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The Years of Awakening

The first volume of my biography of Krishnamurti—Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening—took the story of his life up to the age of thirty-five. This chapter is a recapitulation of the events of those years with the addition of two letters from Mrs Besant not then available to me.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on May 11, 1895, at Madanapalle, 150 miles north of Madras, the eighth child of Telegu-speaking Brahmin parents. His father, Jiddu Narianiah, was a rent collector employed by the British, so the family, though obscure, were not poor by Indian standards. Krishna’s mother died when he was ten, and nearly four years later, Narianiah, who had now retired and who had been a Theosophist for many years, moved with his four surviving sons to the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, to work as an assistant secretary. The eldest son, Sivaram, who was to become a doctor, was fifteen; then came Krishna, not yet fourteen, then Nityananda (Nitya), three years younger, and finally Sadanand, aged five, who was mentally deficient.

Soon after the move to Adyar, Krishna was picked out on the beach one evening from a crowd of other Indian boys by Charles Webster Leadbeater to be the vehicle for the World Teacher (the Lord Maitreya, the Christ). Most Theosophists at that time believed that the Lord Maitreya was soon to manifest in human form, as two thousand years ago he had manifested in the body of Jesus and before that in the body of Sri Krishna. Leadbeater, a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, who claimed to be clairvoyant, chose this particular boy because of the beauty of his aura which, he declared, had not one trace of selfishness in it. Leadbeater could hardly have chosen him for his outward appearance, for the boy was scraggy, dirty, ill-nourished, with crooked teeth, his hair shaved in front as was then the Brahmin custom, and with a vacant, almost moronic expression. Moreover, he had a persistent cough and a weak, sickly look resulting from the many bouts of malaria he had suffered throughout his childhood.

Mrs Annie Besant, the President of the Theosophical Society, who was in Europe at the time Krishna was ‘discovered’, was soon notified by Leadbeater that a ‘vehicle’ had been found. Mrs Besant, who had had psychic powers herself at one time, had relinquished them in order to release more energy for the struggle for Home Rule for India in which she was engaged. She now relied entirely on Leadbeater in all occult matters.

Leadbeater removed Krishna and his brother Nitya from the school where Krishna was being beaten every day for stupidity and began to teach them himself with the help of two of his young secretaries. He also built them up physically with nourishing food, long bicycle rides, tennis and swimming, with the result that Krishna’s appearance changed within a few months. With his teeth straightened, his hair grown and a new look of health, giving life to his huge dark eyes, he had become beautiful. The boys’ spiritual training was undertaken by Leadbeater’s own occult master, Kuthumi, who, with other masters, was said to live in an ever-young human body in a ravine in Tibet and who could be visited nightly on the astral plane during sleep. Kuthumi accepted the boys as his pupils, and not long after Mrs Besant’s return to Adyar, Krishna took his first occult Initiation on January 11, 1910.

In March, Mrs Besant, with their father’s consent, became the legal guardian of the two boys. A few weeks later she took them with her to Benares where she had a house in another Theosophical compound and where Krishna started teaching a group of adults the truths which the Master Kuthumi had taught him on the astral plane. Among this group was George Arundale, a man of thirty-two, Principal of the Central Hindu College founded by Mrs Besant at Benares in 1898, and E. A. Wodehouse, elder brother of P. G. Wodehouse, Professor of English at the College. Krishna’s teaching to this group was published the following year in a little book called At the Feet of the Master which was translated into forty languages and is still in print. Since Krishna’s English was very poor at that time it has always been a matter of dispute whether the book was written by him or by Leadbeater. Krishna himself never claimed to have written it; he stated in a foreword, ‘These are not my own words but the words of the Master who taught me.’

In January 1911 an organisation was started by Mrs Besant and Arundale called the Order of the Star in the East with the object of preparing the way for the Coming of the World Teacher. Krishna was made the Head of this Order. Two months later Mrs Besant took the two boys to England where many converts were made to the O.S.E. and where they met for the first time Lady Emily Lutyens (my mother), wife of the architect, Edwin Lutyens, and a recent convert to Theosophy, who was to become Krishna’s closest friend in the years ahead.

