Embracing the Pathless Journey
Meet Jiddu Krishnamurti
As an autistic person, I find the story of Jiddu Krishnamurti endlessly fascinating. He is one of the most unexampled people to have ever lived. It is hard to compare him to anyone else in history because he may be the only person to have ever turned down the role of being considered the messiah.
His life and philosophy are well worth studying and can enhance the lives of the neurodiverse. He’s not an easy figure to comprehend, but he is well worth the effort.
Much of this particular article will be filled with Krishamurti’s own words, as I feel mine are a poor substitute. Some of it is taken directly from his talks, which do not translate well to the page and the written word. If you want to hear him for yourself, I suggest going on YouTube and watching the hundreds of videos he appears on.
Krishnamurti’s beginnings
Krishnamurti — or K, as he was affectionately called, came from a Brahmin family known as the priestly caste in India. According to one of K’s biographers, Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti was relatively slow and lacked much of a goal-oriented perspective as a child. It has been suggested that those around him thought he had an intellectual disability during his childhood. As his Wikipedia entry states…
A sensitive and sickly child, “vague and dreamy”, he was often taken to be intellectually disabled, and was beaten regularly at school by his teachers and at home by his father.[9] In memoirs written when he was eighteen years old Krishnamurti described psychic experiences, such as seeing his sister, who had died in 1904, and his late mother.[10]Even from his childhood he felt a bond with nature that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.[11]Writing in his journal Krishnamurti states “He always had this strange lack of distance between himself and the trees, rivers, mountains. It wasn’t cultivated.”[12]
You might have noticed that K refers to himself in the third person in that quotation. This is something he did throughout his entire adult life, which suggests emotional avoidance and a detachment response to early life events. Though Krishnamurti never outwardly said he was traumatized at any point during his public life, anyone who has studied his biographies would recognize the traumatic upbringing that he endured. Most of K’s writings and public talks avoid any hints of autobiographical content, almost as if K was devoid of a self in the true Buddhist sense. According to K himself, he remembered very little about his childhood, and when asked about it, he usually refused to talk on the subject. Only on a few occasions would he do so, but when he did, he would refer to the child “K” as if he were a completely different human being than himself.
Things only got more complicated for K. On a beach in 1909, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant named Charles Leadbeater, associated with the Theosophical Society, spotted Krishnamurti and, using the “power of aura detection,” instantly declared him to be the next messiah of humankind: a world teacher, another incarnation of the savior in the flesh and a messianic entity. Specifically, Leadbeater thought K was Lord Maitreya, a being on par with Jesus in the spiritual hierarchy of the universe that Theosophy recognizes. Leadbeater thought K reincarnated as a Bodhisattva, already enlightened with no need to come back to earth but one who chose to do so out of compassion and to save suffering beings such as ourselves.
Leadbeater was right, but not in the way he thought he was.
K was only thirteen years old when this encounter occurred and was told that he was humanity’s savior. K didn’t ask for this; it was flung in his lap. If someone like Leadbeater tried to pull this off today toward someone like K, we would probably call the police and be justified. There would have been a good reason for it in Leadbeater’s case, as he did have some unorthodox ideas about teaching people how to shower properly.
Initially, K was eager to please Leadbeater and take on this role, not because he wanted to be mankind’s savior but because he was a rather sickly and malleable child. But after a while, he resented the strict discipline being imposed on him by Leadbeater and by another Theosophical Society leader named Annie Besant. Leadbeater cunningly convinced K’s father to relinquish his custody so that he could groom (and that is the correct word) him to be the messiah of the New Age. From that point on until 1929, when an entire sect had been created to worship Krishnamurti as the World Teacher (The Order of The Star), Krishnamurti fulfilled his obligation as the reluctant leader.
The dissolution
But in October of 1929, he dissolved the Order of the Star and, upon doing so, gave a speech that I hope is studied for centuries to come. To quote from just a small part of it (the rest you can watch on YouTube):
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.
You must climb towards the Truth, it cannot be ‘stepped down’ or organized for you. Interest in ideas is mainly sustained by organizations, but organizations only sustain interest from without. Interest, which is not born out of love of Truth for its own sake, but aroused by an organization, is of no value. The organization becomes a framework into which its members conveniently fit. They no longer strive after Truth or the mountain-top but rather carve for themselves a convenient niche in which they put themselves, or let the organization place them, and consider that the organization will thereby lead them to Truth.
The anti guru
Think of what K is saying here. He disavows religion, hierarchies of any kind, gurus, organizations, politics, organized forms of worship, and corruption. K was taking a shot across the bow at Leadbeater, who had mistakingly bet it all on a person willing to assume messianic status but discovered that the person he anointed that day on the beach as humanity’s savior would altogether reject it many years later.
