Swanwick Star Issue No. 7 (2014)
My father, Dr. A.S. Atwal (the Indian entomologist who introduced the European honey bee into India) used to go to Kulu and Manali regularly to perform his bee experiments in the early sixties. On one such occasion, he came to know that the famous Bengali actress, Devika Rani, lived in a village he often passed through with her aristocratic Russian husband. Naturally, he could not help wanting to meet this intriguing couple.
They lived in an apple-growing area of the Kulu Valley in a big bungalow that was originally built by a British landowner. It was located on a hilltop where one had to send up a request to visit them. If accepted, their caretaker brought word down the hill right away. My father was elated to find out that his request had been granted.
So, he was invited to visit them for afternoon tea at their residence and they were very pleased when he presented them with a bouquet of local wild-flowers. It turned out that this was their summer home while they lived just outside Delhi during the rest of the year. Nevertheless, the tea-service was conducted in the finest English bone china and nothing was lacking.
Svetoslav Roerich was a quiet and reserved man while his wife was very talkative as might be expected. However, Roerich gracefully answered my father’s many questions about Russia without betraying any bitterness on the subject. He said that he had left Russia during the Revolution. It is quite likely that he was no longer welcome there with his family’s ties to Theosophy. My father had little time for discussions about religion and philosophy, though, unlike my mother’s side of the family, which would not meet Roerich until the next decade once their spiritual quest was well under way.
It appears that Roerich spent much of his time painting while in the valley and some of his works decorated the walls of their house. This was of particular interest to my father who was also an amateur artist and could connect with the spiritual nature of this endeavour.
At the end of this quaint meeting, my father left feeling gratified that he had met an unusually sophisticated pair. The two sisters, Jagdis and Sarjit Siddoo, had first come upon Theosophy in their college days when a friend of their father’s, a Theosophist, had arranged for their lodgings in Toronto where they both studied medicine. The elder, Jagdis, was interested in the occult even at that age, but it was still a little too early for Sarjit to turn her thoughts to spiritual matters so she encouraged more mundane interests in her sister. That particular quest would commence in earnest in their thirties once they had become the first two Indo-Canadian doctors in the country.
In the meantime, after graduating, they went to India where they built and ran a free rural hospital in the Punjab according to their Mother’s and Father’s wishes.
Then, their thoughts turned towards religious matters and they started seriously seeking a spiritual teacher. India, of course, abounds in gurus and there was no shortage of them, but they soon realized the special quality they were looking for was “guidance” and not “mental slavery”.
Scattered throughout the Himalayan foothills of India, there was a thriving community of artists which particularly appealed to Jagdis, who was also quite artistic. They talked of “artistic communes” and it was in this same region that Roerich and Devika Rani lived. It was at one of these retreats in the mountains that the two sisters met Baba Sobha Singh, a renowned Punjabi artist, who told them about Krishnamurti and The Theosophical Society. Apparently, K. was meant to be their “World Teacher” but had broken away from them in an act of defiance. Now, he was acknowledged as a great spiritual teacher, even though he denied being a “guru”.
As soon as Jagdis and Sarjit heard K. speak in Delhi for the first time in 1960, they were both convinced they had met an enlightened soul and embarked upon their life-long dedication to his teachings.
Years later, they decided to visit Roerich and Devika on their way to trek in the Himalayas at Hemkunt and the Valley of Flowers. They went up the hill to see them and were first greeted by the film-star wife, who was chain-smoking. Roerich had a white beard by that time.
The grounds around the house were filled with the rather eery idols for which Kulu is famous. Apparently, Devika Rani insisted on a Brahmin coming every morning to adorn them with auspicious tilaks on their foreheads and to pray to them.
Roerich’s main message seemed to be to look within and to know thyself and was very much in keeping with K’s philosophy.
Before the meeting came to a close, they also talked about the sisters’ charitable hospital near Rahon. Devika Rani said it was a very good thing and that they should continue this work.
