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It is a commonly held view that Krishnamurti
was enlightened, but a poor teacher, yet over the years of his teaching
many thousands from all over the world attended his talks, attracted by
his reputation and his words. I attended one of his summer camps at Brockwood
park (the site of one of the schools he set up) and also saw him lecture
at the Barbican in London: I think that he has influenced me as much as
any living mystic that I have been lucky enough to encounter. The following
passage, from The Only Revolution, gives the flavour of his teachings:
Meditation is not the repetition
of the word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence.
The bead and the word do quiet the chattering mind, but this is a form of
self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill.
Meditation is not wrapping yourself in a pattern of thought, in the enchantment
of pleasure. Meditation has no beginning, and therefore it has no end.
If you say: "I will begin today to control my thoughts, to sit quietly
in the meditative posture, to breathe regularly" then you are caught
in the tricks with which one deceives oneself. Meditation is not a matter
of being absorbed in some grandiose idea or image: that only quietens one
for the moment, as a child absorbed by a toy is for the time being quiet.
But as soon as the toy ceases to be of interest, the restlessness and the
mischief begin again. Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path
leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing watching,
listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion attentive
to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. And
at night, when the whole organism is at rest, the meditative mind has no
dreams for it has been awake all day. It is only the indolent who have dreams;
only the half-asleep who need the intimation of their own states. But as
the mind watches, listens to the movement of life, the outer and the inner,
to such a mind comes a silence that is not put together by thought.
It is not a silence which the observer can experience. If he does experience
it and recognise it, it is no longer silence. The silence of the meditative
mind is not within borders of recognition, for this silence has no frontier.
There is only silence in which the space of division ceases.
(pages 19 - 20)
Like Ramana he does not recommend outward
forms of self-discipline, but unlike him (and the others in this chapter)
he is outspoken in his condemnation of all gurus, teachers, Masters and
so on. His antipathy to the whole context of master and disciple may have
been a result of his early training, but it placed him in a paradoxical
position as a teacher, for he knew in his heart the same thing that Krishna,
Ramakrishna, and Ramana Maharshi knew: association with him could change
people. More than any of these masters he attempted to give the aspirant
independence and self-reliance from the outset, but his own nature and background
and the nature of seekers in general made this maddeningly difficult. In
the following transcript of a conversation between Krishnamurti and the
physicist (and friend) David Bohm Krishnamurti is the master and
Bohm is the disciple, but the dialogue has the outward form of equality,
or even an inversion of roles.
Bohm: You see, one of the things that often causes confusion
is that, when you put it in terms of thought, its seems that you are presented
with the fragments that are real, substantial reality. Then you have to
see them, and nevertheless you say, as long as the fragments are there,
there is no wholeness so that you can't see them. But that all comes back
to the one thing, the one source.
K RISHNAMURTI : I am sure, Sir, really serious people have asked this
question. They have asked it and tried to find an answer through thought.
Bohm: Yes, well it seems natural.
K RISHNAMURTI : And they never saw that they were caught in thought.
Bohm: That is always the trouble. Everybody gets into this trouble:
that he seems to be looking at everything, at his problems, saying, "Those
are my problems, I am looking." But that looking is only thinking,
but it is confused with looking. This is one of the confusions that arises.
If you say, don't think but look, that person feels he is already looking.
KRISHNAMURTI : Quite. So you see, this question has arisen and they
say, "All right, then I must control thought, I must subjugate thought
and I must make my mind quiet so that it becomes whole, then I can see the
parts, all the fragments, then I'll touch the source." But it is still
the operation of thought all the time.
Bohm: Yes, that means the operation of thought is unconscious for
the most part and therefore one doesn't know it is going on. We may say
consciously we have realised that all this has to be changed, it has to
be different. [36]
Arjuna asked Krishna how to still the mind; Bohm is asking the same question,
but what a difference! The same drama is being played out but in the context
of a twentieth century democracy, not a feudal aristocracy. Bohm is certainly
Krishnamurti's intellectual equal, and Krishnamurti directs the conversation
in the detached scientific manner of the debating hall, but now picks up
on Bohm's mention of the unconscious and moves the interaction into a different
gestalt.
KRISHNAMURTI
: But it is still going on unconsciously.
So can you talk to my unconscious, knowing my conscious brain is going to
resist you?
