HERE was nothing second hand about what J. Krishnamurti said. He was a person obviously selected for his special mission, but those who were entrusted with his upbringing had no idea of the kind of person he was, nor of the teaching he was to provide. I had the benefit of being associated with him when he was venerated as a World Teacher in the Theosophical Society and in the Order of the Star. Then he renounced all the land and property at his disposal, and all the name and fame that went with it, and the willing devotion of thousands all over the world, by asserting that Truth is a pathless land and organizations are an impediment to man's understanding of life.
On a personal note, I also struck a different line altogether. At that time we felt nothing would be meaningful until India was free from British rule. My generation was reared on certain postulates. We believed that the purpose of the amazing scientific advancement that was then taking place was, as Bertrand Russell put it, to reconstruct society on saner lines. It was also the passionate faith of my generation that the state was the

most effective instrument for quickly changing man's environment of squalor, injustice and misery. I have now lived long enough to see the relentless progress of history bearing testimony to the fact that we were on a false trail. Nobody with any intelligence today can believe that the modern state, not only in India but anywhere in the world, is an instrument of political power used for achieving greater harmony and ending the avoidable misery of man, particularly the exploitation of man by man.
These exploded myths were at one time sanctified like the cows in India. The cows of our imagination were this great faith in the possibility of using state power for improving society, and in science, which had achieved miracles in the fields of surgery, medicine and so on. Science was expanding in all directions and we believed that scientific progress would automatically be utilized for furthering the well-being of man. I gave nearly twenty years of my life to proceeding along these postulates until the big bang in Hiroshima suddenly awakened me to the realization that something was utterly wrong.

I passed through a spiritual crisis at the time India was just about to become mistress of her own house. We had looked upon Hitler and Stalin as incarnations of the devil, but had not realized that those who sought to destroy them in the name of liberty and democracy, would themselves ruthlessly destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Japan.

It was at that point that I once again came to meet Krishnaji. From that time onwards, I have done my best to understand what Krishnamurti was trying to communicate. It will amuse you to know that I was present at an interview which has not been recorded by any of his biographers. In 1931,1 had just come out of jail and was back in Benares, still in the Theosophical Society. Jawaharlal Nehru happened to be in Benares and his host, who was one of my students, told me that the dinner table conversation was about Krishnamurti. I replied that the conversation at Krishnamurti's table was about Jawaharlal Nehru. Then we said, why don't we bring them together? So Jawaharlal Nehru, along with Acharya Kripalani, came to meet Krishnaji at his residence. Nehru asked: 'Sir, if a man were dying of thirst, would you not say that giving him water is the primary task? If a house is on fire, would not the primary duty be to put out the fire?' Krishnamurti replied: 'That is perfectly all right. The trouble is that you believe when you have state power you will be able to create a new India. But governments cannot change society, science cannot change society. Only man, by the rightful use of his own understanding, can create a new social order.'

This was an outrageously unorthodox statement from the point of view of the contemporary intellectual. But today it does not require much intelligence to see that the present regime in India bears witness to the fact that we have engineered problems for ourselves, and created our own misery. The truth that Krishnaji stated stands vindicated today; if we really want a better, saner world, we must start with man, as K pointed out quite early. Man can be enslaved in new beliefs by religious organizations, so he did not want people to get caught in a network of philosophy and elaborate systems of sadhana. This does not mean that K did not accept the discipline of learning, for every form of learning has its own discipline. Discipline is necessary, but it must be chosen with intelligence, and it must subserve the object of giving us clarity of perception.

Why is man living in conflict and tension? This is a question K addressed to himself and also to his listeners. He spoke about the art of living, which consists of putting everything in its right place, including thought. We live in the world by thought, by accumulated knowledge, by capacities which we have cultivated. In all these, there is emphasis on the past and all that we have acquired from it. He invited us to see what the past had given, and to put it away. How does thought itself arise? He pointed out that when the five senses come into contact with theirrespective objects, they carry sensations to the brain. Though the same tree, bird and flower are seen by several persons, the sensations carried to the brain by each one are different according to its samskara, or conditioning. The brain is programmed like a computer, and if we look intelligently, we will see each brain is conditioned differently. No two people react exactly alike to the messages they receive from their senses. A process in the brain creates experience, happiness, un-happiness, and so forth, and thought arises from that through memory. The originality of K's thinking lies in this: he invites us to see that we have two types of memory - the factual memory of what happens, and the psychological memory, stored up in the brain from what was experienced. The psychological memory is the mechanism by which time is created: yesterday, today and tomorrow. All the mischief in human life is due to our not being able to distinguish between factual and psychological memory, and the residue it leaves in the mind.

We are ourselves programming the brain. Then we say: this is not good, so I must do something else. This only means changing the programming. K said: Just observe what you mean by change, by progress. People usually attribute their problems to the environment, and are concerned with changing their environment. But if we are ourselves creating that environment, it is our conditioning that must be understood. K never wanted people to believe in anything. He made a statement and requested us to have a look at it. We may see that, just as the mind creates time from its psychological memory, the whole process of thought creates the thinker, the T process. He made a marvellous statement, when he called this the self-sustaining process of ignorance, which has no beginning, but which can have an end. His purpose was to guide us to find our own solution.

