“We are delighted to share with you Watkins’ 2022 list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People – spiritual teachers, activists, authors and thinkers that change the world.”
Now it has arrived. Watkin’s Top 100. Pope Francis tops as usual. Swedish Greta Thunberg has received an honorable third place. And actress Gwyneth Paltrow on 9th? (Funny, we saw her in a movie earlier this week, and wondered where she had gone 🙂 )
Today 17/2 it’s 100 years since the State Institute for Racial Biology, in Uppsala, Sweden, was founded, they say on TV.
What did the Western Esoterical (“New Age”) stage looked like at that time? 1922 … Jiddu Krishnamurti, “the Golden Child” of the Theosophical movement, get “enlightened”. (The Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen had had a similar life-changing experience the year before.)
It will not be until 1929 before Krishnamurti turns his back on the theosophists. Theosophy with its doctrine of “root races”, the evolution of souls and cultures, and our rise towards light & sovereignty, peaks the years until then, as I have understood it. They attracts huge masses, thousands and thousands again, of educated people. This world view seems to have fitted well with the Zeitgeist of the time.
Hitler takes full control of the Nazi party in 1922, too, I google.
I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for here…. That the world has changed more than this type of spirituality has, perhaps?
(My take on the subject is rather emotional, personal, superficial when it comes to facts. I recommend you to check out English philosopher Jules Evans. He’s working on something around Western Esotericism, elitism, übermench thoughts, eugenics, and more, I’ve noticed. I. Ex.: This)
Yesterday I lost my new scarf. Had been visiting acquaintances and when it was time to get dressed and go home it was gone. Gone. It couldn’t be found anywhere. Once home, I continued to look, in the pockets of the jacket (for the fifth time), in the luggage, in all the bags & nooks of a cart that had been on the tour. Nowhere the scarf was to be found. I went to bed disappointed.
When I woke up this morning, I knew exactly where it was. Out in the hall, up to my jacket and put my hand in the cap. Voila! There it was.
I wonder what happens when you sleep. What resources are released? If this could happend, what else is possible?
“Ojai”… I see an ad from the Krishnamurti Center on the U.S. West Coast. I have probably mentioned that my two foremost sources of inspiration — not only for what they actually said and have written, but as individuals, almost as “archetypes” for two different kinds of spiritualities — have been the Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen and the Theosophical apostate Jiddu Krishnamurti.
And I’ve had the universe on my side, it seems 🙂
The first time I was going to visit the Martinus Center in Zealand, Denmark, early summer -84, I started hitchhiking in Stockholm in the morning. And got to that center far out in the countryside the very same night. A combination of strange circumstances, it was like a wave of helpfulness.
In the spring of ’90, I was sitting on a Greyhound bus along the coast of California, glanzing through the window. Suddenly saw a sign for an exit road that had such a familiar name: “Ojai.” I knew Krishnamurti had lived in a place called that. I thought it was in India? I guess I catched a bus back just to check. And so I ended up at that center, too.
In both cases, however, I came three or four years too late to meet the founders themselves.
It’s as if every type of spirituality has its possible despecies. Esotericism, like Martinus, then one tend to become far too fond of the answers, “the thought system”. Such systems which there are several similar ones of. But that you has been able to find that one that is superior to the others, etc. And that other kind of spirituality, of which Krishnamurti is a representative? My impression is that the approach can get too aggressive and cross-confident, in its own way. Adherents of Krishnamurti can sometimes behave as spirituality’s equivalent of those organisation fighting against pseudoscience and alternative medicine, etc. (“Vetenskap och Folkbildning” and “Humanisterna”, in Sweden.)
I don’t know how to get their respective teachings together, Martinus and Krishnamurti? Or, in a broader sense: Western Esotericism and Non-duality. When I was more active, I fantasized about how the two might be seen as a kind of “epoxy” solution. Like a two-component glue. They each had an angle. It could not be expressed through the same person. Together, though they were a guarantor that one would not become too cocky, one-sided, fundamentalistic.
Am I a supporter of any of these men today? I guess that’s a matter of definition. Krishnamurti, for example? If someone were to scan my brain – if possible – and see which individuals had made a big impression, whose words and quotes had kind of built up my inner world, then it would say “Jiddu Krishnamurti” on a lot. (Others may in a similar fashion have been nourished by other philosophers, then one would find their names, of course.)
So, I would like to honor him by calling me a supporter. (I’ve barely read a line of him since I was twenty-five, though, but it matters less.) Credit where credit is due.
Then I don’t know if maybe Krishnamurti towards the end got a little too grumpy, like some of his contemporary adepts, too? A long life and having to answer a lot of questions that didn’t reflect what really interested him, along with age, maybe made him tired… He went a little on a routine.
But still, his story about the devil and a friend of his who were out walking, which he included in the speech 1929 when he dissolved the Star of the East, is a really bright light. Like a psychospiritual equation, a magical spell:
“You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, “What did that man pick up?” “He picked up a piece of truth,” said the devil. “That’s a very bad business for you, then,” said his friend. “Oh, not at all,” the devil replied, “I’m going to let him organize it.”
“It all began in the early 1920s in Vienna. Wilhelm Reich was not only a young student of Freud’s… But the father of psychoanalysis himself called him: ‘Der beste Kopfe.’ “The Best Mind in Psychoanalysis.” His ideas were so brilliant that already at the age of 22 – well before finishing his studies – Freud introduced him to work as a Psychoanalyst.”
