The Order of the Star
1915 – 1924
Mrs. Besant’s idea was that this boy should be trained and educated in England for this tremendous role. And the following year she founded “The Order of the Star in the East.” And Krishnamurti was made the head of it.
“A guest am I in this world of transient things, unfettered by the entanglements thereof. I am of no country, no boundaries hold me.”
J. Krishnamurti
German blockade of England
Italy declares war
on Austria-Hungary
Germans sink Lusitania
Kafka writes Metamorphosis,
The Trial, and Amerika
Einstein publishes
“General Theory of Relativity”
1.5 million Armenians
massacred by Turks (1915-1920)
Margaret Sanger jailed
for promoting birth control
D.W. Griffith Films:
“The Birth of a Nation”
Zeppelin bombing of England
The Gallipoli Campaign:
Britain and France
1st transcontinental telephone
conversation


Woodehouse, Jinarajadasa. Normandy, France, 1913


Leadbeater consecrated
as Bishop of Liberal Catholic Church
in Sydney, Australia
First zeppelin raid on Paris
The Battle of Verdun
Sinn Fein Easter rebellion, Ireland
Pancho Villa raids Columbus,
New Mexico
John Dewey:
Democracy and Education
Rasputin killed
D.W. Griffith Films: “Intolerance”
Pershing leads expedition
against Pancho Villa
U.S. intervenes in
Dominican Republic
U.S. child labor laws
Jazz sweeps the U.S




Krishnamurti fails to get into
Oxford or Cambridge
Besant elected president
of Indian National Congress
U.S. enters World War I
Russian Czar abdicates
Lenin returns to Russia
Bolshevik Revolution
Trans-Siberian Railway completed
Charlie Chaplin signs
$1 million contract
Buffalo Bill Cody dies
Women ‘bob’ their hair
Britain captures Palestine
Degas dies


Worldwide influenza epidemic
Armistice signed ending
World War I
Knute Rockne becomes head
football coach at Notre Dame
Czar Nicholas II and family
executed by Bolsheviks
Women over 30 can vote in Britain
German army mutinies
Wilson announces 14 point plan
Poland gains independence
Czechoslovakia
gains independence
U.S. Air Mail service begins




“There was a sense of tremendous feeling about all this, not just an intellectual concept, an intellectual invention, but a feeling that a great event, a great thing was around this boy. People were talking around the boy, all the theosophical jargon about discipleship, and how the Master treated the disciples and so on and on. All that went around him all the time, not just for a few days or a few weeks, all the time. And apparently, nothing of that entered into the boy.
He was taken to Europe, lived with people, so-called British aristocracy, butlers, yachts, clothes, servants, Rolls-Royces. He never smoked, never drank. Girls used to come around him and he didn’t know what it was all about. And so there was this peculiar state of mind which could not be held in a pattern. And they had put him at the head of an organization, “Order of the Star in the East”, where he was literally worshiped. And he used to shrink from all that. He was vague. He would tell everybody: “I’ll do whatever you want.” That used to be his favorite phrase. “I’ll do what you want.” Even now sometimes it happens.
Interview
J. Krishnamurti


Lady Emily Lutyens




London: Krishnamurti
presides over Order of the
Star in the East meeting
Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empires dissolved
League of Nations formed
Henri Bergson:
L’Energie Spirituelle
Los Angeles Symphony
gives first concert
Bauhaus: Walter Gropius
Babe Ruth hits 587 foot home run
Treaty of Saint-Germain
signed by Allies and Austria
White Russian army defeated
Seaplanes cross Atlantic
Gandhi challenges British rule
of India
Jan Smuts becomes Prime
Minister of South Africa
Jack Dempsey wins world
boxing championship
Historical Film Rolls from 1920s | Part 2




Nitya joins the Red Cross in France as a dispatch rider. Krishnamurti hopes to go as well and orders a uniform.
He later gives up the idea at the request of Annie Besant.
“And Mrs. Besant’s idea was that this boy should be trained and educated in England for this tremendous role. And the following year she founded a thing called, “The Order of the Star in the East.” And she was the protector, with Leadbeater; they were the two protectors of the Order; and Krishnamurti was made the head of it. But she thought that he must be educated in England so she took him, first of all, on a visit in 1911, to England, with his brother. And the following year she took him to England to be educated, and he remained in England until 1920.
Of course, the objective of “The Order of the Star in the East” was to spread the gospel, so to speak; to prepare people to prepare themselves to become disciples of the Lord when he came, and that might be twenty years, thirty years, fifty years time. So there was a tremendous surge of interest in this and people absolutely flocked, Theosophists and non-Theosophists, to join this Order and the word was spread all around theosophical lodges all over the world, because it was a world-wide movement.
And it became a very, very great thing. And, as you can imagine, everybody was tremendously excited to think that when they came, they might be chosen as a disciple. And my mother went very much into this because she met Krishna in 1911 and she befriended him all the time he was in England.”
Interview
Mary Lutyens
Krishnamurti’s biographer


