Nobody fully "won" the clash between Trungpa and Krishnamurti! But important issues were brought out that never got properly discussed and resolved because both parties were in an immature, incomplete state about those issues.  We should therefore say a little about the personal background of both these popular semi-mature individuals before we proceed any further into the depths of their dialogue/debate.       

    Chogyam Trungpa became popular in the West because he had been given spiritual authority by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as a child when "recognized" as the reincarnation of a Tibetan meditation master, a Naljorpa or advanced Siddhayogi.  The Karanahitta, reincarnational consciousness, of Trungpa knew itself to be deliberately reincarnating in a Tibetan body.  Spiritual authority of Chogyam Trungpa in the West was not from Westerners perceiving and recognizing directly the identity and reincarnation of the Chogyam Trungpa Karanachitta, but through accepting the glamour and exotic spiritual authority of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with its many circulated tales of the miraculous abilities of Tibetan Yogis, Naljorpas and Lamas.  The Westerners who flocked to hear Trungpa and sit at his feet to listen to his lectures and sometimes commit themselves to following him and developing an emotionally satisfying exclusive identification with Tibetan Buddhism were virtually saying to themselves, "Hey, this man is one of those certified Miraculous Big Guns from Occult Tibet, so maybe he can help us become a Super-Aware Miraculous Tibetan type of individual!" This natural occult excitement and greed, coupled with wanting to belong to something occultly and spiritually important and decisive, was clearly driving the naive and gullible followers of Chogyam Trungpa.  But it turns out that in many ways Trungpa had some personal faults, karmic obstructions and misunderstandings of his situation as a Tibetan Buddhism propagator in the West and America in particular.  He also simply did not have the all-out miraculous abilities of a Padma Sambhava, so he always had to fall-back on his traditionally sanctioned pedigree and the glamour that surrounds that kind of societally upheld "spiritual authority".  Yet this does not mean that Chogyam Trungpa had nothing going for him in the realm of spiritual evolution of human beings.  He contributed many wonderful insights based on his own unique understanding and cultural perspective. 

      Jiddu Krishnamurti got his outer spiritual authority in a similar manner to Chogyam Trungpa, for he, Krishnamurti, was "recognized" by the leading authorities of the Occult Western Tradition of Theosophy that was and still is headquartered in South India.  Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant had decided that young Krishnamurti was "The Vehicle of the World Teacher", which meant that Krishnamurti was not the direct incarnation personally of their idea of "The World Teacher", but was to serve as a kind of advanced medium or channeler of "The World Teacher".  For years and years, even after he had supposedly thrown-off the Theosophical authorities and their new occult tradition or social movement, he would write and report about "the other" coming over him and sending him into states of heightened awareness unexpectedly through no effort of his own as unexpected blessing from the entry of a vaster awareness into his own consciousness.  His personal energy (his Kundalini, in fact) would rise up at these times with effects in his body and brain which he would call, The Process. Because of the traditional authorization from Theosophy, people would flock to his lectures hopefully that he would bring them to a higher state of awareness themselves, and indeed, people who would sit before him would often "get high" on just listening to him talk, even if they could not remember the complexities of various insights he would expound in his own unique manner of channelling and alternately explaining "The Other".  But all the years of his life, he did not know his Karanachitta, which was the reincarnation of the American naturalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, and previous to that a Theravada Buddhist meditation master.  Yet his whole double tendency in his writings was to expound on the beauties of outdoor nature coupled with the idea of a clear meditative state without "ego".  Now, since I am myself The World Teacher, I clearly remember overshadowing Krishnamurti from time to time, communing with his inner consciousness and helping him to develop meditative insights in heightened states of awareness and energy as his "Inner Guru".  He has been and still is one of my most advanced students, I am not ashamed to say.  But he was incomplete and still has much work to do in future incarnations.  But, at any rate, I can also clearly remember when I took my present physical body to Walden Pond near Boston in America back in the early 70's and deeply reviewed Krishnamurti's incarnation as Henry David Thoreau, which I felt and still do feel was very important for natural meditation and sensitivity in a world that is becoming more and more unnatural and insensitive.  After around 1960, I overshadowed Krishnamurti less and less because my present incarnation and its problems were occupying too much of my inner attention, my own Karanachitta.  This body was eighteen years of age in 1960.  I myself of course was never "recognized" by any traditional authorities, so I am operating more normally and straightforwardly as an anonymous human being on our planet Earth here.  But my Karanachitta is much more ancient, advanced and developed in Truth than the causal bodies of Krishnamurti or Trungpa.  I was Adam, Father of the Aryan race in Eden on what is now the island of Cyprus, which body also became known as Shiva to the Hindus of India and Odin to the Vikings, as well as Poseiden to the Greeks and Neptune to the Romans.  That body is still preserved in a secret chamber within Mount Kailas in Tibet, which chamber is closed-off from random pilgrims so as to not disturb it.  There are still sacks with my old personal belongings there in that cavern, including some hand-carved map-pins made of ivory.  I was very fond of those map-pins! At any rate, I am disclosing all this because just like any Tibetan reincarnating spiritual master, I am prepared to prove that I am personally Shiva by showing and even predicting my personal items from that previous life. 
      Of course I have also reincarnated in other bodies and cultures since then, many of which are quite famous historical figures, and I can prove all those as well if and when it might become useful to the advanced seekers of this world on the outer social plane.  But, and this is the issue, such outer recognition is also a phenomenon of Maya and superficial glamour.  It is always a mere shadow or reflection of genuine spiritual maturity, which means that the best and deepest recognition of the Advanced and therefore Helpful human soul or Inner Being comes when it is the Inner Divine Self-nature recognizing the Inner Divine Self-nature by direct intuition without silly outer authority of figures who are themselves flawed and incomplete.  So, in listening to the following dialogue/debate of Krishanmurti, Chogyam Trungpa and my own commentary on their statements, you will naturally let your own Inner Truth be your guiding light and arbiter of spiritual authority as it may or may not apply to you personally.  It is after all your life and no one else's that is at stake over who or what you decide is a valid channel of ideas, techniques, inspirations or blessings.  Also keep in mind, that if you were a Westerner your last life, you will tend to believe that Krishnamurti is better for you than Trungpa, but if you were a Tibetan or Far Eastern Buddhist, you might resonate more deeply with someone like Trungpa about important matters of awareness and meditation.  At the same time, if you were a Hindu Yogi or Jnyani-Sage, you will tend to realize that the things I myself am saying here about all this are far more crucial and significant no matter how we cook it.  But my present body is Western and I have also been a Tibetan Yogi and a Chinese Zen Master, so I am in the inwardly privileged position of being able to identify with virtually any cultural or universal position on this Earth and some other planets in our Galaxy as well, for I have also personally been an Extraterrestrial.  With all this inner evolutionary experience, I have been pressed into service at this time to function as Rudra Chakrin and the current World Teacher or Jagadguru.  I for one feel that there are infinite other and more advanced beings than I who could have gotten into this task, but I was trained for it from the days of Adam Shiva and it is a culmination of my own karma circulating in my Karanachitta.  Therefore, what is a strenuous curse and suffering for me to have to be here on this even more cursed and suffering planet with its evil, abusive and perverse government leaders is potentially your own blessing and uplift if you will be receptive to what I am saying and doing lately.  You can attune yourself to an effectively composite message of the essence of all the World's spiritual traditions and even Shamanic breakthroughs in spirit and consciousness.  But keep in mind that I do not function as a publicly available guru-figure and do not have a cult, ashram or social movement with adherents or followers.  I am a travelling businessman who lives in more than one location.  I teach through telepathic communion with my advanced disciples, who are themselves teachers or advanced meditators who are not at this time teaching, but carrying out more advanced duties and developments.  If you are inspired by what I am saying and doing, then let it help you through Inner Guidance.  A personal meeting with me is a rare thing and I do not encourage it, nor do I have some hidden situation in Shambhala or other Hidden Valleys that I am willing to bring outsiders to.  Those situations are under attack right now from the Evil New World Order of Black Demonic Karma and it is quite enough where they can simply survive and carry-on under the protection of Extraterrestrial forces.  If you want to get into a more peaceful and uplifiting circumstance, create it yourself from within your own labor and advances in your Meditation and Yoga.  The more your inner life advances, the more your outer karmic situation improves and liberates your life-pattern.  Destiny-control is from within outward, not from outward to the within. 

