Finally, After several months, I wake up in India to the sound of silence. Only the early morning birds calling and announcing the break of dawn. Soon the sun will rise over the dry, black-rocked mountains.
The Krishnamurti Foundation study center where I attended a 7 day workshop on his teaching this week, is situated on a hill station named Tiwai hill, near the village of Rajgurunagar in the heart of the high Deccan plateau in the state of Maharashtra in western India. These hills are the northern end of the Western Ghats, the long mountain range which starts here and stretches all the way down to Kerala and the southern tip of the subcontinent along its west coast. The landscape is high and very dry with tall grass and black basalt rock, the only witnesses to the powerful volcanic activity which took place here millions of years ago. It reminds me a lot of Ramat Hagolan in August. Around the hills is a huge water reservoir, collecting the heavy monsoon rains to supply water to the city of Pune, one of India's most modern cities, only 2 hours away, with a population of over 6 million and an advanced high-tech industry. The sunsets over the big kineret-like lake is stunning and meets Krishnamurti's (and my) great love and appreciation of natural beauty.
We are 4 westerners among 20 upper-class Indians, teachers, engineers, doctors, pilots and lawyers from the big cities in south India: Mumbai, Banglore, Pune, Chennai, Nagpur, Goa and more. Our schedule here is very lax and consists of discussions in the morning and watching Krishnamurti's talks in the evening. The rest of the day is spent in nature, contemplation, reading and talking to eachother.
The thoughts I have after the evening talks usually have nothing to do with the talk's content. but just things the K's words have triggered in me. He actually doesn't say much, but the little he says has a lot of power to it when i'm fully present in the listening. The inner activity - mind and emotion becomes clear in light of his words, or the way he conveys his ideas. I sense he was truly awake, but had a bit of a hard time explaining to people what this actually means. He speaks of sudden perception, where thought, time and fear are completely eliminated from human consciousness by seeing through them very clearly. This moment lasted and stuck with him until he died. These moments do occur to me occasionally, as they do to many people, but the mind goes back gradually to its habitual patterns of thought. However, not completely. This is where I find a slight lack of correlation between K's teachings and my personal experience. I see a gradual process of awakening, unfolding constantly on many levels.
What I realized this week is that significant processes are happening all the time. Even at times when I think I am just idling and having doubt weather this workshop is "doing" anything for me. But I feel the real reason why i'm here is sneaking up to me through the back door (excuse the hebrew term) and Krishnaji is just a comfertable excuse to raise new and important questions into my field of conciousness.
All the people I have had interaction with this week have tought me something important. The funny and heart warming conversations with D, the Jewish writer from NY, have opened me up to new aspects of my jewish identity. She spotted me as a "Lanzman" the minute I told her where i'm from, and hasn't let go of me since. Her life story is interesting: Her family escaped from Germany before the second world war and she grew up with a heavily Jewish-German conditioning, carrying the horros of her cousins getting killed in the camps into her life which led her to years of alcoholism and 4 dysfunctional marriages which finally brought her to Krishnamurti 30 years ago. Now she is publishing books together with Kishore, the Director of the center here and a very wise and gentle man. She talks to me like I was her grandson, very funny and energetic, at the age of 73, the same age my maternal grandmother died, whom she reminded me so much of. She gave me a sense of being looked after and protected, a feeling i've been carrying with me since I left the Dharma gathering in Sarnath. Our conversations about the Holocaust and about Israel were raising questions again about my identity as an Israeli jew. These thoughts easily come about while travelling in foreign countries and constantly meeting people from different backgrounds. They provide great mirrors sometimes.
So does this identity I carry have any significance when I look at the world and at myself very clearly? Why do I have such a need in the past few years to declare at every opportunity I get that I want Israel to be my permanent home? Why is there such a strong connection to the earth, the people and the language? Is it just because I grew up in Israel or is it "in my blood" as D pointed out several times to me; this innate Jewish characteristic of learning and thinking and trying to find ways to reach god, or something greater than the self. Even Jack Kornfield, a world famous Insight meditation teacher, said once than Jews are naturally inclined towards spirituality.
To add to all of this, my encounter with H, a retired scientist from Hanover, Germany has been very illuminating. At first he was just plain interesting, with many historical and scientific facts about India and the world, but then he shared with me the story of his father: Drafted to a military academy at the age of 12 after being abandoned by his parents, raised to be an officer at the highest service of the 3rd Reich and the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930's. He fought on the front lines against the Russian army in Lithuania in WWII and reached a point where he rebelled against his high commanders, following the confusion and disorder in the way the war was being fought towards its end. Word got out to his superiors that he was rebelling and he was to be hunted down and killed. After writing letters to his wife and father, explaining he'd rather die in dignity than to be killed by the defunct and brutal Nazi regime, he shot himself. A few months later H was born, a product of his father's last visit home from the front line. Having never met his father, he tried for years to question his mother as to what happened and probe into the truth of his father's death, being told for years that he was killed in the line of duty. His mother closed down the walls and refused to touch the issue, trying to avoid the great pain of losing her husband so tragically.
So here it was again! The holocaust, being Jewish, descendant of Polish jews who would have been in the camps (my grandmothers' families actually were), facing the son of a Nazi officer 60 years later, both of us trying to make some sense of this violent, crazy world we were born into and how it affected us as human beings; our relationships, fears and behavioral patterns, through the teachings of J. Krishnamurti in India. Kind of surreal no?
