The Guru of Ojai

In the 1920s, a messianic visitor to Hari's family home unveils the connection between Indian Independence movement and the astral plane. Nearly a century later, Hari travels to the orange groves of Southern California, where the guru made his home, to examine the globetrotting legacy of New Age spirituality.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Sometime in the eighteen eighties, my great great grandfather
built a hoveli, a large house in the city of
Argra in North India. The house had many rooms built
around a courtyard and a back garden filled with plants

(00:36):
and trees. Outside there was a bustling market, but behind
the high walls the house was its own secluded world.
That world has gone now, but when I was a child,
that was still there, and whenever we went to visit
my grandparents in India, we would stay at the hoveli,
the family home. To me, it was a magical place.

(00:59):
Tribes of monkeys roamed through the trees and they often
came into the rooms. You had to sleep with a
stick beside your bed so you could stop the animals
from stealing your shoes. Some rooms were no longer used.
The furniture in them was coated with a thick layer
of dust. Outside, the toilet block had spiders, which made
it scary to visit in the night, even with a flashlight.

(01:22):
There was electricity sometimes, but if you wanted hot water
for a bath, one of the servants had to heat
it and bring it to your quarters. A defining moment
of my childhood was the shame of realizing that another
little boy just my age had to carry a heavy
bucket so I could wash. It was a house built

(01:42):
for a household, a family, and the people who worked
for them. My great grandfather had loved traditional Indian wrestling.
When he inherited the house, he built a wrestling pit
by the servants quarters in the garden. The pit was
a sandy enclosure where matches could take place. One year,

(02:03):
when I was eight or nine, a big tournament was
held there and I was allowed to sit at the
front of the out as enormous men with impressive curled
mustaches oiled themselves up and grappled, competing for a prize
given by my grandfather at the house. When everyone else
was occupied, I would climb out of the windows and
walk along ledges high above the street. And one day,

(02:27):
maybe when I was ten or eleven, I found my
way into a forgotten room in the compound. It had
been my great grandfather's study. The shelves held a dusty
jumble of books and papers. There were old photos, family groups,
sports teams. A book was lying on the table. I
only remember it because of the strange title, The Lives

(02:51):
of al Signy by CW. Ledbetter and Annie bessent Al
Signy A lcy o ne What did that mean? I
doubt I read much of the book beyond the title page.
It was published in twenty four I do remember the

(03:12):
curious subtitle rents in the Veil of Time. You're listening
to Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how
borders are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry
Kunzru and this episode is about gurus and disciples. It's

(03:37):
about East and West. It's about a young Indian who
didn't want to be the new Messiah. And it's about
my family and how they discovered that fighting colonialism might
involve making contact with being from the astrostra plane. Now

(04:05):
years later, I know much more about the authors of
the Lives of Our SciOne. Together they had become the
leaders of a mystical religion. Their book is a record
of the past lives of a boy whom they believed
to be the new Messiah. Why that book was in
my great grandfather's study is one of the strangest stories

(04:25):
in my family. It's a story I've only recently begun
to understand. But first, Young Indiana Jones has a question
for his dad father. What they, well, Theosophists, believe in
the commonality of all religions, what they call a brotherhood
of man. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones was a

(04:48):
TV series that ran in the nineteen nineties. It chronicled
the globetrotting colonial youth of the fictional archaeologist from Raiders
of the Lost Arc. It's kind of a weird show,
very preoccupied by intellectual things. Young Indie Jones goes to
Russia and meets Tolstoy in Vienna. His father takes him
to the first psychoanalytical comp Friends, where they hang out

(05:10):
with Freud and hung In one episode, Indie's father has
been invited to India to give a lecture and they
attend a meeting of a group called the Theosophical Society.
They're interested in psychic and supernatural phenomenon. There's even a
rumor they found them Assia some sort of great spiritual teacher.

