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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 11, 2009 11:58:54 GMT -6
I have finished Shri Purohit Swami's An Indian Monk. My advice is don't bother. It is completely self-indulgent. A waste of time, unless you like that sort of self-adulation, or, if you find it funny and want a good laugh. There is a good reason it did not do well when it was first published in spite of Yeats' influence and promotion. One wonders how such a brilliant poet could have judged it a masterpiece. It did manage to picque my interest in Yeats, however. I wondered what kind of relationship he had with the good guru. They had a correspondence which might be available. I have not sought that out as of yet. I have been reading the 2nd volume of a recent biography of Yeats to try to learn more about their relationship. It is actually rather interesting. The is a childlike quality about Yeats that is very endearing and I find that I enjoy his poetry. I like poetry that rhymes. Old-fashioned in that way I guess. That is also what I admire about our bard, madanmohanji's work.
Anyway, so much for Shri Purohit's biography. His guru's account of a pilgrimage called The Holy Mountain might be a better work. I plan to check that out once I am back in the USA. Yeats also wrote the preface to that book.
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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 11, 2009 12:44:37 GMT -6
I also finished a biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti called Star of the East by Roland Vernon. What an extraordinary life! This biography does a good job of maintaining an unbiased point of view without ignoring the uncomfortable facts of the story. I highly recommend it. I wanted to cite some passages from it, but had to return it to the library. I come away from it thinking that Krishnamurti's life was something of tragedy. The Theosophists really screwed him up and he was never able to recover. His teachings are really nothing new and in some ways are nonsensical. "Truth is a pathless country." That is to say there is no path to Truth. If so, Baba, why are we listening to you? Such was the criticism of one of his followers, a man who had the same name, U G Krishnamurti who became disillusioned with him. But how could it be any different. Krishnamurti did manage to attract many brilliant people, but he invariably lost them when they discovered the hollowness of his teaching and of him as a person. He was never really allowed to develop into a person.
There is no doubt that he believed he was something special. He said so plainly a few weeks before his death. He regarded himself as a conduit for some higher power which spoke through him. Vernon's biography is an interesting read and has many interesting pictures as well. There is no doubt that Krishnamurti was a very handsome man. That is one trait all World Teachers must have, unless you are a Daoist (vide Zhuang Zi). I may even use it in one of my classes in the future.
The blessing of this book is that it provoked an interest in another character, David Bohm, who died in 1992 not far from where I am living in London at the moment. Thus I am now reading a book on his brilliant life called Infinite Potential by F. David Peak. I am hopeful of discovering in Bohm a more sophisticated way to unite matter and spirit into a single, unified and whole understanding of the nature of reality. That seems to be the message that is emerging so far. He sought for wholeness. His hidden variables was a effort to put quantum unpredictability on a more solid causal ground. I am actually beginning to understand some physics, apart from the mathematics, that is. More on this later.
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