Source: Skeptical Inquirer, July 2000 v24 i4 p20.
Title:     David Bohm and Jiddo Krishnamurti.
Author: MARTIN GARDNER

Excerpted
 
Ex-Communists and fellow travelers have a habit of turning from Marxism to another ideology, often Catholicism or some other religion. In David Bohm's case it was a bounce toward Buddhism and Hinduism, and the teachings of Krishnamurti. After decades of close friendship, with unbounded admiration largely on Bohm's side, the two had a bitter falling out. Krishnamurti always had a low opinion of physics, and Bohm's pilot wave theory in particular. He had a cruel way of treating Bohm as if he were a stupid child unable to fully appreciate his (Krishnamurti's) vast wisdom.

Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was one of the most peculiar gurus ever to come out of Mother India. In 1908, this thin, frail, shy lad, of Brahmin birth, was discovered by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, the most famous disciples of Madame Blavatsky. They became convinced that young Jiddo was the new messiah, or world teacher, and the incarnation of Lord Bodhisattva Maitreya, the fifth Buddha. Leadbeater, who claimed to be clairvoyant, saw all this when he viewed Jiddo's aura. Besant adopted him as her son and raised him as a theosophist. In 1910, Krishnamurti's first book, At the Feet of the Master, was published by England's Theosophical Society. It was said to have been written by Krishnamurti who used the pseudonym of Alcyone, when he was 15.

In 1911, Besant, then the international president of the Theosophical Society, founded the Order of the Star of the East. Krishnamurti was the rising Star. In 1922 Annie purchased six acres in Ojai, California, where Krishnamurti eventually settled, and which became the headquarters of the still-flourishing Krishnamurti Foundation.

Jiddo's father lost a lawsuit trying to regain custody of his son. His Lawsuit accused Leadbeater, who was probably gay, of having had sexual relations with Jiddo.

In 1922 Krishnamurti had a spiritual awakening which Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, edited by Rosemary Ellen Gulley, describes as follows:

He suffered excruciating headaches, visions, and convulsions, shuddering and moaning, and semiconsciousness, much as a person possessed. These seizures and spiritual manifestations lasted for several years and formed the basis for Krishnamurti's later orientation. He called the ordeal "an inward cleansing."

Krishnamurti tried to enter Oxford, but failed its entrance examination. He never got a college degree. In 1929 he made a cleansing break with his
theosophical upbringing by disbanding the Order of the Star. A year later, to Annie Besant's sorrow, he resigned from the Theosophical Society. Henceforth he would travel around the globe, giving talks and conducting dialogues in which he taught a vague form of consciousness raising unrelated to any religion, and based on his own techniques of meditation and self-improvement.

As Bohm's friend and collaborator David Peat tells it in his biography of Bohm, Infinite Potential (1997), young Krishnamurti actually believed for a
time that he was indeed the incarnation of Lord Maitveya, and the true successor to Jesus. His consciousness and that of Maitveya had merged; the
"beloved" spoke through him. Although Krishnamurti outgrew the theosophical nonsense Besant and Leadbeater had drummed into him, he never stopped believing that he and he alone among living mortals knew the truth about everything. His teaching was a mix of dull platitudes and murky phrases such as "the observer is the observed," "thinking is the thought," "choiceless awareness," and that to be transformed one must "die to the moment." He was convinced that when a person was radically changed through proper meditation there were actual mutations in the brain!

Krishnamurti's name was on more than forty books, as well as on endless audio and video tapes. The Ending of Time (1985) was a book coauthored with Bohm. I have done my best to try to read some of these books without falling asleep. It is hard to understand how the author of such vapid ideas could have mesmerized listeners, most of them women, when he lectured, and to have captured the admiration of a great physicist. His lines are like those in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." As Alice remarked, they seem to mean something, but it's hard to pin down just what. There is never a hint in Krishnamurti's writings of a personal God or the survival of personality after death. He almost never refers to or quotes from any other thinker. His vision is a kind of watered-down Buddhism in which the key message is that everything is interconnected and one must live in the moment, without fear, and accept everything that happens with resignation and tranquility. The same infuriating vagueness permeates books written by his admirers.