The Process Begins
Krishnamurti to Paris to learn French
League of Nations created
19th Amendment:
American women can vote
Joan of Arc canonized by
Pope Benedict XV
The Jazz Age:
Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith,
Duke Ellington
Edith Wharton:
The Age of Innocence
Finland gains independence
Ireland granted home rule
Gandhi – independence movement
Palestine becomes British mandate
Syria becomes French mandate
U.S. Prohibition begins
Rorschach devises “inkblot” test
Sacco and Vanzetti indicted for
murder in Massachusetts
At the age of twenty-eight, Krishnamurti underwent a spiritual experience that changed his life and which was followed by years of acute and almost continuous pain in his head and spine. The manuscript shows that “the process”, as he called this mysterious pain, was still going on nearly forty years later, though in a much milder form. “The process” was a physical phenomenon, not to be confused with the state of consciousness that Krishnamurti variously refers to in the notebooks as the “benediction”, the “otherness”, “immensity”.
At no time did he take any pain-killing drugs for “the process”. He has never taken alcohol or any kind of drug. He has never smoked, and for the last thirty years or so he has not so much as drunk tea or coffee. Although a lifelong vegetarian, he has always been at great pains to ensure a plentiful and well-balanced diet. Asceticism is, to his way of thinking, as destructive of a religious life as over-indulgence. Indeed he looks after “the body” (he has always differentiated between the body and the ego) as a cavalry officer would have looked after his horse. He has never suffered from epilepsy or any of the other physical conditions that are said to give rise to visions and other spiritual phenomena; nor does he practice any “system” of meditation. All this is stated so that no reader should imagine that Krishnamurti’s states of consciousness are, or ever have been, induced by drugs or fasting.
Excerpt from Krishnamurti’s Notebook Foreword, by Mary Lutyens






Nitya has hemorrhage
Krishnamurti to Castle Eerde for the first time
Dempsey knocks out Carpentier;
4th round, 90,000 present
Mondrian:
“Composition in Red, Yellow
and Blue”
Birth of Irish free state
Wittgenstein:
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ku Klux Klan exposed
Rudolph Valentino films
“The Sheik”
F.W. Murnau: “Nosferatu”
Modern Turkey founded
Charlie Chaplin: The Kid






Krishnamurti and Nitya to Adyar, meet their father
Krishnamurti and Nitya arrive in Ojai for the first time: Nitya ill
Ojai: Krishnamurti and the Pepper Tree Experience
Soviet Union formed
564 radio stations in USA
Gandhi arrested
on sedition charges
Marcel Proust dies;
Remembrance of Things Past
Abies Irish Rose opens
Scientists view
“smashing” of atoms
James Joyce writes Ulysses
Mussolini seizes power in Italy
Egypt gains independence
Marie Steps advocates birth control
at Queens Hall, London






While traveling Nitya’s illness required that he return to Switzerland for medical care.
The brothers were invited to Ojai, 80 miles from Los Angeles. The dry weather was said to be healthy for consumptives. They arrived in Ojai on July 6th, 1922.


Krishnamurti meets young Helen Knothe, and for the first time falls in love.
Krishnamurti writes monthly message in Self Preparation magazine – his first poem published
Krishnamurti travels and speaks in the USA
Krishnamurti to Vienna for Theosophical Society Convention and Order of the Star Congress
Harold Lloyd films “Safety Last”
Time magazine begins
Martin Buber writes I and Thou
France occupies the Ruhr district
of Germany
Munich Beer Hall Putsch
Treaty of Lausanne
Earthquake hits Tokyo
Jordan gains national status
Teapot Dome scandal
Bix Beiderbecke starts jazz
band in Chicago






Krishnamurti, Nitya and Annie Besant – first airplane trip to Paris
Krishnamurti to Bombay
First Star Camp at Ommen, Holland
Lenin dies
Thomas Mann:
The Magic Mountain
Stanislavsky: My Life in Art
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlansky,
Kandinsky and Klee
Franz Kafka dies
Hitler writes Mein Kampf in jail
Gandhi fasts for 21 days
to protest Hindu/Muslim feuds


Historical Film Rolls from 1920s | Part 3