Krishnamurti puts Bohm in the position of the master, and himself in the
position of the aspirant; at the same time he poses the question that all
masters ask of themselves how to reach the depth of their disciple. The
disciple has come to the master, but they are going to resist him nevertheless:
this is the ancient dilemma. The dialogue unfolds in a revealing way, Krishnamurti
still speaking:
Because you are telling me something
which is revolutionary, you are telling me something which shatters my whole
house which I have built so carefully, and I won't listen to you you follow?
In my instinctive reactions I push you away. So you realise that and say,
"Look, all right, talk to your unconscious. I am going to talk to your
unconscious and make that unconscious see that whatever movement it does
is still within the field of time and so on." So your conscious mind
is never in operation. When it operates it must inevitably either resist,
or say, "I will accept"; therefore it creates a conflict in itself.
So can you talk to my unconscious?
Bohm: You can always ask how.
K RISHNAMURTI : No, no. You can say to a friend, "Don't resist,
don't think about it, but I am going to talk to you." "We two
are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening."
Bohm: Yes.
K RISHNAMURTI : I think this is what really takes place. When you
were talking to me I was noticing it I was not listening to your words so
much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not your words, as you
explained and so on. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening
to you, not to the words which you use, but to the meaning, the inward quality
of your feeling that you want to communicate to me.
Krishnamurti is not telling Bohm that he is ignoring him, the eminent physicist,
but hinting at how Bohm should listen to Krishnamurti not to the words but
to the deeper meaning. They go on in this inverted fashion:
Bohm: I understand.
K RISHNAMURTI : That changes me, not all this verbalisation. So can
you talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies,
without the conscious mind interfering and saying, "Please don't touch
all this, leave me alone!" They have tried subliminal propaganda in
advertising, so that whilst you don't really pay attention, your unconscious
does, so you buy that particular soap! We are not doing that, it would be
deadly. What I am saying is: don't listen to me with your conscious ears
but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened
to you this morning, because I am terribly interested in the source, as
your are. You follow, Sir? I am really interested in that one thing. All
this is the explicable, easily understood but to come to that thing together,
feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning,
a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about it at a level
where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly but
you understand what I mean?
Say for instance I have a conditioning; you can point it out a dozen times,
argue, show the fallacy of it, the stupidity but I still go on. I resist,
I say what it should be, what shall I do in this world otherwise, and all
the rest of it. But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned
there must be conflict. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and
get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious
is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened, but it sees the
danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does. As when I was
walking in California high in the mountains: I was looking at birds and
trees and watching, and I hear a rattle and I jumped. It was the unconscious
that made the body jump; I saw the rattler when I jumped, it was two or
three feet away, it could have struck me very easily. If the conscious brain
had been operating it would have taken several seconds.
Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn't
directly appeal to the conscious.
K RISHNAMURTI : Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk
to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you
penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all
the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else.
This is a rare admission by Krishnamurti (and his attempt to disguise it
does not fool us) that he is the guru, teacher, master, or whatever,
and that the master operates through love regardless of whether he teaches
awareness, self-enquiry, or devotion. We continue now to look at a teacher,
alive at the time of writing, who teaches the path of devotion (in some
ways reminding us of Krishna): Mother Meera.
1.7 Mother Meera
Mother Meera was born in 1960 in South India.
Like Ramana Maharshi she had no spiritual background, practice or guru,
but from a much earlier age entered quite spontaneously into the state of
samadhi, the first recorded example being at the age of six. She describes
such states in terms of seeing the 'light', and we note that there is a
greater content in the descriptions than we have for other examples of samadhi
or a Pure Consciousness Event. The content of her states or visions includes
visitations from various Hindu gods and entities, and also luminaries such
as Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. Her descriptions of the
Light and of supramental beings reminds one a little of Rudolf Steiner,
and the possibility that we are dealing more with an occult phenomenon than
a clear case of Pure Consciousness Mysticism. However, my sense of her project,
that is her overall purpose and orientation, is of a transcendent one not
an occult one.
