that Light.

Love is (inwardly ?) 'dangerous' for it destroys everything that man has built around himself except bricks. It cannot build temples nor reform the rotting society; it can do nothing, but without it nothing can be done, do what you will. The modern computers and automatization can alter the shape of things and give man (lots of ?) leisure which will become another (psychological ) problem when there are already so many problems. Love has no (temporal ?) problems and that is why it is so 'dangerous'. Man lives by (creating & solving) problems ; without them, he wouldn't know what to do; he would feel lost and in the losing gain nothing. So his (self-created) problems multiply endlessly; in the resolving of the one there is another, but death, old age & disease are (the real ) problems which no computer can solve. This is not the 'death' that Love brings. Love, Death & Creation are (inwardly speaking ?) inseparable; you cannot have one and deny the others. But if if you have no problems, not even one, then perhaps 'it' might come when you are looking the other way.

It (the Love that goes together with Death & Creation?) is the Unknown, and everything you 'know' must burn itself
away, without leaving ashes; the past, rich or sordid, must be left (behind?) as casually, without any motive as that girl throwing a stick over the river bank. The burning of the known is the action of the Unknown.

This post was last updated by John Raica Thu, 16 May 2019.

(...) All existence (in the field of the known ?) is (inevitably involving personal ) choice; only in aloneness (all-oneness ?) there is no choice. Choice, in every form, is (breeding ?) conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in (any personal ?) choice; this contradiction ( conflict of interests?) in the inner and outer existence breeds confusion and misery. To escape from this (resulting ?) misery, the commitment to various patterns of activities becomes a compulsive necessity.

Choice must always exist as long as there is the 'chooser' , the accumulated (psychologically active ?) memory of (the past ?) pains and pleasures, and every new experience of choice only strengthens (this ) memory whose response becomes thought and feeling. Memory has only a partial significance, to respond mechanically; this response is choice. There is no (authentic) freedom in choice. You choose according to the (cultural?) background you have been brought up in, according to your social, economic, religious conditioning. Choice invariably strengthens this (inherited) conditioning; there is no escape from this conditioning, it only breeds more suffering.

There were a few clouds gathering around the sun; they were far
down on the horizon and were afire. The palm trees were dark
against the flaming sky; they stood in golden-green rice fields
stretching far into the horizon. There was one all by itself, in a
yellowing green of rice; it was not alone, though it looked rather
forlorn and far away. A gentle breeze from the sea was blowing
and a few clouds were chasing each other, faster than the breeze.
The flames were dying and the moon strengthened the shadows.
Everywhere there were shadows, quietly whispering to each other.
The moon was just overhead and across the road the shadows deep
and deceptive. A water snake might be crossing the road; quietly
slithering across, pursuing a frog; there was water in the rice fields and frogs were croaking, almost rhythmically; in the long stretch of
water beside the road, with their heads up, out of the water, they
were chasing each other; they would go under and come up to
disappear again. The water was bright silver, sparkling and warm
to the touch and full of mysterious noises. Bullock carts went by,
carrying firewood to the town; a cycle bell rang, a lorry with bright
glaring lights screeched for room and the shadows remained
motionless. It was a beautiful evening and there on that road so
close to town, there was deep silence and not a sound disturbed it,
not even the moon and the lorry. It was a silence that no thought,
no word could touch, a silence that went with the frogs and the
cycles, a silence that followed you; you walked in it, you breathed
it, you saw it. It was not shy, it was there insisting and welcoming.
It went beyond you into vast immensities and you could follow it if
your thought and feeling were utterly quiet, forgetting themselves
and losing themselves with the frogs in the water; they had no
importance and could so easily lose themselves, to be picked up
when they were wanted. It was an enchanting evening, full of
clarity and fast-fading smile.

( The chooser's personal identification with its ?) choice(s) is always breeding misery. Watch it and you will see it lurking, demanding, insisting and begging, and before you know it you are caught in its net of inescapable duties, responsibilities and ( collateral regrets &
?) despairs. Watch it and you will be aware of the 'fact'. Be aware of the fact; you cannot change the fact; you may try to cover it up, or run away from it, but you cannot change it. ( However?) if you will let it alone, not interfering with it with your opinions and hopes, fears and despairs, with your calculated and cunning judgements, it will flower and show all its intricacies, its subtle ways, its seeming importance and ethics, its hidden motives and fancies. If you will leave the 'fact' alone, it will show you all these and more. But you must be choicelessly aware of it, walking softly. Then you will see that ( the inner 'fact' of ) choice, having flowered, dies and there is freedom. You, the (savvy ?) 'chooser' have ceased (inwardly) to make choices. ( Psychologically speaking ?) there is nothing to choose. Out of this choiceless state there flowers an aloneness (all-oneness?) which is always flowering and it is always new. Dying to the known is to be (inwardly) alone. All (psychological ) choice is in the field of the known; and any action in this field always ( ultimately?) breeds sorrow. There is the ending of sorrow in all-oneness

This post was last updated by John Raica Tue, 21 May 2019.

(...) The flowering of meditation is Goodness and it is
the beauty of meditation that gives perfume to its flowering. How
can there be joy in meditation if it is the (conscious or subliminal ?) coaxing of desire and pain; how can it blossom in the corrupting ambition and in the smell of (public recognition & ?) success; how can it bloom in the shadow of hope and despair? You will have to leave all these far behind, without regret, easily & naturally. You see, meditation has not the strain of building ( mental self-) defences, to resist and to wither; it is not fashioned out of a sustained practice of any system. All systems (of meditation ) will inevitably shape thought to a pattern and ( the meditator's ?) conformity destroys the flowering of meditation. It (Meditation) blossoms only in ( the inward ) freedom (from the known ?) and the withering of 'that which is'. Without (this inner ?) freedom there is no self-knowing and without self-knowing there is no Meditation. Thought ( The self-centred thinking ?) is always petty and shallow however far it may wander in search of ( superior ?) knowledge; acquiring (or) expanding knowledge is not meditation. It flowers only in the freedom from the 'known' and withers away in the ( self-enclosed field of the ?) 'known'.

(Excerpts from "The Only Revolution")

(...) Meditation is not ( supposed to be ?) an escape from the (real ?) world, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter, and (momentary ?) pleasure with its great sorrows.

Meditation is wandering away from this world; one has to be (inwardly) a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for self-fulfilment or the conceit of power.

The room overlooked a garden, and thirty or forty feet below was the wide, expansive river, sacred to some, but to others a beautiful stretch of water open to the skies and to the glory of the morning. You could always see the other bank with its village and spreading trees, and the newly planted winter wheat. From this room you could see the morning star, and the sun rising gently over the trees; and the river became the golden path for the sun.
At night the room was very dark and the wide window showed the whole southern sky, and into this room one night came - with a great deal of fluttering - a bird. Turning on the light and getting out of bed one saw it under the bed. It was an owl. It was about a foot-and-a-half high with extremely wide big eyes and a fearsome beak. We gazed at each other quite close, a few feet apart. It was frightened by the light and the closeness of a human being. We looked at each other without blinking for quite a while, and it never lost its height and its fierce dignity. You could see the cruel claws the light feathers and the wings tightly held against the body. One would have liked to touch it, stroke it, but it would not have allowed that. So presently the light was turned out and for some time there was quietness in the room. Soon there was a fluttering of the wings - you could feel the air against your face - and the owl had gone out of the window. It never came again.

(...)
Truth is never ( to be found ?) in the past. The 'truth' of the past is the ashes of memory; memory is of time, and in the dead ashes of yesterday there is no truth. Truth is a living thing, not within the field of time.

This post was last updated by John Raica Tue, 21 May 2019.