(05:30):
Maybe so, though Young Indies Governess dismisses the whole thing
as flimflam. Anyway, Theosophy is much more than a subplot
in an obscure televised prequelps. It's one of the strangest
and most quietly influential religious organizations of modern times. If

(05:51):
you've ever heard about aura's color therapy, clairvoyance, or spirit guides,
you have Theosophy to thank. It's behind many of the
ideas we associate with the New Age movement. Theosophy inspired
some of the wildest pop culture of the twentieth century.
The book found in my great grandfather's dusty study was

(06:12):
the first sign I had that my family had been
involved in it. It turned out to be woven into
my life more deeply than I knew. Theosophy starts with
one of those great self invented people, Madame Helena Blavatsky.

(06:33):
She was a minor Russian aristocrat, and it's probably significant
that her mother was a romantic novelist. Though Helena Blavatsky
herself wrote a number of books, her most stirring tale
was her own life. She was the heroine of her
own adventure story. She grew up in a drafty house

(06:54):
in Ukraine, where her only pastime was curling up in
the library and reading her grandmother's occult books. At the
age of seventeen, she married a forty year old man
who happened to be the vice governor of Yerevan in
the Caucasus, a wild border region of the Russian Empire.
Blavatsky's marriage lasted three months, then she ran away. Her

(07:20):
father sent someone to bring her home, but she gave
him the slip and did an almost unthinkable thing for
a seventeen year old rich girl. In eighteen forty eight,
she made it to the Black Sea, boarded a steamship
and headed for Constantinople to start a new life. We
don't exactly know how she supported herself, probably by working

(07:42):
as a spirit medium. Madame Blavatsky was fond of putting
her occult knowledge to use, contacting the dead on behalf
of the living. So far, all I've told you is
actually true. The rest of Helena Blavatsky's romantic story, well,

(08:04):
perhaps not so much by her own account. She set
off around the world looking for secret knowledge. She went
to Syria, Mexico, Egypt, and India. She was badly wounded
in a battle fighting alongside Italian revolutionaries. She was shipwrecked.
She journeyed in a covered wagon across America. She rode

(08:26):
bareback in a circus. She outwitted secret agents in Central
Asia and played a major role in the Great Game,
as people called the geopolitical power struggle between the Russian
and British empires. Blevatsky climbed the Himalayas and studied in
a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in London. In eighteen fifty one,

(08:47):
Blavatsky attended the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. There
she had a vision of a spirit. This being Master
Maria explained that he was one of the Great White Brotherhood.
I know that sounds like a prison game, but the
brotherhood was. Blevatsky reported a band of super beings who

(09:08):
sely looked after the earth. From then on, Lavatsky was
in regular contact with these so called ascended masters. They
taught her, so, she said, the secrets of the Universe.
Madame Lavatsky led an extraordinary opiated fever dream of a life.

(09:29):
At a certain point, In a life like that, it
becomes obvious that you should start your own religion. She
called it the Theosophical Society. It aimed to be the
vanguard of a new kind of universal human brotherhood. Theosophists
were going to use the combined wisdom of the world's
religions to discover hitherto unknown laws of nature. They would

(09:54):
generally help humanity level up, turning us all into spiritual
supermen and women. If you read theosophical descriptions of the
ascended Masters, it's kind of like a cosmic boy band.
Everyone has his own look. Jesus and the Buddhera in there,

(10:14):
but so as Pythagoras and various other guys like Hilarion,
a sexy Greek who's in charge of science, Kutumi, a
fair skinned Kashmiri, and of course Maria, the spirit she
met at the Crystal Palace. He's a flashing eyed Rushput prince.
A plethora of leading men or for the leading lady,

(10:35):
Madame Blavatsky. By the time she died in eighteen ninety one,
her new religion was doing very well. Theosophy was Madame
Blavatsky's gift at the future. Theosophical wizards and mystics were
turning up in popular novels, along with shadowy groups like
the Nine Unknown Men. By the early years of the

(10:58):
twentieth century, the public was in love with stories about
teams of beings with superhuman powers and missions to save
the earth. The ex Men and the Avengers a director
sentence of the beings in Blavatsky's Pantheon. DC's Green Lantern
is part of an interstellar law enforcement agency that's like
a cop version of the Great White Brotherhood. Superheroes are

