At our essence, we human beings are the same as one another. Nor are we apart from the world we dwell in. (This is not something the ordinary mind can understand, so resist the temptation to try.)
Someone recently asked why it meant so much to me to be in Ojai, California, where I traveled not long ago. Ojai is where Krishnamurti lived much of his life. It’s where he woke up, where he took countless delicious walks in the natural world, and where he would finally come to the end of his long life. He gave many talks in Ojai, trying earnestly, all his very long life, to help others experience what it was like to not suffer.
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Ever since my awakening in 2003, I had longed to go to where he had been. For in the aftermath of that radical change, Krishnamurti’s writing had been such a blessing: his writing helped me fathom what had happened. For decades I dreamed of traveling to Ojai. At long last, some time ago, it seemed I needed to let go of that desire.
That is how it feels to me, when I take my walks in the woods.
Then it came to be, to my delighted surprise, that circumstances conspired to get me there after all. And so I was able to see — to taste, to feel — the places where K was flooded in such extraordinary joy.
It was above all when he was in the presence of the natural world that this occurred: the hills, his fellow creatures, the ocean. The air, the earth his shoes moved over. All of it.
He was it. And that is how it feels to me, when I take my walks in the woods. This is why I relate to him, and to how life felt to the man.
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K did not write often of what it felt like to be himself, plainly that. His writing generally was intended to be of use to people. A precious few of his books portray the embodied human experience of his day-to-day, the unity of his in-motion body through the trees, with the clouds and earth, birdsong, the unceasing movement of sky, the scent of the non-human creatures among whom he moved. Two I especially cherish are Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal and Krishnamurti’s Notebook. These are not “teacherly” volumes. They allow the reader into the man’s experience, to taste the continuity of him and what he moved through: the utter non-separation.
As I do now, he struggled to find words to express the unboundedness of himself and the glorious natural world in which he moved.
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Some years ago, I realized I wanted to live alone. Because without another person occupying the house, it wouldn’t be necessary for me to need to “remember,” at intervals, that I was in some sense separate from the other. You can’t have a conversation unless there are two of you there, the going back-and-forth in an exchange. There is a perceiver and a perceived, one speaking and the other listening, taking it in.
I shared the house, in those days, with the man who was the love of my life. Choose to live apart from him? But if there was anything I cherished even more than that man, it was the extraordinary palpable experience of utter non-separation. So we began to live apart, though we stayed dear to one another all his remaining years.
There had come to be a strong preference to live in the experience of unity, to forgo the need to “pretend” to a distance I didn’t feel. I had landed in daily solitude. I struggle to describe all of this in Love Incarnate: Twenty Years After Awakening.
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When I’m reading one of Krishnamurti’s luscious descriptions of those walks he went on in Ojai, it’s as if I am walking with him. So to blessedly walk the land he walked, all those years ago — to smell the air he breathed, see the miraculous colors of the still-abundant hummingbirds, wander the hills surrounding the buildings he was in — was the sweetest of dreams come true.
You are the whole world, my friend. You are all your senses drink in, with such lusciousness. For God’s sake (for your own dear sake!) slow down and notice it all.
Revel in it. You don’t have forever to do so.