(...) Two crows were fighting, they were viciously angry with
each other; there was fury in their voices, both were on the ground
but one had the advantage driving its hard, black beak into the
other. Shouting at them from the window did no good and one was
(probably?) going to be killed. (Fortunately enough ?) a passing crow dived in, suddenly breaking its flight, cawing more loudly than the two on the ground; it landed beside them, beating its black, shiny wings against them. In a second, half a dozen more crows came, all cawing away furiously and several of them with their wings and beaks separated the two who were intent on killing each other.
They might kill other things, but there was going to be no (fratricide?) murder amongst their own kind and that would be the end of it. The two still wanted to fight it out but the others were telling them off and presently they all flew away and there was quietness in the little open space among the trees by the river.

Parrots were flying in crazily for the night; it was a bit early but they were coming in; the large tamarind tree could hold quite a lot of them; their colour was almost the colour of the leaves but their green was more intense, more alive; if you watched carefully you would see the difference and also you would see their brilliant curving beaks which they used to bite and to climb; they were rather clumsy among the branches, going from one to the other but they were the light of heavens in movement; their voices were harsh and sharp, and their flight never straight, but their colour was the spring of the earth.

Earlier, in the morning, on a branch of that tree, two small owls were sunning themselves, facing the rising sun; they were so still you would not have noticed them, they were the colour of the branch, mottled
grey, unless by chance, you saw them coming out of their hole in
the tamarind tree. It had been bitterly cold, most unusual (for this places ) , and two golden green flycatchers dropped dead that morning from the cold; one was the male and the other female, they must have been mates; they died on the game instant and they were still soft to the touch. They were really golden green, with long, curving bills; they were so delicate, so extraordinarily alive still. Colour is very strange; colour is God and those two were the glory of light; the colour would remain, though the machinery of (their) life had come to an end. Colour was more enduring than the(ir own ) heart; it was there beyond time and sorrow.

Thought can never solve the ache of (man's existential) sorrow. You can (try to) reason it out but it would be still there even after the long & complicated journey of thought. Thought can never resolve (the profound ?) human problems; thought is mechanical and sorrow is not, Sorrow is (a human feeling ?) as strange as love, but sorrow keeps away love. Sorrow is (the sublimated result of ?) self-pity with all its anxieties, fears & guilt, but all this cannot be washed away by ( the earnest efforts of) thought. Thought breeds the (identification with the) 'thinker' and (in the time gap ?) between them sorrow is begotten.
(Experiential Hint:) The ending of sorrow is (to be found only in ?) the freedom from the 'known'.

This post was last updated by John Raica Thu, 23 May 2019.

(From 'Commentaries on Living' cca 1954) )

In a small, sunken garden by the roadside there were quantities of bright flowers. Among the leaves of a tree in that garden a crow was shading itself from the midday sun. Its whole body was resting
on the branch and it was calling or answering other crows, and within a
period of ten minutes there were five or six different notes in its cawing. It had extraordinary eyes which were never still; it was completely at rest and yet completely alive.

It was strange how the (observer's ?) mind was totally with that bird. It was not just observing the bird, though it had taken in every detail; but it was with this bird as the sea is with the fish; it was with the bird, and yet it went through and beyond it. The sharp 'aggressive & frightened' mind of the crow was part of the Mind that spanned the seas and time. This Mind was vast, limitless, beyond all
measure, and yet it was aware of the slightest movement of the eyes of that black crow among the new, sparkling leaves. It was aware of the falling petals, but it had no ( inner) focus of attention, no point
from which to attend. Unlike ( the physical) space which has always something in it - a particle of dust, the earth, or the heavens - it was wholly empty, and being empty it could 'attend' without a cause.
Its attention had neither roots nor branches. All energy was in that empty stillness. It was not the energy that is built up with intent, and which is soon dissipated when pressure is taken away. It was the ( creative) energy of all beginning; it was life that had no time as ending.

Here are a few selected excerpts from the 'free' long version of Mary Zimbalist's memoirs of K:

"I had a friend who was a regular medical doctor, but he was very interested in all kinds of psychiatric things, and so was I. So, whenever I went in for a flu shot, or whatever it was, we’d wind up discussing the brain or the mind and how it worked and such. Well, one day, in the spring of 1944 I went into his office for some medical reason, and he said, “Oh, come in. Come in. I have something I want to tell you.” He proceeded to tell me about a friend of his, a psychiatrist, who had learned that he had some fatal form of heart disease. On learning this, he had up and left his family, his friends, and everything in Chicago where he lived, and said, “I’m going to California to learn how to die from a man named Krishnamurti,” which doubtless startled everybody. My doctor friend was very curious, so he went to see his friend, the dying doctor, and of course, he meets Krishnamurti.

That was on a weekend, and I happened to come in on the Monday afterward, and he said to me, “I’ve met this extraordinary man, who knows more about the human mind than anyone I’ve ever heard of.” Well, of course, I was all ears at this description. And then there was a pause for about, I don’t remember, but say a month or two or maybe three when I heard that this Krishnamurti was going to resume giving talks in Ojai. As we all know by now, during the war he was in Ojai because he happened to be there when the war broke out, and he couldn’t travel. So he simply led a quiet life in Ojai, and didn’t talk publicly at all. However, now that the war was winding down, it was decided that he would speak again. Well, I thought I wanted to see what this was about, so I drove up to Ojai from LA, found the place where he was to talk, and heard the talk—the first talk. I remember quite vividly his coming into the Oak Grove; his dignity and his quiet, and his doing what we later came to see so often: his looking around before he spoke. And then his speaking; being struck by his voice, which was partly English but not quite 'English-Englis'h. He had an English accent but with his own intonation. I found the talk and his manner of giving it  very impressive, but it was all strange to me in a way. So, afterward, I went and bought some of the booklets, the things that we have come to call “The Verbatim Talks,” those little pamphlets. I took them home, and started to read. I found that, because of my background in psychoanalysis, I argued with him down the page. I couldn’t advance in these things. I kept thinking,  why  does he say that? This went on for a couple of days, but luckily it dawned on me, somehow, that I should just go and listen to what he said and not argue through these written things.

He was speaking, in those days, standing up, I think on the ground and not on a platform. I sat on the ground, and most people sat on the ground, as I remember it.
One of the people who was selling the books was a Mrs. Vigeveno. I bought the pamphlet from her. She and her husband had an art gallery in Westwood in Los Angeles, where I had gone to look at pictures at some point. I don’t know whether she knew my name, but she recognized me from having come into the gallery, and, so, when I bought the little pamphlets, she asked, “Are you interested?” Anyway, I continued to go to the rest of those talks. That was my first sight of Krishnaji.

Now the relevance of Mrs. Vigeveno in the story is that sometime later that year I had a telephone call, I think from her, and I was invited to join a discussion group at their gallery once a week with a small group of people. So, I went, and I think there were probably a dozen or fifteen people, maybe a few more. Some of the people there I already knew, two couples I knew, plus the Vigevenos, whom I knew but just very casually. Rajagopal was at those discussions, and it was said that Krishnamurti might come, and indeed, he eventually did come. While the talks were going on, I heard somehow that you could request an interview with Krishnaji—he would meet people individually. So I wrote, and in due course I got a reply saying that, if I could come on such and such date at such and such a time to such and such a place, I would have an appointment with Mr. Krishnamurti.

The address for the meeting was a house in Hollywood, not in Ojai. So I went, rang the bell, and the door was opened by Mr. Krishnamurti. And I remember very vividly the way he sort of bowed. He had beautiful, very formal manners. “Good morning, Madame,” he said.  In I went and apparently there wasn’t anyone else in the house. I don’t know. It was very quiet. We went to a sort of sitting room. Krishnaji sat there and didn’t say anything. So I felt it behooved me to say why I was there, and why I had come. I told him a little bit about myself, and was approaching the questions that I had intended to ask him when he asked me some questions. I only remember that it was a different order of any discussion of anything psychological or indeed any other kind of discussion I had ever had. When I came out I felt as though my head had been opened up and everything inside had been operated on. I remember also that he took me so far into my own mind or consciousness or level of understanding that I wept copiously. I mean, it was so deep, it touched something so deep inside me that it made me cry.  In fact, it happened to me in other interviews later on. Anyway, I went to all the talks of that year, and after the first talk, I really just listened. I’d caught on that you shouldn’t keep going on about what you think, but just go and listen. And, well, it became the thing that has interested me most centrally for the rest of my life.