Krishnamurti was very particular about saying that nobody could do this for us, except ourselves. I have not met another person who pleaded with greater earnestness:

These are valuable guidelines for pilgrims wandering through the world.

If we look at the world today, we realize that human beings have great capacities, and all living is often just the effort to acquire capacities. Because without acquiring capacities, a career, or the railways, or aeroplanes, or eminent doctors, would not exist. So capacities are absolutely necessary. But what our education fails to give us is the art of using that capacity for human well-being, including our own. In view of this, K devoted his time to the schools started in India, America and England. The intention behind the schools is to warn ourselves and our teachers that capacities can be a great blessing as well as a curse. The earth's great ecological problems and the hole in the ozone layer point this out. So, merely acquiring capacity as a means to a good career is too shortsighted, too dull witted a way of looking at life. K invites us to work for the awakening of intelligence.

We must learn the difference between the intellect and intelligence. Intellect has been described by Bernard Shaw, in his own witty way, as rascality turned prudent. We do not behave properly because we do not have goodness, and we have to pay a price for not having it. All the order we see in society today is engineered by fear. Therefore K talked a great deal about fear, pointing out that fear is, like time, a product of thought and memory - somebody insulted me yesterday, therefore I am afraid. He may insult me again today so I am on my guard. Fear is one of the great problems affecting thousands of people, and if we really want to understand it, we must look at it and see what we are afraid of. Then we see that it is attachment to something.

Then one comes upon another truth: one likes to possess and hold. If one looks at the number of possessions one has, one is sometime amazed and asks: 'Why am I collecting all these?'

K explained that if we want to understand the art of living, we must know what death is. Death is one of the great causes of fear. It is part of the law of Nature that whatever is compounded must be uncompounded. Our bodies are made up of the five elements (earth, water, air, fire, and ether) and they cannot possibly remain stable; they must always dissolve. Once the body is dissolved, you cannot carry anything with you. He used to say: 'Sir, you cannot carry your furniture to the other world when you go.' Now, the furniture we carry is not only material, but also our many likes and dislikes, and all our attachments. Death signifies leaving everything here. In order to appreciate and understand this, his advice was to understand how thought arises, its nature, and its end. Desire is nothing but repetitive thought, a child of thought.

Thus K was able to lead us to the understanding of the entire gamut of life from birth to death. Another part of his very valuable teaching was about saying: 'I do not know.' According to him, the process of learning begins only when we say, 'I do not know.' Otherwise, learning is additive. When we add something to what we already know, our opinions and prejudices get strengthened. Therefore in the K schools the teacher must understand what K himself exemplified - that there is no teacher, there is only learning.

Then we must notice the parts of our lives: one entirely made up of thought, including motor cars, streets, furniture and so forth; and the other that is not made up of thought, which is Nature. Life is full of relationships. We are related to people, ideas, institutions, and also to Nature - the great factor of rejuvenation. To really look at the night sky with all its stars, to look at the sea, or watch the cycle of seasons is to come upon the fact that there is no difference between the observer and the observed, because we are also part of that process, inseparable from Nature. If we can truly observe Nature, it is easier to commune with her as Wordsworth did. It is possible for every person to have moments of sublime ecstasy.

When driving a car and suddenly the light turns red, one stops not out of volition, but by reflex. The ending of thought may come at first in a similar manner. We are with Nature and without realizing it, our thought ceases to be. It will come back again, but we need to observe this.

Learning means not merely accumulating, not verbally knowing and naming, but opening one's eyes to see the tree, or the bird, without wanting to give it a name. In the process of learning, there is also the process of listening to the sound of the bird, or of the sea. All this looking, listening, learning, is a part of freeing the mind from the shackles of thought.

Science has made such advances, that it believes that only the known is the real. If it is not known, or if it cannot be known, it is unreal. A telescope is mounted on a satellite which brings a most interesting message that no scientist can discover in his laboratory. But a bigger telescope will see more. How much more, I cannot say. It is through cosmology that science has come to realize that existence as a whole is unknowable, and man is a part of it. This mystery of human existence must be observed with great intelligence.

Is it possible for a man in this wicked world to use his intelligence in such a way that he can earn a decent livelihood without harming the other? The teacher's profession is one in which he is using all his capacities to awaken the intelligence of the child, and also his general attitude to life and relationships. The cultivation of capacities is absolutely important, because second-rate minds cannot discover a way out of the modern confusion and conflict. A first-rate mind is needed, but also a heart that knows what is compassion - a heart that can feel the sorrow of another as one's own. Our education must help a person to understand that the earth is in peril. It was not in peril when peopled by savages, by untrained tribes. It is in peril because man has endowed himself with science, but has not learnt its right use.

If Krishnamurti's teaching is to be given a name, it should be 'a sermon on the Art of Living', to learn which we must realize all these aspects of the spectrum. The words do not give undue importance to accumulated know ledge, yet they do not discard it. It is only when thought ceases, that a glimpse of intelligence comes into being. Is it possible for us to sit quietly and commune with ourselves without words, without thoughts, and in that silence perhaps get a glimpse of intelligence?

An unrevised talk by the late Mr Patwardhan, a member of the TS who was closely asssociated with J. Krishnamurti and his work, and well known for his work for India's freedom.