(11:20):
one theosophical legacy. Then, of course there's this, so it's
safe to talk about flying saucers and people from outer space,
the aliens. This is a news reporter called Jack Webster,
who had a TV show in Vancouver in the nineteen sixties.
People who may be circulating among us now, and who

(11:43):
demonstrate their unearthly qualities if they choose you as one
of their agents by disappearing and reappearing at will. The
skeptical Glaswegian Webster is queuing up an interview he did
with one of the early UFO contacts, a man named
George van Tassel. Van Tassel ran a private airport out

(12:05):
in the Mohave Desert at a place called Giant Rock.
In fifty three, a spacecraft had landed on Van Tassel's runway.
The aliens, beautiful humans dressed a little like ancient Greeks,
had shared with him the secret of time travel. I
say that what is occurring now has occurred before. There's

(12:26):
many records of these ships landing throughout history, clear back
into sandscript. When you realize we're dealing with a type
of man that is almost as far above us and
intelligence as we are above the lower animals, there is
an anthing phenomenal in this at all. I researched UFOs
and Van Tassel in particular for my novel Gods Without Men.

(12:48):
I discovered that almost all that first generation of contactees,
people who claimed to have met aliens, were also involved
in spiritualism or theosophy. One belief system that emerged out
of the Soup of the West Coast UFO counterculture in
the nineteen fifties involves the Ashtar galact Command, a team

(13:12):
of super beings with many names familiar from Madame Lavatsky's pantheon,
including Hilarion Ku to Me and the Great Beloved Commander
in Chief Jesus the Christ. The Ashtar Galactic Command is
still around today. I'll let British color therapist and spiritual
teacher Hayden Crawford explain more. The Ashtar Command is an

(13:34):
ethnic group of extraterrestrials, angels, and light beings, plus millions
of starships, which act as coordinators over the space fleet
over the Western Hemisphere. They are here to assist humanity
through the current process of planetary cleansing, polar realignment, and

(13:55):
ascension into the fifth dimension. I think that's reasonably clear.
And then there's the Ethereous Society, the group of UFO
enthusiasts founded in nineteen fifty five by Yogi Guru and
former cab driver doctor George King. They're headquartered in Hollywood

(14:16):
and London, but the real work gets done elsewhere. A
top so called holy mountains like the wind Swept holds
them down in devon site of their operation prayer Power.
Picture this a friendly looking group of people, middle aged
and retired, and dressed in all weather gear in case
it starts to drizzle, sitting in folding chairs, communing with

(14:39):
a great beyond. We send out energy from places like
this to the world as a whole for healing, for peace,
but we do it in cooperation with being from other planets.
That's Richard Lawrence, the Ethereous Society's executive secretary. He's interviewed
in a twenty seventeen documentary by Vice. Right, So, aliens,

(15:03):
if you like, if you like, Yes, A number of
the great spiritual figures of history, Buddha Shri krish were
from other planets. In the documentary, Lawrence gestures to a
strange object at the center of their circle, the prayer battery.
It's the size of an old tripod camera, a brightly

(15:24):
colored box with some cables and straps that definitely does
not look like a prop in a late night movie.
Has everybody been given the mantral we're going to use today? Good? Okay,
that's great, So why don't we prepare ourselves then to
become channels as the ethereans chant their prayers are stored

(15:46):
in the battery. Later, this prayer power will be released
in a jolt of good vibes directed at strife anywhere
on Earth. In the past, the prayer battery has helped
clean up oil spills, protected against hurricanes, and even in
nineteen eighty one, kept the Soviet Union from invading Poland.

(16:12):
Through this world, the prayer battery is a radionic device,
a physical combination of theosophy and modern engineering. It was
invented by a British cabby, George King, in nineteen fifty four.
A voice told King he was going to be the
representative of the ascended masters on Earth. King was already

(16:35):
a serious practitioner of yoga. This is long before it
was a mainstream lifestyle activity. He says, a famous Indian
yogi walked through his locked door and initiated him into
certain spiritual secrets. This type of turn from India to mysticism,

(16:57):
to any number of incredible beliefs was already well worn
by the time George King and his followers scaled holy
mountains with their batteries. And it all goes directly back
to a trip taken long ago by Madame Blavatsky. In
eighteen seventy nine, records show that Blavatsky arrived on a
ship into Bombay looking for enlightenment. Her effect on my

(17:21):
conservative Indian family would turn out to be profound. Madame Blavatsky,
the founder of Theosophy, came to India to meet Hindu mystics.