(...) Many years later, in Saanen , he once said to me, “Did I ever know you in California, or meet you in California?” And of course, this meeting, which was such an overwhelming milestone in my life he, of course, had no recollection of! I remember laughing because it seemed, well, it pleased me so much. It was right, was in character for him not to remember.
Then, there’s a big gap in all this, because I didn’t really hear him speak again until he came back in 1960, and began a series of talks in June.

 Sam Zimbalist ( the producer of the classic technicolor film 'Ben Hur') died at the end of 1958 of a massive heart attack. I don’t want to go on about that, but it was as though, I don’t know, my life had ended too, somehow. It was very strange…this is very personal, but I had the feeling that as I was still alive, there was something that I had to do, and in some strange way, I felt I was doing it for him and for me—as though, there was something that I had to learn, and don’t ask me how, but I could somehow do it for him too.  It was a very profound feeling. I felt that I had to find out what all this was about. That was the only important thing to me: what lay beyond life and death, and what are we all doing with our lives, and why do we go so wrong? All the questions that …probably we all have about our lives when we come into contact with something that is as serious as Krishnaji’s teachings, or as serious as someone dying in your life that is really a crisis. The answer to that was that I had to go back and listen to what Krishnamurti had to say. It wasn’t running to Krishnamurti for some kind of a refuge or enlightenment or solace. It was that I had to understand what he was talking about because I felt instinctively and profoundly that what he was talking about had to do with reality and truth, and that that was the whole point of my still being alive. It was the only thing that I wanted to do, was interested in. It was the only reason for anything to me at that point.
But I also had a very strong feeling in the weeks and months that followed that I mustn’t run away from something; that I mustn’t go to anyone to solve a problem, or to somehow make me feel better in some way. I mustn’t run away from what’s happened, but rather come to terms with what happened in my own life. I felt that intensely, strongly.

So I didn’t make any attempt or even think of going to see him, and then suddenly he came back in 1960. I went to the talks. I also wrote and asked for an interview. He was to give eight talks, but he only gave four. At the end of the fourth he announced that he regretted that that would be the last talk. For reasons of health, he had to stop. In the meantime, he had given or okayed to whoever handled it, a certain number of interviews, and mine was among them, fortunately.
So, I was called to go on a certain, again, time and date and place, but it was in Ojai this time, at the Vigeveno’s house. He again greeted me very formally. There was no reference to my ever having seen him before. We talked for a very long time, and it was all about death. I was able to tell him that I had seen for myself that when people are in a state of grief, it’s very often self-pity. They’re feeling, why did this happen to me? Why have I lost something? And I thought that was false and repellent, and I didn’t feel that way. I felt I had seen that very clearly, and I was able to tell him this. I remember his nodding, and I could tell, or his manner showed that he saw that I saw that, and that he didn’t have to go through  that with me so he could go on from there. The sort of conclusion of this, to put it very simply, was his statement, which I understood at the time and have since; “You must die every day to everything. Only then are you really living.” I understood that it doesn’t mean that you brush your life under the rug and forget everything. It doesn’t alter what you feel, or the feeling of loss, if you’ve lost someone you loved, it doesn’t alter that, that sense of loving them, or indeed, remembering them. But it’s the factor of dependence, it’s the factor of egotism, it’s the factor of me and the whole thing. You have to die to that and only then, otherwise, well, as we now know from his teaching, that you mustn’t carry the whole shadow of the past and react to that. It was the most profound experience of listening to Krishnaji that I’ve ever had. It meant a great deal. After that, he left Ojai, I guess. I didn’t know what was happening. But, I determined then  that I would hear him again and follow what he was saying seriously.

Now, what I didn’t know was that he wouldn’t come back to Ojai. I assumed that he would return because he’d resumed talking in Ojai, but he didn’t. So it wasn’t until 1961 that I realized he wasn’t going to come back to speak in Ojai. Finally, I thought, well, if I want to hear the man speak, go where he’s speaking. So, the first time I went to where he was speaking, which was Saanen, Switzerland, was in the summer of ’64. I determined that summer that I would follow the whole tour; do this really thoroughly that next year. I would start wherever he spoke in Europe, which turned out to be London, and that I would go on to Saanen and to India—do the whole year, which is what I did. I remember landing in Geneva, renting a little tiny car, and driving along the lake with a map, figuring how to get up to this place called Saanen. It was strange to be back in Europe. I hadn’t been in Switzerland before, but to be suddenly driving along in the middle of Europe by myself.

Then the talks started. I remember that he took questions at the end of each talk, and I wanted to ask a question but somehow it didn’t work out, and the talks ended. At the end of each talk, Krishnaji used to stand over where Vanda, who was driving him in those days, used to park her car under some trees. He would stand under the tree and talk to a few people who would come up and shake his hands, as they always did after the talks. So, I went up to him and said, “Mr. Krishnamurti, I’m Mary Zimbalist, and you won’t remember me, but I’ve talked to you before in Ojai, and I wanted to ask you about…so and so.” He replied, “Yes, yes, ask that tomorrow.” So, I thanked him and walked away. Of course, the next day, the talk went off in a totally different direction, and my question had no relevance to what he was saying! So I didn’t ask it. Again, I hoped to have an interview, but I was shy about asking and I didn’t know how to go about it there.

However, there was a friend, in those days, of his and Vanda’s, a lovely man Pietro Cragnolini, a funny man; very, very Italian, and he’d known Krishnaji from the Ommen days. He used to tell me tall tales of what really went on at Ommen, people going in and out of the wrong tents in the middle of the night, sleeping in the woods, all these stories. I used to walk with him, or lunch with him sometimes, and he caught on what I wanted: he asked, “Do you want an interview?” and I said, “Oh yes, but I’m hesitant to ask.” He said, “Don’t worry about it,” and I had an appointment on Wednesday at 3 o’clock at Chalet Tannegg. And again, Krishnaji opened the door and took me into the living room. I remember Krishnaji’s eyes, and I thought it looked like a cataract was developing in his eyes, and I remember thinking—horrible! He’s going to lose his vision, which, of course, he never did. But his eyes were sort of cloudy.
I remember what I was asking him then. I was telling him that I was really tormented by the disturbances in the world that were going on and to the degree that I was not a free, enlightened, psychologically clear person, I was responsible for all that human evil, really. I felt that I had to do something about it, the whole thing. I felt a terrible burden of this. He sort of brushed that aside. He didn’t feel that was really the root of it. He said, “You take all these things very seriously,” and I said, “Yes, I do.” He went on from there, and it somehow unhooked me from this ( activistic ?) thing. He was saying was that I was displacing onto the state of the world, that my responsibility was myself, and I shouldn’t feel all this other burden of everybody’s insanities. One day, Cragnolini asked, “Would you like to come on a walk? I’m walking with Krishnaji this afternoon. You come too.” And I said, “Well, if it’s alright, yes, of course, I’d like to.” I remember that we walked towards Lauenen, on the road to Lauenen. And I remember we walked way up.

As the talks were ending, he said to me on one of these walks “Are you going to stay after the talks? Will you be here, or are you leaving after the talks?” I said that I had intended to leave. He replied, “Well, we’re holding a small discussion after the talks, and if you’d like to be part of it, you are welcome.” So I naturally changed my plans, and stayed on. He had about 30 people, roughly, in that meeting, and again it was at Tannegg. By this time, I’d met Vanda, and also met Alain Naudé, who had just come to the talks, but he was going to go to India. He was very serious about it all, and he sort of was acting as a kind of assistant. For instance, he was the one who called me up and told me when to come to Tannegg for the meeting, and things like that.  Vimala Thakhar was in the discussion, and she was already obnoxious. She was already saying, “Where do you live?” When I told her where I lived, she made it up in her mind that she’d come to visit me, and that I would put her up during her coming tour of the west coast. I was not going to have that at all.(to be continued...)

