Today I listened to Osho’s discourses on the 42 sutras of Buddha that have been compiled as The Discipline of Transcendence. I listened to a small portion of discourse no.9 and the first couple of questions from discourse no.10. Sharing a few excerpts here about how organised religion can also have a positive impact. Osho also speaks about Jiddu Krishnamurti in the same discourse.
I was quite intrigued with Jiddu Krishnamurti, another enlightened master who was a contemporary of Osho. Krishnamurti had probably the most beautiful eyes ever on a human being. That’s what caught my attention as a young girl. In fact Krishnan gifted me a book of his when we first met, but it was so difficult to read that I left it halfway.
Ofcourse Osho happened to us within a few months of our getting married and after reading and listening to Osho, it’s difficult to read or listen to anyone else. We have found someone who fits :):).
To read the entire transcript click on “While am here, enjoy me“.
“…… even organized religions play a positive role. The positive role consists in provocation, in challenge. Even the prison plays a positive role: it provokes the spirit of the courageous; it becomes a challenge for freedom – it has its role, its function.
I am not saying to live in the prison. In fact, the prison itself forces you to get out of it. The prison itself can be used in a positive way. If you are thrown in a prison, your spirit will continuously meditate and think about how to get out of it, how to find ways and means to escape. In a prison the courageous soul will start brooding and dreaming about freedom. The bigger the prison, the greater the enforced structure of it, the more the challenge will be. Only cowards will accept it.”
“…Krishnamurti was trained in a certain discipline, was an inmate of a prison called theosophy – but he tried hard, broke out of it, became free of it. If you ask me I will say one thing: if there had been no theosophical imprisonment for him in his childhood, it would have been difficult for him to become a free man. Annie Besant and Leadbeater and other theosophists created the whole situation – unknowingly, of course, they were not meaning it. They were trying to do something else. They were creating a dogma around him, a cult around him. And they were so hard upon him that it became really impossible to live in it. He HAD to get out of it. The credit goes to those people – Leadbeater and Annie Besant.
If the prison had been a little more comfortable, if the prison had not been so hard and if the discipline imposed had not been so arduous, if the ideals had not been so superhuman, if he had not been asked to play a role so unnatural to him, he might have relaxed, he might have accepted it.”
“….Krishnamurti fell into the hands of a very fanatical group – theosophists. It was a new religion. Whenever a religion is new, it is very fanatical. By and by, it relaxes and compromises and becomes just a social phenomenon; then it is no more religion. Theosophy was just in its beginning, and Krishnamurti was only nine years old when he fell into the hands of those fanatics. They tried hard. They wouldn’t allow Krishnamurti to meet and mix with ordinary children – no – because they had a goal that he had to become the world Teacher, JAGADGURU.
He had to become the coming-Buddha; he had to become the incarnation of Maitreya.”
“….He was not allowed to move alone; somebody was always with him, watching him. And he was forced to follow very strict rules: three o’clock in the morning he had to get up and take a cold bath; and then he had to learn Sanskrit and he had to learn French and he had to learn English and he had to learn Latin and Greek – because a World Teacher should be well cultured, sophisticated. Just a nine-year-old child!”
“…..He was completely in seclusion, never allowed to move into the outside world.
He was not allowed to enter in any school, in any college, because there he would meet ordinary people and he would become ordinary. Special teachers were appointed; he was taught specially. And all around him, just a nine-year- old boy, all around him such big talk – of Masters, Master K.H. sending messages, letters falling from the roof. They were all managed! Theosophists were caught later on – they were all managed: the roof was specially made and a letter would drop suddenly, and it was for Krishnamurti – a message had come from the unknown.
Just think of a small boy…. No freedom allowed became a great urge to be free.
One day – nobody was expecting it, that he would renounce it – the theosophists had gathered from all over the world for the first declaration in which Krishnamurti was expected to declare that he was the World Teacher and that God had entered into him.
Suddenly, without saying anything to anybody…. He could not sleep the whole night. He brooded over it: he has become a slave, and they are all do-gooders; they have made you a slave because they want to do good to you; and they love you and their love became nauseating; and their well-wishing became poisonous.
The whole night he brooded: what is he to do? Whether he has to continue and become part of this nonsense, or get out of it?
And blessed he is that in the morning when they had gathered and they were waiting for God to descend in him and to declare that he is now no more Krishnamurti but Lord Maitreya – Buddha has entered in him – he suddenly declined and he said, “It is all nonsense. Nobody is descending in me. I am simply Krishnamurti and I am nobody’s Master. And I am not a Jagadguru, not a World Teacher. And I dissolve this nonsense and this organization and the whole thing that has been made around me.”
They were shocked! They could not believe it: “Has he gone mad, crazy?” They had put much hope in him, much money; it was a great investment, years of training. But it was going to be so. If he had been absolutely a dead man, then only would he have accepted it. He was alive. They could not kill his life, that aliveness exploded.
If he had been a dull, mediocre mind, maybe he would have accepted – but he has an intelligence, a tremendous awareness. He got out of it. That whole movement and the whole organized thing functioned as a positive challenge.
As far as I see, nothing can hold you. If you are alert, you will use organized religion as a challenge. If you are not alert, then organized religion or no organized religion, wherever you are you will create an imprisonment around you. You carry it around you – in your cowardice, in your fear, in your urge to be secure and comfortable.”