Chanda Siddoo-Atwal
August 19, 1999
If we were to talk together about the nature of “awakening” and the meditative insight in one’s life, how might it sound, even though words are wholly inadequate? –
Once “the light goes on”, time and space must be created in one’s life to accommodate that energy.
With this nurturing, right action comes into being.
Right action is choiceless, inevitable –
outside the realm of normal consciousness.
It has no blue-print, no mandate.
It is the voice that must be heard and obeyed.
It negates all that is false.
It recalls all that is truth.
It creates all that is good and pure.
It is timeless in conception.
II November 14, 1999
There is an Insight which can fundamentally change one’s perception of things, if it is embodied in one’s life:
When the Intelligence within one awakens and sees that calculative reason is intrinsically incapable of realizing enlightenment, a displacement occurs and, if obedience to the inner voice ensues, it check-mates all frivolous activity. Then, one does not enter the world of falsehood and turns back at the threshold. That mind is a transformed mind and is open to revelation or the Unknown.
III March 17, 2000
A mutation can occur in the brain bringing about a radical change of view whereby the past and future lose their hold and one becomes incapable of sustaining thoughts about them; it is this capacity of the human mind to sustain certain thoughts that seems to link it to the induction of falseemotion lived in the past or projected into the future and, therefore, to cause suffering. The result is a totally stale and unspontaneous way of living.
Suddenly, one wakes up from this stupor and says:
God knows how many times we’ve come round and married and had children and gone through all the hell of human existence, but, this time it’s a party –
and, I’m not going to miss it for anything!
[The above are personal impressions by Chanda Siddoo-Atwal of dialogues with Professor Allan W. Anderson printed with his permission; these are not verbatim discussions, but only excerpts recalled after conversations in which she has tried to “pluck out” their essence from her notes taken during these talks. It shall be serialized in its entirety as a tribute to his life and work in the coming issues of The Swanwick Star]
Vancouver Public Library screening – March 23, 2014
The video opens with an open invitation from K to explore the nature of disorder. Is it possible to live a life without disorder? Is the mind capable of creating order in our lives? Or, perhaps, the mind could be the source of disorder itself?
In his usual fashion, K invites the listener to enquire together with the ‘speaker’ into the movement of the mind and to enquire into the nature of desire, fear and time; enticing his audience to find out for themselves the factors that prevent order from springing into our lives.
The dialogue started with an open question: Can the mind create order?
In order to start the conversation, I expressed my perspective, that to me it seems that K suggests that order is a natural state, the underlying sense of peace and purpose that is under covered with the confusion and self-centered activity of the mind. Pablo questioned my point of view suggesting that the mind is useful and necessary to maintain order in technical activities of our lives, like driving, working, doing homework and to organizing ideas and expressing them eloquently.
Stephen suggested that for him, and according to personal experience, it is a matter of intelligence to balance the technical abilities of the mind and the infinite possibilities of creation that lie beyond its limitations. He implies that there is no definite answer to determine when the mind should be used or not, but rather to discover that answer from moment to moment as one walks deeper into that which is.
Avinash, on the other hand, made the warning that no matter the position one takes, the mere act of looking for order is a form of escape from what is, and close the dialogue with the enlightening statement, that what liberates your mind from confusion is your sensitivity to recognize the disorder in your life as it is, without condemnation or justification. And said that for him, is more valuable to learn and explore the causes of disorder in one’s life in order to remove them rather than looking for new ideologies and beliefs. According to Avinash, the ability to recognize disorder in one’s life is what liberates and not your effort to be free.
Veto Barraza
Recently I had the pleasure of attending a retreat at the Krishnamurti Centre in Metchosin, British Columbia. The centre itself is located on a majestic estate which was a Krishnamurti school from 1977 to 1981, and is currently being used for a variety of spiritual retreats and gatherings. It was certainly refreshing to relax in such a beautiful setting, the property itself flowing down to the ocean and surrounded by the serenity and majesty of the Canadian west coast, but the content of the retreat itself was especially refreshing. In fact, while the word “enlightened” gets thrown around quite a bit these days, I can say with sincerity that I left the retreat a great deal more enlightened than when I had arrived two days earlier.