      We now proceed to the dialogue/debate between Chyogam Trungpa and J.  Krishnamurti, which is called in the Questioning Krishnamurti book, What Is Meditation? My comments will simply be called in each case, Comment.  Keep in mind that sometimes Krishnamurti made many different assertions before Trungpa would respond, so most of the dialogue belongs to Krishnamurti, who in the book was given the long first words and long last words.  I will therefore inject comments on various little sections of Krishnamurti's long-winded assertions and challenges. 

What Is Meditation?

Krishnamurti: You know, sir, in all the organized religions, with their dogmas, beliefs, traditions and so on, the person and personal experience have played a great part. 

Comment: They have indeed played a great part in creating and renewing spiritual traditions, for undeveloped, spiritually inexperienced and unhappy human beings are attracted to miracle-working, spiritually experienced and happy human beings who demonstrate by their very state and way of life that they are more advanced in evolution than the average person in the situation of that language and culture.  But only those minority of people who themselves actively aspire to be developed, spiritually experienced and happy are attracted to such advanced personages.  The majority of human beings have always tended to personally rot and live out a crude, undeveloped pattern of life with a veneer of outer religious ritual or even materialistic denial, remaining selfish, unhappy, complaining and increasingly sick to the end of their days without concern for genuine self-improvement or the development of higher states of meditative awareness that we see in either a Krishnamurti or a Chogyam Trungpa.  So "organized religions" in all cultures have always tended to be superficial and hypocritical on the whole.  Advanced Yogis and Siddhas or Godmen have always been followed by only a minority of people with an even tinier fraction of those fully successful in their development and liberation.  So we cannot put all religious and spiritual activity on the same level in any culture or civilization on Earth or anywhere else in the Universe.  The same is true of the value of any given individual's reported spiritual experiences or states or demonstrations of unusual ability. 

K: The person has become extraordinarily important, not the teachings, their reality, but the person. 

Comment: He is saying that people are more attracted to the miraculous and the occult and to unusual states of consciousness than they are to the overarching Truth of the different dimensions and possibilities of life and consciousness.  He is saying that Awareness and Spiritual Truth are beyond powerful, impressive personalities.  However, his concern about Impersonal Truth can easily become a mere intellectual pursuit of the material brain rather than the Evolutionary Development of being guided and energized by a highly developed human being, a Sadguru.  How advanced a Teacher actually is will always be urgently important, regardless of the philosophical or cosmological doctrines and arguments floating around in the region or culture of the time.  Who do we need to listen to the most: the academic logician who is concerned about philosophical arguments or the advanced mystic who is coming from higher states of consciousness and personal development? There is the Lesser Truth that comes from intellectual study and thoughtful deductions, but the Greater Truth that comes through revelation from Higher Seers and Experiencers.  This has always been true whether in Tibet or America, whether in the Tibetan language or the English language.  But the Cult-of-Personality can and often does lead to persons dogmatically and exclusively following incomplete, half-baked spiritual figures who have had some experiences and some higher developments of psychic capacity.  This leads to great misleading errors in the Greater Truth that could sometimes be corrected by astute and clear thinking in the extended Lesser Truth.  Without a trained intellect plus higher intuition, the spiritual quest breaks up on the hard rock of logical intellectualization or drowns in the foolish whirlpool of emotional belonging and dogmatic belief within a cult surrounding an incomplete spiritual teacher who is himself or herself probably indulging in the vanity and dogmatism of cultural and religious prejudice.  The advanced Tibetan Incarnation can deny the advanced Hindu Yogi or Islamic Sufi, the advanced Hindu Yogi can easily deny the advanced Tibetan Incarnation or Islamic Sufi and the advanced Islamic Sufi can deny the advanced Hindu Yogi or Tibetan Incarnation.  A Baba Muktananda would therefore say, "Forget about Chogyam Trungpa, Idries Shah and Krishnamurti.  They will not get your Kundalini up and running like my advanced Shaktipat Intensive. " And Idries Shah would say, "Do not dilute your correct development with the fragmentary teachings of people like Baba Muktananda, Chogyam Trungpa, Krishnamurti and other guru-ist cults.  Only Our tradition has the complete human development.  Of course, if you want their results, follow them, but if you want Our results, follow Us. " Chogyam Trungpa would also say, "If you try to get seriously into teachings like the Sufis, Hindu Yoga and Krishnamurti or Theosophy, you will just confuse yourself and create a mental junk shop of grotesque items you cannot make personal real use of.  You are much better off to just choose one tradition or school and concentrate exclusively on it for the rest of your life as an intelligent, discriminating choice and get advanced enough in it that you can reincarnate personally in that exclusive tradition life after life and never investigate or make use of anything from anywhere else no matter what its relative value might be. " And, of course, what Krishnamurti was always saying was essentially, "Pay no attention whatsoever to Chogyam Trungpa, Idries Shah or Baba Muktananda because you do not need the Six Yogas of Naropa, Complete and Balanced development on a basis of service and anonymity or Kundalini Shaktipat energization from an advanced practitioner.  All you need to do is assume that I am saying the most advanced Truth that has ever been spoken and you should not let anyone influence you or teach you about anything except where I need to influence and teach you, though I am not a teacher and you should be totally independent and never make efforts to improve yourself or get into higher experiences or developments except where they happen accidentally when you are not trying, but alert. " The person is thus rightly or wrongly "important", but where all the persons are behaving like hawkers of merchandize in a bazaar and putting down one another's products, hoping to create "customer loyalty", surely it is more an exercise in social marketing than Spiritual Truth. 

K: Human beings throughout the world have emphasized the person of the teacher. 

Comment: The vast majority of human beings throughout the world deny and disparage spiritual evolutionary teachers and followers of teachers, and this ugliness from society is directed blindly at random with no concern whatsoever as to the relative truth, value or level of human development of any teacher or student anywhere in anything.  So it is only a tiny and beleaguered minority of people "throughout the world" who Krishnamurti wants listening to him and nobody else!

K: The person represents to them tradition, authority, a way of life, through him they hope to attain or reach enlightenment or heaven or whatever. 

Comment: People listen to Krishnamurti in hope of getting into an enlightenment, a higher state of awareness, a liberation from painful psychological states and so on.  They hope that by merely listening to Krishnamurti and avoiding efforts of self-improvement they will achieve a superior state of being that will not have to understand and make use of spiritual traditions, teachings or advanced people in their own achievement of Transcendental Awareness and Spontaneous Ecstasy as described by Krishnamurti.  So Krishnamurti represents an authority, a way of life, an attitude or policy, and that through him they will come to a higher, better state.  He is trying to deny that he is on the same basic social footing as Chogyam Trungpa, but unfortunately he is and this is complicating things already as Krishnamurti carries on in his diatribe. 
      Another important issue here is that most people who take up a traditional path of higher human development are not merely trying to "go to a heaven of belief after death".  That is a superficial assessment of genuine evolutionary aspiration.  We must not confuse superficial outer religion with the deeper and more thorough spiritual and evolutionary aspiration of a human being who truly wants to work to improve their character, their level of being and their ultimate state of consciousness.  This puts personal performance, development and experiencing way beyond mere beliefs and rituals of outer religion, language and culture.  To put all this on the same level by Krishnamurti is a basic category error that will not do.  There is a world of difference between what Buddhist Siddhas were doing in their private cave-or-wandering lives and a public ritual ceremony performed by Lamas with the Dalai Lama presiding, just as there is a similar world of difference between what Krishnamurti was unfolding on his solitary walks and what people in Rome get from a Mass presided over by the Pope.  Krishnamurti forgets that he is talking to a Tibetan Meditation Master, not the Dalai Lama or the Pope!