So use organised religion to break free !! 🙂
Thank You Master.
Bindu and Krishnan,
Yet another point of connection: I was a great fan of Krishnamurti, many years ago. I still have one of ths paperback books: “The Urgency of Change”. Then and now he impressed me with his emphasis on awareness, to be aware of what you’re doing as you do it. He said the worst habits can be broken through doing them with awareness.
Later, I learned how he had been commandeered by the Theosophists and used to symbolize their movement. He later rejected this mantle of worldly prominence, as you say, and was allowed to descend from his platform and become human.
Thus with Jesus, who was martyred and then used as a symbol for the religion of Christianity.
Buddha, too, renounced his wealth and earthly position to go among the people and to live as a beggar, spreading his philosophy through his own radiant spirit.
Each expressed transcendant spirit through the earthly lives they lived and shared. The religions created from them can become rigid and the opposite of what the spiritual master promoted. Jesus’ teachings, such as : “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” attest to what you report, that children have the innocence that allows them to perceive without pre-formed judgment.
Thank you for this post.
Wow !!! Katharine am convinced that you were born in India in a previous life 😊. I have come across very few people outside India who have read or heard of Krishnamurti. This is truly a wonderful connection.
I feel spiritually connected to India and may have lived a previous life there. I feel a stronger connection to China, in that I have vivid memories/fantasies of specific lives as a high-born woman with bound feet, and as a rural peasant’s wife who bore several sons but worked the fields until my body gave out.
I’ve been an avid reader all my life and explore the world through books, magazines, and whatever catches my attention. Krishnamurti’s philosophy still interests me, but I distilled the essence of what I believe he meant years ago. Theosophy interested me, too, for a short while, but I didn’t like the way Besant and Leadbetter pushed Krishnamurti forward, as though they had guns at his back. He reclaimed his own soul by renouncing the pedestal.
I’ve forgotten many details, but your blog about Osho’s take on Krishnamurti confirmed my memories and added new information about these spiritual masters.
My views on space, time, and eternity have evolved over time, culled from more sources than I can count or remember, but re-incarnation seems so obvious and natural to me, that I can’t imagine otherwise.
We may know each other from previous (or future) lives. I feel I know you in this one.
Thank you Katharine. Am sure we have known/would know each other from previous or future lives !! Thanks for sharing about your strong spriritual connect with China and India. Unfortunately China is under a non-spiritual government for the past 75 to 80 years. Hopefully they return to their spiritual ways soon. India is meandering it’s way back to its spiritual roots. ❤️
Yes,
I’ve been intrigued with China’s long history. Jung Chang, a writer now living in the UK, has written extensively about her growing up years under Mao Zedong, and of the women in her own family over three generations.
She was born my year, 1952, so I can relate to her experience time-wise, as I grew up in the US, where we heard about the poor starving children in China when we didn’t clean our supper plates.
Reading Chang’s memoir: “Wild Swans–Three Daughters of China” opened my eyes to Mao’s extreme efforts to erase China’s cultural heritage in the “Cultural Revolution” he advertized. Now, I’m in the process of reading her biography of Mao.
I hope China is now on the road to recovery. The East does not need to imitate the West. It has such a rich history of its own that I hope the East can build on its strengths and unique cultural and spiritual heritage.
I have read her book Wild Swans and it was an eye opener ! For a short while at work, I managed a team in Shanghai. Got the opportunity to travel there and experience the country first hand for a very short while.
Culturally the Chinese are similar to Indians with a hierarchical mindset, respect for elders and hardworking.
Communism just eats away the human-ness in people and that has happened to China. Sad.
See? Another point of connection: Chang’s book. I have also been to Shanghi, with a group of medical acupuncture students who visited several hospitals where acupuncture, cupping, qi jong, and various other techniques were used and demonstrated. It was not a pleasant experience for me. We were herded from place to place, mostly where we had opportunities to buy things, and our group was too closely packed for me to see the demonstrations of techniques. Also, we were forced to check our luggage, and my suitcase was pilfered during the long train trip.
We did see the terra cotta soldiers near Xian, and that was interesting, but a travelling companion and I both caught some respiratory illness there, and I later was coughing so hard at home that I may have broken a rib.
Exhaustion and the poor air quality in the cities probably contributed to my illness.
In Xian, I did get a chance to walk alone one morning. I was impressed by seeing many people in the parks practicing Tai Chi, mostly alone. These were relatively old people, who kept fit by keeping their bodies limber through use of ancient energy enhancing exercises.
Yoga may have the same effect, and I have practiced yoga, but I don’t see people doing yoga outside in the US.
Anyway, about communism, in the US, we had the “Red Scare” in my childhood, and my mother, among others was terrified of communism. Chang’s biography of Mao states Mao was under the influence and directed by Stalin’s agents, but Mao had his own agenda so was a willing patsy. Before that Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, I believe, in which he enumerated a list of points, inclding state ownership of land and “the means of production” which he didn’t define. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1919, I believe, occurred with the purposeful instigation of people like Lenin, who was funded by Western bankers and corporate interests, who wanted to unseat the Tsar.
See how interconnected it is? History makes its mark on the present and future.
very truthful