I’ve struggled since I was young with issues surrounding identity and purpose. This is something most people wrestle with at different times in their lives, and to varying degrees, but it was something that I could never reconcile enough to actually feel grounded in my own being. My father introduced me to Buddhism and mysticism when I was a teenager, and I’ve been exploring different philosophies and spiritual practises since then. Beneath that exploration though- and something that was far more pervasive than the outward seeking- was a constant underlying questioning that had permeated every corner of my psyche. “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?” and “What’s the point of all this?” were questions that were really tearing me apart inside. There’s nothing wrong with these questions in and of themselves, but if our sense of self is contingent on finding reasonable answers, than such questioning can easily become a slippery path to confusion, despair and existential crisis.
It was a combination of questioning and crisis that led me to pick up Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now last year. For the first time in my life I was reading something that was actually affecting a very real change in the way I related to my thoughts and the world around me, but it only took me so far at the time. While The Power of Now remains my favourite “spiritual” book to date, it ignited a process in my psyche but I would require further wisdom to help me take the next step. This year I started listening to Alan Watts lectures, which ultimately led me to the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. I was quite surprised when my mother informed me that she had seen an advertisement for a Krishnamurti Centre right outside of Victoria, the city I’m grateful to call home.
The retreat itself was based on Krishnamurti’s teachings, and it was entitled The Nature of Relationship. It was led by Dr. Harshad Parekh, who was formerly a teacher at a number of Krishnamurti Schools in India, and someone whose life has been deeply impacted by Krishnamurti’s teachings. Dr. Parekh shared an excellent selection of videos and excerpts from books, elaborating and answering questions in ways that helped to clarify the teachings, which can sometimes seem quite esoteric. Ralph Tiller, who hosted the retreat, also provided valuable insight and helped to engage the conversation in meaningful ways.
The nature of relationship is truly at the core of Krishnamurti’s teachings, and so this retreat was not merely about “relationship” as many might presume. When most of us think of relationship, we tend to default to the realm of interpersonal relationships, such as those we have with our friends, family and coworkers. But the relationship Krishnamurti refers to is much more all-encompassing than that. In fact, he is referring to something that encompasses the totality of our experience.
We relate to the world by attaching meaning to our experiences, and by mentally labelling objects within the field of those experiences. In other words, we relate to the world through our thoughts. While thinking certainly serves its purposes, Krishnamurti asserts that our thinking has become a terrible barrier where our relationship to reality is concerned. Our thoughts are based on our past experiences, and in relating to the present by way of our thoughts we are relating to reality as a construct of the past, reducing it into a series of “likes and dislikes”. Instead of experiencing and engaging in life in a natural and dynamic way, our relationship to our experience is based purely on the images we have formed about ourselves, each other and the world. Krishnamurti explains how this incongruent relationship is at the root of suffering, at the heart of the conflict and dysfunction that has troubled humankind since time immemorial. He explains that society is simply an extension of the individual, and that as long as individuals continue to perceive reality by way of the past, then their actions will be out of step with reality and society will continue to be a destructive affair. This deep conflict manifests at every level of society, in such sad and tragic affairs as broken marriages, suicide, and war.
One of Krishnamurti’s most powerful and challenging assertions is that to correct these problems is not simply a matter of correcting negative or hateful thinking, but that the entirety of our normal process of thinking is at the root of all this suffering. And because the very basis for the way we think and relate is a product of social and cultural conditioning, the process of freeing ourselves from that conditioning is not a matter of using thought, because that simply limits the outcome to the realm of that conditioning and always essentially leads us right back to where we started. For that reason, the process of undoing this conditioning cannot directly involve any teaching, system, or tradition. The path to freedom is pathless, as Krishnamurti says, and involves embracing what he calls choiceless awareness. This is a state of consciousness that is free from judgement and condemnation, of likes and dislikes, and one that is not constantly defining experience- because every act of such definition is a distortion of the present into a construct of the past.