(17:46):
She ended up selling her own brand of mysticism to
the Indians. In England, they call this bringing coals to Newcastle.
The Internet tells me that the closest American expression is
taking sand to the beach, but Madame Blavatsky pulled it off.
Theosophy became wildly popular in India. Theosophical meetings were one

(18:08):
of the few places where British and Indians, the colonizers
and the colonized could meet on equal terms around a
shared worldview. And because of this, something unforeseen happened. Theosophy
got political. The cranks and mystics who followed Madame Blavatsky

(18:30):
got mixed up in the Indian independent struggle against the
British raj. This is where my great great grandfather comes in.
Pandit Adjudyanath Kunzru was a lawyer in the city of Argra,
best known for the taj Mahal. He was from a
wealthy family of high caste Hindus. In the one picture

(18:52):
that exists of him, he's younger than I am now,
maybe in his thirties. He has gentle eyes, but most
of the rest of his face is obscured by a
huge hipster beard. Like many educated Indians of his generation,
my ancestor was torn into directions. When he was seventeen,

(19:13):
Indian troops rose up against their British officers in Britain.
This is known as the Indian Mutiny. In India they
call it the First War of Independence. It was bloodily suppressed,
and afterwards the British were determined that it wouldn't happen again.
They set out to create a trustworthy Indian elite educated

(19:34):
in British style schools and universities with a British curriculum.
Adjudanath became part of this. He went to a government
college where he learned English poetry, English history, the dates
of the Battle of Hastings, and Magna Carta. It was
drummed into the young men of this Indian elite that
their own culture was backwards. All English schoolboys knew that

(19:59):
Indians had barbaric gods with too many heads and arms.
Indians burned widows on pires. Indians were passive and fatalistic.
Unlike plucky Victorian Englishmen who had a candu spirit, Indians
didn't try to change things because the state of the
world was God's will. My great great grandfather internalized some

(20:24):
of these feelings. He wished his country were more modern,
but he also found he couldn't ignore the problems colonialism created.
Indians had no voice in their own politics, and they
were barred from joining the civil service that ran the country.
On behalf of the Empress Queen Victoria English businessmen were
making vast fortunes in India, but they spent the prophets

(20:48):
back home. Ajudianath wanted social progress, the education of women,
the end of child marriage. He was a strict vegetarian
and was passionate about animal rights. He also became a
rich man, so he did what rich men do when
they want to voice their views. He started his own newspaper.

(21:10):
It was called the Indian Herald. I have a Judynath's
picture on the wall of my study, but it was
only while I was researching this podcast that I found
out that he'd had a newspaper. I couldn't believe it.
No one in my family had ever mentioned it, though
perhaps there's a good reason for that. It didn't go
very well. A Judynath wanted a native English speaker to

(21:33):
edit the newspaper, and somehow he hired a young itinerant
American named Francis Marion Crawford, who, as far as I
can see, was the eighteen seventies equivalent of a hippie backpacker.
Crawford thought his job as a joke. According to him,
my ancestors newspaper staff consisted of a baronet, a disqualified jockey,

(21:55):
a drunken parson, a countess, a bank director, several struggling
young barristers, and a host of others. The struggling barristers
would have been a Judynarth's idealistic friends. Whatever really and
at the Herald, Crawford and my great great grandfather soon
fell out and the paper had bust. Crawford said the

(22:16):
Herald lost money because it was too radical for the
British and not radical enough for the Indian masses. Knowing
what I do about A Judy Narth's views, that sounds
about right. Despite his failures as a newspaper proprietor, a
Judy Narth still wanted to work for his country. His

(22:38):
chance finally came when he met one of the greatest
eccentrics of Victorian India, a retired colonial official named Allan
Octavian Hume. Hume was an obsessive ornithologist who has no
less than seven birds named after him as Hume's leaf warbler,
Hume's ground tip, Hume's short towed laugh, and so on.

(23:01):
But more importantly for the future of India, Hume believed
it was time for Indians to step up and take control.
In typical victor in fashion, He expressed himself in verse,
are he ss or archie freeman, he that grovel in
the shade in your own hands? Rest the issues by themselves?

(23:24):
Are nations made? The other thing about Hume, he was
a theosophist and a close friend of Madame Blavatsky. Through her,
he had personally received spiritual communication from two of the
ascended Masters, Kut to me and Maria. The way it worked,

(23:44):
he wrote letters to the Masters, which Blavatsky placed in
a special wooden box. From there they dematerialized and were
fedexed to the higher planes. The answers floated down from
the ceiling or were found on the recipient's pillow. Though
this is all rather silly, the Masters gave Hume a

(24:05):
message that was to have profound political consequences. That told
him that British India was in danger and it was
up to him to save it. The cosmic balance between
East and West had tipped too far toward the western side.
It was up to him to correct it. How to
do that by helping Indians gain more power, Hume put

(24:29):
out a call for fifty good men and true, the
picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, men
like my great great grandfather. In eighteen eighty five, Hume
started an organization called the Indian National Congress. The British
authorities would instantly have shut down anything national started by Indians,

(24:51):
but they found it much harder to muzzle the dissenting
opinions of Allen Octavian Hume, a companion of the Order
of the Bath and a distinguished member of the Imperial
Civil Service. In eighteen eighty eight, the Congress met in
Allahabad near Agra. I have a copy of the speech
my great great grand father gave At the opening of
the Congress. He defends his friend Hume. We mean to

(25:15):
stick to mister Hume to the last, he says. His
advice to us has always been loyalty and moderation, and
yet he's been stigmatized as the most seditious man in India.
A judianath affirms his loyalty to Queen Victoria. He points
out that the Congress is only asking for the same
rights as other subjects of the English Crown. There's also

(25:38):
a defiant note. You know the strength of the opposition,
he says, and you also know that it is fast
losing its power for evil and dying out. As all
unrighteous things sooner or later die. A Judianath had been
influenced by Hume in more than politics. He had begun

(26:01):
attending meetings of the Theosophical Society. He was still a
relatively young man, only fifty two when he died suddenly
of influenza. He left an intellectual legacy for his children,
who all became ardent nationalists. Madame Blavatsky died at about

(26:22):
the same time as Adjudynath, also of the flu Leadership
of the Theosophical Society passed into the hands of another
charismatic woman, Annie Bessant. She'd been a labor organizer in London,
leading a famous strike of young women and girls working
in terrible conditions at a factory making matches. Later, Bessant

(26:44):
became a disciple of Madame Blavatsky and traveled to India.
She took over the Theosophical Society with a lapsed Anglican
priest called Charles Ledbetter. Led Better and Bessant with the
oddest of odd couples, the fiery radical leader of the
London match girl's strike and the former curate of Bramshott Village,

(27:05):
who started talking to spirits and then ran off to Asia.
One day in nineteen o nine, Ledbetter was walking on
the beach when he saw a young boy who had,
he wrote, the most wonderful aura he had ever seen,

(27:28):
without a particle of selfishness in it. The boy's mother
was dead, his father was very poor, and for whatever
reason led Better became convinced that in this boy he
had found the world teacher, the new Messiah. Not everyone agreed.

(27:50):
At least one other, Theosophus described the child as dimwitted.
And then there was the other issue. Ledbetter had already
been expelled once from the Theosophical Society because of his
sexual interest in young boys. The boy, Judu Krishna Murty,
was very ansom. Early photos emphasized his fine features and

(28:13):
soulful eyes. Very quickly led Better ascribed to him dozens
of past lives. Somehow, Krishnamote's family agreed that he and
his brother Nietzsya should go and live at the Theosophical
compound in Adhya. There, led Better and Besson would tue
to them and do further research into their past lives,

(28:35):
which apparently stretched back twenty five thousand years from India
to the lost continent of Atlantis. Krishnamoty was given a
star name. He was Alcyone, the central star in the
Pleiades constellation. Led Better began to publish an account of
Krishnamurti's lives in a theosophical magazine. Eventually they were collected

(28:59):
together into a book, a sort of reincarnation soap opera,
in which all the characters were previous incarnations of senior Theosophists.
It was this book, The Lives of Alcione, that I
found in my great grandfather's study when I was a boy.
To me, the real life of Krishna Murty is more

(29:21):
interesting and affecting than the stories in the Lives of Alsiony.
Annie Bessent and Charles led Better became the legal guardians
of Krishna Mute and his brother Nitsya, even fighting a
court case against their father. The Theosophists formed an organization,
the Order of the Star in the East, to promote
their young messiah. Krishna Murty was dressed in tailored suits

(29:44):
from saval Row and plans were made to send him
to Oxford. Christna Murty turned out not to be very academic,
so the Oxford plan was dropped, though he himself was
one of the ascended Masters, he never could hold a
lot of the complex teachings in his head. In nineteen fifteen,

(30:07):
Charles led Better left India run the Theosophical Society in Australia,
where it was very popular. Chrishnamurtiu was relieved to see
him go. Annie Bessant, who became a sort of substitute mother,
combined her mystical interests with support for Indian independence. In
the days when Hume was advising my great great grandfather,

(30:29):
the ascended Masters, speaking through mystical letters seemed to be
in favor of loyalty to the Crown. Now the Masters
were sending messages from the astral plane enthusiastically supporting the
corps for the British to quit India. Enter my great grandfather,
rajnas the wrestling fan, whose copy of Bessend and Ledbetter's

(30:51):
book I found in our old house. In nineteen sixteen,
Rajnath was a delegate at the Indian National Congress along
with both his brothers. The following year, Annie Bessant was
elected as the chair. The Congress was gradually turning from
an elite talking shop into a serious independence movement. By

(31:12):
the nineteen twenties did the Krishna Murty, or just Kay
as his followers called him, was traveling the world with Bessant,
mixing in high society. Kay had become a startlingly handsome
young man with a long, straight nose and sweat back hair.
The Order of the Star of the East was now

(31:32):
very wealthy. Thousands of people came to hear Kay speak.
Sometime in early December nineteen twenty two, Krishna Murty and
Annie Bessant were on a whistle stock tour of India.
Kay hadn't been home for several years. He stayed the

(31:55):
night in Argre and according to my family, it was
our house that he stayed in. This was always spoken
of as a great event, and it seems to have
cemented Rajnath's loyalty to Theosophy. But though Krishna Moote was
becoming world famous, there were signs that the new Messiah
was contemplating his own independence movement. In the early nineteen twenties,

(32:38):
Krishnamote's younger brother, Nietya, fell ill with tuberculosis. A theosophist
offered a cottage in Ohi up in the hills north
of Los Angeles. The healthy climate of California would be
perfect for his recovery. In nineteen twenty five, Kay left
his brother Nietya in Ohi, though Nietya was gravely ill.

(33:00):
Reluctantly a Kay was on his way back to India
to attend a massive rally of the Order of the Star.
He stopped in England, where he met Senior Theosophist aboard ship.
At port side, he received a telegram saying Nietzsche had died.
Kay locked himself in his cabin and didn't emerge for

(33:22):
some days. Much later, in an interview, Kay revealed that
the English members had told him that if he accepted
them as disciples, his brother would recover. What a joke
he thought. Though he went on to India, this moment
was the beginning of a total disillusionment with the movement

(33:43):
and his role as the Messiah. Still, by nineteen twenty nine,
Theosophy seemed as if it might turn into a global
spiritualist church. The Theosophists arranged a big meeting at Omen
in the Netherlands, where the Order of the Star had
its headquarters. A wealthy Dutch donor had given them a castle.

(34:06):
It was there rumor had it that would announce the
names of twelve disciples, just like Jesus had. That is,
whatever Vanard the wall is attempting to rue truth, he
is lettered down LaMDA plating for those who are weak.