At the age of seventeen Mother Meera was 'discovered' by the poet and scholar
Andrew Harvey at the Aurobindo ashram, and became the subject of his book
Hidden Journey [37]. Her descriptions of herself (mainly in Answers
[38])
hinge round her use of the word avatar as distinct from a self-realised
person. A self-realised person, in Eastern terminology is a person who sought
enlightenment and achieved it, perhaps easily, or perhaps with difficulty
people in this category would probably include the Buddha, Krishnamurti,
and Ramakrishna, but not Krishna or Meera. Some consider Jesus to have attained
a realisation in his early thirties (supposedly a common age for this to
happen) but still regard him as an avatar. Meera does not agree with this,
as we see in the following passage from Answers dealing both with
Krishna and Jesus (Q is the questioner, MM is Mother Meera).
Q: If we could see you in cosmic
vision as Arjuna saw Krishna, would we see the entire Divine Mother in her
glory around you?
MM: Each individual will have a unique way of seeing the Avatar.
Q: You have said that there are both Mothers and Fathers. What kind of force
do the Fathers bring down, and how is it different from the Mothers?
MM: All Avatars come from the same source, and the Light they bring down
is the same. However, the purposes of each Incarnation are different. Both
male and female may work for peace, or transformation or harmony, for example.
Q: Do Avatars know right from the beginning that they are divine, or do
they come slowly into that realization? For example, wasn't it only later
in Jesus' life that he understood his divine mission?
MM: Jesus knew from the beginning that he was the son of God. The changing
experiences in an Avatar's life have more to do with making it clear to
the world who he or she is.
Q: What, specifically, did Jesus and Krishna bring to the Earth?
MM: Jesus symbolized sacrifice. Krishna brought love and peace and destroyed
some of the asuras [demons] of the time. [39]
It is interesting to see how Andrew Harvey saw Meera (both the following
extracts are from Hidden Journey).
Then she turned to me. Her face
seemed to detach itself from her body and swim, burning, back and forth
in the air before me. There was nothing but her face. I did not know whether
it was separate from me or within me; all sense of distance was obliterated.
The Light became more and more intense, so bright that it took all my strength
to go on looking into it. The face was smiling not gently as it had to Jean-Marc
but with a tigerish, exultant smile, a smile of absolute triumph. She gazed
deep into my eyes; my whole body filled with flame. In the seconds of that
gaze I was only my eyes and this Fire. (page 37)
Ma sat down, with her back to the storm. I sat on the edge of the roof next
to her. We were looking into each other's eyes. The whole sky had now turned
a dark purple-gray. Her eyes were larger than ever, boiling with energy.
I felt frightened but could not turn away. Suddenly the entire horizon behind
her from one end of the sky to the other broke into a vast flame of lightening
and a thunderclap so loud I wanted to cry out.
What I saw, as clearly and precisely as I have seen anything, was that the
great unfurling of lightening was in her body. In the second of the explosion
of lightening I saw her in outline on the edge of vanishing altogether,
but with the whole of the purple sky and the zigzag of lightening inside
her.
The storm ceased as quickly as it had begun. No rain came, and the sky cleared
with eerie speed. Ma said something quiet to Adilakshmi, got up, and went
downstairs.
I stayed up on the roof. In Pondicherry, in the early days, I had seen Ma,
while kneeling to her at darshan, as vast with all the stars and
suns inside her body. But this had been a kind of gentle dream. Now she
had shown me what? Herself. For those seconds I had been allowed to see
her Divine Being in its splendor. (page 71-72)
There are similarities in these descriptions to the visions that Arjuna
has of Krishna and Vivekananda with Ramakrishna, but we must be cautious
with them; as Meera herself says, each individual sees avatars in a different
way. PCM gives no stress to experiences of this type, or at least to the
imagery expressed in them, though the emotional intensity is not to be ignored.
What is important is the change in orientation of the individual as a result
of such experiences particularly important is that such experiences themselves
are not seen as a goal, and sought after, but rather that the individual
comes to the infinite and eternal through them. If the 'cosmic' expansivity
(the stars and suns) and the cornucopia of manifestations experienced in
these moments is not also balanced by a tangible sensation of the unmanifest,
or nothingness, or love and compassion, then they are meaningless. In the
Gita Krishna dwells on love and silence; without this aspect we descend
into the drug-induced occult mish-mash of a Carlos Casteneda.
