David Bohm and Jiddo Krishnamurti

In 1922 Krishnamurti had a spiritual awakening which Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, edited by Rosemary Ellen Gulley, describes as follows:

He suffered excruciating headaches, visions, and convulsions, shuddering and moaning, and semiconsciousness, much as a person possessed. These seizures and spiritual manifestations lasted for several years and formed the basis for Krishnamurti's later orientation. He called the ordeal "an inward cleansing."

Krishnamurti tried to enter Oxford, but failed its entrance examination. He never got a college degree. In 1929 he made a cleansing break with his theosophical upbringing by disbanding the Order of the Star. A year later, to Annie Besant's sorrow, he resigned from the Theosophical Society. Henceforth he would travel around the globe, giving talks and conducting dialogues in which he taught a vague form of consciousness raising unrelated to any religion, and based on his own techniques of meditation and self-improvement.

As Bohm's friend and collaborator David Peat tells it in his biography of Bohm, Infinite Potential (1997), young Krishnamurti actually believed for a time that he was indeed the incarnation of Lord Maitveya, and the true successor to Jesus. His consciousness and that of Maitveya had merged; the "beloved" spoke through him. Although Krishnamurti outgrew the theosophical nonsense Besant and Leadbeater had drummed into him, he never stopped believing that he and he alone among living mortals knew the truth about everything. His teaching was a mix of dull platitudes and murky phrases such as "the observer is the observed," "thinking is the thought," "choiceless awareness," and that to be transformed one must "die to the moment." He was convinced that when a person was radically changed through proper meditation there were actual mutations in the brain!

Krishnamurti's name was on more than forty books, as well as on endless audio and video tapes. The Ending of Time (1985) was a book coauthored with Bohm. I have done my best to try to read some of these books without falling asleep. It is hard to understand how the author of such vapid ideas could have mesmerized listeners, most of them women, when he lectured, and to have captured the admiration of a great physicist. His lines are like those in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." As Alice remarked, they seem to mean something, but it's hard to pin down just what. There is never a hint in Krishnamurti's writings of a personal God or the survival of personality after death. He almost never refers to or quotes from any other thinker. His vision is a kind of watered-down Buddhism in which the key message is that everything is interconnected and one must live in the moment, without fear, and accept everything that happens with resignation and tranquility. The same infuriating vagueness permeates books written by his admirers.

To give you a glimpse into Krishnamurti's vagueness, here are a few typical excerpts from his talks: