A Light to Yourself
1955 – 1964
Nobody on earth or in heaven can give you that light, except yourself, in your own understanding and meditation. And to die to every thing within oneself, for love is innocent and fresh, young and clear.
“Destruction, the complete emptying of the brain, the reaction and memory must without any effort wither away; withering away implies time but it is time that ceases and not the ending of memory.
This timeless expanding that was taking place and the quality and degree of intensity are wholly different from passion and feeling. It was this intensity totally unrelated to any desire, wish or experience, as remembrance, that was rushing through the brain. The brain was only an instrument and it’s the mind that is this timeless expanding, exploding intensity of creation. And creation is destruction.”
J. Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti travels and speaks in Benares [Varanasi], Bombay [Mumbai], India; Amsterdam, Holland; London, England; Ojai, California; Sydney, Australia; and again in Benares [Varanasi], India
Peron regime overthrown
Unions AFL and C10 merge
Israelis capture Gaza
Rosa Parks refuses to give
bus seat to a white man
Civil Rights Movement:
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Einstein dies
The Beat Generation
Marilyn Monroe:
“The Seven Year Itch”
Tennessee Williams:
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
opens on Broadway
Germany becomes a
member of NATO
Vienna Treaty restores
Austrian independence
Geneva Summit
First McDonalds
restaurant opens
Ortega y Gasset dies
It is only the religious man that can bring about a fundamental revolution; but the man who has a belief, a dogma, who belongs to any particular religion, is not a religious man. The religious man is he who understands the whole process of so-called religion, the various forms of dogma, the desire to be secure through certain formulas of ritual and belief. Such an individual breaks away from the framework of organized religion, from all dogma and belief, and seeks the highest; and it is he who is truly revolutionary, because every other form of revolution is fragmentary and therefore inevitably brings about further problems. But the man who is seeking to find out what is truth, what is God, is the real revolutionary, because the discovery of what is truth is an integrated response and not a fragmentary response.
Krishnamurti’s 1st Public Talk in Bombay, 1955
Gives talks in Benares [Varanasi], Rishi Valley, Madanapalle, Bombay [Mumbai], New Delhi, India; Stockholm, Sweden; Brussels, Belgium; Hamburg, Germany; Athens, Greece
Bing Crosby: “High Society”
Satyajit Ray: “Pather Panchali”
Soviets attack Hungary
Khrushchev denounces
Stalin’s policy
Bertold Brecht dies
Maria Callas debuts at
Metropolitan Opera: “Norma”
Ingmar Bergman films
“The Seventh Seal”
“My Fair Lady” opens
on Broadway
Soviet troops march into Hungary
Tunisia and Morocco gain independence
Sudan becomes independent
Suez War begins
Martin Luther King campaigns
for desegregation
Israeli troops invade Sinai Peninsula
The world was still recovering from the effects of the war. Krishnamurti continued to speak out.
“Peace is a state of being in which all conflicts and all problems have ceased; it is not a theory, not an ideal to be achieved after ten incarnations, ten years or ten days. As long as the mind has not understood its own activity, it will create more misery; and the understanding of the mind is the beginning of peace.”
Second Public Talk, Bombay, 1950
Speaks in Colombo, Ceylon [Sri Lanka] and Bombay [Mumbai], India
Khrushchev rises to power
Eisenhower sends troops to
Little Rock, Arkansas
Soviets launch Sputnik
Civil Rights Act
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Bobby Fisher becomes chess
champion at age thirteen
Rome Treaty, Common Market
Military dictatorship in Venezuela
Duvalier becomes dictator in Haiti
Travels and speaks in Pune, Madras [Chennai], and Bombay [Mumbai], India
De Gaule elected
Premier of France
Alaska: 49th state
Pope John XXIII elected
Mao: Great Leap Forward
Boris Pasternak: Dr. Zhivago
wins Nobel Prize for literature
Imry Nagy executed in Hungary
Egypt and Syria form
United Arab Republic
US troops land in Lebanon
Cuba: Fidel Castro revolts
against Batista government
The Beatnik movement begins
Gives talks in Benares [Varanasi], New Delhi, Madras [Chennai], and Bombay [Mumbai], India
Hawaii becomes 50th state
Fidel Castro rises to power
in Cuba
Pope John XXIII
Ecumenical Council
Teilhard DeChardin:
The Phenomenon of Man
Singapore independent
Uprising in Tibet
De Gaulle votes for Algeria
Federico Fellini films
“La Dolce Vita”
DeValera: President of Eire
Pope John XXIII:
First Ecumenical Council
since 1870
The Notebook Is Written
Talks and travels take Krishnamurti to Bombay [Mumbai], Benares [Varanasi], New Delhi, Madras [Chennai], India; and Ojai, California
Kennedy elected President
French-owned African
colonies freed
Arnold Palmer wins USA
Open Golf Championship
U-2 plane shot down in USSR;
Francis Gary Powers confesses
to reconnaissance
American Heart Association:
smoking causes
higher death rates
Oscar Niemeyer builds Brasilia
Le Corbusier: La
Tourette Monastery
Failed summit in Paris
The Sino-Soviet split
South Korean President
Syngman Rhee resigns
Polaris missile invented
USS Enterprise launched
Student sit-ins protesting
segregation in Greensboro,
North Carolina
Talks held in New Delhi, Rishi Valley, Bombay [Mumbai], Madras [Chennai], Benares [Varanasi], India; London, England; Saanen, Switzerland; and Paris, France
Writing begins on a rare ‘inner diary’ describing ecstatic perceptions of ‘otherness’ and ‘immensity,’ which will be published later as Krishnamurti’s Notebook
J.F. Kennedy inaugurated as
President of United States
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
Soviets orbit Yuri Gagarin in space
Adolf Eichmann guilty of
crimes against humanity
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Liberal Freedom Riders attacked
Kuwait gains independence
Peace Corps established
Kennedy-Khrushchev:
Vienna Summit
Berlin crisis
Rafael Trujillo, dictator of Dominican
Republic, assassinated
Tanganyika independent
“It was the center of all creation, it was a purifying seriousness that cleansed the brain of every thought and feeling.