K: And most people seek personal experience and that in itself has very little validity, because it may be merely a projection of one's own intentions, fears and hopes. 

Comment: Actually, and this should be obvious, most human beings are all too content with their shallow level of sensate, selfish, distracted and superficially busy or indulgent living and do very little about cultivating higher personal experiences and developments.  Only very rare individuals fully and intelligently dedicate themselves to Yoga, whether universal or traditional.  Real Meditation and Heightened Awareness are far from the overwhelming majority of self-stagnating and ignorant human beings of this planet. 
     If some people were not seeking higher states of personal experiencing and awareness, they would not read or listen to people like Krishnamurti or Chogyam Trungpa.  To say that such seeking has no validity because it may "be merely a projection of one's own intentions, fears and hopes" or any other secondary motivation of emotionally disturbed outer ego of the social self does not mean that any and all seekers and cultivators of higher, subtler experience and awareness are stupidly and crudely motivated in a wrong way that will tend to undermine or defeat the longed-for higher states and experiences.  This is a matter of maturity.  Not all are on the same level of evolutionary maturity or readiness.  And the fact that Krishanmurti carefully says "may" in reference to immature psychological projectors implies that he knows he is on shaky footing in his assertion about all and everyone.  But indeed we each need to ask ourself, "What am I actually trying to achieve with my being and consciousness and why am I trying to achieve it?" If we are shallow believers projecting some socially or culturally conditioned hopes or fears, we are certainly going to have to wake up from all that.  This is where someone like Krishnamurti may be a little more helpful to our higher evolution than someone like Trungpa who is stuck in Buddhism and its cosmological assumptions, hopes and fears. 

K: So personal experience has very little validity in religious matters.  It really has no value at all where truth is concerned. 

Comment: The lack of "validity in religious matters" is mostly true, because the human brain, conditioned by the propaganda, beliefs and expectations of an external cultural conditioning will shape the imagination and visionary experiences that keep the true intellect deficient and the subtle developments locked into too low a plane of consciousness.  One needs to be very aware of the limitation on Consciousness that comes with conditioned religious beliefs, with its cosmological incompleteness and ignorance.  In terms of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, this problem is called the Mayiya-mala that clogs and pollutes the Chit or Consciousness and keeps Consciousness stuck in the limited state of Karanachitta, the Causal Dualistic Consciousness that is a mere reflection of Real Consciousness or what should perhaps be called Divine Superconsciousness or Universal One Mind of Buddha-nature.  So prejudicial, dogmatic belonging to an outer religion and culture is a dark clogging and dullness of both the intellect and the Transcendental Spirit beyond.  We do need to be very clear about this.  Higher quality spiritual experiences cannot unfold where there is this darkness and clogging in the Consciousness and Superconsciousness.  But we need those experiences and their unfolding, their sustained development, their completion.  Hence the true "religious matter" is a matter of direct, personal divine experiencing and not mere worship, prayer, hope or belief.  We need divine self-realization beyond limited religions, cultures, beliefs and conditionings of the brain and body. 
      Not all personal experiencing is "without validity where truth is concerned".  Krishnamurti himself wrote many inspiring accounts of his own experiencing of states of higher sensitivity and awareness that can be very useful at a certain stage in our development or to renew those aspects of our evolution where Krishnamurti's personal insights are pertinent.  In actual fact, it is ultimately one's own direct experiencing that is most urgent where Spiritual Truth is concerned, for otherwise one is merely adhering to this or that authority and trying to live on vicarious experiences reported by others.  What we merely believe or disbelieve about the assertions of others is wholly secondary to our own direct experiencing and awareness.  Yes, we must "think for ourselves", but more importantly we need to awaken Heightened Awareness and Energy personally in our own system and consciousness, both physically and beyond, spiritually. 

K: Now, to negate personal experience is to negate the "me", because the "me" is the very essence of all experience, which is the past;

Comment: In the plane of the lower mind, the subtle body and imagination, which is getting its experiences shaped below, physically, from the culturally conditioned brain and nervous system, it is clear that a false ego of the mind, the psychological and emotional "me", is being sustained by all the physical memories of one's personal accumulated history in the present physical body.  This is a very physical, organic cognitive predicament where Superconsciousness is blotted out completely and the Karanachitta or empirical consciousness is utterly sunk down into the lower mind and body through constant use of the conditioned physical brain and the things read, experienced and interpreted by that same physical brain.  Hence, when chitta, consciousness, through an ignorant and fallen intellect or buddhi, is identifying itself with a particular religion or culture and caught up in the kind of personal visions or experiences one can get based on that identification, it is caught up in biological roboticism like a living machine that has no real conceptual ability on the causal level of consciousness beyond the physical and subtle levels and certainly no genuine activation and experiencing of Superconsciousness or Divine Awareness beyond the causal level of causal reincarnational ego.  Hence the accumulated experiences of one's personal history on the physical and subtle or dream levels of existence must be suspended and transcended in higher states of consciousness and superconsciousness.  It is the evolutionary duty of the true intellect to seek universal spiritual truth beyond all dogmas and cultural conditionings, which wipes out Mayiya-Mala or dirt-of-illusory-beliefs, and the evolutionary duty of the Purusha, Atman, Self-nature or Godself to awaken beyond causality and self-limiting Anava-Mala or dirt-of-self-limited-identification.  So Krishnamurti is very correct in what he says here, but only in reference to the physical and subtle planes where he is correct.  I have to say this because it is an actual fact that the Dharmakaya or fully awakened and clarified Karanachitta has an intellect that neither clings-to nor rejects any traditional teaching on Earth or anywhere on any planet in any Universe.  The ability to understand and appreciate teachings and methods for their relative value and applicability to any particular individual's evolutionary progress is an aspect of Bodhichitta, truly awakened or illuminated consciousness.  Wherever there is exclusive clinging and assumption of cultural superiority on the one hand or intellectual rejection of foreign or alien cultures and their teachings, whether on Earth or beyond, there is pettiness, imbalance and excess of Karanachitta in the lower causal body faculty of ahamkara, ego-building, where the social influencer or outer spiritual or intellectual influencer is getting carried away.  Social glamour and sense-of-superiority will always lurk and plague us all for as long as we are incarnated on a causal, subtle or physical level because of the natural tendency of ahamkara to want to expand its social territory and dominate lesser, weaker causal egos.  That is why even the most ignorant and undeveloped human beings will be proud and self-defensive and overestimate their own social importance, making them impossible to teach or help for the most part.  The animal pride of the lower consciousness coupled with a deficient intellect makes each person on Earth believe they have the superior cultural conditioning and the highest judgements or opinions about everybody and everything.  It is on this basis that horrible wars are fought and the humanity kept troubled with international conflicts and misunderstandings. 

K: and when religious people go on missions or come over to the West from India or elsewhere, they are really doing propaganda and that has no value with regard to truth, because then it becomes a lie. 

Comment: Truth of what? What truth is in jeopardy from various traditions and cultures offering their best teachings and methods of human development to people who in foreign cultures may find them valuable and useful? The Tibetans were driven out of their own country by the aggression of Communist China.  Where were the Tibetans and their Buddhism and their most advanced Yogis or Sages supposed to go? The survival of their hundreds of years of valuable spiritual teachings and practices became dependent on an appreciative welcome in both India and the rest of the world.  Was Chogyam Trungpa being told by Krishnamurti to return to Tibet and try to help Chinese Communists understand Tibetan teachings about Yoga, Meditation and Higher Awareness? How was that supposed to work and on what basis?
     But the even deeper issue here is that not all spiritual know-how in Tibet or any other cultural tradition is necessarily mere "propaganda" for converting people to an exclusive religion, such as Buddhism.  If shallow, gullible people get converted to a foreign religion, it does not mean they would not be just as shallow, gullible and petty within their own local dogmatic religion of their birth and childhood.  At the same time, some of us can appreciate and make good use of spiritual teachings and methods from foreign parts without becoming "converted" or caught-up in an exclusive language and culture that appears to be superior in the social spiritual field.  A mature intelligence does not try to become more and more socially authentic in adopting a particular language and culture as exclusively one's new social self, like when we have decided our new Hindu, Tibetan or Arabic name is our New Spiritual Self and so on, which is obviously a heavy game of the ahamkara, social-ego-builder. 
      To go further, however, we must see the obvious fact that a lot of immature, incomplete and even entirely misleading figures have been creeping for years all over the West touting a social spiritual identification with their own projected traditional culture of their home countries without the slightest attempt to coordinate and understand one another's offerings.  This has resulted in a chaotic hodge-podge of misprojected, fragmentary and misunderstood teaching and methods of self-improvement floating around in a consumerist atmosphere of shallow social marketing, a battle of tribal and Eastern cults for supremacy over one another in the New Age bookstores and festivals with their little stalls and advertisements in New Age magazines.  As if advanced human development would somehow ensue from the kind of attractions and choices one makes in a state of window-shopping.  A Sufi Teacher once put all this perfectly when he said, "Do not seek the Way in places where the unworthy expect to find it. "

K: So if one puts aside completely all the experiences of human beings and their systems, their practices, their rituals, their dogmas, their concepts - that is, if one can actually do it, not theoretically but actually wipe it all out - then what is the quality of the mind that is no longer held in the matrix of experience?

Comment: That is exactly what the Chinese tried to do, actually, literally, not merely theoretically, completely wipe out the culture and language of Tibet and Vajrayana Buddhism.  Is this what Krishnamurti wants: the total destruction of all cultures and religions on Earth? Who is going to do all that destruction? Whether it is a nation or an individual who destroys or utterly ignores another people, culture or language, does that actually leave a clean slate, a table rasa, in the human brain?
No! It simply leaves the original conditioning and propaganda without alternatives, without wider and more promising perspectives. I do not wipe out my basic language of English just because I do not want to speak Tibetan, think in Tibetan or work with Tibetan concepts.  The language and culture of our conditioning is not a clean and pure Transcendental Awareness beyond all languages and conditionings.  In actual fact, the more languages and alternative cultures we can enter into and commune with, the more universal and transcendental our own thinking and awareness will tend to be.  So let us not be in a hurry to be exclusive and conditioned when we need to learn to be inclusive and less conditioned.  If we cannot suspend the brain entirely, we cannot achieve awareness beyond the brain, but that does not mean we stay in our native tongue and conceptual frameworks.  Suspension is not destruction.  If we have our brain surgically removed, as with a lobotomy, that is hardly a liberation of consciousness as such, but simply a debilitation or deliberate dysfunctionality.  So lets have less talk about rejection and destruction, but rather look at silencing our physical cognition and rising into voluntary states of free awareness beyond our conditioning, but keeping the brain and its education in a good, comprehensive and universal condition with multilingual and multicultural skills.
     "What is the quality of the mind that is no longer held in the matrix of experience?" This is a valid and important question that we each need to experiment with directly.  It is not a merely intellectual question.  The active brain is the cognitive matrix in question and therefore cannot answer it.  If the brain actively tries to answer the question of what happens when its activity is suspended and transcended, the answer will be a superficial and clever concoction without validity.  Indeed, any supposedly higher state or method of "meditation" that merely reinforces brain-conditioning and identification with a particular culture, whether one's native culture or one that one has converted to, is obviously immature and self-deceptive.  The only valid response to Krishnamurti's challenge is to undertake one's own experiencing of awareness beyond cogitive activity of the brain and imagination activity of the emotional mind as well.  In Rajayoga this is called, Nirvikalpa Samadhi. 

K: Because truth is not something you experience, truth is not something towards which you gradually progress; you don't come to it through infinite days of practice, sacrifice, control, discipline. 

Comment: This is an assertion that did not begin on Earth with Krishnamurti, but with the advent of Zen Buddhism in Ancient China where a debate took place between the advocates of Gradual Enlightenment through personal disciplines and sitting in meditation and the advocates of Sudden Enlightenment, which is Zen beginning with Bodhidharma and which reached its fullest formulation with the expositions of the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng.  In one famous Koan/Kung An, Hui Neng's successor, Haui Jang explained to his successor, Ma Tsu, that trying to achieve enlightenment gradually through sitting in meditation was like trying to polish a tile to make a mirror.  Later in his life, Krishnamurti heard this Koan and liked it because it supported what he was always saying about the futility of gradual awakening of awareness through disciplines and practices.  But by acknowledging that Koan he was also trying to discover that his idea on meditation and discipline is not a World First and that the traditions of Chinese Buddhism have been working on the issue of "Sudden-versus-Gradual" for long ages.  In Japanese Zen, it is recommended that we sit still in Zazen, but not to "gain Enlightenment" but as an expression of Enlightenment.  This is a rather clever ruse for cultivating the gradual discipline approach in the name of "Sudden Awakening". 
      Chogyam Trungpa was aware of the teachings of Chinese Buddhism and even more importantly of his own deep tradition of Mahamudra stemming from the Indian Buddhist Siddha, Tilopa.  In Tilopa's verses on Mahamudra, "The Great Position", we hear:

K: What you have then is 'personal experience', and when there is 'personal experience' there is the division between the 'me', the person, and the thing that you experience, and though you may try to identify yourself with that experience, with that thing, there is still division. 

Comment: Transcendental non-duality beyond dualistic causal division of "personal experience" of a dualistic reincarnating ego, a "me", is the sudden emergence of Superconsciousness in and as the Atman, the Spirit beyond duality and causality of karmic efforts and results.  This ecstatically intense state is on the Divine plane of existence beyond the causal, subtle and physical planes of existence.  However, if the body and brain are pure and silent, they can like a mirror reflect this lofty state of nondual Awareness and Bliss, as when one is totally relaxed and clear in a beautiful, natural place.  Hence Tilopa said to his disciple, Naropa in the Song of Mahamudra:

Krishnamurti's statements against the personal pseudo-spiritual efforts and experiences of the everyday social self or "me" are not in fact separate from Chogyam Trungpa's warnings to his students in America about Spiritual Materialism of the Ego.  He also pointed out very deeply in one of his lectures that his students should try to see the utter hopelessness of their mediocre ordinary attempts to achieve a superior state through the spiritual ambition and hopefulness of their usual cognitive and psychological self.  So, again, with or without Buddhism or "tradition", the issues and principles shared by Krishnamurti and Trungpa are remarkably the same.  If we understand Krishnamurti, Tibetan Mahamudra, Chinese Zen and Taosim, and Hindu Rajayoga and Vedanta, as well as the instructions given by Juan Matus to Carlos Castaneda on "Stopping the World" through cessation of one's internal dialogue, we will have to see that all these instructions are all like signposts pointing into the same Fundamental Place of Transcendental Awareness in Our Own Being Beyond, which is for us to discover directly in the light of the issues and principles shared across all those teachings.  Without clinging to any particular signpost, we look into the vector where they are all pointing.  We thus go beyond them all without disregarding their indispensable pointing-out function.  We do not "choose" one or another of those teachings nor become an emotionally belonging "adherent" or social show-off "representative".  Like Tilopa or Krishnamurti, we wander off away from the common herd of social seekers and directly unfold The Real Thing, walking, as it were, on the Path of the Void in the Great Unknown where Cosmic Nondual Being, Superconsciousness and Innate Bliss unfold freely and get reflected in soul, mind and body.  When we do that basic and direct Ultimate Good for Ourself, We are thankful toward all Great Teachers on Earth and in the Universe who pointed it out in a variety of interesting and useful ways. 