Mrs Besant and the two boys returned to India in the autumn. On December 28, at the T.S. Convention at Benares, while Krishna was handing out certificates to about 400 new members of the O.S.E., those who came up to receive them started prostrating at his feet. According to Leadbeater the hall had all at once filled with a tremendous power which was evidently flowing through Krishna. This was said to be the first manifestation of the Lord Maitreya, the World Teacher.

In February 1912 Mrs Besant again took the boys to England where they remained until 1920. Their father was now trying to regain custody of them. He brought an action against Mrs Besant in the High Court of Madras which he won. She appealed and lost, but, undaunted, took the case to the Privy Council in London who quashed the ruling of the Madras Court in May 1914. By that time Krishna had reached his majority according to Indian law and needed no guardian.

The boys meanwhile had been studying in England with two Theosophical tutors—George Arundale and C. Jinarajadasa, a prominent lecturer for the T.S., who were both Initiates. It had been ruled by the Master Kuthumi, through Leadbeater, that Krishna must always be accompanied by two Initiates. It was hoped that both boys would pass into Oxford or Cambridge or, failing that, into London University. A very rich American Theosophist, Miss Mary Dodge, who lived in England with her friend, also a Theosophist, Muriel, Countess De La Warr, had in 1913 settled £500 a year on Krishna for life and £300 on Nitya. This gave them a certain sense of independence.

I remember Krishna well in the war years 1914–18. I was two when he first came to England so I have known him since the dawn of my memory. His nature was then, I believe, what it has been from the beginning—affectionate, generous, shy, diffident, dreamy, docile, self-effacing. At times he appeared quite vacant and oblivious of his surroundings. He was completely unspoilt—I might say untouched—by all the adulation he had received since he was first ‘discovered’. He liked poetry—Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare—and some parts of the Old Testament which Lady Emily read aloud to him. He also enjoyed P. G. Wodehouse and Stephen Leacock, light comedies at the theatre and exciting films, but his favourite occupations were playing golf (he became a scratch player) and tinkering with his motor-bicycle. He has always loved mechanical things—watches, cameras, motor cars—an unexpected trait in his character.

Krishna was very dependent on his brother Nitya, a bright lovable boy. They shared everything and were as close as twins although anything but identical in appearance. Nitya was smaller, had great charm of face and personality but none of Krishna’s beauty. Three years younger than Krishna, he seemed to be the older of the two.

Before the end of the war the Initiate-tutors had returned to India and the boys were living with Miss Dodge in the luxurious house on West Side Common, Wimbledon, which she shared with Lady De La Warr, coming daily to London to study at London University. It was at this time that they learnt to dress well and feel at ease in a rich aristocratic household. Nevertheless, Krishna was not happy. He had lost his belief in the Masters and the Lord Maitreya and shrank from the role he knew he would be called upon to play in return for all that had been done for him. ‘Why did they have to pick on me?’ he often asked Lady Emily.

Eventually in January 1920 Mrs Besant, despairing of Krishna ever passing an examination (he had failed his matriculation three times), sent him to Paris to learn French while Nitya remained in London studying for the Bar. It was a wrench for Krishna to leave Lady Emily whom he loved better than anyone at that time, but in Paris he was to meet a delightful French-Russian family—the de Manziarlys—an ardent Theosophical Russian mother with three daughters and a son who all became his devoted friends. By July Madame de Manziarly had reawakened in him some enthusiasm for Theosophy and the O.S.E. as well as stimulating him mentally by taking him to picture galleries and concerts. However, as he told Lady Emily, he far preferred natural scenery to any picture. At the end of the year he spoke voluntarily at a Theosophical meeting.