This pops up in my FB-feed (an ad for something called “Metameric massage”). I don’t know much about Wilhelm Reich, hardly anything at all, other than that he somehow derailed later in in his career.
But It gets me starting to think about genius and madness. I recently got reminded of another of those freethinking pioneers, R. D. Laing, who also derailed, disappeared, and whose work has long been in the psychiatric-therapeutic freezer. But is being taught again today.
Yes, Madness and Genius, how they are connected. I think something that many of the pioneers, the founders of different schools, etc, in the world of psychology (I limit my thoughts to that) had in common, is that they somehow have been troubled souls. “Cross-border.” But what’s underneath this? What does their desire to transcend boundaries come of?
I often think it must have had something to do with their early upbringing. A sort of imbalance, actually. How they have had it with mom and dad (or equivalent), simply put. Reasonably harmonious individuals, who have found their (psychologically) place in the world rarely have what it takes. They rarely have that itch to make revenge or make their mark on the world, to rebel against establishments & authorities. They seldom have this deep experience that you have something unique to come up with, something that you obviously need to manifest.
So, that it’s really a defect or wound, a developmental psychological flaw in them, that drives them… They can achieve great things, find truths, make important contributions. But basically or in some respects, at least in the beginning, they often are “sicker” than average.
Today’s picture mystery. Background: Alfie Atkins does not want to sleep, so he sends dad away on various assignments. Get that and that. Finally, the teddy bear! Where is it? Dad finally finds it under the couch. Alfie waits and waits. But dad’s not coming? Alfie leaves the bed and goes to look… Then he finds dad lying on the floor of the living room.
Alfie notices that dad is asleep, because he snores. But, and this is where I was going to come!, I think nowadays (“Good night, Alfie Atkins” is from -72) one would be wary of making a drawing like this for a children’s book. Why? Because it could awake associations to stroke, heart attack, death.
Because something has happened to our collective “mentality”, that is. Which paths the thoughts quickly go, and thus what one must beware of. Or what do you think?
(It's a joke, 😉)
Here’s what might seem like wild speculation. Speaking of how a thought can pull out like a plague, an avalanche, for good or bad, impossible to stop, once it is on a roll.
After the weekend, Kentucky Fried Chicken in the U.S. will start selling deep-fried vegetarian “chicken” pieces. Even classic temple of meat must now be able to offer vegetarian options (and push a little extra for them in their advertising) so as not to seem completely passé, uninformed, irresponsible, unintelligent, evil.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/01/05/kfc-beyond-fried-chicken/9091297002/
It reminds me of how everyone now has to jump on the “vaccine train”. Authorities, states, journalists. And then I still think both trends are basically well-intentioned, but I recoil at the “mass formation” about it.
There are so many levels of scepticism one can harbor about how the pandemic is handled by society. Personally, I do not believe in any supranational, over-state orchestrated conspiracy, behind the fact that, among other things, the vaccine strategies look the way they do. Of course, there are companies where managers are rubbing their hands right now, over increased sales, and virologists who otherwise work in the quiet, unnoticed, but now get to experience themselves as heroes and sought after.
But there’s something exaggerated about it, isn’t it? Everything just “rolls on” and no authority or state dares to be less restrictive than the others.
Is it more like a perfect storm? Where the fuel is a mix of xenophobia, refugee flows across all borders that over the past decade have been perceived to threaten life as one enjoy it and want it to continue to be, and even the zoombie concept that is so cherished in pop culture. Along with globalization & the internet that makes everything so easy to stage and just be swept away by? That all of that became like fuel?
When I think about it, there must also be an element of “displacement” in it all, how we focus on and invest so much to deal with the pandemic. Maybe there are other things that are at least as urgent, but where you are more confused about how to cope with it. Something that is more worrying, something that arouses even more anxiety.
So then the pandemic, unwittingly understood, has offered an opportunity to escape the tension for a while. What could the other things be? The climate? The world economy? (And as a consequence of them both the refugee flows.)
But I don’t think this is something that our leaders are doing deliberately, to shuffle away the cards for us citizens and voters. I think it is so that they can maintain a sense of action, determination, competence, and to have a goal to work toward, themselves.
I myself realize that there is a real challenge with covid. But that it feels like there is something “psychological” behind the handling becoming so resolute, all or nothing, as well. “We know how to do it, follow us!” Sort of.
As a result, there is also a blaiming of “the others”, those who hesitate to follow restrictions and guidlines. Those who shout about how the emperor is at least carelessly dressed. Not naked, anyway, that’s not my own opinion.
(I’ve made an appointment to receive my third vaccine dose next week, just to let you know.)
Buddha’s Standpoint in Earthly Life, January 1920 – Hilma af Klint
Reminded of how much I wrestled with that admonition of “be yourself”, like in my late teens-early adult years (o pretty long I think). I just couldn’t understand what was meant! That it was something desirable, which was talked about, was called upon, so much I understood, but I was clueless.
It is normal in your teens at least, the search for identity, trying out who to be? My dilemma probably went a little deeper. Had to do with the fact that I ended up with older people in environments celebrating high, refined ideals of how to be, so early, I think.