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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.
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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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