K: Seeing all this, how organized religions have really destroyed truth, giving human beings some absurd myth to make them behave, if one can put all that aside, what place has meditation in all this?

Comment: What sort of "truth" is "destroyed by organized religions"? Religions are no doubt filled with the projected ignorance of stupid, emotional and neurotic human beings conditioned in various cultures.  How can a prejudiced mind see God or attain to Cosmic Consciousness? Krishnamurti tells us the fact of ignorant prejudice, of erroneous belief, but he does not tell us the unknown cosmic facts that pertain to the truth of life, consciousness and evolution on various planes of Existence.  If we set aside our prejudice, our belief-system, our assumptions about God or Non-God, about what is or is not the Ultimate Level of Being, we will be in a state of open-minded meditation where Great Truth can be revealed, both through one's own direct experiencing and through listening deeply and carefully to the reports of advanced honest other experiencers.  Identification with a culture and its unquestioned dogmas, its beliefs and imagery, its particular heros, gods and demons, its own limited language, its terms and concepts, no doubt disallows any truth or cosmic facts that are not within that particular culture with its insular religion and philosophy.  At the same time, that same culture and in particular its deepest esoteric tradition, will contain special perceptions and insights that may be very hard if not impossible to find elsewhere.  So, someone with Trungpa's spiritual background, however limited by certain prejudices stemming from exclusive mental and personal identification with Tibet and its brand of Buddhism, can contribute certain important elements to people outside of Tibet and Buddhism if he wants to take the trouble to learn a more global language, such as English, and learn to think in terms of the more global and Western perspective.  So Tibetan Buddhism, however bound to tradition, may contribute to the quality of meditation of an individual with a universal and cosmic perspective.  It would only be a constriction or distortion of meditation if the individual becomes emotionally identified with Tibetan Buddhism and excludes all other teachings and perspectives from yet other traditions that may also have important elements to contribute. 

K: What place has a guide, a guru, a saviour, a priest?

Comment: What place has a Krishnamurti, whether coming from a particular culture to his own culture or to people of another culture? Various teachers and advanced people can be helpful influences, even good trainers, coaches or guides, in whatever they have become expert and personally developed in.  Numberless are the areas and dimensions where a teacher or guide can indeed be helpful.  If we want to attain a personal state akin to a Krishnamurti, we read and listen and try to interact with someone like Krishanmurti.  If we want the attainment of whatever Chogyam Trungpa has going for him, then listening to him and interacting with him can help one get into a similar state of one's personal evolution in the total universe.  People listen a lot to someone who has gotten into a state that is hard to get into.  Trungpa talks about "basic goodness" in his Shambhala teaching, so we do not read and listen to Krishnamurti to connect with our potential for "basic goodness".  On the other hand, Krishnamurti talks about "choiceless awareness", so we do not read and listen to Trungpa to connect with our potential for "choiceless awareness".  If we are going to meditate outdoors in nature, Krishnamurti wants a meditation with awareness of nondualistic beauty, whereas Trungpa wants us to be more aware of drala, which is the subtle magical essence hidden within and around everything in nature.  Actually, we need both kinds of awareness and other aspects as well that are not mentioned much by either Krishnamurti or Trungpa.  So, the place of any particular guide, guru, saviour or priest is usually limited but useful in some way.  If we will only pay attention to an absolutely unlimited being, we may find that it is virtually impossible to encounter such a being for many lifetimes until one has qualified oneself to meet such a being and benefit from the teaching, guidance and energetic power of such a being.  How well we learn from limited sources will have a lot to say with how well we will eventually learn from an unlimited source, in so far as there is any such thing as an absolutely unlimited source.  And if Krishnamurti tells us to sweep away all teachers and guides, are we not then clinging exclusively to him, to Krishnamurti, as our teacher and guide? This dilemma needs resolving again and again when dealing with an influencer such as himself.  And are all human beings on the same level of potential that they all share an equal need or non-need for the function of a guide, guru, saviour or priest? Some people try to function as their own lawyer, but that is not always advisable.  The same is true with certain medical problems where perhaps one needs a surgical operation one cannot perform on one's own body even if one is oneself an expert surgeon. 

K: Recently I saw somebody from India preaching Transcendental Meditation; you attend his class and practice every day and the idea is you will have greater energy and ultimately reach some kind of transcendental experience.  It is really - I can't put it too strongly - it is really a great calamity when such things happen to people. 

Comment: Transcendental Meditation has both its enclosing limitations, its assumptions and stupid superficialities, but also its particular benefits and opening up of an inner channel for higher experiencing and awareness.  To either reject TM or cling to it exclusively is a tremendous misunderstanding of all the issues in and around human consciousness and higher spiritual consciousness or heightened intelligent awareness.  That there are thousands of ignorant people doing TM who cannot understand the ideas on all this by someone like Krishnamurti simply means they are still immature and will only make slow progress in their personal evolution.  By the same token, there have remained thousands of people who cling dogmatically to Krishnamurti's particular assertions about effortless meditative awareness and who try to avoid self-reform and self-improvement, who are in a state of unevolved personal stagnation as Krishnamurti adherents.  They imagine they are transcendentally enlightened from adhering to Krishnamurti's lectures and personal interviews.  If they could learn to do both TM and Krishnamurti Outdoor Sensitivity Meditation, they might learn what the Tibetans have known for hundreds of years: that the Path of Means (active self-realization yogas) and the Path of Liberation (Mahamudra, Zen or Krishnamurti Awareness) are not a contradiction or either/or proposition, but two sides of the same coin of human development where on the one side the emphasis is on the quality and intensity of Prana, Life-energy, and on the other side the emphasis is on the quality and vastness of Chitta, Conscious Awareness.  The quality of mantric breathing effects our Life-energy; the quality of our inner silence effects our Conscious Awareness.  Both have a combined effect on our Being.  A Tibetan Yogi is more likely to understand this better than either a Hindu mantric breathing expert or a Krishnamurti choiceless awareness adherent.  So an even bigger calamity than someone clinging exclusively to TM would be someone clinging to Krishnamurti and unable to appreciate Tibetan perspectives on improving both Prana and Mind as a balanced approach. 

K: When they come from India, from China or Japan to teach people meditation, they are doing propaganda. 

Comment: There is a vast difference between religious or philosophical beliefs and the techniques of Yoga and Meditation.  The principles of Yoga and Meditation are fundamentally neither for nor against the cultural containers that have been carrying them for hundreds and even thousands of years.  To put all this on the same level is itself an ignorant and irresponsible statement, just as it is ignorant and irresponsible for any expert on Yoga or Meditation coming from a foreign culture to demand exclusive identification and involvement with that particular culture.  Yogis and Meditation Masters from the East are not necessarily doing propaganda in the West, and even when they are, that may not be all they are doing if one can appreciate it.  A Tibetan Siddhayogi with an advanced development based on the balance we were speaking of above in the previous comment may have a lot more to contribute to our development than a Krishnamurti even if he is more caught-up in tradition than Krishnamurti.  If the tradition has more going it for it intrinsically than some sort of anti-tradition, then we better learn to be traditional where we need to be traditional, at least for awhile, and yet remain non-traditional where we need to be non-traditional.  Do all dimensions of our existence have the same requirement about tradition and non-tradition, about specific expertise and general perspective?

K: And is meditation a thing that you practice daily, which means conforming to a pattern, imitating, suppressing?