Who would of thought 60 years ago that this would be possible? I'm hoping that in less than 60 years, my son will travel to India and meet a Palestinian guy his age and together they will see the futility and ignorance in the senseless battles that were fought over the land they live in; how that conditioned their psyche, their sense of national and religious identity. I feel a lot of love when I bring all these life stories together and look at the present, and at mankind's ongoing, relentless striving for happiness and clarity of mind; freedom from the fog and from the dividing constructs which drove our parents and theirs to conflicts and war. Over what?! For god's sake! what the fuck for?! Ignorance has killed so many people, and for what? for having a country? God knows how long that's going to last. We've only been on the land for 60 years now, who can guarantee the next 60? Is it worth dying for? I feel that this has been the agenda for which I have come here, oddly enough.
All this is reinforced by the Indians in this workshop, constantly asking me questions about Jerusalem, Israel and Judaism. I'm happy to reply, and it brings to my attention again the fact that this is an identity I have constructed for the past 29 years, despite the fact that on a deep level it is not WHO I AM.
At times, the morning dialogues were a bit frustrating. Going on and on about theoretical terms without penetrating the actual essence of the teaching. Kishore is very intelligent and concise, but his facilitating skills are a bit poor and the thread of conversation is often broken going into the hands of a babbling mass of old Indian intellectual men. I saw how I very easily started labeling these people as this mass, incapable of authentic insight and only concerened with terminology. But as the days went by, I was proved wrong. My heart opened to them completely during a ride 12 of us took to Bhima Shankar temple, a Shiva temple 40km from the center. I suddenly found myself getting to really know them, up close, this fascinating cut of Indian society, melting the barriers i've created in my mind and realizing how alike they were to me.
These people have worked hard to be where they are in life and they do not take for granted the affluent lifestyle in which they live. Many of them own several cars, live in big houses, have servants and maids and send their kids off to study in Europe and America. But at the same time they see on an everyday basis the other side of India; the poverty and the corruption and the mass idolatry and carelessness for the environment, and found them selves also struggling with the less attractive sides of their own country. They see more clearly than any other Indian I have met the absurdity and dangers of India's fast development and the problems of holding on to traditions such as the caste system and religious beliefs. This is what brings them here, to the radical teachings of Krishnamurti, instead of running off with the rest of the millions to Sai Baba, Amma or any other of India's popular present day gurus. They are seeking answers that their ancient culture could not give them, although they feel an integral part of it. They still closed their eyes and chanted to Lord Shiva in the temple, and prostrated to the Shiva Lingam covered by a silver cobra. But that does not give them security like it does to many other Indians. They are thinkers, articulate english speakers, demanding more from life, even after achieving the comforts of living a high-class life in modern India.
And I couldn't help but feeling the same. Growing up with a sense of being Jewish, that Zionism is important and that without Israel we'd all be killed by our neighbors or by all nations of the world, but feeling there must be more to it than that. These stories don't provide answers to the deeper questions of life. Who am I? What is the nature of our existence as human beings, without these titles and identities? Why is the system so defunct? Why is the violence never ending if this is the "right" thing to do? Why did my friends have to see people blown up to pieces in Lebanon at the age of 20? Why is there such neglect of our environment and of resources while we clearly see the world being destroyed in front of our eyes? Why the apathy and blindness? Why do people have to be so bull-headed? Including myself. Isn't it much simpler to love? Is holding on to ideas and images so much more important? Can't we see it's leading us nowhere as a human being on this planet?
I think this is part of what brings me to India. Gaining some perspective, being away from the routine and having the space and time to look deep within and investigate. look clearly into the movements which are going on inside my mind and heart, and maybe to understand the way I act out of conditioning, the way I react to the world around me. What makes this human organism of mine tick? Why does the world function as it does? Not to take anything for granted, appreciating the capacity to question life given to me by the love being human and being able to think and feel, and eventually realize something which is greater than myself, great than the self; a reality which encompasses all of life and all experience which all phenomena comes out of and dissolves back into in an ongoing, ever changing flux of natural interactions arising and passing away, being born and dying in every second without leaving a trace.
This wild journey has no path. No comparison; no way of evaluating where I am, how I'm going, what is happening to me. It is a path not yet trodden and only I am walking it. It is forming as I step on it, each step revealing new and fascinating realities. There is no security in this journey. No one who can tell me I will reach somewhere at the end of it or who knows when it actually began. It may have began before I was born, much before I knowingly did anything about it. Doing implies that there is someone actually on this path, but the more I see the less I sense myself actually doing anything or making any real choices. Life is just unfolding itself and showing it's grandeur more and more, bit by bit, non sequential and non-chronological because time is not a factor for it. I put my experience in terms of time and I am not in the experience anymore. Time implies there is movement of thought, but who is thinking? Thought is just commenting on it, trying to fit into habitual ways of thinking, associating it with me, the ego, the self and everything happening in relation to it. But I am a part of this journey just as everything else and new aspects of its existence, or non-existence unfold just as other aspects of reality show them selves.
Thank you for listening.
(The title to this entry provided by brother George Clinton. Long live the funk!)
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