Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00737)

   Hi

   After HPB passed away, the model advocated in the Theosophical Society
for spiritual growth is that of non-meat eating, non-smoking, non-fur
wearing, celibacy (?), etc. etc. and could be for convenience called the
Leadbeater-Theosophy Model. We all agree that all these are conducive to a
healthy life.  

   The ironic fact is that when the Real Founders selected individuals to
launch the modern Theosophical Movement, they did *NOT* select ones fitting
the Leadbeater-Theosophy spiritual Model. HPB and HSO ate meat and both
smoked. (They also several times when travelling in India, just lived on
bananas and so they were flexible.) If they were to miraculously reappear
today, they would not be allowed to live either at Adyar or Wheaton and eat
meat or smoke. I am not advocating that the present restrictions should be
lifted at either place. 

   What I am trying to understand is whether in attempting to force serious
Theosophists into the Leadbeater-Theosophy spirituality model (even though
fully  voluntarily) if the priorities got mixed up.

   This issue has been brought into focus by the publication of the book by
Radha Sloss on Krishnamurti. Sex and violence sells. The book focused on the
physical relationship K had with her mother Rosalind Rajagopal and this when
viewed from the traditional Leadbeater-Theosophy spiritual model shocked
many who were brought up in that tradition. The book was very widely
reviewed and a review appeared in TSA's Quest Magazine.

   In a recent book by Mary Lutyens titled "Krishnamurti and The
Rajagopals", she addresses this issue head-on in the very first page. As
this may be a topic of interest for consideration of some here, I am
excerpting it.

MK Ramadoss

============================================== 

   This is a personal reply to Lives in the Shadow with J Krishnamurti by
Radha Rajagopal Sloss (London, 1991).

   The publishers of this book claim that it was written "in a spirit of
tenderness, fairness, objective inquiry and no little remorse", yet the
author rarely misses an opportunity to belittle Krishnamurti; it contains
many misstatements of fact, false inferences and snide innuendoes, and it is
heavily biased in an attempt to justify the author's parents at
Krishnamurti's expense.

   Radha Sloss (RS in future) has taken such pains to make out that K (as I
shall now call him) was a liar, that anything said by K's friends as to what
he told them can, RS implies, be dismissed as a lie.  The author even goes
so far as to write that my mother, K's oldest friend, who had known him from
1911 until her death in 1964, had called him "a congenital liar".  I will
never believe this without written proof I knew her feelings for him too
well.  We are supposed to assume that everything Krishnamurti said which the
Rajagopals objected to was a lie whereas everything unsubstantiated they
choose to say is the truth.

   RS's main accusation against Krishnamurti is that he had a physical
relationship for many years with her mother, Rosalind Rajagopal, while
maintaining "a chaste image".  The physical relationship is not in dispute
and should not come as a shock.  It certainly did not surprise or shock me
when K told me about it.  I knew about his relationship with Rosalind before
I wrote the last volume of my biography but did not realize that Rosalind
wanted her adultery broadcast to the world.  I have always stressed that
Krishnamurti was physically a perfectly normal man.

   As for its being a secret affair, was K supposed to go about saying that
Rosalind was his mistress?  It was her concern as much as his.  And he never
"presented" himself as being celibate.  According to the tenets of
Leadbeater-Theosophy, celibacy was essential for any aspirant to the Path of
Discipleship but K broke away entirely from Theosophy and its tenets in 1929
and thereafter often spoke publicly against celibacy.  Here are a few
quotations from his published talks to prove this point: "So-called holy men
have maintained that you cannot come near God if you indulge in sex,
therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it.  But by
denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they
deny the whole beauty of the earth.  They have starved their hearts 
and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty
because beauty is associated with woman." And again: "I think we should
understand what love and chastity are.  The vow of chastity is not chastity
at all, for below the words the craving goes on and trying to suppress it in
different ways, religious and otherwise, is a form of ugliness which, in its
very essence, is unchaste.  The chastity of the monk, with his vows and
denials, is essentially worldliness which is unchaste.  All forms of
resistance build a wall of separateness which turns life into a battlefield;
and so life becomes not chaste at all." And yet again: "To deny sex is
another form of brutality; it is there, it is a fact.  When we are
intellectual slaves, endlessly repeating what others have said, when we are
following, obeying, imitating, then a whole avenue of life is closed; when
action is merely a mechanical repetition and not a free movement, then there
is no release; when there is this incessant urge to fulfil, to be, then we
are emotionally thwarted, there is a blockage.  So sex becomes the one issue
which is our very own, which is not second-hand.  And in the act of sex
there is a forgetting of oneself, one's problems and one's fears.  In that
act there is no self at all."

   In answer to a question he was asked at a public meeting, "Is it possible
for a man and a woman to live together, to have sex and children, without
all the turmoil, bitterness and conflict in such a relationship?" K said,
"Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship?  I love
someone and she loves me and we get married-that is all perfectly
straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all. (When we
say we get married I might just as well say we decide to live together.)
Can't one have that without the other?  Without the tail, as it were,
necessarily following?  Can't two people be in love and both be so
intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and an absence of a
centre that makes conflict?  Conflict is not in the feeling of being in
love.  The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict.  There is
no loss of energy in being in love.  The loss of energy Is in the
tail-jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that
love, the constant demand for reassurance and security.  Surely it must be
possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without
the nightmare which usually follows.  Of course it is."

   Are these the words of a man pretending to be celibate?  People who are
disturbed and disillusioned by the fact that K had a physical affair should
inquire of themselves whether they have not been projecting on him their own
conventional image of what "a holy man" should be.

   What K had to experience with Rosalind Rajagopal after some years was
"the tail".  She became jealous, possessive and suspicious, thus ruining
what had once been a beautiful relationship.

   The question of whether Rajagopal was deceived or not and the pregnancies
and abortions will be gone into later, as will the most monstrous of the
accusations made against K, those to do with the "process".

   The strangest thing about RS's book is the Rajagopals' lack of interest
in K's teaching, their absence of all mystical sense and knowledge of the
true nature of the extraordinary being they lived with for so many years,
thus trivializing his story to the level of their own triviality.  To
realize this it is necessary to touch again on those parts of K's early life
where RS has often gone badly astray. (A detailed account of K's life up
till Mrs Besant's death in 1932, taken from original sources in the Adyar
archives and K's own letters, is given in The Years of awakening.