Comment: Again, this is pitting the Path of Liberation against the Path of Means, which is an unbalanced approach.  What pattern of living are Krishnamurti adherents conforming to in their avoidance of deliberate, systematic yoga or techniques of self-reform and self-development? In their supposedly unpatterned style of living do we find them becoming Immortal Divine Adepts? Not at all.  Most of the ones I have encountered over the years are rather flat, boring and dogmatic individuals who are unwilling to properly discuss the issues of things like meditation except along the lines of Krishnamurti's outdoor hiking and sitting around trying to be sensitive and aware without effort while having to avoid understanding the cosmological issues surrounding human evolution in the total universe.  In getting rid of Theosophy, Krishnamurti also got rid of the issues Theosophy was rightly trying to address, even if Theosophy was getting some of it wrong and creating some rather silly illusions along the way.  Also, if we are injecting a mantra into our breathing with spinal circulation visualization, such as in Taoist Immortality Yoga, Agastya Siddhayoga of South India or the Kriya Yoga transmitted by Herakhan Baba Gorakhnath to Lahiri Mahasay in North India, we are not necessarily "imitating" anybody nor are we "suppressing" something.  In fact we may be actually releasing something, which is our Life-energy, from its usually constrictions and limitations.  This release is called Pranothana, release-of-life-energy! This leads to the heightening of quantum energy in the atomic structure of the cells of the human body, which is called "raising the level of Kundalini".  So both Prana and Kundalini become less "suppressed".  So, what "suppression" is Krishnamurti worried about? Is he afraid we might suppress one or another of our bad habits and fail to indulge it? Is he afraid we will give-up something bad for our body, such as smoking, coffee or meat? Is he afraid we will "suppress" our anger and violence or our acts of nasty remarks that needlessly hurt other people? What kind of "unsuppressed" living does he recommend as optimum for developing higher states of intelligent awareness? Perhaps beyond both suppression and non-suppression is something we each need to deeply discover as our True Will or what Mexican Sorcery calls Intent.  What and when in our personal habit-nature to suppress or release is a very deep art and science of Life-Mastery that cannot and should not be approached rigidly, dogmatically, but indeed with extensive awareness, understanding and self-knowledge as to what our life in our body is really about and what is possible beyond our usual way of going about our daily habits and routines.  Taking up better habits to replace more impure and self-harming habits can save our life and our future even at risk of a little "suppression".  So, what is rigid and sterile suppression in an immature ascetic might be a deeply flexible yoga of self-liberation in a mature man or woman of the Path of Tantra. 

K: You know what is implied in conformity.  Can such conformity to any pattern, it doesn't matter what it is, ever lead to truth? Obviously not. 

Comment: He wants us to get to what he calls "truth", whatever he thinks "truth" is, but if our idea is to get to heightened levels of energy in our body and mind and to expand our consciousness beyond its usual limitations into heightened states of ecstatic awareness such as he himself describes for himself throughout his cheerful outdoor meditative life, then we are attempting to go beyond mere "truth" to a higher level of being and functioning, which will reveal vast and cosmic vistas beyond becoming merely more universal and Western in the Post-modern philosophy that is sceptical against all religions and metaphysics.  Meta-Truth in Superconsciousness of the Spirit is way beyond arriving at truth in consciousness operating in the intellect and the material brain.  Krishnamurti helps us get to the Krishnamurti level of truth, which does take us beyond religious prejudice and immature clinging to our cultural conditioning, but it is not yet developmental truth of the Spirit nor the full art and science of the yogic transformation of body, mind and causal ego, which are called in Buddhism, the Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya of Buddhahood, which is also the Triple Transformation that Sri Aurobindo so beautifully elucidates in his writings on Integral Yoga.  So it is just not true that all this automatically implies dogmatic conformity to a rigid formulation that negates important truth.  But if we cling to Buddhism or Aurobindo exclusively in the manner of belonging to a cult or tradition, we may never get at the full cosmic and evolutionary Triple Transformation that we so deeply and urgently need. 

K: Then, if you actually see, not just theoretically, but actually see the falseness of practicing a system, however absurd, however noble, that it has no meaning, what is meditation?

Comment: I have already answered this.  It is then that meditation which is called Mahamudra by Tilopa and the insights which are contained in the Path of Liberation.  But there is still a helpful, supportive and extensive meaning to the practice of the right system or Tantra.  The actual level of understanding and development of the individual practitioner or non-practitioner is also going to be decisive in what is going to happen.  The right emphasis of systematic practice or spontaneous non-practice will vary from level to level of human beings.  According to the Sufis, Gurdjieff and others, there are fundamentally seven levels of human being evolving on the Earth and yet other planets everywhere out there.  Krishnamurti seems to want to put everybody on the same level with the same evolutionary requirement as to what is the next big step for any individual.  This cannot work.  No individual on any level should sacrifice his or her potential to either a rigid system on the one hand or a sloppy and stagnating do-nothing approach on the other hand.  There are the right times and seasons of practice and non-practice in the human development.  Timing is the issue.  And who authoritatively decides what is "absurd" or "noble" for whom?

K: What, first of all is traditional meditation? - whether it be Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Tibetan or Zen, you know all the varieties of meditation and their schools.  For me, all that is not meditation at all.  Then what is meditation? Perhaps we could discuss that?

Chogyam Trungpa: Yes, I think so. 

Comment: Krishnamurti has just said to Trungpa that Trungpa is a false and absurd being, a Tibetan going about teaching Tibetan Meditation, but that if Trungpa will agree totally with Krishnamurti to stop being a Tibetan and stop teaching Tibetan Vajrayana Tantra and Meditation then Krishnamurti is willing to discuss his ideas on Meditation and get Trungpa up-to-speed about it all.  So, when Trumgpa said, "Yes, I think so," can we say that he was agreeing to reform his consciousness in accordance with Krishnamurti's aggressive and unsympathetic requirements? Not at all.  He was simply willing to hang-in there with Krishnamurti and help Krishnamurti extend his perspective on what Meditation is really all about, whether one is a Tibetan or a non-traditional person who adheres to no particular school or tradition.  Weathering Krishnamurti's dogmatic barrage could not have been easy for our Tibetan Meditation Master, but he stayed cool and must have felt some strange fascination with the conscious presence of someone like Krishnamurti, which was a kind of person he had never before encountered.  So, there is going to emerge not just the Krishnamurti perspective on Tibetan Meditators, but the Tibetan Meditator perspective on Krishnamurti.  The Trungpa perspective is immediately courteous, non-combative and non-committal, just deeply watching whatever is going to unfold.  So, he is basically saying to Krishnamurti without words, "Go ahead, you first, and make all the assertions you feel you need to make about all this so that you become more focussed about what you believe you are trying to accomplish with me.  Maybe at some point you will actually hear what I might want to say, but we have not arrived at that point yet, so there is not yet anything for me to expound or explain to you.  As things stand right now, you consider me to be what you consider is a typical piece-of-shit doing an Eastern propaganda thing in the West that has nothing to do with Meditation.  So what I am to say to you whether I stay here with you or just walk out now before you become even more insulting and discourteous? So, I will be the polite, courteous person here and you can be the self-assumed superior authority ego-trip.  We will let those who are perceptive in the audience decide which way of being is most admirable for their purposes.  All this is basically beyond words and assertions anyway. "

K: Why should one make meditation into a problem? We human beings have enough problems, both physically and psychologically, why add yet another one with meditation?

Comment: If a physically heavy and impure body and brain attempt meditation, it is not going to go very well.  There will be inner darkness, a lack of inner subtle experiencing, coupled with tension, discomfort and restlessness.  If the mind is psychologically disturbed, upset, worried, obsessed with sexual frustration or ambition for money, fame and secular power, then the period spent for meditation will be internally wasted on worrying, planning and rehearsing the personal future of the body.  An impure, neurotic mind cannot have depth, quietude and clarity necessary for meditation, even if the body is being kept in an unhealthy and tense rigidity hoping for some miracle to take place.  So there is no doubt that heavy, dull, impure, tense and neurotic people should first do something serious about their physical and mental condition before attempting meditation.  If silly attempts are made to "meditate" when one is in no suitable condition for it, it will just add another problem to a life already filled with problems indeed. 

K: And is meditation a way of escaping from one's problems, an avoiding of what actually is, and therefore no meditation at all?

Comment: Again, if the body and mind are heavy, impure, restless and neurotic, then attempts at systematic meditation will be extremely immature, fanciful and escapist, which is on the same level as taking drugs.  In fact, impure people will sometimes try to combine drugs with forms of meditation to try and get a miraculous breakthrough.  Unfortunately, whatever we get with drugs and meditations in an impure state, we cannot keep.  What goes up artificially and forcibly must come down.  The more often this is done, the less "up" things go in the bodily energy with eventual need for recuperation and repair from such adventures.  However, things experienced in this way can give a glimpse of spiritual possibilities that might encourage self-reform, yoga and meditation.  It all depends on the inner maturity of a person who is presently caught up in physical and mental impurities and imbalances as to whether a temporary "escapist" episode is put into its proper perspective with an awakening of correct self-assessment of one's predicament and possibilities.  So, when Krishnamurti sometimes says about the immature trying meditation systems, repeating mantras and so on, that they "might as well take a drug, it is much quicker," he is quite right.  But if we are talking about a mature human being with a purified body and mind, then different principles apply as to what is useful to the inner progress through yoga and meditation. 

K: Or is meditation the understanding of the problem of living? Not avoiding but understanding daily living with all its problems. 

Comment: Any kind of self-development process or meditation undertaken without the right foundation must fail to attain the desired higher and subtler spiritual development or access to higher planes of existence, so correct self-assessment of one's actual state, physically and mentally, is indispensable.  We can shift into clarity about the truth of humanity, about the state of the world, and about one's own polluted body and disturbed mind, which mind is confused about evolution and the possibilities for future well-being in a better circumstance.  This basic awakening of clarity, of sanity, is foundational meditation of a truly human being.  If we do not face the real nature of our problems, our confusion, our learning disabilities, then we cannot do anything valid about all that, we cannot correct the problems or improve our possibilities of personal and spiritual evolution or transformation.  This basic decision to shift into clarity beyond our usual confusions, escapes and merely keeping busy will enable us to learn how to learn.  We will see that we can stop stagnating and degenerating.  We will stop going the way of the common herd, the masses of sheep being led over the cliff by their political leaders. 

K: If that is not understood, if that is not put in order, I can go sit in a corner and follow somebody who teaches me transcendental or some nonsensical meditation and it will have no meaning at all. 

Comment: It is true that a lot of false gurus have come over from the East and sell courses on meditation to impure, unqualified and unworthy escapist Westerners.  Swami Muktaanda used to give Kundalini Shaktipat "intensives" indiscriminately to anyone who would pay money for it and built a silly cult empire for himself in America and India.  Eventually he was punished for this with a terrible stroke that quite debilitated him.  So, we cannot argue with Krishnamurti's pointing out of the silly wretchedness of all this exploitation of hopeful but immature Western seekers and escapists on the part of cunning, predatory pseudo-gurus from India, Tibet, China, Japan and the countries of Islamic Sufism, not to mention all the Native American and other tribalistic and shamanic trips offered to titilate the occultist miracle mongers and escapists who would go looking for Don Juan in Mexico or hook up with some mushroom eating maniacal witch-doctors.  So, he is in fact probing Trungpa as to Trungpa's intentions in America and the West.  He is asking Trungpa, quite severely, "Are you here in the West to really help out or are you just another expoliter after occult fame, money and sexual opportunities?" Of course, Krishnamurti is assuming all too much that Trungpa is automatically dishonourable and will not face what this is really all about. 

K: So what is it to you to meditate, what does it mean? I hope I have not made it too difficult for you to answer because I deny all that kind of meditation, the practice of constantly repeating a word, as they do in India, in Tibet, as they do all over the world, Ave Maria or some other words, repeat, repeat, repeat, it means - nothing.  You make the mind more absurd and grotesque than it is. 

Comment: He is aware that he is prejudging and attacking Trungpa so heavily that it is virtually impossible for Trungpa to say anything or get in a word edgewise, so he says, "I hope I have not made it too difficult for you to answer. . . " The fact that Trungpa has not really said anything yet is weighing heavily here. 
     One can affect one's state of mind, life-energy and even the atomic structure of the body with the right mantras or intoning of cosmic sounds, especially if only mentally repeated with one's breath and life-energy, one's prana.  That is why it is important to learn Cosmic Language, as with Weilgart's AUI, Language of Space.  There is a universal spiritual science that goes beyond the mere uttering of words that reinforce one's religious conditioning in a particular culture.  This subject is however deeper than either Krishnamurti or any culture-bound teacher from the East wants to go.  Some Secret Yogis in the Himalaya have occasionally gone beyond Sanskrit as such and explored the true Twilight Language or "Speech of the Gods", which borders on Cosmic Language and Mantra.  When Krishnamurti says, "You might as well repeat Coca Cola," he is really speaking of what happens to immature Western minds that try to take up a mantra or zikr from an Eastern religion.  But even there he is not totally correct, for any statement repeated with higher intention can have an uplifting affect on the personal system.  It all depends on who is doing it with what intention.  That it is generally the hopeful efforts of a silly, immature consciousness is however all too often the case.  The culture-bound gurus are of course not helping much either.  To equate culture-bound language conditioning of the semantic net in a prejudicial brain with the "Sacred" is obviously the ignorance of a mechanical cognitive system.  "My language is holier than yours (or theirs)," is clearly bad thinking about all this.  But we can hardly believe that Chogyam Trungpa is going to answer by saying, "Nonsense! You better start repeating OM Mani Padme HUM or you will never get up to my advanced level of being. "

K: So if we may, together, inquire into this question.  Is it because there is a long established tradition that you must meditate? When I was a small boy I vaguely remember that being a Brahmin we went through a certain ceremony, we were told to sit quietly, close our eyes, meditate, think about something or other - the whole thing was set going. 

Comment: He is saying to Trungpa, "I started out in the East, just like you.  They tried to condition me to culture-bound ritual and meditation.  But I got free of all that.  Are you still trapped in the culture-bound childhood training you were given by Tibetan religious elders? Are you just another pseudo-advanced self-assumed superior personality operating on the West as a culture-bound biological robot?" So there is real heat of a certain level of cognitive truth being applied to Trungpa about all this.  Does Trungpa have an awakened cosmic intelligence beyond prejudicial religious conviction? However vehemently ruthless, insulting and discourteous Krishnamurti is behaving about all this, he does have a real point, a real question here that deserves a real answer.  He is going for Trungpa's jugular without beating around the bush. 

K: So, if we could together examine and share what is meditation, what the implications of it are, why one should meditate at all.  Because if you make meditation into another problem, for God's sake avoid it!

Comment: Who is immature and who is mature? Who is creating a problem with attempts at meditation and who is solving a problem with genuine meditation? Again, this issue is not all on one level.  What is a ridiculous self-deception for the average person trying to "meditate" could be a profound self-realization for a certain level of understanding and spiritual focus within Meditation and Samadhi as in Rajayoga. 

K: So could we go together into this? Seeing the traditional approaches, and seeing their absurdity.  Because unless the human being becomes a light to himself, nothing matters: if you depend on somebody else then you are in a state of perpetual anxiety.  So could we examine this traditionally first.  Why should one meditate?