(continuing the selected excerpts from Mary Zimblist's memoirs )

(...) So, the next bit in this story, is that Rajagopal comes into the picture now, because while these meetings were going on in Chalet Tannegg, some of the people, including myself, wanted to hear the recordings of the meetings. So, I said to Alain, “So many of us would like to hear the tapes of our discussions, or read a transcript that I would be delighted to pay some secretary to transcribe it for some of us, if that’s allowed.” Word came back from Krishnamurti via Alain that, “Mr. Krishnamurti does not have the right to give that permission, only Mr. Rajagopal does”. ( Back in California) I called up Rajagopal and said, “Look here, I was in this discussion group, and I know you have the tape and I’d like to hear them.” “Well, you see, everyone wants to hear them, and I can’t possibly let everybody hear them, so no, well, if you can come up to Ojai,…did you make notes?’ “Yes, I made notes.” “Well, you bring your notes, and you can hear one tape, and you can choose the tape, but you must bring your notes.” And it had to be a day when the Vigevenos, who lived next door, would not be in Ojai, because he didn’t want them to know that I was allowed to hear a tape. And, not only did I have to come when they were away, but I had to park my car so that it would not be visible to them next door.

Well, I could tell that he had a sort of teasing, flirtatious way, not towards me, but toward another woman who was all excited by him. He sort of made himself the center of attention, not by coy behavior, but in a way that drew attention to his every reaction. So, I knew he was a bit neurotic, but this nonsense over the tape was something. Oh, I was asked for lunch too. So, we had lunch, and Rajagopal, his wife, and I sat solemnly in the living room. It was in sort of an alcove. We ate on a table in a corner of the living room, and then we moved to another area where he had a tape recorder. I had to hand over my marvelous notes. I could make notes of listening to the tape, but I had to give him copies of those notes too. So, I listened to the tape. They both sat there and listened with me. I suddenly figured out why he was letting me near the tape: he had recognized some of the voices of people he knew on the tape, but he didn’t recognize others, and he wanted me to identify them. That’s why all this performance went on. By this time I was living in Malibu, and naturally I wanted to know when and where future talks were going to be held. So I called him up and he said casually that he didn’t know. I thought that was very odd. He said, “You must write to Mrs. Mary Cadogan in London.” So I wrote to Mrs. Mary Cadogan, and I got back a letter that said that since I was coming from so far away, that she would tell me where the talks were and when, but I must please not tell anyone else where they were, including my family, or why I was going to London. When the spring came, I returned to London, and went out to Wimbledon where the talks were being held. The talks were in the Boy Scouts’ Hall in Wimbledon, which was a very small hall. I didn’t understand why such a small hall was rented, but, Rajagopal was really trying to damp down all this; printing these little booklets which were only sent out to those on the mailing list, and nobody knew anything, It was all kept as a big, dark secret. Anyway, I went and afterward when Krishnaji stood outside, I went up to him this time. Alain was there and Krishnaji seemed to recognize me and he was charming. We chatted a bit.

Alain eventually called me up and said that they’d like me to come for lunch at the house in Wimbledon. It was really awful to put Krishnaji up in those dreadful houses, but they did. So I went. I had again rented a little tiny car to get out there. So, we had lunch. I was the only guest with the two women, Alain, and Krishnaji. He was full of the questions about “What is the American mind?” as he used to say. “What’s happening in America?” Well, as it happened, I had gone on the March to Selma, from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King. I thought that would interest him, because that was big news in America at that point. He was very interested, and I described the whole thing in quite some detail: how it came about, and what happened, and all of it. He listened with great interest to that. He walked me out to the car afterward with Alain, and he said, “Perhaps we could go to a cinema.” I, of course, replied, “Yes!” Then he said, “Well, you decide.” So I went off, thinking, “What in the world do I take this man to? A cinema? What would he like?”  So I stared at the newspaper and pondered and finally decided that My Fair Lady was playing and that that would be a good movie and suitable
Anyway, that’s what I decided. So, either I called Alain and told him my choice, and Alain said, “Oh, Krishnaji has changed his mind by now. He doesn’t want to go to the cinema. He wants to go for a drive in the country. So could you choose a place and drive us to the country.” So, I was back to my problem. I didn’t know where to go. I’d spent two winters in London, but I hadn’t gone driving in the country especially with the aim of something that would please a man named Krishnamurti.

So I did some researchI heard about the royal horticultural gardens at Wisley, and I thought maybe that would be a place. So, I did a dry run. I went out and cased Wisley and decided, yes, that it was really beautiful and perhaps he’d like that. I remember that I got a better car than the one I was driving, and I went to the house in Wimbledon. Doris came out and she said “Now, be sure you have him back here by 6 o’clock. He has an appointment at 6 o’clock. It is very important that he be here in time for that.”
“Yes, yes, Ms. Pratt. I will.” So, in we get, in the car. Krishnaji looked happy, pleased.
“Where are we going?”, he asks. I said, “Well, I thought perhaps a place called Wisley, the garden.” “Oh, Wisley!” said he. He knew it, but he hadn’t been there in a long time. So, off we went to Wisley, and it was a success. We walked around, and I had the feeling that he saw every flower and every tree and every bird and every everything. It was my first experience of that…of his extraordinary perception that he had of…of everything. When we got back in the car, he said, “Oh, let’s drive a little further.” Where to take him now?! Luckily, I had been to Box Hill. I knew where it was, which was not too far away. It’s the highest point of Sussex, and you look out at all of southern England. It’s beautiful!

So we went up Box Hill. We got out and looked at the view and it was beautiful, very pleasing. So now it was time to get back for 6 o’clock. We got back on the A3, and it was heavy afternoon traffic. Now, I wasn’t used to driving on the left and I certainly was not used to driving the World Teacher. And the responsibility was weighing heavily on me, especially in the terrible traffic, and getting there at 6 o’clock. I drove with absolute concentration, and just I got him back at 6 o’clock.
When he got out, he thanked me. “Thank you, Madame, so much. It was so kind of you.” I replied, “It was a pleasure, Krishnamurti”—or Krishnaji, he asked me to call him Krishnaji in the Saanen discussions. They didn’t have any car, and there was no way to get into town from Wimbledon, so I did a lot of taxiing them back and forth. Sometimes just Alain, I’d take him for, I don’t know, a dentist or something, and sometimes Krishnaji. Or, they’d somehow get into town, I don’t know how, and I’d pick them up and take them home.

By this time, 1965, Alain had been hired as Krishnaji’s secretary. Alain became his secretary that winter in India. He’d gone to India in the winter of ’64—’65. In January, Alain wrote me a couple of letters, and then he wrote me that Krishnaji had asked him to be like a secretary, assistant, do things for him.
Anyway, after London came Paris. I took the boat train to Paris I forget how Krishnaji and Alain went, but Krishnaji was scheduled to give his Paris talks in the Salle Adyar, a theosophical place near the Tour Eiffel, in that quartier, only a few blocks from where he was staying with the Suarès’. He spoke twice in the Salle Adyar, and then he had some days off. Apparently my driving abilities were satisfactory, because he suggested going to Versailles and at some point I had caught on that he liked Mercedes cars. So I went to Hertz and I got a Mercedes car and we went to Versailles. He wasn’t then and never has been very interested in palaces and looking at them. He was not a sight-seer. But he loved gardens, and a walk in the gardens was something he enjoyed. We walked all over: a big walk. After that we went on to St. Germain. I think we had a cup of tea, and then we walked some more in St. Germain, which was also pleasant.

There was another talk, and after that there was another expedition, again in the Mercedes, and this time we went to Chartres, which was wonderful. We walked all around and looked at everything very carefully. Krishnaji was taken with the stained glass windows, found that particularly beautiful, and we all agreed that this was the loveliest of all the gothic cathedrals that we had seen. We lunched  nearby. I’ve forgotten the name of the restaurant, but it was about a block away from the cathedral. I could go there if I were there, but I can’t remember the name. And then we went to Romboulliet and had another walk in the forest. That, also, was very pleasant. Paris was busy for him, but not so much for me. All the French friends wanted to see him.  He was always very elegant. For an outing like these he would wear a sort of sports shirt, a tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers and beautifully polished shoes. And a scarf at his neck.