My own experience of Mother Meera, despite my occasional tendency to expansive
visions, was quite neutral. She has found her own solution to the age-old
problem of how to teach large numbers of aspirants while allowing for an
intimacy, by allowing a brief contact in turn with a typical audience of
over a hundred visitors each night to her home in Germany. The visitors
are seated facing her in a large room, and one by one come up to kneel in
front of her, have their heads held briefly in her lap, and then gaze into
her eyes; all this taking not much more than thirty seconds. Throughout
the several hours that it takes to see each visitor one is in meditative
silence, and Meera herself makes no acknowledgement of the audience, their
reverent gestures, or indeed looks at anything other than the individual
in front of her for those few moments. She is silent, earnest, and determined;
when she looks into one's eyes there is no normal recognition or acknowledgement.
For me, on the first occasion the look was almost blank, but on the second
occasion there seemed to be more, though I cannot say what. Through the
simplicity and silence of her method one is left with no foothold for analysis
and intellectualisation my only thoughts at the time were that I felt the
weight of my history in a sombre way, and perhaps as Meera has no previous
lives her lack of history made me encounter my own more forcibly. The overall
experience of a visit to her is of love, and I saw many visitors lit up
by it; one gentleman sitting next to me was overcome by a personal grief
however, and I remembered how my first contact with a Rajneesh brought me
face to face with a grief of my own. For others the apparent requirement
to show reverence or even obsequiousness was a problem: in short each person
encountered themselves.
I have no doubt from the books about Meera, and from my visit, that she
is permanently oriented to the infinite and eternal; her embraciveness shows
in her determined efforts to reach those that can 'meet' her, and also in
a daily routine when not in darshan involving household tasks. There is
not space here to enquire more deeply as to the role of the more obviously
occult elements in her life and teaching as I have said before the presence
of these elements do not in themselves exclude an individual from consideration
under PCM. I would offer this quote from her to show both the simplicity
and directness of her teachings (which auger well for Pure Consciousness
Mysticism) and the lingering occult elements (which, depending on one's
personality, may cause reservations):
Can I reach the Divine through art or work?
Don't go the Divine "through" anything
go directly. Realize yourself and see that everything you do is filled
with light. Don't live for your work only; live for Him and do your work
in Him and for Him. If you surrender to Him truly, it will no longer be
you who does the work but Him who does it through you. You will become
a channel for His power and His will and His light. This takes time and
a great purity of heart and motive.
What attitude should I have towards my spiritual
experiences?
Be grateful. Offer them to Him, but never think
of yourself as special or chosen. That leads to pride, and a proud man
is far from God: Whatever experience you have had, however extraordinary,
remember that there are further and greater experiences. The Divine Life
is endless; the being of God is infinite. Remember the aim of our yoga
is not experience, not individual illumination, but the transformation
of the whole life, a continual experience of Him, an unbroken ecstasy.
And be careful always; there are so many ways in which the vital and mental
can imitate and pervert the spiritual. In ordinary consciousness, in which
most people are, it is hard to tell where an experience comes from. The
best attitude is wariness and humility. Rest nowhere and become attached
to nothing even your own deepest knowledge. [40]
1.8 Krishna and Pure Consciousness Mysticism
Having looked at Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi,
Krishnamurti, and Mother Meera, we now are in a better position to judge
whether it is reasonable or useful to consider Krishna as a man. As I can
vouch for the quite ordinary physical appearance of both Krishnamurti and
Mother Meera, and as our accounts of Ramakrishna and Maharshi (who both
died of cancer) indicate quite normal physicalities, it is reasonable to
assume that Krishna at least appeared to be an ordinary man. Arjuna
certainly treated him that way up to their encounter on the eve of battle,
unaware of the claims that mythology were later to make on him. The question
then relates to Krishna's incarnation: is there something of a different
order going on here than in the case of Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi and
Krishnamurti, and if so, is it important to Pure Consciousness Mysticism?
We may remember that the mothers both of Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti sensed
something unusual about their future sons; so for that matter did Jesus's
mother, while Krishna's birth is even more mythological. We can look at
the issue of the nature of Krishna in terms of the word Avatar: this generally
refers to a divine incarnation, rather than a guru or mystic, and is often
used in connection with both Krishna and Jesus. Mother Meera, as we have
seen, explicitly places herself in this category, but is there any usefulness
in the distinction? Is it one of degree, or is it a fundamental difference?
