Book Review

The Beauty of Life: Krishnamurti’s Journal
By Jiddu Krishnamurti
Publisher:London: Watkins, 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-78678-747-7

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was “discovered” on a beach by the Adyar River in India when he was 14 years old by the Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater. Leadbeater observed that the young boy had the “most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it.” He believed that the boy was destined to become a great spiritual teacher and that he was already an advanced spiritual entity. Krishnamurti was then introduced to Annie Besant, the Theosophical Society’s international president, and came under her guardianship.

In 1929, however, Krishnamurti ended his association with the Theosophical Society and renounced any claims to being a World Teacher. Instead, he advocated cultivating self-awareness and freedom from reliance on spiritual teachers. He continued to write and to teach, and later established the Krishnamurti Foundations in the United States, Britain, India, Spain, and Canada.

Krishnamurti’s Journal was published from a notebook that he kept in his later years.

With acute observations uncoloured by a personal “self” he offers vignettes of intense natural beauty interwoven with spiritual truths. We are given a glimpse of a wide-open perspective, of a calm and clear mind, and of the oneness of all that is. We see with him the beauty and truth that are revealed everywhere and in everything.

The western sky had lost its colour and just over the horizon was the new moon, young, shy, and tender. On the road everything seemed to be passing, marriage, death, the laughter of children and someone sobbing. Near the moon was a single star.

Pupul Jayakar (1915-1997), author of Krishnamurti: A Biography, observed that Krishnamurti’s “relationship with nature, trees, rocks, and the earth has special significance; he has the ability to enter into spaces within nature, to feel life move. Lately he has started to speak of the sound that reverberates within a tree, when all other sound ends.” Krishnamurti says of himself, “He always had this strange lack of distance between himself and the trees,rivers, and mountains.” On 20th October 1973 he shared this experience:

Among other redwood trees, which were also very old, this one was towering over them all; other trees had been touched by fire but this one had no marks on it. It had lived through all the ugly things of history, through all the wars of the world, through all the mischief and sorrow of man, through fire and lightning, through all the storms of time, untouched, majestic, and utterly alone with immense dignity.… It soared up to the heavens as you sat under it, vast and timeless, its very years gave it the dignity of silence and the aloofness of great age. It was as silent as your mind was, as still as your heart, and living without the burden of time. You were aware of compassion that time had never touched and of innocence that had never known hurt and sorrow. You sat there and time passed you by and it would never come back. There was immortality, for death had never been. Nothing existed except that immense tree, the clouds, and the earth.… There was unfathomable sacredness which would never again leave you, for it was not yours.

In this journal Krishnamurti offers us an intimate glimpse of his innate ability to “be alone without word and thought but only watching and listening.” Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes: “Ever since he was a boy…no thought entered his mind. He was watching and listening and nothing else.” He observes that,

He was not withdrawn, aloof, but like the waters of a river. He had so few thoughts; no thoughts at all when he was alone. His brain was active when talking or writing but otherwise it was quiet and active without movement.

He explains that this quietening of the mind, this state of no-thought, allows us to experience the oneness of all.

Krishnamurti urges us to understand the operation of our own minds so that we can be free of the conditioning that obscures the truth. He explains that the thoughts that we have are a response to the “memories, experience, and knowledge stored up in the brain.” They have “divided existence as the outer and the inner and from this separation conflict and control arise … and this also brings about untold wars, violence, and sorrow.” These thoughts have “divided the world into nationalities, ideologies and into religious sects.”

Meditation, he says, allows us to see the movement of thought. He goes further: “Meditation is the complete transformation of thought and its activities.” Then there is no division of the inner and the outer. With meditation, he says, “[t]he consciousness of the world is your consciousness; you are the world and the world is you.” However, only a quiet and spacious mind can attain this oneness of being.

At the time when he wrote the journal, he was living in Brockwood Park, Hampshire, U.K., later in Rome, and then in California. However, the entries were often written from his memory of earlier times and other places. On 22nd October 1973 he recalled being in a small boat on a river:

On the quiet slow current of the river all the horizon from north to south, east to west was visible; there wasn’t a tree or house that broke the horizon; there was not a cloud floating by.… The sky and the earth met and there was vast space. In this measureless space the earth and all things had their existence, even this small boat carried along by the strong current.… There must be this space for beauty and compassion.… Where there is no space, outwardly and inwardly, every form of mischief and degeneration is inevitable. The condition of the mind through so-called education, religion, tradition, culture, gives little space to the flowering of the mind and heart.

If we are to find this “space for beauty and compassion,” he says, we need to let go of both the known and the unknown, and cease from inventing imaginary “facts” to fill the void of the unknown. That space is already there, latent within us.

The gods don’t give you space, for theirs is yours. This vast, measureless space lies outside the measure of thought, and thought is the known. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content, the known, the “me.”

He explains that this letting go of the “me” is essential as “[t]here’s no meditator in meditation. If there is, it is not meditation.” There is no separation between the individual and the divine; meditation enables us to realize the truth of this oneness. He expresses his own experience of the continual presence and timeless nature of meditation: “You are not even aware that meditation is going on, this meditation that began ages ago and would go on endlessly.”

He writes of freedom:

Freedom is to be a light to oneself; then it is not an abstraction, a thing conjured by thought.… Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself.… This light, this law, is neither yours nor that of another. There is only light. This is love.

Physical death is, he says, simple and natural; it is pervasive, unavoidable, and necessary. As long as we don’t see that “the observer is the observed, the experiencer is the experienced,” however, “[d]eath is everywhere and we never seem to live with it. It is a dark, frightening thing to be avoided, never to be talked of.” He explained: “When the observer leaves everything which he is, then the observer is not. This is not death. It is the timeless.… When time is not then death is not. Love is.” And when love is, separation is not.

Toward the end of his life Krishnamurti suffered from pancreatic cancer. When a close friend said she was afraid that she might not see him again and that all she would have left would be a memory of him, he replied, “No, … if you make me a memory… you cut yourself away from that eternity, with all its compassion.” Then he explains that what is essential is to put the teacher’s teachings into practice. He imagines a person who meets the Buddha:

I meet the Buddha. I have listened to him very deeply. In me the whole truth of what he says is abiding, and he goes away. He has told me very carefully, “Be a light to yourself.” The seed is flowering. I may miss him. He was a friend, somebody whom I really loved. But what is really important is that seed of truth which he has planted – by my alertness, awareness, intense listening, that seed will flower. Otherwise, what is the point of somebody having it?