Now this may all seem like intellectual abstraction that has very little value in terms of real world application, but I believe that it is actually a deep understanding of human psychology and the roots of personal and social conflict. I’m just becoming acquainted with Krishnamurti, and even if my knowledge were greater, I certainly couldn’t explain the intricacies or implications of his teachings in such a space. Personally though, I have already started integrating his teachings into my awareness, and I can attest that they are indeed very powerful. I’ve become aware of how I’m constantly defining elements of my experience and how that causes a great deal of inner conflict for me. Practising “just watching” (as Dr. Parekh often says) as a means of nurturing choiceless awareness, I find my awareness is increasingly stepping in when I would otherwise be caught up in thinking, and that interruption can lead me to a place of true mental stillness. It’s a huge relief from the incessant mind that has been burdening me for so long.
Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts paved the way for my understanding of Krishnamurti’s teachings, and my retreat at the Krishnamurti Centre seems to have ignited an ongoing process that continues to unfold on a daily basis. Just as I could only explain so much about Krishnamurti’s teachings, I have only explained just a bit about how these teachings are playing out in my daily life. I’m treating this as an ongoing experiment.
As for my big questions about life, thanks in large part to Tolle, Watts, and Krishnamurti, I’m developing an understanding of “self”, “other” and “society” that is helping me make sense of many things. I’m seeing more clearly just who I really am (by a process of understanding who I “really am not”), and also coming to understand some of the major underlying reasons for the suffering and chaos that have been humanity’s close companions for such a terribly long time.
Once we begin to shed those layers of self that are merely conceptual, it might seem like there is a great emptiness at the heart of all this, and at the core of our very being. In a sense, I think that’s correct. But I don’t believe this is a cold emptiness- quite the opposite in fact. I believe it’s something divine, and as we let go of the concepts that rule our perception, there is a real opportunity to enjoy a relationship with this underlying stillness that can enrich our lives in ways most of us can barely imagine, deepening our relationships and helping us to live our lives in ways that are truly serving both ourselves and others. This is a new path- a path to real freedom.
Julian Ruszel
When we were young, before going to schools, we looked at everything with a fresh and curious mind. There were clarity, freshness and beauty in our way of looking. We were fascinated to look at flowers, birds, moon, people, colors and shapes. There was not much knowledge about these things within us.
After we went to school, we were encouraged to remember the names of birds, flowers and other objects around us. We were enthusiastic in gathering knowledge about our environment. Learning was fun up to the end of 7th standard (grade). There were no examinations at the end of academic year to test our knowledge.
When we came to senior school in Standard 8, we had to learn too many subjects. Slowly learning became a burden. We had to memorize too many things in order to pass examinations. We developed fear and other psychological problems like competition, ambition, shyness and guilt about the nature of sexual feelings and insensitivity to nature. Our mind was occupied with too many thoughts and problems. Now trees, flowers, birds, colors, shapes did not look strange and beautiful. We looked at all these things with the words and knowledge we had learned.
We became intellectual as we grew older. We learned how to solve mathematical problems and apply our knowledge to solve problems in science. We learned how to analyze social, political, economical problems. We became clever in expressing ourselves through words and ideas. But in this process, we paid a heavy price. We lost the ability to look at things, people and nature with the sense of wonder and freshness, the way we looked before we went to school.
Is it possible to get back the way of looking at everything with freshness and beauty, without knowledge and images? Is it possible to have a silent and awake mind which can look at all things with innocence, beauty and love?
It is possible but for that one must have a passion to look within, to see how thoughts arise and how they move from one thing to another. One can observe in relationship how thoughts create all kind of psychological problems. Without turning our attention within, it is not possible to be free, happy, peaceful and to feel love and beauty. Without this freedom, life can become mechanical and meaningless even if one has money, power and fame in society.