(34:27):
But there was a problem. Kay hadn't chosen anybody. The
list had been cooked up by Bessant and some other
senior theosophists. Conveniently, their names were all on it. Kay
told Bessant that he wouldn't cooperate, that he found their
vanity absurd and disgusting. There's a photo of Christna Murty

(34:50):
with Annie Besson opening the ceremony. They both look unhappy.
Bessant is an old lady by this point, and she's
dressed up like a Christmas tree with mystical embroidered robes
and a mess of necklaces and pendants hanging around her neck.
Christia Murty Movie Stars Suave has impeccably tailored double breasted

(35:10):
jacket and a fashionably casual open necked shirt, and he
bescent knows what's about to happen. Chrishna Murty gets up
on stage and he drops the bomb. He tells the
assembled crowd that he's not the Messiah. He doesn't want
any disciples. Theosophy is a sham. The speech wasn't recorded

(35:37):
at the time, but later on Kay was persuaded to
repeat it for a newsreel crew. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned,
unapproachable by any part whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should
any organization deform to lead or cause people along in

(35:58):
a particular path. Christna Murty says, you can't find truth
by following leaders. You have to find it for yourself.
He's giving back the castle and disbanding the organization. The
Theosophists are at Paul Ledbetter, the old pedophile who found
the beautiful boy on the beach, splutters that the coming

(36:21):
has gone wrong. What did Krishnamurti do? Once he'd walked
away from being the Messiah? He went to California. He
settled in Ohio and made his home there for the

(36:43):
rest of his life. He never stopped writing and giving talks.
His presence in Ohio became one of the seeds for
the West Coast counterculture that grew up in the fifties
and sixties, a fusion of East and West that secretly
owes so much to Madame Lavatsky and the Theosophists. The
Ohi cottage is pretty modest. He can't help feeling that

(37:06):
it was a reaction to the pomp and circumstance of
his days in theosophy. Kay certainly wasn't a hermit. But
though Christian Murty always had famous friends and followers, from
Langston Hughes to Van Morrison, the trajectory of his life
was towards quietness and meditation. Since the famous pepper tree

(37:29):
that in the mid nineteen twenties that he sat under,
and he kind of came to some kind of understanding
or opening. This is Christie Lee, who helps run the
Christian Murty Center in Ohio. It fell at a certain
point and we thought it had died, but obviously it's
you know, gave back roots. This needs actually the same tree.

(37:52):
So the stump of the pepper tree is taller than
I am, and it shoots out like a branch, a
fully mature, beautiful tree with a canopy of shade. There
was such profound calmness, both in the air and within myself,
Christian Murty wrote, the calmness of the bottom of a deep,
unfathomable lake. Like the lake I felt, my physical body,

(38:17):
with its mind and emotions, could be ruffled on the surface.
But nothing, nay, nothing could disturb the calmness of my soul.
In Ojai Kay completed his transformation from a beautiful, rather vague,
young dandy into a profound thinker. Christie Lee's husband, Up Sloater,

(38:38):
directs the Christian emoti Foundation of America. I asked him
how he'd characterized Kay's teachings. Unlike theosophy, there's no complicated
metaphysical system, no rituals, no trances or incantations. He was
constantly saying, look at yourself, look at what luke, at
your thinking, at your thoughts, See how you're building up images.

(39:01):
See how your consciousness is put together, and see how
your consciousness is similar to other people's consciousness. And see
how that's the root of all conflicting in society and
conflict inside you, under your root of human suffering. Another
person who works at OHIO is Michael Kronin, who used
to be Christiana Murty's personal chef. He would hear Kay
rail against organized religion a lot. He said, Look, I'm

(39:24):
not starting a new religion. This is not a new religion.
I am not an authority, you know. I'm not having
sacred scriptures or any of that. The only thing that
approaches what you might call a device is observe. Observe yourself,

(39:47):
be aware of your own reactions, be aware of how
you are conditioned. This feels intuitively right to me. I
feel a connection to Christiana Murty. Partly it is because
I admire what he did, how he had the courage
to be simple, to reject or the messianic flimflam of theosophy.