In May of the following year it was discovered that Nitya had tuberculosis. He went to Paris to be under a nature-cure doctor recommended by Madame de Manziarly, and then to Villars in Switzerland to be treated by a specialist. By November he was pronounced cured and that month he and Krishna returned to India after nine years’ absence. Mrs Besant had sent for them. Krishna was now twenty-six and she believed that he was ready to play his part as Head of the O.S.E. In December, at the Theosophical Convention at Benares, he gave four of the Convention lectures on the subject of Theosophy and Internationalism. Public speaking was at first a torture to him. Lady Emily, who had followed him to India, recalled that he obviously had great difficulty in putting his thoughts into words although he had thoroughly prepared his lectures. He never considered rebelling against what he believed to be his duty in spite of the acute embarrassment he felt at the reverence with which he was now again treated.

Leadbeater had been living in Sydney since 1917 as head of a Theosophical community. An ex-curate in the Church of England he had now become a bishop in a new church—the Liberal Catholic Church, derived from the Old Catholic or Jansenist Church (called after Cornelius Jansen, a seventeenth-century reformer who had broken away from the Church of Rome), which claimed Apostolic Succession and which, according to Leadbeater, had the blessing of the Lord Maitreya. There was to be a T.S. Convention in Sydney in April 1922 and it was decided that Krishna and Nitya should attend it with Mrs Besant. They had not seen Leadbeater since 1912. They found him dressed as a bishop, wearing a large amethyst ring and a pectoral cross. Krishna was repelled by all the ceremonial of the church services he was expected to attend.

Nitya became very ill again in Sydney and was advised by the doctor to return immediately to Switzerland via San Francisco, the quickest route. Krishna, determined to go with him, told Mrs Besant that he did not feel his ‘mental body’ was developed enough and that he wanted to take eighteen months off from all Star and Theosophical work in order to study ‘quietly and uninterruptedly economics, religion and education’ in Switzerland. Mrs Besant and Leadbeater both approved of this plan.

Krishna and Nitya had not intended to stay in California more than a few days but they liked America so much that when an American member of the O.S.E. offered to lend them a cottage at the upper end of the Ojai valley, 360 miles south of San Francisco, 1,500 feet above sea level and with a dry climate suitable for Nitya, they accepted the invitation. They both fell in love with this beautiful valley full of orange groves where Nitya at once began to feel better. In the event they were to stay there for nearly a year. During that time a trust was formed (the Brothers Trust) which bought for them the cottage and six acres of land with money raised in England.

This was the first time the brothers had been alone together, though Mr Warrington, the General Secretary of the T.S. in America, was staying in another cottage near by. Between August 17 and 20 Krishna underwent a three-day spiritual experience that transformed him. Mr Warrington was present at the time, and afterwards he, Nitya and Krishna all wrote accounts of what had taken place. Krishna was out of his body for much of the time during those three days, and in the evenings he would sit in meditation under the pepper tree outside the cottage.^*

Krishna emerged from this experience in a state of ecstasy. He wrote to Lady Emily, ‘I have changed and with that change in me I am going to change the lives of my friends ... I am going to help the whole world to climb a few feet higher ... You don’t know how I have changed, my whole inner nature is alive with energy and thought.’ And to Leadbeater he wrote: ‘As you well know I have not been what is called “happy” for many years; everything I touched brought me discontent; my mental condition has been as you know deplorable. I did not know what I wanted and everything bored me in a very short time and in fact I did not find myself.’ He then recounted something of his experience and the ecstasy he had found.

Nitya too was deeply affected by what had taken place. He told Mrs Besant that ‘the whole world has so changed for me since these things happened, I feel like a bubble which has suddenly become solid ... I feel as if I have never really lived before, and now I could not live unless I served the Lord.’

Krishna concluded his own account of what had happened with the words: ‘The fountain of Truth had been revealed to me and the darkness has been dispersed. Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated.’

