Timeline 1915 – 1924 - The Life of Krishnamurti

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

1915

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

1916

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

1917

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

1918

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

1919

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

1920

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

1921

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

1922

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.