After these talks I left for Switzerland by train. I became a vegetarian on the first of June Knowing I was going to be a vegetarian, I started, not in Paris because of my father, who lived in Paris in those days—his pleasure was to take me to all the best restaurants in Paris, and I didn’t have the gall, or 'courage', or whatever you want to call it, to say, “Father you should know that I am now a vegetarian.” So I postponed making the change until I got on the train leaving Paris. Alain was particularly good at rounding up young people. That was really his function in those days because he was of the opinion, and Krishnaji shared it, and I shared it, that the old situation of white-haired ladies filling the auditorium should change. It was time to mix that up a bit. So, Alain collected young people.I rented a room, for the discussions, in the hotel where I was staying, and about sixty or seventy young people came. Krishnaji discussed with them and answered questions. Some of them would ask questions in French, but he’d reply in English. These meetings with young people was something new and something good, and it continued from then on for as long as Alain was with us.
Anyway, so now I’m on the train from Paris to Geneva, and I go into the dining car for a meal, being now a vegetarian and there’s nothing on the menu that’s vegetarian. There isn’t a vegetable in sight except for 'pommes frites', which... came with steak.

So a few days after I got there, the telephone rang, and it was Alain to tell me that they had arrived; they flew from Paris to Geneva. He asked, “Do you have a car?” “Yes, I have a car.”
“Well, Krishnaji would like to drive up to Gstaad instead of coming on the train, can you come and pick us up?”
So, I drove down. I think I got a slightly bigger car. I was forever switching from the smallest, cheapest to something worthy of the event! I drove down to Geneva and met them. They had spent the night at the Hotel du Rhône, and went into the dining room. I remember scrutinizing the menu thinking, “You know, I’m a vegetarian now, what do I order?” Krishnaji, who picked up everything, looked at me and said, “What have you been eating lately?” Well, what I had been eating was cheese omelet, and cheese omelet, and again cheese omelet, and I had the feeling, “Am I going to live on cheese omelet for the rest of my life?!”  He said, “We will teach you how to eat.” And he said it quite…firmly. And then they ordered a lovely meal of vegetables and salads and fruits and all the things that we’ve all been living on ever since!

Anyway, we drove up to Chalet Tannegg. Vanda had rented, as always, one floor of Chalet Tannegg. But she wasn’t there and didn’t come until July. This was in June still.
Vanda had sent ahead a cook, a chef really, to look after Krishnaji and provide the food and all that. It was lovely in Gstaad. There was nobody there. Usually I was asked for lunch, not supper because he had that in his room, but usually for lunch. And I would, with my car, drive to wherever he wanted to walk in the afternoon, if it wasn’t up the hill and into the woods, sometimes we went up towards Gsteig and walked. I remember there was a way of going off the road onto some higher fields and walking up there. Also, we often walked down along the river, the Saanen River toward the airport, that way.

Then, not too long after arriving in Gstaad, we had to go back to Geneva. Again, we lunched at the Hotel du Rhône. Then we went to pick up shirts. Krishnaji got shirts in Geneva. I don’t know why he got shirts in Geneva, but he did. There was a place on the Rue du Rhône where he got some sort of shirts. Then we drove back, this time we went via Bulle. By this time I knew the way to go via Bulle, which was lovely. But before turning up into the mountains, he always wanted to go along the lake. He didn’t want to go on the auto-route. Well, we did sometimes when we had to, and that’s when I found out that Krishnaji liked to drive fast. So, we went back via Bulle, and I had supper with him that night. That was the first expedition of that kind.

One day I went up to Tannegg and there was this beautiful little silver jewel-like car, with Krishnaji looking so pleased. He showed me everything about it, and then he asked if I would like a drive. I said, “Yes, I’d love a ride.” So, he drove me to Chateau d’Oex. I remember it was the first time I’d driven with him driving instead of me driving. He looked so elegant with his driving gloves, and he drove beautifully. Obviously an experienced driver! We just went to Chateau d’Oex, then turned around and came back. When we got back he dusted the car—it had been out! I think the next day when I went up, I found him and Alain both washing it because it had been out. As I watched Alain working, I thought, “My god, he’s a musician, he’s going to ruin his hands.” But he was doing what had to be done, and Krishnaji was also washing. After it was washed, Krishnaji opened the hood and dusted all the machinery inside. Only then was it alright.

He, also at this point, received some tapes of chants from India, and we listened to those, which I enjoyed.  They were made at the Rishi Valley School with the children chanting.
Every day we walked, rain or shine. Also, there was a lot of talk about my going to India. I was planning to make the whole tour that year, so, we talked about that. Krishnaji said that he must see that I’m properly looked after in India, and he’d arrange my housing. He said that I shouldn’t go to a hotel in Madras, but that Frances McCann and Alain and I should rent a house in Madras, because it would be healthier: we could control our food. I hadn’t the remotest idea how to rent a house in Madras, but Alain knew just what to do.

We often went down to the Biascoechea’s for lunch. Either I would also be asked to have lunch, or I would drive them, drop them, and later take them back up the hill. That was when Enrique pulled out a photograph of Krishnaji and his brother Nitya as little boys. The Biascoecheas brought them out to show us. Krishnaji looked at that and looked at that, and he kept going back and looking at it again. He said he didn’t remember that time at all. Afterward, when I drove him up the hill, I said, “What was it that interested you so much in that photo?”
That’s when he made the statement, “If we only could figure out why that boy wasn’t conditioned and remained vacant, perhaps we could help children in the schools not to be so conditioned.” He was trying, somehow, to get a sense of why that boy, meaning himself, remained that way. Why nothing really scarred him at all, mentally. I remember his looking at the photo for, oh, such a long time.

Vanda eventually arrived. I, in the meantime, not wanting to spend my life in the Hotel Rossli with cheese omelets, had rented a flat in an apartment house called Les Caprice.
When Vanda came there was no longer a room for Alain because she only rented one floor, the floor on the level where you came in, and that only had two bedrooms. The proprietor lived upstairs. He was a German, and he only came for a short time in summer, but he never rented out his floor. There was a downstairs floor with a flat, because the chalet was built on a hill, but Vanda only had the middle floor. When Vanda came Alain had nowhere to go. Fortunately, the flat I had taken had two bedrooms, so I invited Alain to stay with me, which he did.
Then the talks began. Again, usually I walked in the afternoon with Krishnaji and Alain. Vanda didn’t want to walk; she was doing yoga all morning and wasn’t much for walking. So, I usually walked.
At one point, Pupul Jayakar arrived, and that was my first meeting with her. She stayed only a short while. Also, Pupul’s daughter Radhika arrived, also staying with the Biascoecheas. I remember going on a walk with everybody, Pupul, Radhika, Alain and, I forget who else; I was walking behind, and Krishnaji fell back in step with me. This is when he said to me quite shyly, “Did I ever know you in California?” Of course, this refers  to the interviews I’d had. which were earth-shaking events in my life. He didn’t, of course, remember anything. I remember laughing and being very pleased. It was the way he should have been. 

In those days a lot of people made their own tape recording. There weren’t any rules about that. People sat down at a kind of table near the stage and taped.
Krishnaji gave an awful lot of talks in those days. I think there were ten or something like that. And, at the end of each talk, he would ask for questions from the floor.
After the talks were over, he held young people’s discussions again. Alain had rounded up young people. He used to go around the camping ground where a lot of the young people camped, and just collect young people like the Pied Piper. Sometimes these young people’s discussions were at Tannegg, if they could all fit in, but there was one across the river in a field. Also, David Bohm came, and they had discussions. There were six of those, and they were at Tannegg. Then there was another trip to Geneva. I don’t quite remember when. But at that point Krishnaji asked me to be on the RishiValley School committee! I had no qualifications, but it didn’t matter to him! I don’t remember what I replied, but fortunately nothing came of it.
So, then I flew back to Malibu, and I went and saw my family. In September, there was a fight between India and Pakistan, which put the whole Indian winter tour in jeopardy. Alain called me to tell me that Krishnaji was going to decide whether to go to India as scheduled, or postpone it until the end of the month. He then suggested that I come to Rome, and that if we didn’t go to India, that we all spend the winter in Italy.