Krishnamurti had no patience for any label, whether mystic, guru, or avatar,
yet he was specifically trained to be the 'vehicle' for the Buddha Maitreya,
and there was debate throughout his life (though he did not participate
in it) as to whether he was merely the vehicle, or whether he had 'merged'
with the Buddha.
Meera talks of the difference between the Avatar and the realised guru as
a difference of power, power that is to change the world. At the heart of
PCM, however, is the recognition that one is the world; part of this
recognition is an acceptance of it as it is. Although Krishna states that
he comes when righteousness is at an ebb in the world we have seen that
there is no evidence for this in any strict sense, and should probably not
be taken literally: he may well have been stating a more general truth that
the world simply produces enlightened ones at all times, and that they respond
to their situations this does not make them incarnations of Krishna or of
the divine in a literal sense (if indeed there is any literal meaning in
this). When Meera says that Krishna brings love and peace, it is also clear
that he does not control the world he has no power over it in the sense
that one usually understands power to be the ability to effect one's will.
Krishna's observation that all is to be seen from the perspective of one
set of natural forces acting on another is useful here. In PCM will
is a manifestation of the psyche, which in turn derives from the body and
its material interdependency in the physical world, and as such it has no
special place amongst the manifest phenomenon; any attempt to grasp at power
or to accrue special 'powers' to oneself is a pathology, and belongs to
the occult. The humility of Meera's own life suggest that her use of the
term power is strictly in the context of compassion, but we should be wary
of it and any emphasis on the 'spiritual' worlds she has access to.
An ex-cult member of Aum Shinrykio, the Japanese organisation held responsible
for a recent poison gas attack on subway commuters, told interviewers that
he had been attracted to the cult because it promised him 'powers' he ran
a small business with seventy employees, and he thought that he could run
it more effectively with these promised powers. This is a relatively innocent
example, but sadly very widespread, of individuals feeling a powerlessness
in their lives which makes gurus of a certain type attractive. Meera promises
no such thing to her disciples, but from the type of questions that she
receives it is clear that her status as Avatar has the lure of power. Even
the reflected glory of being near to someone with power is among the many
wrong reasons for being there. Why is it wrong? Because, firstly, power
is meaningless other than an expression of compassion, and secondly it leads
to laziness. The guru is meant to 'give' the revelation; to the falsely
humble this is enough. This is not to say that Arjuna's visions of Krishna,
or Andrew Harvey's visions of Mother Meera are not genuine or important,
but only to the extent that Arjuna or Harvey come closer to making the infinite,
the eternal and the embracive their own. If an Avatar is not human, as Meera
implies, then their reality cannot be aspired to. Geoffrey Parrinder gives
a good overview of the debate on Avatars through history and across cultures
[41],
but all the scholarly work in the world cannot change the fact that in the
presence of a teacher one is sat in front of a human being. The real issue
is probably one of authority: if we accept a teacher as an Avatar, then
their teachings carry a special weight however, what makes one aspirant
propose or accept this status for a teacher and another reject it? At the
end of the day it is the authority of the aspirant that counts: in
their search for the infinite and eternal they are empowered by their human
intercourse with the teacher and other followers to grant or deny this status,
usually on instinct or intuition (or more sadly through gullibility). In
turn it makes little difference to the teacher, because, whether they accept
or deny special status of any kind, they live in the infinite and eternal
and the mechanics of their incarnation affect that not one jot.
The status of a teacher is sometimes created by the followers according
to perceived 'powers' (including divine birth), and paradoxically also by
perceived renunciation. Krishna however was in no way a renunciate, according
to all that is known about his life (though this is only through texts that
have mythical and legendary status). In the Gita he is proposing a form
of renunciation as one possible route to self-realisation; on the other
hand the immediate aim of his teachings is to pursuade Arjuna to fight in
the cause of regaining a kingdom hardly an act of renunciation. What then
is the quality of embraciveness that pervades the Gita? It is of this form:
give up the part and you shall receive the whole. By losing identification
with the body and its history, it is easier to identify with the awareness
that is the ground to the infinite and eternal. Krishna is identified with
the whole universe, but at the same time is prince of a kingdom, owner of
wealth, commander of armies, and a full participant of every aspect of life
of the day, including politics. Why then do we see such a strong renunciative
streak in Indian religious thought, right up to the extreme examples of
Ramakrishna and Maharshi? Why was Gandhi obsessed with renunciation? Perhaps
the key to it lies in the simplicity of a life of renunciation: it allows
one to focus on the transcendent without distraction; it can also be seen
as an impulse of generosity. In terms of Pure Consciousness Mysticism however,
renunciation is not an issue, other than its practicability or otherwise
in modern Western society. It is worth noting that the extreme of non-renunciation
that Rajneesh advocated, and attempted, may be a simple reaction to the
deadly insistence (as he saw it) on linking transcendence with renunciation.