Leadbeater and Mrs Besant both affirmed that this experience had been Krishna’s third Initiation (he had taken his second Initiation in 1912) but they could find no explanation for what occurred afterwards. From six o’clock every evening for about an hour, Krishna became semi-conscious, with the most excruciating pain in his head, neck and spine. He also became so sensitive that the slightest noise became a torture to him and he could not bear to be touched. The pain would gradually ease off but it left him exhausted. This ‘process’, as it came to be called, went on for years with greater or lesser intensity whenever he was quiet or alone with close friends. It would stop as soon as he had to travel or meet strangers. (It still goes on to some extent.) With the exception of one Theosophical woman doctor, who was baffled by his condition, no medical practitioner has ever been consulted about ‘the process’ and Krishna has never taken any kind of pain-killer for it. He has always been certain that it was something he had to go through—some kind of expansion of consciousness that could not be avoided. It was at its most intense and agonising for several months on end in 1924 when he and Nitya returned to Ojai after a summer in Europe. By that time the Brothers Trust had bought for them a larger house and more land at Ojai while still keeping on the cottage. They called the large house Arya Vihara, meaning Noble Monastery.

After the experience of August 1922, Krishna began to write poetry which he continued to do for several years. He also took on a new stature and authority. He had no more doubts as to what his mission in life was to be. He became less vague and more beautiful. From that time onwards most of his friends and followers started calling him Krishnaji—the suffix ji being a term of respect in India. In the first volume of his biography I referred to him as Krishna up to the time of his ’22 experience and then as K which is how he refers to himself now, nearly always in the third person. I shall follow the same practice in this book and call him K hereafter.

In 1923 Baron van Pallandt made over to K his beautiful eighteenth-century ancestral home, Castle Eerde, near Zwolle in Holland, with 5,000 acres of woodland. Since K did not want to own any property personally another trust was formed to receive it, of which K was President, and Eerde became the international headquarters of the O.S.E. In the summer of 1924 the first Star Camp was held on part of the property at Ommen, a mile or so from the Castle. This camp was to become an annual event up till the war.

During another visit to India and Sydney in 1924–25 Nitya became very ill again. On the voyage back to San Francisco from Sydney in June ’25 he nearly died and he remained dangerously ill throughout the summer at Ojai. K nursed him devotedly, slept in his room and did for him all those tasks that have to be done for a bedridden patient. K did not go to Europe that summer on account of Nitya, but the Star Camp was held at Ommen in August, presided over by Mrs Besant. George Arundale, now a bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church, and another Theosophical leader and Liberal Catholic bishop, James Ingall Wedgwood, were also there. Arundale and Wedgwood claimed clairvoyance and ‘brought through’ all kinds of messages from the Masters and announced various Initiations. Arundale’s young Indian wife, Rukmini, was said to have taken three Initiations; Arundale and Wedgwood took their fourth (Arhathood) and Mrs Besant and Leadbeater their fifth and final one (Adepthood). None of these amazing happenings was confirmed by Leadbeater from Sydney; nevertheless, Mrs Besant trusted Arundale so completely that during the Camp she publicly announced the names of ten of the twelve people who were to be the Lord’s apostles when he came, according to information ‘brought through’ by Arundale. Among these were Mrs Besant, Leadbeater, Nitya, Lady Emily, Jinarajadasa, Wedgwood, Rukmini and Arundale himself. Leadbeater was ‘visibly distressed’ when he heard of all these pronouncements, and K was not consulted about them; he was merely informed of them by cable and letter.

Lady Emily, who had been at the Camp and had been carried away by the hysterical excitement there, was one of those who wrote to K telling him about it all. She received letters from him in return, full of a most unhappy scepticism. He felt that something sacred had been defiled and she soon realised what a gullible fool she had been. At K’s request she destroyed all the letters she received from him at that time; he feared that if they fell into anyone else’s hands his criticisms of Mrs Besant, whom he dearly loved, would be misunderstood. He believed that she was growing senile—she was seventy-eight—and was being imposed upon by those she trusted. She had written to ask him to confirm what had taken place at Ommen to which he had replied, ‘I am afraid I do not remember [on the astral plane] any of those happenings over there as I am much too tired as I have to sleep with Nitya and be constantly wakeful.’

