Taken from the book:
'Meetings with Sages and Saints'
A beginner in Krishnamurti’s teaching is initially faced with two apparent hurdles. The first is his usage of unconventional terms and the second, his denial of spiritual techniques, the Guru, and God.
Puzzled by these, I voiced my concern to the mystic-saint, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, also a great admirer of J. Krishnamurti. He listened attentively, and with a beatific smile replied, “Krishnaji is for the non-believers. Believers have any number of Masters to follow. But for a genuine non-believer, what is the recourse? Hence, Krishnaji chose totally different terms - terms acceptable to non-believers.” After a pause, Yogiji added, “I assure you, Krishnaji gives us the same essence as any of the great Masters, but couched in different terminology.”
Having received this inspiring clarification from an incomparable Siddha Purusha, I plunged myself again into the reading of both Krishnamurti and the Maharshi. It was not surprising that I stumbled across a plethora of striking similarities and it gladdened my heart.
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Krishnamurti: “Things happen in their own course. Stop fretting.”
Maharshi: “Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, Is for one to be resigned.”
Krishnamurti: “The mind is cause and effect, it is caught in time, it has a beginning and an end. Mind can never experience that which is without cause, the timeless, that which has no beginning and no end.’’
Maharshi: “How is it possible for the mind to know the Lord who imparts His light to the mind and shines within the mind except by turning the mind inward and fixing it in the Lord?”
Krishnamurti: “Thought cannot, do what it will, free itself from the opposites; thought itself has created the ugly and the beautiful, the good and the bad. So it cannot free itself from its own activities. All that it can do is to be still, not choose. Choice is conflict... The stillness of the mind is freedom from duality.”
Maharshi: “If a man is free from the pairs of opposites and lives in solitude, perfect wisdom shines in him even in the present body.”
Krishnamurti: “I was born in India into the Brahmanical fold. That root — it might be thousands of years old — was his conditioning, but so long as the mind was so conditioned, it was not free. It was the past as thought that essentially divided [the] man.”
Maharshi: “Break away from all relationship of country, status, caste and its duties and think always of your own natural state.”
Krishnamurti: “When the mind is in that state of loneliness, without any escape, then there is freedom from it. Separation exists because of the desire to fulfill; frustration is separation.”
Maharshi: “A yogi should not be swayed by desires or yield to gratifying the senses. He should find ecstasy in the Self alone, free from desire and fear. ”
Krishnamurti: “When I step out of that stream, I am not fragmented, not contradictory. I am Whole. The Whole has no root.”
Maharshi: “He enjoys bliss who realizes the Supreme, beatific, formless One, not alloyed with perceptions but is in pure all-covering Awareness.”
Krishnamurti: “The body does not divide. It never says, ‘I am’. It is thought that separates.”
Maharshi: “This body does not say ‘I’. Nobody says ‘I did not exist during sleep’. Once the ‘I’ arises everything arises. Inquire with a keen mind whence this ‘I’ arises.”
Krishnamurti: “This feeling of the ‘me’1 and ‘mine’ is the very core of the mind, it is the mind itself.”
Maharshi: “That which arises in the physical body as ‘I’ is the mind.”
Krishnamurti: (speaking of the sign of the Cross): “The straight line is the ‘I’ and the horizontal bar, the negation of the ‘I’.”
Maharshi: “Christ is the ego. The Cross is the body. When the ego is crucified, and it perishes, what survives is the Absolute Being.”
Krishnamurti: “In the Hebraic tradition it is only Jehovah ‘the Nameless One’ who can say ‘I AM’, that is the Tat Tvam Asi in Sanskrit.”
Maharshi: “ ‘I AM’ is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is indeed so well put as the Biblical statement : I AM THAT I AM’ in Exodus (ch. 3). There are other statements, such as brahmaivaham, aham brahmasmi and soham. But none is as correct as the name JEHOVAH — “I AM”. The Absolute Being Is what is — it is the Self. It is God. ”