How many of us would do that? If someone told you that you were the savior of humanity and it seemed like most people around you believed it, would you give it up? Krishnamurti was offered the status of being recognized as a living deity, and he didn’t want it.
His philosophy remained the same from his speech in 1929 until he died in 1986. He maintained that you couldn’t find truth by seeking his advice or find it in anything the world had to offer. You could only find truth within yourself. Truth can only be located outside the temporal realm, and since life exists in the dimension of time, it cannot be found in the world of form. You can only be free when you break through the conditioning imposed upon you by the world. Krishnamurti’s goal was to free humankind.
Krishnamurti believed (although K said he didn’t have any “beliefs”) that psychological time was the literal enemy of mankind. K’s words can do it more justice than mine ever could…
There is chronological time and psychological time. The chronological is necessary, but the other is quite a different matter. Cause-effect is said to be a time process, not only physically but also psychologically. It is considered that the interval between cause and effect is time; but is there an interval? The cause and the effect of a disease may be separated by time, which is again chronological; but is there an interval between psychological cause and effect? Is not cause-effect a single process? There is no interval between cause and effect. Today is the effect of yesterday and the cause of tomorrow; it is one movement, a continuous flowing. There is no separation, no distinct line between cause and effect, but inwardly we separate them in order to become or achieve. I am this and I shall become that. To become that, I need time. This is chronological time used for psychological purposes. I am ignorant, but I shall become wise. Ignorance becoming wise is only progressive ignorance; for ignorance can never become wise, any more than greed can ever become non-greed. Ignorance is the very process of becoming.
Is not thought the product of time? Knowledge is the continuation of time. Time is continuation. Experience is knowledge and time is the continuation of experience as memory. Time as continuation is an abstraction, and speculation is ignorance. Experience is memory, the mind. The mind is the machine of time. The mind is the past. Thought is ever of the past; the past is the continuation of knowledge. Knowledge is ever of the past; knowledge is never out of time, but always in time and of time. This continuation of memory and knowledge is consciousness. Experience is always in the past. It is the past. This past in conjunction with the present is moving to the future. The future is the past, modified perhaps, but still the past. This whole process is thought, the mind. Thought cannot function in any field other than that of time. Thought may speculate upon the timeless, but it will be its own projection. All speculation is ignorance.
The process
But K was not a nihilist. He did not believe we could never really experience truth because we exist in time. Instead, K experienced reality in something he called “the process,” where he went through extreme physical pain but also blissful moments of transcendence unrecognizable to most of us. When I read about K’s “process,” it reminds me of going through the birth canal. There is a term that originates in “new age” literature called “spiritual emergency,” which is as close to K’s process as one could probably hope to put into words.
But because he physically endured such pain, transcendence, and insight during this unique process, it’s unlikely we will ever be able to know what was happening to him. It’s possible he was merely releasing stored trauma in the body from his childhood, but how would that explain the mystical state he was able to achieve as a result? Others have speculated this “process” resulted from his messianic expectations since age thirteen. Still, others thought his “process” could account for a genuine spiritual experience like similar spiritual figures who displayed stigmata-like phenomena.
We know that when K entered these states, he instantly identified with everything in the universe. It is almost as if his awareness expanded beyond the “I” of his being, and he became one with everything that existed — trees, flowers, blades of grass, a sunset — everything beautiful about the world. In these dimensions, going beyond space and chronological time, he was free from the burden of seeking “knowledge” and of “psychological time.” (K claimed that other than the newspaper and some detective novels, he did not read anything.)
K wanted everyone else in the world to experience this bliss, if not for ourselves, then because he thought it might help save our narrow-minded species from self-destruction. But because he believed that “truth was a pathless land,” he refused to offer specific prescriptive advice on getting there.
Truth is a pathless land
Think of it. Here was this man that people came from all over the world to gain a glimmer of the wisdom Krishnamurti attained, yet he wouldn’t oblige with straight answers. He answered all questions with questions of his own, giving gentle nudges here and there but never any flat-out answers.
There are hundreds of hours of YouTube videos showing K speaking. And if you watch him, you will notice that he will address a particular question as if he is trying to process it in his mind for the first time, even though K has probably been asked the same question hundreds of times before. In other words, he approaches his audience with a beginner’s mind or Shosin.
Take this exchange as an example:
The questioner asks: Can there be absolute security for man — and naturally woman — in this life?