Mrs Besant wanted K to attend the Jubilee Convention of the T.S. at Adyar, Madras, in December. He was assured that Nitya would not be allowed to die; the Masters had said so, for he was needed for the Lord’s work. Mrs Besant asked K to travel with her to India in November. Since Nitya was a little better and Madame de Manziarly offered to go and look after him, K reluctantly agreed. Lady Emily, the Arundales, Wedgwood and others travelled with K and Mrs Besant on a ship leaving from Naples on November 9. There was a distinct coolness between K and Bishops Arundale and Wedgwood in their spectacular regalia. As soon as they embarked K received a telegram to say that Nitya had influenza, and at Port Said on the 13th another telegram arrived: ‘Flu rather worse. Pray for me.’ Even then K was not unduly worried. As he said to Shiva Rao, one of his first tutors at Adyar with whom he was sharing a cabin, ‘If Nitya was going to die I would not have been allowed to leave Ojai.’ His faith in the Masters’ power to save Nitya’s life seemed to Shiva Rao to be ‘unqualified and unquestioning’. That same night came the announcement of Nitya’s death. According to Shiva Rao the news

broke him [K] completely; it did more—his entire philosophy of life—the implicit faith in the future as outlined by Mrs Besant and Mr Leadbeater, Nitya’s vital part in it, all appeared shattered at that moment. At night he would sob and moan and cry out for Nitya, sometimes in his native Telegu which in his waking consciousness he could not speak. Day after day we watched him, heartbroken, disillusioned. Day after day he seemed to change, gripping himself together in an effort to face life—but without Nitya. He was going through an inner revolution, finding new strength.

By the time K arrived in Bombay he had written a piece about Nitya which was published in the magazine of the O.S.E.—the Herald of the Star:

On the physical plane we could be separated and now we are inseparable ... For my brother and I are one. As Krishnamurti I now have greater zeal, greater faith, greater sympathy and greater love, for there is also in me the body, the Being of Nityananda ... I know how to weep still but that is human. I know now with greater certainty than ever before, that there is real beauty in life, real happiness that cannot be shattered by any physical happening, a great strength which cannot be weakened by passing events, and a great love which is permanent, imperishable and unconquerable.

These were not just words. A friend who was at Adyar to greet him recalled that his face was radiant; there was not a shadow on it to show what he had been through. I myself noticed that he had gained a new power of love and sympathy when he came to Colombo to meet Leadbeater and a party, of whom I was one, coming from Sydney for the Convention. Leadbeater greeted K with the words, ‘At least you are an Arhat’.

Mrs Besant was greatly torn in her loyalties. Her personal love and reverence for K were unshaken as were his for her, and she still believed him to be the vehicle for the Lord Maitreya, but she also dearly loved George Arundale. She made one last effort to reconcile him and K. She gathered together in her drawing-room Leadbeater, Jinarajadasa, Arundale and Wedgwood, and taking K by the hand and seating him beside her on the sofa, she asked him if he would accept them as his apostles. He replied that he would accept none of them except perhaps Mrs Besant herself. There never was a reconciliation. Arundale, however, stopped ‘bringing through’ messages, unlike Leadbeater who went on doling out Initiations to his own flock.

The T.S. Convention was followed by a Star Congress on December 28. At the first meeting at 8 o’clock in the morning under the great banyan tree in the compound a dramatic change took place while K was speaking about the World Teacher: ‘He comes only to those who want, who desire, who long...’ and then a new expression radiated his face, his voice changed and rang out—‘I come for those who want sympathy, who are longing to be released, who are longing to find happiness in all things. I come to reform and not to tear down, I come not to destroy but to build.’