(40:09):
But my sense of connection also goes back to something
much simpler. Listen for a moment to Krishna Murty's accent
as he reads out his speech disbanding the Order of
the Star. I am concerning myself with the only one
essential thing, the true freedom of man. I would help
him to break away from all limititians. That clipped, old

(40:33):
fashioned accent of K's that's very familiar to me. I
heard it in the mouths of older Indian men, men
of my grandfather's generation, who had been taught English by
British teachers in the last days of the raj. I
remember being startled once when I was at the house
in Arga. An old man, a friend of my grandfather,

(40:54):
came walking toward me, supporting himself with a stick. He
was dressed in a shawl and a lungi with a
cap on his head. Hello, he said, you don't happen
to know the latest score in the cricket that East
west accent. I didn't understand until recently how marked my

(41:14):
family had been by theosophy. Various older relatives were astrologers
and homeopaths. I have an uncle who's a retired army
officer but gives out a business card advertising his skill
in the mystic science of namology. My father was different.
He became a doctor, a scientific rationalist, and it's his

(41:36):
spirit I'm inherited, not the mystical side. In Ohi, Michael
Cronin takes me into Kay's personal library, where the books
are just as he left them. The Ways of White
Folks by length and Hughes. This is actually quite a

(41:58):
oh my goodness, an interest in wonder, Sincerely, Lengthston Hughes, Carmel, Highland,
September eighteenth, nineteen thirty four. Like most writers, when I
walk into a room, my eyes are drawn to the bookshelves.
In Ohi, it's impressive to see all the various editions
of works by and about K. But you can also

(42:20):
tell a lot about someone by what they like to read.
So when I'm taken into Christian Murty's study, I'm immediately intrigued. Yeah,
I was a Jack Higgins. The Igor has landed. He
was a great fan of these kind of books. Yeah,
I was a Jack Higgins. Oh yeah, We've got The

(42:42):
Freelance Spy, the Wolfling, the Scream of the Dove. Yeah.
So he was pop fiction, that's what. Yeah. Sometimes I
remember he asked me, you know, I mean not here,
but in over where the lunch was served, and he said, sir,
could you go to the local bookstore and maybe by

(43:05):
by a couple of books by Leon Urus, you know,
and I would buy some of those. I mere Garden
Ruins and oh yeah, Tom, these books James Bond, the
Scottish thriller writer Aliston McClain, and Leon URIs, who wrote

(43:28):
a lot about World War Two. They're mucho trashy entertainment.
I think this is the moment that Christian Murty really
comes into focus for me. He didn't just reject being
the Messiah because he had some philosophical belief in simplicity.
He was simple, he was ordinary. He spent the second

(43:50):
half of his life turning himself into an ordinary person.
My family house in Argre is gone now. Sometime in
the nineteen nineties it was torn down and all the
books and papers vanished. Every time I think about that,

(44:10):
I experienced a pang of loss, all that lost knowledge,
all that history. Let the cottage, you know, Hi, I
decide that I'm okay with it. This is a place
to let things go, to allow the past to slide

(44:30):
into forgetfulness. Maybe the thing to do would be to
follow Kay's example and sit under the pepper tree reading
Tom Clancy, enjoying the afternoon sun. Chrishnamuti was not exactly

(45:19):
hiding out in California, not an exile, but many others were,
and they hated the sunny state. To find them, we
have to leave behind the orange groves of Ojai for
the freeways of la I don't know how you feel generally.
What are your feelings generally about literary pilgrimage. Is it

(45:42):
something you you're always up for? I am always up
for it, and I'm always disappointed. Fun Son and lots
to complain about optimism. Pessimism that's next week on Into
the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Rider Also

(46:08):
and Hunter Braithway. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La
Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer.
Music for this episode composed by Spatial Relations. Our theme
song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti, also known as
Lipp Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz,

(46:33):
Maya Kanig, Carlie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, and Maggie
Taylor into the Zone as a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know.
The best way to do this is by rating us
on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review. See
you next week. I'm Harry KUNZRN