Searching for the Perfect Heat

Consider this:
      "You follow this guru and that one. Do this practice and that one and what do you become? Second-hand people."

      Boom! That phrase ~ “second-hand people” ~  cuts deep to the bone.

Jiddhu Krishnamurti, or JK as he was later known, may have known a thing or two about this issue of authenticity, fake v. real.
In 1895 in Madanapalle, southern India, Charles Leadbeater, a Theosophist, first saw the 14-year-old Krishnamurti on the banks of the Adyar river. Leadbeater, an occultist who claimed clairvoyance, was reported saying of the experience, that it was "most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it.” JK and his brother were soon adopted by the society’s president, Dr. Annie Besant, who later worked for Indian Independence. Though largely forgotten these days, the Theosophical Society was instrumental in introducing features of Eastern religions to the west, where they were hardly known in that era. The Theosophical Society and JK should rightly be considered pioneers of the new age and more.
      Theosophists had already been predicting the coming of “a world teacher” and JK was chosen for this role. He and his brother were shipped off to the UK for training. The Order of the Star in the East, a worldwide organization, was formed with young Krishnamurti as its head.

     But… in 1929, as all the many thousands of members of the Order eagerly awaited the proclamation of the arrival of the “world leader”, during the annual Star Camp in the Netherlands, Krishnamurti instead publicly dissolved the Order and returned the donated property and money. He stated that he had made his decision after two years’ careful consideration and famously stated:
“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect…

    “I have now decided to disband [the Order of the Star], as I happen to be its head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set man absolutely, unconditionally free.” [You can read the complete text of this speech here: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=354 ]
  JK spent the rest of his long life giving public lectures, taking part in group discussions and meeting with people in different countries. In the 1960s, he had numerous documented discussions with the physicist David Bohm, whose philosophical and scientific concerns about the world and the state of mankind, were echoed in Krishnamurti's philosophy.

     JK died in Ojai, California, in 1986, at the venerable age of 90.

      In one talk, he again returned to that same razor-sharp phrase: “We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our own inclinations, our tendencies or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves.”

     Is that what we should aim to be? By all appearances, and after counting the masses of people who flock to gurus, teachers, false prophets and leaders, it may well be. Courage may be needed to walk alone against the flow of humanity and not everyone may have the cojones for that.
Consider now: What, if anything, is original or authentic in ourselves. Are we not, to varying degrees, depositories of scraps of second-hand fragments masquerading as a whole? Consider this well and something may open-up that is unique, genuine, authentic, universal and timeless.



PS: So why call this piece: “Looking for the Perfect Heat”?

Could it be because of this ~
~ or could it just be a crock of shit?
Let’s consider, for a moment, that it isn’t the latter…

JK’s story, imho, is a variant on the Hero’s Journey (see as above and below) and such journeys are not without their trials of fire in which the dross is burned away; hence the alchemical Heat. And in his song, Mr B. was surely looking for something beyond mundane perfection, hence that link, but, in all honesty I prefer the special something for you in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KK44UADIxw
©2017 Neil Riley. All Rights Reserved.
 [To be continued… ]

Written by Neil Riley