For those of us who noticed the change to the first person this was a spine-tingling moment. Among the few who noticed nothing were, not surprisingly, Arundale and Wedgwood. Mrs Besant certainly noticed the change, for at the last meeting of the Congress she declared: ‘...the event [of December 28] marked the definite consecration of the chosen vehicle ... the final acceptance of the body chosen long before.’

K himself did not doubt what had happened. Speaking to the National Representatives of the O.S.E. he said, ‘You have drunk at the fountain of wisdom and knowledge ... When He comes again, and I am sure that He will come again very soon, it will be for us a nobler and far more beautiful occasion than even last time.’ And at a meeting on January 5, 1926, he said: ‘A new life, a new storm has swept the world ... I personally feel quite different since that day ... I feel like a crystal vase, a jar that has been cleaned and now anybody in the world can put a beautiful flower in it and that flower shall live in the vase and never die.’

In July of the same year, 1926, K held the first of what were to be many small gatherings at Castle Eerde before the Ommen Camp. This group came by invitation and K talked to them for an hour every morning. Mrs Besant, who was lecturing in Amsterdam, was not invited. She wrote pathetically to K on July 10:

My beloved son,

Thank you for your loving letter. I seem very far away. I hear of many delightful poems, which I, of course, do not see, and I am sure you are giving delightful talks. I am like the prophets and kings who desired to see and hear the things that the lucky people round you see and hear, but which the poor ps and ks did not see and hear.

Don’t leave off loving me because you have many who are more demonstrative than your loving old Amma [Mother]

And on July 18 she was writing again, this time from Huizen, close to Ommen, the centre of the Liberal Catholic Church in Europe, presided over by Bishop Wedgwood:

My beloved,

Thank you very much for your dear little letter. It is sweet of you to love me, and I love you and wish to serve you.

I am sorry and glad that your spine and head are troublesome, for it means that He will come and use His body, His, my darling, for you have given it to Him, your great and splendid privilege.

We can only help by not hindering. I, too, would like to be with you, but I have to help all those gathered here from all parts of Holland.

May all the Devas guard you, dear one, the happy crowd that love Shri Krishna and listen to hear His flute call them to their joyous service.

Always your own loving Amma¹

Mrs Besant attended the Camp at Ommen with Wedgwood. Several times it seemed that the Lord spoke through K at the meetings. At one evening talk round the Camp fire it was unmistakable: ‘I belong to all people, to all who really love, to all who are suffering. And if you would walk you must walk with me.’ One woman who heard him that evening described how ‘His face had grown strongly powerful and stern and even his voice sounded deeper and fuller. The power went on increasing in every word he uttered.’

Mrs Besant and Wedgwood were in the audience and after the talk Wedgwood whispered to Mrs Besant that it was not the Lord Maitreya who had spoken through K but a powerful black magician whom he knew well. When Mrs Besant passed this on to K he was dumbfounded. He said that if she believed that he would never speak again. She made no more reference to it but thereafter whenever K said anything not approved of by Wedgwood he claimed that ‘the Blacks had got him’.

At the beginning of 1927 K wrote to Leadbeater, ‘I know my destiny and my work. I know with certainty and knowledge of my own, that I am blending into the consciousness of the one Teacher and that He will completely fill me.’ In April that year at Ojai, where Mrs Besant was staying with K, she made a statement to the Associated Press of America which ended with the words, ‘The World Teacher is here.’ Because of this belief the name of the O.S.E. was changed to the Order of the Star, and the Herald of the Star to the Star Review.