Harshad Parekh
May 7-13, 2014
The KFA’s Annual May Gathering took place on May 10-11, 2014 at the Krishnamurti Educational Centre (KEC) in Ojai. I had been invited to attend on behalf of KECC.
I stayed at the Theosophical Society’s Krotona Guest House, together with the Indian delegation, and for meals and the events I commuted to the Pepper Tree Retreat at the other end of Ojai valley. The mealtimes turned out to be an unusual opportunity to meet many Foundation trustees, KFA staff and other members of the ‘K World’.
For this year’s Gathering the theme of “Unconditioning” had been chosen. Workshops took place Saturday and Sunday mornings and afternoons at Pine Cottage, Arya Vihara and the Archives building.
About 150 people were at the opening session and then attended about 24 different sessions and activities, including presentations by some trustees. Many of these were also videotaped and simultaneously broadcast online.
Three different events were held at any one time, so it was not possible to attend every event. Of the ones I attended, the talk by Dr. Krishna of Rajghat School on ‘What is meant by Freedom from Conditioning?’ was impressive in its scope, insight and accomplished delivery. Of special interest also was a presentation by Amanda Lezra, a 21 year old graduate of Oak Grove School, who reported on her project ‘Think on These Things’, an outreach program of the KFA aimed at young adults in high schools and universities. It uses social media in an innovative way to engage young people in the exploration of questions such as ‘What is success?’ and ‘What is learning?’ and to stimulate discussion for deeper self-understanding. I also attended two dialogues facilitated by Kandaswamy, the secretary of the KFI, and Eric Hassett, mainly to see how they were being conducted.
I had opportunities to meet with Jerome Blanche, the secretary of the KFT, Kandaswami, the long-term secretary of the KFI and Jaap Sluijter, the Director of the KFA (who said he was happy to finally ‘put a face’ to the KECC), as well as many of the attending trustees. Ray McCoy of KFT, who had visited Wolf Lake School and is now senior editor of the KFT, was unable to attend, but instead I had interesting conversations with David Skitt, who works with him and wrote the preface to K’s classic ‘Freedom from the Known’, among others.
The trustees from the various K Foundations seemed interested in knowing more about KECC and they were pleasantly surprised to hear that KECC is this year offering five K based sessions each month, in addition to the monthly weekend retreats, most of which are also K based.
I also met with K. Krishnamurthy, the head of KFI Publications, to finalize the publication in India of the small K booklet “On Knowing Oneself”, a good introductory talk by K in Sydney in 1955, that we will be handing out to guests and visitors free of charge.
I also reconnected with Mark Lee and Asha in their home for tea, with Ivan Berkovicz who had spent time at Wolf Lake School, as well as with Michael Krohnen, K’s cook and author of ‘The Kitchen Chronicles: 1001 Lunches with J.Krishnamurti’. Michael had given a cooking workshop at Swanwick many years ago and is now in charge of the library and book store. With him I visited the book store and received helpful feedback as to the books most in demand.
The KEC staff was very busy during the Gathering, but I briefly met most of them, including Eric Williamson, their website developer and Kelley O’Mara, their marketing manager and social media person. Most of the present staff are quite young, with Michael Krohnen the one long-term staff member. This seems to reflect the renewed energy that Jaap has brought to KFA since becoming Director two years ago. There is, moreover, an interesting new Intern Program for young persons, mainly in their twenties, and I met with some of them. One of them mentioned she would want to come to Swanwick at some point as a guest helper.
I also met with Richard Waxberg and Deborah Kerner in their home to finalize arrangements for them to hold a K based dialogue retreat at Swanwick that is now scheduled for October. They have successfully been holding Intensives at the KEC over the last decade, and also some 6 years ago at Swanwick. This workshop, together with Mark Lee’s July retreat here, are concrete ways of strengthening the KECC-KFA connection.
I had an interesting conversation with Ulrich Brugger at his Ojai Retreat, now a top ranked B&B, who at one time trained dialogue facilitators for the KFA, including Richard Waxberg. He also hosts dialogues and made some helpful suggestions in this regard.