More on Rajneesh later.
Krishna and Jesus taught in feudal times, Meera in a democratic era. Krishna
is not just accommodating to the caste system of his day, he points out
that the 'four orders of men' come from him (v. 13 ch. 4). Mystics vary
widely in the positions that they explicitly place themselves in as teachers,
leaders and authorities; they also vary widely in their attitude to devotion
from their students. I have been in the presence of six mystics of the first
rank: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Bapak Subuh (founder of Subud), Krishnamurti,
Douglas Harding (more of whom later), Andrew Cohen and Mother Meera. The
first three are no longer alive at the time of writing, while Cohen and
Meera are relatively young and just establishing their reputations and followings.
While Rajneesh and Meera advocate devotion to themselves, Krishnamurti and
Harding are adamantly against it. Having mingled extensively with followers
of all these teachers I would estimate (and this is very subjective) that
I am slightly more inclined to the devotional than average, and as result
experience an instinctive devotional impulse to all these teachers, regardless
of their position. Accordingly, it is difficult for me to reject this aspect
of mysticism, even though there may be reasons to do so in a democratic
era. The greatest danger of course is a reliance on the person of the teacher,
firstly to actively bring about the transformation in oneself that only
oneself can do, and secondly to be an ideal. Rajneesh, for example,
endlessly stated that he was not celibate, did not believe in charity, and
was reckless about conventional morality and public opinion; yet, because
of the devotional aspect for his following was blamed for the collapse of
the Oregon community, not only by outsiders but by many of his followers.
Andrew Cohen is creating a worse rod for his own back in insisting on purity
in the life of the mystic, and even Krishnamurti has been the subject of
attacks on his personal life. Bapak Subuh seems to have escaped this, perhaps
due to the Islamic context of his teachings, but it is Douglas Harding who,
probably more than any, has consistently taught in such a way as to make
his person as irrelevant as possible to his teachings.
The origin of the ancient teachings on devotion lies in feudal societies:
the king was seen as divinely appointed, and the aristocracy legitimised
by the hierarchy of God and king; the serfs or peasants accepted their lot
on the basis of this 'natural' order that formed part of their religious
world-view. It is no accident that Jesus referred to the infinite and eternal
as the 'kingdom of God': for the people of his time a kingdom was the greatest
thing they knew; it was the microcosm for the divine universe, and, poignantly,
lost to them at that point in history because of Roman occupation. In India
the caste system is a special case of the more universal model of the feudal
system, based in part on a belief in reincarnation. Cynics see the role
of organised religion to reinforce these orders and suppress free thinking;
the more generous see in it genuine channels for the expression of religious
love in pre-industrial societies where widespread education and leisure
was impossible. The devotional impulse in a democratic society is problematic
however, for it elevates the recipient individuals in a way that is incompatible
to modern notions of freedom and individuality. It is no coincidence that
in the West in the 20th century it is Buddhism and Buddhist texts, which
place greater emphasis on self-reliance or personal effort, that have been
more widely taken up than Hinduism and the Gita.
In Pure Consciousness Mysticism the emphasis is on the identification with
the infinite and the eternal, so the route to it is not so important if
the route is devotional it makes no difference. However, there are many
reasons to suggest that there are routes that are more at ease with our
contemporary democratic culture: these will be examined in the next chapter.
References for Krishna, part Four
[36]
Krishnamurti, J. The Awakening of Intelligence, Victor Gollancz,
London, 1973, p. 536
[37]
Harvey, Andrew, Hidden Journey, London: Rider, 1991
[38]
Meera, Mother, Answers, London: Rider, 1991
[39]
Meera, Mother, Answers, London: Rider, 1991, p. 35
[40]
Adilakshmi, The Mother, Oberdorf: Mother Meera Publications, 1994
[41]
Parrinder, Geoffrey, Avatar and Incarnation - A comparison of Indian
and Christian beliefs, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
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