Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00740)

The TS Membership was at its highest when Annie Besant was the President and
just before Krishnamurti disbanded all organizations set up for him to teach.

In a very little known, but one of the boldest actions ever taken by Annie
Besant, she shut down the ES in 1928. It was of course re-opened, I believe
a year later. 

Besant was known to be one of the boldest action oriented organizers and the
historical fact may be of interest to some. I am excerpting from Emily
Lutyen's book "Candles in the Sun" which gives a very good account leading
to the shut down.

Hope this may interest some here.

MKRamadoss 

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Dr Rocke, who was travelling with Krishna and Mrs Besant .to India on the
China, fell down a companionway and died instantly from cerebral
haemorrhage.  She was to have attended the T.S. Convention at Adyar before
returning to Australia.  I have no letter from Krishna about this tragic
event, but he must have felt it keenly because Dr Rocke was one of his
oldest friends.  I certainly was deeply saddened by the news.  We had all
seemed so invulnerable and now there was Nitya gone and Dr Rocke too.

C.W.L. also went to Adyar for the Convention (from Sydney), and in a letter
dated December 8th 1927 Krishna told me that C.W.L. and his party had
arrived and that he had had a long talk with him for an hour and a half.
C.W.L. had asked him what his new consciousness felt like and when Krishna
told him there was no Krishna any more- the river and the sea had become
one-C.W.L. had replied, "Yes, like the books of old.  It is all true."
Krishna added that C.W.L. had been very nice and extraordinarily reverential.

I stopped keeping a diary after 1927, and I can find very few letters from
Krishna for 1928, so I have to rely mostly on the International Star
Bulletin' and the Star Review for the events of that year.

In March Krishna returned to London and gave his first public lecture in
England on the 31st at the Friends' Meeting House. The hall was packed with
fifteen hundred people and many hundreds could not gain admittance.  He
spoke for fifty minutes and the audience were deeply attentive.  A
correspondent wrote to the Star Review that she was present at the Chapel
Royal Savoy on the Sunday after Krishna's lecture and that the Chaplain, the
Rev.  Hugh Chapman, in the course of his sermon, spoke most beautifully of
Krishna, whose speech he had evidently heard.  He spoke of him as being full
of the spirit of God.  At the close of the service he asked- a blessing on
all those who were filled with gifts of the Spirit and on "that young Indian."

In April Krishna went to Ojai and the first Star camp was held there in May.

On May 16th he spoke in the Hollywood Bowl, a magnificent natural
amphitheatre, to sixteen thousand people.  This was his first public lecture
in America and it received a very good press.

Two days after the Ojai camp closed Krishna left for London.  On the 18th of
June he lectured at the Kingsway Hall in Holborn.  On the 20th he flew to
Paris, where he gave a public lecture at the Salle Pleyel.  Every one of the
three thousand seats was taken several days beforehand, and "a very
cultured, representative and interested audience filled the hall."

On the 27th he broadcast in French from the Eiffel Tower radio station on
"The Search for Happiness." This talk probably reached two million listeners.

I give all these facts to show that Krishna's public mission had now begun
in earnest.

Further alterations at Castle Eerde made it possible to have a gathering of
eighty people there this year before-the camp.  Leopold Stokowski, the
conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, came with his wife for a
short visit.  The gathering lasted three weeks and the camp afterwards was
held between the 2nd and l0th of August.

Krishna in his teaching this year declared more positively than ever that
the way to happiness-or Liberation, True, or whatever one liked to call
it-could not be found in any outward forms or "shelters of comfort,"' as he
put it, but only in oneself.

In his last talk at the gathering at the Castle he told us, I do not want to
have followers.... I abhor the very idea of anyone calling himself my
disciple.  Be rather the disciple of that understanding which is the fruit
of ripe thought and great love; be the disciple of your own
understanding.... If my authority or personality can sway your emotions and
your thought, so the authority or charm of another may upset your whole
understanding."

He asked us in his opening camp speech "to doubt everything, put aside
everything you have accumulated ... for if you would climb to a great height
you must carry very little with you." He declared that "Truth does not give
hope; it gives understanding." "The time has come," he said, "when you must
no longer compromise with Truth, when you must no longer subject yourselves
to authority. . . . All your systems,, your philosophies, your half-truths
must go in order to find the Eternal.... I hope you will not listen to
anyone, but will listen only to your own intuition, your own understanding,
and give a polite refusal to those who would be your interpreters."

I contributed an article to the September number of the Star Bulletin on the
Ommen Camp of 1928, which gives some idea of the effect of Krishna's
teaching this year on a great many people.  I wrote:

"The time has come for us all when a great and serious decision must be made
between a dead past and a living future.  How strange it seems that for
seventeen years we have been expecting the World Teacher, and now when He
speaks of that which is beyond all forms, we are hurt or angry.  He is
making us do our own work, mentally and emotionally, and that is the last
thing we expected of Him.  Some people are returning home naked and alone,
their foundations shattered, realizing the necessity of reorientating
themselves in a world in which every value has changed.  Some are feeling a
sense of bleak desolation at the prospect; others are feeling a joy and
freedom such as they have never known before.  Some will begin at once to
gather again the broken pieces and rebuild them on the old plan.  If there
can be tragedy associated with one who has attained ultimate liberation and
eternal happiness, the tragic side of this camp has been the way in which
the dead past has risen at every moment to confront the new ideas.  In every
question we stabbed him with the words, 'It has been said,' ' We have been
told.' He says to us, 'Accept no authority'; and we say, 'We cannot live
without authority, so, as we do not understand you, we will find someone
else to tell us what you mean and what we must do about it.'

"Krishnaji says, 'There is no God other than as manifest in man.' And we
say, 'You are wrong.  There is a God: we pray to Him, we know Him, we build
altars for His worship and He blesses those altars.'

"Krishnaji says: 'No ceremonies are necessary for spiritual attainment.  If
your desire is for the mountain-top I will show you the shortest way.
Come.' And we reply, 'The direct path is for you, the ceremonial path is for
us.  Besides, the world needs our ceremonies which generate force for its
assistance.  Your way is too simple and too difficult."'
Krishna closed the camp with the words, "There have been many thousand
people at these camps and what could they not do in the world if they all
understood I They could change the face of the world tomorrow."

After the camp Mary and I went with Krishna to St Moritz for a wonderful
month of peace.  We stayed in a chalet overlooking the Lake of Silvaplana.
Jinarajadasa spent some of the time with us and he and Krishna had many
talks together.

In October Krishna went off to India and I got a letter from him written
during the voyage on the S.S. Orford, telling me that he had had a letter
from Jinarajadasa enclosing a copy of one he had sent to Mrs Besant and
C.W.L. In this letter Jinarajadasa had told them that he had been seeing a
great deal of Krishna at St Moritz and that Krishna felt he was not being
supported in his teaching- by the leaders of the T.S. Krishna maintained
that the Liberal Catholic Church, Masonry, and so on were a waste of time,
and that although he (Jinarajadasa) did not follow him entirely he saw the
absolute necessity for some action-either the E.S. must be altered or some
other change made.  Krishna went on to say that he was not going to change
his attitude for anybody in this or another world; that they might say he
was not the World Teacher but he was going on with his teaching.  Life was a
strange affair, he added, but fortunately he had a strong sense of the
ridiculous.  The boat was full of Australians, the scorning variety, who
laughed at him to his face, so that there was not much danger of his
becoming conceited.

Before Krishna arrived in India, Mrs Besant, no doubt prompted by
Jinarajadasa's letter, closed the E.S. throughout the world and gave out a
statement that as Krishna was the Teacher he should teach and no one else.
Krishna wrote to me from Adyar on November 8th that Mrs Besant had done the
biggest thing that anyone could do-to build up something great and then put
it aside for something greater.  He was very glad that she had done it of
her own accord before he arrived, as no one could then say that he had put
pressure on her.  It would give him an immense opportunity and he must be
wise and full of patience.  He ended his letter by telling me that George
and Rukmini had left Adyar two days before he arrived.

A fortnight later he was writing again, still from Adyar, to say that he had
been speaking every day but that speaking to people who had ceased to think
was very exhausting.  They were all a bit nervous of him, he said, as he was
like a piece of glass which reflected them and they did not like that.  He
went on to say that George had returned and that they had had a long talk
together, the gist of which was that George had told him that he did not
believe Krishna was the Teacher but that he did not want to say so in public
out of consideration for Mrs Besant.  George had finally said, "You go your
way and we will go ours.  I also have something to teach."

There was now a clear-cut division between Krishna's followers and those of
George and Wedgwood - which Krishna thought better than the former pretence,
but the cleavage had not yet been made public or official.  Mrs Besant was
still holding the two factions together, although she told Krishna that she
would do anything he wanted her to do.  She wished she could give up the
Presidency of the T.S. and go with him wherever he went, but to her
disappointment her Master had told her to stand by her work.

However, she removed all functions of a ritualistic and ceremonial nature
from the Theosophical Convention at Benares at the end of December as
evidence of her recognition of Krishna as the World Teacher, and at his
talks she insisted on sitting on the ground with the rest of his audience
instead of on the dais beside him, and listened to him with the greatest
reverence.

She was now eighty-one and the faction against Krishna gave out that her
memory was failing and that she was senile.

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