I also visited the nearby Krotona library and book shop, both of which now also include a good selection of K books.
Before leaving, however, I left with Mark Lee some ‘Talking Points’ that he agreed to present at the ITM on behalf of the KECC. They clarified the role of the KECC, its relationship with the K Foundations and its intention to maintain and further strengthen its relationship with the KFA for the purpose of disseminating K’s teachings.
All in all, my presence at this event helped create greater awareness of KECC among the Foundations and helped create new contacts that may be helpful in the future.
Ralph Tiller
“Perhaps nobody can really meditate, because the very presence of you trying to meditate eliminates the arising of meditation. The meditator is not someone who meditates, but is the meditation itself. Meditation, he (Krishnamurti) says, is the ending of thought, but not by the meditator. The meditator is a thought-constructed “self” and thus cannot meditate. The meditator cannot bring an end to the movement of thought, because it is a product of thought. In that sense, perhaps meditation is a sort of brain-washing, but not of the scary, cultish kind that replaces one set of mental conditionings for another. Instead, to Krishnamurti perhaps meditation is a sort of detox, or purification of the mind, by allowing thoughts to find their proper place, and not dominate or shut out the silent mind with their constant chatter.”
Prof.Hillary Rodrigues
We at KECC are saddened by the recent loss of Mary Cadogan, who visited Wolf Lake School with Dorothy Simmons just before its inauguration in 1976 from Brockwood Park School in England. We were all impressed by her handsome and statuesque appearance and the gift of her autographed, new book “You’re a brick, Angela”. Although Dorothy (the sculptress-principal of Brockwood Park) was the vivacious one, Mary was the kind, soft-spoken one. She remained a Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust until the end.
The open meadows that fringe the shores of the sea in Metchosin are the result of the Garry Oak groves that stand there, and the careful cultivation of the camas plant by the First Nations people. They cultivated the camas fields, which form part of the natural order of vegetation, a plant whose bulbs were an important part of their winter diet. The dark Douglas fir forest favoured the deeper soils a bit farther inland.
Berta was born Sep. 6, 1913 in the village of Neuhofen, Lower Austria. Her father died when she was still a child and she and her mother then moved to the nearby town of Waidhofen. There they came into contact with a residential community of local intellectuals and artisans keen on exploring new ways of living and thinking, and who were attracted to the ideals and ideas of the Theosophical Society that, at the time, had a large international following and had declared Krishnamurti (or K) to be the vehicle for the World Teacher.
In later years she, with her brother Tony, would several times attend the Ommen camp talks in Holland where she, after the talks, would be invited to join K and others at mealtimes and social events. She also spent time in England to attend classes by Maria Montessori and completed her Montessori training. After WWII she attended K’s talks as often as she could, mainly in Saanen (Switzerland), but also in Brockwood (England) and Ojai (California).
On returning to Montreal 4 years later, the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada (KECC) was urgently looking for teachers and support staff for its newly established Wolf Lake School in Victoria. Accepting an offer to work there, I arrived in late 1979. I helped with tutoring and administration, but a main activity became organizing and maintaining a national outreach program for the KECC by organizing and hosting K video showings in Vancouver and Victoria and by supporting local groups across Canada. Eventually Hillary Rodrigues, a teacher and colleague, and I were asked by the owners to be in charge of the school in their absence until it was closed in 1981.
This is being written to honour an exceptional woman who lived a secluded life and yet had the foresight and immense generosity to leave her lifelong savings to a legacy which will allow others, like herself, to deeply explore the truth within each one of us. Without Gladys Clauson, it would not have been possible for the KECC (the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada) to reopen its doors.
Three weekend retreats, hosted by Ralph and Madelaine Tiller, were held this year in May, August and October at the Centre, the first year after its reopening. These retreats introduced Krishnamurti and his teachings in the context of videotaped talks by contemporary teachers Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti whose approach shares a similar focus on open enquiry into self and truth and a questioning of tradition, beliefs and spiritual authority.
