Jiddu Krishnamurti would sit very still before vast crowds in India and all over the world. People traveled great distances to be with the man, to take in what he had to offer. He referred to himself in the third person: the speaker, he would say. All of them sat together in the scorching heat of what his listeners tried so hard to understand.
What he embodied. What he lived.
Even when he was quite old and in decline, he would sit with them. Riches poured from his frail lips, from that ferocious, tender heart. Those before him drank in his words, longing to draw them into their own dear selves, so that they might be like the speaker.
He lamented all his life that he never seemed to get through. They kept supposing it all to be too complicated.
* * *
I never sat with him.
I understood what he was aching to get across to people. Though it was after the fact. It was some time after the thing had already happened to me that I came upon him. I sat with K’s words. When I watched talks of him (long dead by then) or read words in his books, it helped me to get what had happened inside myself. Oh, I said again and again. He was like this too.
What a blessing he was to me. Long after his death, I wrote a poem to thank him. It’s included in Love Incarnate. The lines are spoken to Krishnamurti, but really, the poem is “addressed” to those who have eyes to see, hearts to drink in the radical truth of their dear selves.
* * *
If only the thousands who came to sit with him, over the decades, could have seen how simple it was. How in the intimacy of one’s own heart it could all be known, shiny and silvery in the light of their innate pure awareness. What they (what I, the first five decades of my life) could not see. How it all was obscured by the dust and mess of what human beings kick up, the mold and residue of our ordinary confused lives. What miracle might have unfolded, if only a person could soften to herself, to himself.
What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment.
If only we could let go of trying to wake up. Let go of angst, of time and its frenetic little dance. Unbutton the hot, heavy, suffocating clothing of all prior experience. And so come to encounter directly the truth animating all existence, our own blessed selves.
* * *
What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment. Flawed and imperfect though it may be. No matter where a person has been before, what we think has been learned there, what wisdom accumulated: we dig and dig to get at the truth.
See how useless it is.
Here you are. Open your eyes, your mouth, your arms, your heart. The only real thing is this, here, now, just as it is. You are it. You are the moment, the atmosphere in which the only real is. Oh, not the you you’re used to thinking is reality. That is insubstantial, flimsy as gauze, readily burned as parchment. The light shines through it.
Let the light get hotter and hotter till the edges begin to singe, crisp, dissolve. Feel your blood grow warm with your own dissolution. Forget whatever might have been useful to you in the past. It is not useful here. If it taught you, you are taught. You do not need to remember it: it has done its work. There is no need to keep going over and over it in your mind.
Krishnamurti didn’t waste time. He didn’t know how. Every pore of him was alert, always. How he loved the world! His natural mode was stillness, even when he was in motion. He loved to take long, brisk walks. Each moment fresh and new.
Do not hide from the present. When you do that, you rush toward death. Why hurry? Hook your finger in the finger extended to you. It is your own. It wants to dance. For God’s sake, dance. Soon enough the curtain drops.