But, as it happened, there was a cease-fire, and Alain, who had been refused a visa for India, now was able to get a visa for India. So, I flew back to meet them in Rome in October and two or three days after arriving, on the first of November, I think it was, we flew to Delhi, and were met at the airport by Kitty Shiva Rao and Pupul. I remember the fact that when Krishnaji arrived in Delhi, the car met him at the foot of the steps down from the plane and we were ushered into the VIP lounge, while other people saw to the luggage. I didn’t have to do anything, which was wonderful. Our passports were taken away. Eventually passports were returned after being processed, and we were taken into Delhi, stopping first at the Shiva Rao’s for Krishnaji. Kitty Shiva Rao had very kindly arranged for me to stay in a place called the Indian International Center, not far from her house, where I had a very nice room. She lived not far from Lodhi Park. I remember that same day, Krishnaji, and, I think, Pupul, and Alain, we drove around to show me a bit of things, and we drove into Lodhi Park, but it was dark by that time. We got there on the second of November, and he gave his first talk on the seventh in the garden of the Constitution Club. He was under a shamiana on a little raised platform with a bright little canvas thing shielding him from the sun. There was a wonderful red and blue carpet put out for people to sit on. I sat with Alain, right in front of the stage with the Nagra tape recorder. That was the first time I saw Krishnaji with an Indian audience, and he startled me by being really blunt with the audience, saying, as nearly as I can recall, “You people have talked about non-violence for all these years, and yet this year not one of you spoke out against the war.” They’d almost had a war with Pakistan. He really, put it as only he could, witheringly! I remember really feeling shocked, that he talked differently to Indian audiences at that time. He was tougher with them.

When we got to Benares, Krishnaji went off with Madahvachari and some others in a kind of a bus.
I’ll never forget my first glimpses of Benares, because it made me feel that I hadn’t been in India till then. All the traffic with the lorries constantly honking at each other, and all the decorations on them, and the goats and cows wandering around, and the women putting dung patties on the walls to dry them, and other women with big brass pitchers of water on their head, and the smells of things drying and the people lying on those string beds, low beds by the sides of the roads. It was India, much more so than Delhi!

When we got to Rajghat, there ensued this business about the rooms that were prepared for us. There was a big turnout at the school to greet him, little children with flowers and everything. Frances and I were given rooms. We had a big room and a little room and we shared a bathroom. It was in one of those buildings looking over the river called Krishna Ashram. We went upstairs to our rooms and opened the door, and were astonished. It must have been unused for several years because, I’m not exaggerating, there was so much dust it was like being in the desert. When we entered, clouds of it went up. It looked like sand, but it was dust. There was nothing in the room except one bed with just the rope, no mattress, no sheets, no blankets, no mosquito netting, nothing! The small room was in a similar condition.
Frances and I debated about  who got the big one and who got the small one. She won and got the small one There were three pegs in the wall on which you could hang things, but that’s all there was, nothing else! The bathroom was not very big, and it was chiefly extraordinary because of the wash basin and there was just a hole in the floor as a toilet. Alain was in the same building but somewhere else,  and after seeing our place, he went right to Krishnaji and told him. Then, apparently, Madhavachari, who ran all K activities in India, was told that all was not well. He’d been an Indian railway big shot of some kind but was now retired. Very tall, big man. Very severe Brahmin type, but he had no interest in people’s comfort—at all! He came and looked at it and mumbled something like, “Oh, it, ah yes, it’s not ready. Well, I’ll ah, send someone” but  nobody ever came!

Apparently Krishnaji was again informed, and now Krishnaji he came in and started asserting his authority. In no time people came with buckets of water and brooms, etc. Eventually a mattress was found, and some sheets and a blanket and, I think, eventually mosquito nets. Some pathetic bearer, the one who staggered up the stairs with our buckets of boiling water in the morning, which he’d gotten up way before dawn to make (we could hear him cutting the firewood, making the fire, boiling the buckets of water); this poor man was set to cleaning the wash basin. He cleaned it for four hours the first day, and he was still scraping away with a razor the day we left three weeks later.  But the consternation at Krishnaji coming over and seeing what his guests were subjected to—everybody’s face was ashen.
Anyway Krishnaji gave lots of talks, and talks to the children; there were talks to teachers, and to students, together and separately. And, one lovely day in December Frances and I were invited to Krishnaji’s room where he chanted with Mr. Salman, who was the music teacher. We sat on the floor. I remember his room, it was very neat. There was a towel over this pillow. The mosquito netting was pulled back ever so neatly, and there was a metal wardrobe and something with drawers, and a chair. I can still see it vividly. There was a small rug on which we sat, and they chanted. It was wonderful. There was a big walk that goes all around the property. I remember the earth is sort of sand-colored, and the buildings were made of that same earth and so were the same color, but with white decorations on them. They weren’t square, like ordinary houses; they were sort of rounded as if little children had made them, you know, like the houses children make on the beach. I used to walk over there quite a lot. Also, I used to walk to the agricultural school.

I also remember being asked to go with Alain into Benares to buy staves because there was a student in the agricultural college who’d been bitten by a rabid jackal, and he didn’t take the Pasteur treatment, so he died. We were asked to buy staves, big heavy things, to ward off rabid jackals. I never saw jackals, but that was the errand. I remember the extraordinary-ness of Benares, which again is like no place else in the world.
Again, the taxis and trucks honking, with goats and cows wandering around. At one point, Frances and Alain and I were walking down toward the ghats and, going around a corner, I almost collided with a bicycle with a dead body on the back! Wrapped up and being taken to the burning ghats Then walking along the river, on the ghats, and we were just walking through ashes. I remember saying to Alain, “Look if I fall in, just keep walking and forget you ever knew me, because I’ll be dead!” Strange city!

Eventually, when we were to travel on, I remember at the airport, there was a lady, she was a Jain, and she was (mentally) disturbed and believed she was married to Krishnaji, so we had to protect him from her. She would lie in wait for him because she always wanted to touch him, and he didn’t want her to, so we had to run interference like in football. We used to call her Mrs. Moonlight, because she got madder when the moon was fullest, as some people do. At one point, in the airport, she almost got to him, and I remember his saying severely to her, “Don’t touch me.” He later told a story about how once in Bombay, he was out alone, and she appeared, and he had had to say, “Go away,” and eventually, “If you don’t, I will call a policeman.” She replied, “Go ahead, I’m your wife!” Luckily, at that point, a streetcar came by, and he jumped on the streetcar and escaped. She had a daughter, and she got the poor child to write, “darling daddy” letters to Krishnaji.
Anyway, we traveled on to Madras. I remember stepping out of the plane in Madras, and it was suddenly the tropics. It was late afternoon, and it wastotally different. There were crowds of people to greet Krishnaji, many of them with garlands, and one of them was Mrs. Jayalakshmi - she was quite tall for an Indian woman, with great presence and dignity. She dressed in a South Indian style, which was always the cotton blouse with beautiful heavy, heavy, heavy silk saris, but she wore them differently: it was wrapped around her waist in a different way. It wasn’t the over-the-shoulder way, and it had great elegance. Eventually I saw her collection of saris, which is something extraordinary. She was very silent, and rather shy; and slightly austere. When Alain greeted her, she said, “I have found you a house.” She proceeded to drive us to the house that she had rented for us. She also rented all the furniture from Spencer’s in town, and she lent us her Brahmin cook to cook one meal a day! I couldn’t believe the hospitality. She didn’t know Frances and she didn’t know me. She knew Alain, and because he’d written to her that Krishnaji wanted so and so, she’d gone to all this trouble!  Really extraordinary.

So we moved in; Frances and I had rooms upstairs with a bath. Alain was downstairs, and we had a kitchen, where I was to get breakfast and supper. And I remember my first glimpse of the kitchen, a room about ten feet by twenty feet, a sizeable room, and at the narrow end were shelves with  cooking pots, which looked like silver, but they don’t have handles. At the other end of the room was a stone counter with a square hole cut out, above which was a cold water faucet. Well, the one servant arrived, the Brahmin cook. He was a very handsome young man, very polite and austere and dignified, but I saw him preparing lunch on the floor. Chop, chop, chop, chop, on the floor. Now, because he’s Brahmin he’s very clean, and I realized that I had to not go in there without taking off shoes and having clean feet! But even so, on the floor!
So, my first meal was breakfast, but before that the milk-man came with water buffalo milk. He carried it in a huge pitcher. The customers had their container, and he would pour it into your container. And I remember there was always the dirty thumb that was holding it like this and the milk cascaded down over the dirty thumb. The milk had to be boiled, so you don’t fuss about these things. So I would boil the milk. There was also an earthenware closed pot for boiled water which was filled by the Brahmin cook. You could trust the water. I made toast on the camp-fire thing with toast stuck on a fork and there was fruit, carefully cut so you didn’t get dysentery. That was breakfast

That was interesting as a first experience. Frances didn’t do anything about breakfast in those days. I got the breakfast alone Anyway, I was invited over to Vasanta Vihar. Krishnaji showed me all around and explained that when he was no longer welcome in the TS that Rajagopal collected donations to buy the six acres of Vasanta Vihar. They had intended to build two small buildings, but somehow all this great big thing was built, which wasn’t what Krishnaji would have chosen, but there it was.
After that we went for a walk. Mrs. Jayalakshmi drove us to the deer park, and the three of us walked around the deer park. That was nice. Then, the public talks began, at which point I got the flu. I was really sick and had to stay in bed. I remember thinking that I was going to get pneumonia because I got sicker and sicker and sicker. Finally, one night I went down to Alain’s room and said, “Look, what am I going to do?” He responded, “I promise you, as your friend, that if you really get seriously ill, I will get you to the American hospital in Paris if I have to drag you there myself.” That reassured me. I had a terrible feeling that I’d be put in an Indian hospital. I kept having visions, I suppose from movies, where there’s a caravan crossing the desert and someone falls off a camel, and the rest just continue on. And that was going to be me! Left in India!

So, my spirits picked up and I guess I conquered my bug. The moment my fever dropped, Alain told Krishnaji, who said, “Bring her here.” Alain came back and told me, “Krishnaji wants to see you NOW!” So I staggered up and put clothes on. He wanted to do, what we have come to call, “healing.”  That was the first time he ever did that with me. He sat me down in a chair, put his hands on my shoulders so lightly it was like a bird’s wing touching me. He then asked me where I felt the illness, and I had, of course, terrible sinus congestion. He put his hand on, above, and beneath my eyes as though smoothing it away with the tips of his fingers. Then he put one of his hands over one eye and the other hand on one shoulder. The pain stopped instantly. He said, “Now, you come every day and I’ll do it.”
I wanted to weep at his kindness. I was so touched. It was terribly moving. Years later, he once helped my housekeeper, Filomina, who had terrible arthritis. She said to me afterward, “A le mani de un santo.” He has the hands of a saint. That’s what it was like.
I could have sat there after he finished for I don’t know how long.
He would always go away afterwards and shake his hands like he was shaking the illness off. And then he’d go and wash his hands.

So, from Madras we drove to Rishi Valley. Krishnaji drove with Pama  and I forget who else. Alain, Frances, and I were in a separate car that I had hired with a driver. We all set off at four in the morning, the usual time to set off for Rishi Valley.
Krishnaji’s car was ahead, and he had told me to look for the Southern Cross, which I’d never seen. I remember driving through that morning before sunrise and the bullock carts coming in from the country bringing vegetables to the city; those white bullocks prodding slowly along, not to be hurried, and the lorries honking—the whole thing. Going through villages where people were huddled around small, smoky fires and all wrapped up, especially their heads and necks wrapped up to keep them warm in the predawn of India.
We were to all meet up and have a picnic breakfast somewhere along the road. But when we got to a certain road block, a check point as it were, it turned out that our car didn’t have the proper papers. So we hired another taxi, which had the proper papers and we got to Rishi Valley rather late. Krishnaji was out in front of the old guest house when we arrived.
I immediately felt better in RishiValley, because it was a different climate: dry. It was like Arizona for me. All my troubles with that flu-like illness ended with the good climate.
I just remember the strange look of the valley, with those extraordinary rocks that have always looked to me like children’s toys that must have been put there by a giant baby and balanced just so. Nature couldn’t create them somehow.

At Rishi Valley there is what’s known as the old guest house. Krishnaji had two small rooms upstairs, and there was also a dining room and a kitchen and a big open place where meetings were held. Downstairs there were some guest rooms. Frances McCann and I had each a room downstairs and we shared a rather large bath. Alain was on the other side of the building in his quarters. We settled in, and eventually went to lunch. There was a special dining room for the visitors, and the food was less spicily prepared than for the school. I was immediately struck with the beauty of RishiValley, which was entirely different from Madras. It was dry, and it has a wonderful feeling of being away from the whole world somehow, which I like. To the west there was the mountain which Krishnaji cared so much about called Rishi Konda. In the afternoon the students used to go to watch the sun go down behind Rishi Konda, which was a nice sight because they’d all had their bath after playing sports, and changed into little white pajama suits. All the boys with their black hair, their big eyes, and the white, clean and neat outfits, and very young. It was very, very nice to see. Krishnaji felt that there was something sacred about Rishi Conda. The legend was that once some hermit had lived up at the summit, a holy man, a Rishi. And he’d left some kind of something in the air, which Krishnaji felt, I think. He didn’t say he felt it, but he cared very much about Rishi Conda.
The way of our life usually there was as follows: In the mornings sometimes Krishnaji would talk to the staff, in which case we (meaning Alain, Frances, myself and any other guests) would sit in on the discussions.

On certain days there’d be a chanting in assembly when the students chanted, and Krishnaji would go. He usually sat among the students on the floor, cross-legged, and chanted with them. It was very beautiful, very moving. Some days I would go up the mountain by myself and lie in the sun and take a sunbath and feel a wonderful sense of being away from the whole rest of the world, in this ancient valley, sort of suspended in time and place. I loved it.
Usually, in the afternoon, I would walk, and very often I would be invited to accompany Krishnaji on his walk with maybe some other people. I met Narayan then and walked with him and with Krishnaji. Other days I’d be walking on my own and sometimes meet him coming back from his walk and walk back with him and talk.

Somewhere in those weeks we were there, I asked Krishnaji for another interview. This time I felt much more relaxed in the interview with him. I remember the question that I had on my mind which, was one of relationship. I asked him if there is indeed any reality to relationship between people if they really don’t see each other a great deal. He asked me what I had in mind, what I meant. Well, what I was talking about was a niece of mine who was quite a young child then, and I was concerned about her but I hardly ever saw her. I was questioning whether there was any relationship just because you’re a member of a family. He asked me a little bit about it, the circumstances of the child’s life, where she was, etc. In effect he replied that probably there wasn’t any relationship, but there would be if there’s an exchange of some kind, either a conversation or by letter, or something. If I was to establish a contact verbally, then relationship can be real and can endure, but otherwise not.
Then he asked me what all this (by which he meant the really listening to him, the contact, etc.) was meaning to me.
I think I repeated what I’d said to him in an earlier conversation, which is that I was leery, as it were, of trying to measure where I was all the time because of the inclination to and danger of trying to achieve some aim. I saw that that wasn’t an intelligent way to go about it. He then asked me if I was fearful of anything. I replied, “Well, actually no, not at the moment, but I distrust that. It’s like a fear of not being afraid.”
He laughed a little bit, smiled at that, and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t make problems for yourself.”
I told him that once earlier I had said to him, “I’m very hesitant about asking for an interview with you because I don’t want to take up your time unnecessarily, and there are so many people who want to talk to you. So, I haven’t asked to speak to you in quite a long time. Also, it didn’t seem right, unless I have a crisis of some kind, I shouldn’t ask.

I remember his replying, “Now that we’ve talked a little bit and we know each other better, it will be easier for you to speak…” Also,  he didn’t want to have to tell me to come for my so-called treatment. You know, I had been sick in Madras, and I should just come when I thought it was necessary.
I said, again, that I was hesitant to bother him with anything like that. He replied, “Well, now we know each other better, it will be easier.” So, that was the end of that.
I remember that before that interview he wanted to cure me of something, and he said, “Do you want it before we talk or after?” I said, “I think after.”
You could often tell with Krishnaji if you made the right answer. You felt it. And also one always knew when an interview was over. His attention was turned off like a light. It was curious; not his total attention—he would still speak to you and all that, but that other quality went out. You just knew, that was that, you felt it was over. When I got up from the interview, he pulled out a chair for me to sit on. He washed his hands and came back and stood behind me very quietly for a while, and then, ever so lightly, he put his fingers on my eyelids. The touch of his fingers was extraordinary. It was as delicate as a leaf touching a pool of water. It was so unlike most human touch.

There was to be a puppet show in the school later that evening. The children of the lower school had made puppets of the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops; quite marvelous, great big puppets out of papier maché, and in those days Mark Lee was head of the lower school, and he had organized all this. At tea, Shakuntala asked. ”Why don’t you wear a sari? I’ll lend you one.” But, of course, I didn’t know how to put one on, and I’m still not any good at it. So, she literally dressed me in the sari. I stood there like a dummy! We then walked over to where the puppet show was to be, and we were seated in the front row. Everyone was ready and then Krishnaji came in from the side, and he walked in, at right angles to where I was. He noticed me immediately , and he did something that was utterly un-Indian and very Western—he raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word! However, when it was all over, when he’d said good night to everybody, he bowed to me and said, “I see you have a new dress.” But most of the time I wore things that I had gotten in Delhi—cotton kurtas and trousers and sandals. Of course, the tailor in the school, who was so  heavily patronized when the visitors came, made some kurtas and trousers for me.

I remember some nuns who were always asked for lunch up in Krishnaji’s dining room. I also remember Balasundarum’s wife, Vishalakshi, I think, being a traditional Indian wife; she didn’t eat with everybody. She sat on a stool and saw that everything was properly done, but she didn’t eat. Very old-fashioned Indian style.
And Parameshwaram was the cook. In later years, he would go wherever Krishnaji was, and not this year. I can’t remember when he joined Krishnaji this year, but he was certainly in Rishi Valley because that’s where he was cook the rest of the year. He would come to cook for Krishnaji in the little kitchen upstairs.
Pongal occurred then while we were then in Rishi Valley. All the bullocks were dressed up with flowers and ornaments on their horns. Villagers came and played on flute-like things and drums, and the children had a lovely time dancing. Krishnaji came with his big umbrella to watch. At some point in his early years, I don’t know when exactly, he’d had sunstroke in India, so he was sensitive to sun, which is why he used to walk always in the afternoon, when the sun wasn’t high.
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It was a wonderfully peaceful time. I remember the combination of Krishnaji, his talks, the beautiful valley, the remoteness, the silence, children all around, and those funny hills. A great atmosphere there. I imagined suddenly leaving everything and becoming a kind of hermit there. Then, of course, there were the dance performances under the banyan tree. I think that the same Mrs. Moonlight lady—the demented lady—had come, too. So, again, we had to run interference for Krishnaji to keep her away from Krishnaji.
But overall, Rishi Valley was just lovely.

The next move was to Bombay but via Bangalore. Again, Alain, Frances, and I had a car, a school car this time, which took us to Bangalore. We had lunch, did a little shopping, and then we met Krishnaji at the airport and flew to Bombay. I was invited over to Pupul’s for lunch about the second day, and Krishnaji said, “Bring me the things that you want kept safely.” In other words, money, passports, and things like that. So, I brought them, and he took me through the bathroom into his bed-room, and he took my things and put them away, saying they were perfectly safe as no one would come in his room. He then said, going out through the bathroom, “When I got here they had all sorts of pictures on the wall of Indian statuary and they’d taken them down quickly after he’d got there. And he added, “But not before I’d had a good look!”I remember Alain saying, “They were pornographic, weren’t they, sir?’ And Krishnaji replied, “Oh, no, they were religious!” I said that I didn’t feel that they could be pornographic because they all looked so happy! Well, it turned out as the conversation went on, that I hadn’t seen the ones that were on the bathroom wall; I’d only seen ones that are reproduced books—strange positions and so forth. Anyway, I had lunch there. Then Krishnaji began giving his talks. They were held in the usual place, in that college of art. He also held public discussions in the something like Khareghat Hall, which lots of people came to. You had to leave your sandals outside, and I remember one day I came out and all the sandals had been stolen!  Hundreds of pair of sandals where gone! Great consternation. Then there were walks around the hanging gardens in Malabar Hills with a required number of laps around. Krishnaji one day (there were people milling around), and pointed to a couple on a bench with their arms around each other, sprawling, and he said, “What is this country coming to? You never would have seen that a few years ago.” He sounded quite shocked.

I was invited to several meetings at Pupul’s, and I remember in particular the first one I went to. There were about fifteen people. Krishnaji asked the question, “What can the individual do in the face of the disintegration of society?” He made it something very interesting. He said that an individual cannot be changed by another individual. He made a distinction between individual consciousness and human consciousness: the individual consciousness is one’s own, but an individual can affect the totality of human consciousness He said that if only two or three people ever could do what he talked so often about, it would make a change in the world. He was pointing that out in this discussion. The individual who has changed has a vast resonance, like a wave going out from the individual; if there’s really change in the individual it would spread out like a wave through the totality of human beings. He didn’t use those exact words, but that was the implication of what he was saying. He said one has to see this, but people don’t, aren’t willing to. It was one of those discussions which were frustrating because he would say something like that and then inevitably, as in all discussions, there’d be someone who would say, “But we don’t see that, Krishnaji!” And then the discussion would go back as so many of his discussions did. So you’d go through a whole catalogue of what’s wrong, and it wouldn’t go forward. It was frustrating, somehow. If the discussion had flowed onward, people had gone with it, they would have seen something. There was one day, another private discussion, and he was a little bit late, which he usually never was; he came in laughing, and said, “I’ve just been scolded,” he said, “by a guru.” Apparently some guru took him to task for saying that gurus were no good! Were a hindrance! He was laughing at that so much! I think he said that in a talk at which I felt that one occasionally gets a sort of insight, and then thought perceives that insight as a danger to itself because we perceive that as almost like death; because if we really went ahead the self would disappear, and that is perceived by the thought process as death,  and it’s so scary that you pull back, and don’t go ahead.

Anyway, he talked, and whatever I said, I said, and he said things back. But I had the feeling—many people have these feelings in talks with Krishnaji—that he was talking to me directly, not only words, but subconsciously. I could feel it coming at me, even when he was talking to somebody else or addressing some particular question. It was very strange. Afterward he came over to me for some reason and said, “You didn’t mind me pounding you in that talk, did you?” I replied, “No, of course not.” It was one of those times when there were different levels of communication going on. I think it was in that talk that he said, as he so often did, “When you see that the road you’re on is the wrong road—you’re going north and someone comes and says that doesn’t lead anywhere; go south or east or west—why don’t you do it? Why don’t you see that where you’re going leads no place and stop?”
I remember saying, “But I can’t stop walking. My mind won’t stop. Even though I see it’s futile. It won’t go on.” He replied, “Why do you say that? You think you can’t, but you can.” I remember that strongly. It was like, he didn’t say it then, but it’s like, “Stop thinking.” I’d never done that. I mean, I could stop thinking about a particular thing, but the mind would run on in some other way.
(to be continued...)