This is a very serious question, because we all want security, both physical and principally psychological. If you are psychologically secure, certain, then we might not be so concerned with physical security.
The search for psychological security — please follow this — the search for psychological security is preventing physical security. We’ll go into this. The questioner says: is there absolute security for us, for human beings? We will answer that at the end, but follow it step by step.
We must have security — right? Like a child hanging on to its mother, the child must feel secure, otherwise something goes wrong. They have found this. If the mother and the father don’t pay enough attention to the baby, give it all affection, etc., etc., it affects the brain, the nerves of the baby and the child. So it must have security, physical security.
And why do we demand psychological security? Do you understand the difference between the two? There is the psyche demanding security and the physical demanding security — right? This is obvious. Now is there psychological security at all? We want it, we want security in our relationship — right? My wife, my children, a sense of family unit. That unit is now breaking up. In that there is a certain security, psychological — right? So one is attached to the wife, or to the girl — right? So in that attachment there is security, at least we think there is security. And when there is no security in that person we soon break away from it and find it in another — right? This is happening. And we try to find security in a group, in the tribe — that glorified tribe is the nation — right? No? I am glad. And the nation against another nation — you follow? So seeking security psychologically in a person, in a country, in a belief, in your own experience, all these are forms of wanting, demanding security, as one demands physical security — right? we are sharing this together, you are not just listening to me. We are together examining if there is security for us human beings. And demanding the psychological security we have divided ourselves — right? The Hindu, the Muslim, the Jew, the Arab, the Christian, non-Christian, the believer in Jesus, the believer in something else — in all this there is the demand for security. And this security has been found in illusions — right? Do you accept that? Right? Being secure in Catholicism, hold yourself tight. In Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Judaism, Islam and so on — you follow? That has created an illusory security, because they are fighting each other. I wonder if you see this? Do you? The moment you see it, you don’t belong to anything.
So wait a minute. So the demand is for security. It may be an illusion in superstition, in a ritual, in a dogma, in a nation, in an economic system, in Totalitarianism — in, what’s the word, in the… — in being safe, secure, economically, like in America, completely safe, at least they think they are. So, the desire for security not only creates illusion, because it is an illusion — isn’t it? — to belong to a tribe, or belonging to some church, so one finds security in illusions, in actualities, in a furniture, in a house, in a person. None of these, as you observe, give man security, because you have had two terrible wars — you haven’t had — you follow? You want security, but you create wars, which destroys your own security.
So when you see the truth that the mind or thought has sought out security in illusions — right? — the very perception that you are seeking security in illusion, that very perception of that brings you intelligence — right? Are you following this? Are you following this? Please don’t, unless I make it perfectly clear, don’t agree with me.
I sought security in my belief as being a Hindu with all the nonsensical superstitions and gods and rituals and all the nonsense that goes on. I sought security in that — I haven’t, but suppose one does. That opposes another group of people who have different ideas, different gods, different rituals — Catholic and all the rest of it. So these are the two opposing elements, tolerated but they are antagonistic essentially. So there is conflict between the two, in which I have sought security in one or the other — right? And I realise, by Jove, they are both illusions, in which I have tried to find security — right? And to see that they are illusions is intelligence. It’s like seeing danger. A man who is blind to danger is an idiot, is neurotic, there is something wrong with him. But we don’t see the danger of this — right? And the man who sees the danger, intelligence is in operation. In that intelligence there is absolute security. You get it? Do you understand this?
“Don’t agree with me!” That’s right, this was a constant refrain from K at his talks. He was the antiguru guru. If he saw the audience nodding in agreement, he would chastise them for not thinking the issue through themselves and just nodding in deference to him, like sheeple. At the same time, K would often get impatient that his audiences did not seem to understand his long answers.
Many people thought what K said at his talks to be thoroughly incomprehensible. Don’t we need security as functioning human beings? After all, safety and security are close to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as being critical to what we need on an evolutionary and psychological level to survive physically. But K was all about downplaying security. He even considered seeking it to be quite silly. He saw each person’s need for security as a source of conflict because people’s needs for security naturally conflict with one another and also because scarcity is a built-in property in the physical realm. This need for security, for K, is problematic at both the personal and the societal level, explaining that it creates conflict between human beings and global conflict based on differing ideologies, available resources, and the like. If we can give up our psychological need for security, which K viewed as illusory, perhaps we would have a shot at peace in our world without blowing ourselves up first.
Krishnamurti was an educator
Nowhere were people more confounded by K’s talks than the children who attended his schools. K founded several schools worldwide, including in Ojai, California, one in India, and another in Brockwood Park, England. The curriculum was designed to be structured holistically, emphasizing self-reflection, arts/creativity, multicultural awareness, and a close student-teacher relationship. It deemphasized competition, choosing to teach the art of cooperation instead.