To give you a glimpse into Krishnamurti's vagueness, here are a few typical excerpts from his talks:


It was not just Bohm who fell under the sway of Krishnamurti's charisma. He strongly influenced such writers as Joseph Campbell, the poet Robinson
Jeffers, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts who churned out popular books about Zen Buddhism. George Bernard Shaw once called young Krishnamurti "the most beautiful human being" he ever saw. After visiting Krishnamurti's castle in Holland, Campbell wrote in a letter: "I can scarcely think of anything but the wisdom-and-beauty-of-my friend." In another letter he said, "Every time I talk with Krishna, something new amazes me."

There were two Krishnamurtis. One was the persona presented to the world through lectures and books; a man without ego who led a sanctified life of
celibacy and high moral purity. The other Krishnamurti was a shadowy, self-centered, vain man, capable of sudden angers and enormous cruelty to
friends. He was also a habitual liar. Krishna, as his friends called him, freely admitted his compulsive lying. He blamed it on simple fear of having
his deceptions detected.

Krishna's closest associate was Raja, whose full Indian name was Desikacharya Rajagopalacharya. A native of India, Raja was as handsome as Krishna, and for almost thirty years a devoted disciple who served as his master's business manager, secretary, literary agent, and editor. It was Krishna's good friend Aldous Huxley who introduced Raja to his editor at Harper and Row, the firm that published Krishna's many books. Krishna had little interest in writing or publishing, but he allowed Raja to cobble books out of his talks and notebooks, and to edit this material into volumes.

Raja's wife Rosalind was a beautiful American Caucasian who grew up in Hollywood, a friend of movie stars, who almost became a professional tennis
player. Toward the end of Krishna's life an astonishing revelation came to light. For nearly thirty years, unknown to Raja, Rosalind had been Krishna's
mistress! As such, she had undergone a miscarriage and several abortions, all miraculously kept secret from her husband.

Raja forgave his wife and never ceased loving her, but a rift between Raja and Krishna grew steadily wider until finally they became bitter enemies. Twice Krishna unsuccessfully sued Raja for mishandling funds, and Raja in turn sued Krishna for slander. All three lawsuits were finally settled out of court. The two former friends never reconciled.

Rosalind's passion for Krishna cooled when she discovered he was having another secret affair, this time with a shy, beautiful young woman, Nandini
Mehta. Raja's passion for Rosalind also dimmed when he fell in love with Annalisa Begha, a Swiss-Italian who was twenty-three years his junior. After
he and Rosalind finally obtained a Mexican divorce, Raja and Annalisa married.

You can learn all the sordid details about these surprising events in a splendid biography of Krishna, Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti (1991), by Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of Rosalind and Raja. Now married to mathematician James Sloss, a professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, Radha is also the author of India Beyond the Mirror (1988).

A story in Mrs. Sloss's book reveals how little Krishnamurti understood science. America's funniest and nuttiest medical quack was Dr. Albert Abrams. You can read about him in my Fads and Fallacies. Abrams invented a bizarre electrical machine which he claimed could diagnose all ailments from a drop of blood, and could cure terrible diseases by electrical rays. Like the writer and socialist Upton Sinclair, Krishna became convinced that Abrams's machine did everything he claimed it did. He sent Abrams a blood sample, and was told he had cancer in his intestines and left lung, and syphilis in his spine and nose. After being treated for a while by Abrams's machine, Krishna said he felt much better.

Radha likens her father to the Hindu god Vishnu, the preserver, and Krishna to Shiva, the destroyer. "The division between Krishnamurti himself will cast a very dark shadow on all he has said or written," Radha concludes. "Because the first thing the readers will say, is: 'If he cannot live it, who can?'"

After learning about Krishnamurti's secret love affair with his best friend's wife, Bohm felt betrayed. Perhaps this plunged him into his third and final
deep depression. Hospitalized, suffering from paranoia and thoughts of suicide, Bohm underwent fourteen episodes of shock therapy before he recovered sufficiently to leave the mental hospital. Earlier triple bypass surgery on his heart had been successful, but his death in 1991, at age 75, was from a massive heart attack. Krishnamurti had died six years earlier, at his home in Ojai, of pancreatic cancer. His body was cremated.