Its seriousness was as lightning which destroys and burns up; the profundity of it was not measurable, it was there, immovable, impenetrable, a solidity that was as light as the heavens.”
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Talks began in Saanen, Switzerland. A central location in Europe allowed world-wide audiences to gather yearly as they did until 1985
Cesar Chavez founds National
Farm Workers Association
John Glenn orbits Earth
Mississippi Riots: James Meredith
(a ‘negro’) attends university
Andy Warhol exhibits painting
of 33 cans of Campbell Soup
Color television invented
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
Cuban missile crisis
Eleanor Roosevelt dies
Beatles: “Love Me Do”
Nelson Mandela imprisoned
in South Africa
Marilyn Monroe dies
Anthony Burgess:
“A Clockwork Orange”
Francois Truffaut:
“Jules and Jim”
Border war between
China and India
Burundi gains independence
Uganda gains independence
Algeria gains independence
Prayer found unconstitutional
in U.S. schools
Environment movement begins
Life Ahead is published
Public talks are organized in London, England; Saanen, Switzerland; New Delhi, Banares [Varanasi], and Rishi Valley in India
Birmingham, Alabama, riots
Martin Luther King: “I Have a
Dream” speech
Freedom March; 200,000
march in Washington protest
John F. Kennedy assassinated –
Lee Harvey Oswald shot
Montgomery church bombed,
4 children killed
Dr. Michael DeBakey:
artificial heart
Bob Dylan:
The times they are a’changin
J. Robert Oppenheimer:
Fermi Medal for atomic work
French veto common maket
South Vietnamese President
Ngo Dinh Diem assassinated
Kenya gains independence
Betty Friedan: Feminine Mystique
University of Alabama integrated
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers slain
Vaccine for measles becomes
available
Audio Recordings of Public Talks in Saanen, 1961
There is a tree full of green bright leaves, very quiet in its purity and dignity, surrounded by houses that are ill proportioned with people that have never looked at it or one single leaf of it. But they make money, go to offices, drink, beget children and eat enormously. There was a moon over it last night and all the splendid darkness was alive. And waking towards dawn, meditation was the splendour of light for the otherness was there, in an unfamiliar room. Again it was an imminent and urgent peace, not the peace of politicians or of the priests nor of the contented; it was too vast to be contained in space and time, to be formulated by thought or feeling. It was the weight of the earth and the things upon it; it was the heavens and beyond it. Man has to cease for it to be.
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Think on These Things and This Matter of Culture are published
Talks are given in Rishi Valley, Madras [Chennai], Bombay [Mumbai], New Delhi, Banares [Varanasi], India; Rome, Italy; London, England; Paris, France; and Saanen, Switzerland
Cigarettes linked to cancer
Poll tax abolished
Palestine Liberation Organization is formed
Martin Luther King: Nobel
Peace Prize
The Beatles: “A Hard Day’s Night”
USA attacks north Vietnam,
Tonkin Gulf
Brain drain scientists
emigrate to USA
Stanley Kubrick: “Dr. Strangelove:
Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb”
Cassius Clay becomes
heavyweight boxing champion
Khrushchev ousted
Yasser Arafat leads Al Fatah
Cole Porter dies at seventy-two
Johnson swamps Goldwater
China explodes atomic bomb
Tonkin Gulf Resolution
Civil Rights Act
Warren Report released