K would visit these students, and these talks can also be found on YouTube. It’s humorous to see how puzzled they are by this man. When they ask him questions about life, he tells them about the futility of finding work and a job, getting employment to feed the beast, having a family for the sake of having a family, and being “ordinary.” If I were to guess, no one gave you this advice at school.
K’s students could not grasp this: Don’t you need money to be successful? Isn’t that why we are at your school, to begin with? He’d say something like…” Look, young man. Look at that daisy over there. Does it look like it needs money to be successful?” And K would get a look back like…”What the heck are you talking about?”
Take this dialogue as an example. This is an actual dialogue from 1983. ‘K’ is Krishnamurti, and ‘S’ is a student in the audience:
K: Have you noticed the greatest tree grows very, very slowly. That Banyan tree has taken five hundred years probably, it grows slowly. You understand what I am saying? The speaker is going to be eighty-nine in May — you understand? But you, all of you, you are merely recording, like a gramophone, like a tape, recording, and you keep on recording, so your brain is never fresh. And youth is meant to be fresh.
S: Can you say it is your fault because you are sent to school by your parents who expect something out of you.
K: You, you demand something different. You understand? You demand, all of you demand of your teachers that something different be done. But you say, it’s all right, sir, I’ll do what you ask me to do, I’ll learn mathematics by just listening, by rote, you follow, and gradually your brain becomes shoddy.
S: Excuse me, sir, how can you demand?
K: Ask your teachers.
S: Would they listen to us?
K: Oh, yes, they are going to.
S: I doubt if some of them would.
K: Have you done it?
S: No.
K: There you are, you are contradicting, you are saying something you haven’t done. If I say to him, he is my teacher, `Sir, I heard this morning he was saying, don’t let’s repeat, teach me a way I can learn without repetition’.
S: They won’t tell you.
K: Wait, listen. `I have heard this morning K saying, teach me so that I learn not by memorizing a different way of teaching, so teach me’. You are challenging him. And he has to respond. So he says, `By Jove, these children are much smarter than I am’.
S: Sir, what they would say is…
K: Just a minute.
S: What they will tell you is, we still have to go through this process of memorizing, and all the children have passed out well with that.
K: What have they done well? Got more money. Listen. More money and what happens to their brain? They are just mediocre people, they may have a marvellous job, plenty of cars, women and all the rest of it, but their brain is like mud. If you see that, actually see it, you say, by Jove, I am not going to be like that. When I was younger I was offered — I am just saying this out of humility — ten thousand dollars every week to go into the cinema. How many of you would say, `No, sorry, thanks so much, I don’t want to’? You would jump at it, wouldn’t you?
S: If you give me ten thousand dollars.
K: That’s all I am saying, you are all so mad after money, which means freedom, which means pleasure, that’s all you want, and you call that living.
S: Society wants us to do that.
K: Who created the society?
S: We did.
K: Therefore change it. Don’t bother, you do the right thing.
S: I’d like to do the right thing but what about all the others?
K: Don’t bother about the others, do the right thing.
S: I can’t face it.
K: Then you are weak and you will deteriorate, that’s all, if you can’t face it.
S: If you don’t study your parents might get worried.
K: I didn’t say, don’t study. Just a minute, I did not say, don’t study. Don’t get away with that. I said, teach me a different way of learning, not just memorizing. You follow?
S: My parents don’t want me to learn but they just want me to get good marks.
K: Forget the parents, they have sent you here and find out. What’s the matter with you? You have already grown old, all of you? Good god!
S: If you don’t listen to their words they might…
K:…disown you. So you listen to them politely, carefully, and say, `Daddy, this is the way to learn, I am learning something’.
S: But if you try it, what happens if there is conflict? They think in another way, you think in another way.
K: All right. You are younger, so you are more polite and say, sorry, you go your way.
S: No, even if you do it, sir, there will think you are arrogant.
K: No, we have been taught to learn the same subject differently, using our brain, using our capacities, using our senses.
S: How can you your senses and capacities in subjects that you have to memorize?
K: There is no subject…
S: History, the dates, how are you going to remember them?
K: I know, it’s silly.
S: Yes, it is silly.
K: Find out. You see you stop there. Find out what is history. Have you thought about it?
Rarely an educator doesn’t try to indoctrinate their students. Krishnamurti bristled at his students being indoctrinated by anything or anyone and always encouraged them to seek the truth without providing a clear path.