But during the Ommen Camp in August that year K was disconcerting many of his followers by saying, ‘No one can give you liberation, you have to find it within ... He who has attained liberation has become the Teacher—like myself. It lies in the power of each one of us to enter the flame, to become the flame.’ He was saying in effect that the Masters and all other gurus were unnecessary, that everyone must find truth for himself. He had written and spoken a great deal about ‘union with the Beloved’ and caused even greater consternation when in a later talk at the Camp he tried to explain what he meant by this:

When I was a small boy I used to see Sri Krishna, with the flute, as he is pictured by the Hindus ... When I grew older and met with Bishop Leadbeater and the Theosophical Society, I began to see the Master K.H. [Kuthumi]—again in the form which was put before me ... Later on, as I grew, I began to see the Lord Maitreya. That was two years ago and I saw him constantly in the form put before me ... Now lately it has been the Buddha whom I have been seeing ... I have been asked what I mean by ‘the Beloved’. I will give a meaning, an explanation which you will interpret as you please. To me it is all—it is Sri Krishna, it is the Master K.H., it is the Lord Maitreya, it is the Buddha, and yet it is beyond all these forms. What does it matter what name you give? ... What you are troubling about is whether there is such a person as the World Teacher who has manifested Himself in the body of a certain person, Krishnamurti; but in the world nobody will trouble about this question ... My beloved is the open skies, the flower, every human being ... Till I was able to say with certainty, without undue excitement, or exaggeration in order to convince others that I was one with my Beloved, I never spoke. I talked in vague generalities which everybody wanted. I never said: I am the World Teacher; but now that I feel I am one with my Beloved, I say it, not in order to impress my authority on you, not to convince you of my greatness, nor of the greatness of the World Teacher, nor even of the beauty of life, but merely to awaken the desire in your hearts and in your own minds to seek the Truth ... It is no good asking me who is the Beloved. Of what use is explanation? For you will not understand the Beloved until you are able to see him in every animal, in every blade of grass, in every person that is suffering, in every individual.

A year later at one of the Camp meetings K said he would abolish the Order at once if it ‘claimed to be a vehicle which held the Truth and the only Truth’. At a subsequent meeting he told his audience, ‘I hope you will not listen to anyone, but will listen only to your own intuition, your own understanding, and give a public refusal to those who would be your interpreters.’ These ‘interpreters’ were, of course, the leaders of the T.S. He added that he did not want disciples:

Every one of you is a disciple of the Truth if you understand the Truth and do not follow individuals ... There is no understanding in the worship of personalities ... I still maintain that all ceremonies are unnecessary for spiritual growth ... Is it not much simpler to make Life itself the goal—Life itself the guide, the Master and the God—than to have mediators, gurus, who must inevitably step down the Truth, and hence betray it?

He had warned his listeners that they were to be shaken to their foundations. The great majority of them were. They wanted him as their guru, they wanted to be his disciples and for him to tell them what to do and how far advanced they were on the occult path.

From the time the O.S.E. had been founded in 1911, the leaders had been warning the members that when the Lord came his teaching might be so contrary to all they expected that they would be in danger of rejecting him. Now they had fallen themselves into the very trap they had warned others against. Leadbeater, Arundale and Wedgwood had rejected him because as well as denying that they were his apostles he would not accept the Liberal Catholic Church or Co-Masonry, the other ceremonial in which they had given themselves high degrees, while Mrs Besant, although she remained as infinitely loving to him as he was to her and even longed at moments to resign from the Presidency of the T.S. in order to follow him wherever he went, could not give up her occult Master. Jinarajadasa, the other important leader, though remaining quite friendly, was too entrenched in Theosophy to change. There was no place in K’s teaching for any of them. They had been in positions of great power which they were not prepared to relinquish.

At the Star Camp at Ommen on August 3, 1929, in the presence of Mrs Besant and over 3,000 Star members, K formally dissolved the Order.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land [he began], and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect ... I do not want to belong to any organisation of a spiritual kind ... If an organisation be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in his discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth ... Because I am free, unconditioned, whole ... I desire those who seek to understand me, to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage ... You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else ... No man from outside can make you free ... You have been accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what your spiritual status is. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible? ... For two years I have been thinking about this slowly, carefully, patiently, and I have now decided to disband the Order, as I happen to be its Head. You can form other organisations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.

At the end of the year K also resigned from the Theosophical Society.

_______________

^* Krishna’s and Nitya’s accounts are given in full in Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening.