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His dad worked on the grounds of the Theosophical Society in India. This was back in the day when India was a British colony and the West still believed in “the mystery of the Orient.” One day handsome young Jiddu was spotted at the beach by one of the Society’s leaders, Charles Leadbeater. “Wow!” Leadbeater exclaimed from behind a window. “What an aura that boy has about him. One day he’s going to be a world spiritual leader. And I’m just the man to see it done.”

Krishnamurti was fourteen. Leadbeater took the boy under his wing. Naturally, speculation has arisen ever since what else he took him under. But back in 1909 people weren’t quite so suspicious as they are now of the motives of well-to-do white men in authority over disadvantaged little brown boys. Or they kept quiet about their suspicions. Or maybe they just took a lot more for granted back then.

At one point, Jiddu’s father tried to get his son back from the Theosophists. The case went to court and dad lost.

Whatever else Leadbeater intended, he did keep his promise. Krishnamurti was raised and educated by the Theosophical Society and prepared for his role as a World Teacher. Some observers of the period weren’t so impressed by young Krishnamurti’s potential. They recall Jiddu as a rather dim-witted, passive boy, who would go along with what anyone said. “His head’s like a sieve,” said one such witness. “Whatever you put in the top comes pouring right back out the bottom.” Seeing as how they were trying to stuff his head with a lot of Theosophical mumbo-jumbo that may have been the best proof of all of Krishnamurti’s intelligence—and his instinct for survival.

Krishnamurti was raised to be a proper English gentleman, who also just happened to be a vehicle for Lord Maitreya in our time.

When he was twenty-seven, he began having these really bad pains at the back of his neck, like an eagle was grabbing his nape in it’s talons and trying to lift him up into the clouds as prey. The pain continued for quite some time. Krishnamurti decided it was a spiritual
transformation. Something was taking hold of him, clearing his consciousness. Then his beloved younger brother, always sickly, got sicker. The Theosophists assured Jiddu that his brother would get better. They were wrong. He unexpectedly died. Krishnamurti found himself a changed being. He quit the Theosophical Society. He was about to embark on his role as a World Teacher, but not the one everyone had planned for him.

He started off by declaring that “Truth is a pathless land.” That gives some indication of what was to come out of his mouth for the next 60 years.

The Theosophists were outraged. “And after all we did for that kid! Ungrateful little bastard.”

Krishnamurti never got tired of saying basically the same thing. “You can’t get the truth from anyone. Not from a priest or rabbi. Not from a psychoanalyst. Not from a guru. Not from a Zen master or a philosopher or politician or a Theosophist. Not from any book or Bible or Constitution or authority whatsoever. Oh, and, by the way, not from me either.”

Krishnamurti was like a magnet for disciples with his anti-authoritarian rap but he turned into a lightning rod once he attracted them, blowing their expectations to smithereens, because these people were still looking for an authority—an authority who would tell them that there was no authority. Krishnamurti wasn’t that. He wasn’t the sign pointing to anything at all. Enlightenment was just this: the idea that whatever you expected enlightenment to be—it wasn’t.

Whatever self-improvement people think they’re pursuing is nothing more than a variation of something they already are—it’s not a true transformation. What is necessary is a complete break from the “known.” When you think of being good, peaceful, loving, forgiving, etc…all you’re doing is projecting an idea of those qualities and conditioning your future behavior accordingly. You’re taking your idea of those qualities from some book or teacher or philosophy.

Krishnamurti urge those who truly wanted to change to inquire into the situation of their daily for themselves, without the crutch of authority. He urged those who came to hear him speak to observe their own thoughts and behaviors. Don’t try to change, he advised. That involves conflict, that involves time and a sequence of events that never breaks from the past, and is therefore no real change at all. You cannot “change” into something premeditated; that’s just an exchange of one “idea” of how you should be for another idea of how you should be. What you need to do is to break completely from the past, from the known. That is the only way to discover the unknown. And that’s precisely why people are so afraid to do such work. They are afraid of the unknown. Because the unknown is death. Any kind of real change requires a complete dying to yourself, to your thoughts, dreams, ambitions, beliefs, loves, hatreds, family, friends, country, job…your entire past self.

He said that when you’re doing or thinking something shitty, don’t try to discipline yourself, don’t force yourself to stop. Instead just watch yourself doing or thinking it that shitty thing. Even if you’re acting out that shitty thing, just keep watching, watch it like you’d watch a poisonous snake that had gotten loose in your room. Don’t take your eyes off it for a second. That’s what true meditation is—not sitting cross-legged in a room counting breaths awaiting Samadhi.

Just before he died, he issued a statement saying that he was authorizing no one to carry on his teaching. And that he shouldn’t be remembered as any kind of guru or demigod. “You’re on your own,” he said. “You always were. That’s what I was trying to tell you all along. What—you still don’t get it?”

He died in Ojai California on February 17, 1986. Of pancreatic cancer. At the age of ninety.