Autism and Krishnamurti
As an autistic reading Krishnamurti and watching his talks, I find him both enlightening and frustrating. He saw all through the bullshit of this neurotypical world. He questioned all authority and asked us never to take what he said at face value. He did not trust politicians, religious leaders, bureaucrats — anything concerning indoctrination. This greatly appeals to my autistic sense that the neurodiverse are square pegs that cannot be fitted into round holes. I believe Krishnamurti got that; only he applied this insight to humanity. But it is particularly comforting to me as someone who society was not designed for to hear this from a person of such enlightenment. And I find it funny that K got irritated whenever anyone applauded him. He felt that they were making him out to be a false idol. At some of the first autism conferences I went to, people flapped their hands to substitute applause out of concern for those with sensory sensitivities.
Yet I stumble when K never answers the question he is asked. He makes me do the hard work, not fair! Autistics love answers; we love certainty, we love knowledge, and we love security. Yet K tells me not to chase after security and knowledge; that is illusory for me to do so. But a fundamental part of my autism is to seek predictability, which to me is synonymous with security. K would say I am on a fool’s errand.
Much of K’s advice is impractical and cannot be followed in the real world. You should not try to follow his advice 100% of the time. But I delight in watching him speak, his idiosyncracies, the utmost seriousness and effort he placed in trying to stop our species from self-destructing, and his authenticity. I believe he is one of the purest souls to have ever lived.
It is no coincidence that crowds worldwide from the 1930s to the 1980s flocked to see him speak and get a glimpse of his being. He spoke at Carnegie Hall and the United Nations, among so many other places. It’s not a coincidence he collaborated with people such as the 20th century’s most renowned quantum physicist, David Bohm. He might have been seen as intellectually disabled as a child (and perhaps he did have some learning challenges; who knows?), but I see parallels between the extremes of either “autism is a profound disability” or….“autistic people can save the world”…happening early in K’s life. His mind was highly incisive, penetrating, probing, and always looking to slow down humankind’s self-destruction in his imitable way. Go watch him on YouTube. You’ll see what I mean.
This man, K, turned down an opportunity he could have easily exploited to become one of the most influential people in the world. With his charisma, he could have become a political leader, perhaps the Prime Minister of India. Instead, he lived very nicely and comfortably from a material standpoint, but certainly not as someone people would speak of today in superhuman terms. All he wanted to do was wake people up. That’s it. He genuinely thought that people were asleep, similar to Gurdjieff. He tried to shake us out of our stupor and say…”There’s more to life than titles, accomplishments, status, and wealth, you fools! Life is beautiful if you slow down and look around at it.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s story offers an intriguing and relatable narrative for autistic individuals. With his unique life experiences, detachment from conventional norms, and profound philosophical insights, Krishnamurti mirrors the experiences of those often marginalized by societal norms, even though he was relatively privileged. His childhood, marked by misunderstanding and trauma, followed by a rejection of an imposed messianic role, echoes the resilience and struggles inherent in the autistic community. K was at once viewed as having an intellectual disability and then being considered as the messiah. As noted, this parallels today’s situation, where autistics are viewed as incompatible with the world, but some of us have superpowers, like Greta Thunberg. Krishnamurti’s relentless pursuit of truth and rejection of organized belief systems present a fascinating challenge to the autistic preference for certainty and security. I know it does for me.
Krishnamurti’s philosophy encourages a journey toward truth that rejects traditional paths and societal constructs, aligning well with the autistic desire for authenticity. His teachings promote personal discovery, resonating with those of us on the autism spectrum who often seek to understand the world on our own terms.
Furthermore, Krishnamurti’s profound connection with nature and the universe offers a unique perspective that parallels the intense and nuanced ways autistic individuals experience the world. His concept of “psychological time” and his experiences during “the process” might mirror the distinct sensory and cognitive experiences characteristic of autism, where perceptions of time and reality can significantly diverge from the norm.
I genuinely believe Krishnamurti’s life and philosophy provide a rich source of kinship and inspiration for some of us on the autism spectrum. His message, emphasizing the importance of finding personal truth and bravely challenging societal expectations, strongly resonates with me and possibly others.
One can start by reflecting, questioning conventional wisdom, and embracing one’s truths to feel like a kindred spirit of Krishnamurti. Practicing mindfulness and connecting with nature can also help foster a deeper understanding of oneself and the world, aligning with Krishnamurti’s philosophy. Additionally, embracing one’s unique qualities and experiences, rather than conforming to societal norms, can be a decisive step towards self-discovery and fulfillment, in line with Krishnamurti’s teachings.