Comment: He is really trying to get Trungpa to say something now, to respond to the challenge.  If we read the books of Castaneda and his dependency on the Nagual Juan Matus for learning Mexican Seership, he was obviously going through a lot of personal anxiety for years and years, yet without the Nagual's rigorous instructing and handling it is doubtful that Castaneda would have attained to the powerful subtle developments that unfolded within his consciousness.  There are some things worse than dependency on a Teacher or Guide.  One of those things is the mediocre false independence of imagining one is solving one's evolutionary predicament without the higher knowledge and energy that a true teacher possesses and can transmit.  If one is just stubbornly clinging to a lot of bad habits and ordinary routines in a nasty mood of pompous opinions asserting on the basis of some occult or spiritual books one has read, one is not a true thinker or a genuinely free will or spirit.  A real evolutionary Guide or Sadguru is not some half-baked exploiter from the East or from some tribe who is trying to dominate large groups of followers for his own vainglory and pleasure.  The actual motives and abilities of both Teacher and Student are the critical issues here, not whether just anybody should try to follow just anybody who seems impressive.  As a great Sufi has pointed out, the existence of charlatans is no argument against the real adept.  That most oysters are empty and do not contain pearls does not mean that we should throw away all are freshly collected oysters.  Instead, we should open them all until we find the one with a big pearl inside it.  This requires thorough persistence, investigation and the right motive in our evolutionary quest.  Cheap and easy one-sided answers are never good enough in life in any dimension.  Who does and does not need a Guide, Instruction or Energization-from-beyond for what is not an issue that is going to go away just because Krishnamurti is totally against the issue, just as it is not necessarily going to be resolved satisfactorily through an emotional identification with Tibetan Buddhism and Chogyam Trungpa or any other magnetic and reasonably advanced individual, such as Idries Shah of the Sufis or Swami Rama of the Himalayan Nath Siddha sampraday or tradition.  There may be solid, valid reasons to get engaged with a traditional development technique or one or another of these teaching masters of their traditions, so we cannot just throw it all out.  Let us collect the pearls from those oysters that actually do in fact possess pearls.  So what pearl might Chogyam Trungpa possess in response to Krishnamurti's onslaught?

CT: Don't you think meditation happens as part of the living situation of a man?

Comment: There is the pearl! There is something fundamental, something basic within any human being, which is a desire to be unconfused, to really know what to do, to somehow get things cleared up so things can turn out better, regardless of how vague, confused, prejudiced or otherwise debilitated the human being may be.  It does not matter what culture one is, there is this very basic need within the human spirit, the inner man, the inner woman.  To recognize this and work with it is going to be very important for any teacher and any student.  Trungpa does not deny that there is this very fundamental situation which is the seed-potential for meditation and enlightened higher awareness. Right there he understands Krishnamurti's concern, but does not agree that advanced meditators from Tibet cannot help out if they will carefully connect in a meaningful, intelligent way with the disturbed Westerner who is in a very materialistic and virtually hopeless state.  So there is this very basic element of something like a preliminary meditation.  If a human being is an actual human being, then there is the essential human spirit within, and that reincarnational soul is essentially made of the substance or essence of intelligent meditation, however weak, asleep and hypnotized by the world it may presently be. 

K: Sir, a human being has innumerable problems.  He must solve those first, mustn't he? He must bring order in the house in which he lives, the house that is the 'me' - my thoughts, my feelings, my anxieties, my guilt, my sorrow - I must bring order there.  Without that order how can I proceed further?

Comment: Krishnamurti did not hear what Trungpa was saying, so he speaks blindly at cross- purposes, somewhat uselessly.  However, if we look carefully at the basic inner position of the human soul or spirit, the inner essence-of-intelligence, we see that there is this fundamental meditative presence that indeed must awaken and put the whole psychological self of the lower emotional dream body and the whole physiological self of the brain, heart and body into a purified, clear and orderly state of sanity and health.  This is a very basic situation.  But all depends on what level we are coming from.  If we do not come from our innate clarity, but from our neurotic psyche or our habitual brain thinking and automatic self-defensive life-habits, then it will be a confusion that is trying to bring order.  If there is no fundamental meditative awareness and intelligence awake there, then action to improve will only be something mistaken that creates further problems, further disorder.  So Trungpa quite intelligently and clearly says to Krishnamurti:

CT: The problem is that if, while trying to solve the problem, you are looking for order, then doesn't it seem to be looking for further chaos?

Comment: Again, from what place within ourself are we looking for order, for things to somehow get better? This a big issue that Trungpa is bringing up here.  Who or what is the order-maker? If it is the false, neurotic ego of spiritual materialism, further confusion will be found instead of order. 

K: So I do not look for order.  I inquire into disorder and I want to know why there is disorder, I do not want to find order, then I have all the gurus and all the gang coming in! I don't want order, I only want to find out why in one's life there is such chaos and disorder.  A human being must find out, not ask someone else to tell him if there is disorder. 

Comment: The First Noble Truth of Gautama Buddha was, The Truth of Disorder.  The Second Noble Truth of Buddha was, The Truth of the Causes of Disorder.  Whether we understand this basic human predicament from Buddha, Krishnamurti or Chogyam Trungpa the Tibetan, it is a very basic, fundamental challenge to awaken clarity about disorder, which is actual human suffering, and the causes of disorder or actual states of mental and physical discomfort, pain and suffering.  Each of us must basically shift into our awakened inner clarity and see the whole thing directly for ourself.  Buddha pointed this out thousands of years before J.  Krishnamurti.  So, is it a matter of being merely caught up in Krishnamurti's conclusions and assertions about all this? If one conditions one's brain and intellect to either Krishnamurti, Buddha or anyone else, there will not be genuine direct clarity and perceptive awareness.  So Trungpa quite rightly points out:

CT: Well, you can't find out intellectually. 

Comment: A higher faculty within the human spirit must awaken and find out what is really going on.  That higher faculty is called in Tibetan Buddhism, Bodhichitta, Awakened Consciousness.  In the West, it is sometimes called "Intuition" as the faculty that is higher than mere intellect with its efforts and opinions working in and through the material human brain.  The Sufi's call it Ruh, the subtle organ of Spirit.  Same thing.  In Indian Yoga Vedanta, it is called Prajna, Wisdom, as the essential nature of the causal body, the Third Attention, which in most human beings is in a deep sleep or hypnotic stupor of believing in the ordinary world and its limited conditionings.  Ordinary intellect working in the human brain is just spiritual darkness and endless confusion covered up with false certainties and all sorts of illusions created by prejudice. 

K: Intellect is part of the whole structure, you can't deny intellect. 

Comment: Again, he is not really listening to Trungpa adequately here.  Trungpa was pointing out a crucial spiritual truth about all this, but Krishnamurti doesn't want to give him that, so he tries to make an unnecessary correction to Trungpa's idea.  However, it is also true that the inner clarity will have to make use of intellect to bring the situation to it and to carry out the actions of bringing real order, real sanity and health, which cannot originate from the level of intellect and brain as such.  So, again, Krishnamurti is speaking at cross purposes because he insists on believing himself to be Trungpa's teacher.  This is so painfully obvious, I have to say, but it does pain me to say it because of my great affection for Krishnamurti and the usefulness of so many of his great insights.  His reaction to this issue of the intellect is not at all to the point, so Trungpa rejoins with:

CT: But you can't use intellect to solve intellectual problems. 

Comment: Bravo! Krishnamurti has to get with it! The intellect, which normally operates through the impure, heavily conditioned human brain, only stirs up more doubts, hesitations, contradictions and confusions no matter what calculations, formulations and opinions it tries to assert.  The intellect is part of the problem! That it is "part of the whole structure" is correct, but only in the sense of also being an organ of further disorder.  The order it tries to bring always turns out to be a disorder.  That is why our anxious brain thinking and worrying about this or that problem never solves it, but only gives us a headache from the smoking and coffee-drinking we like to do when worried.  That whole biological robotic cognitive approach to our problems has to stop! It will never bring the missing clarity and awareness that can actually see what is really going on and initiate the right response.  That is why we often do better with our problems by simply giving them a rest and taking a walk outdoors to "clear our head" as it were.  When we get into a more relaxed and open state of being, when we are more naturally meditative, an awakening of clarity can take place. 

K: No, you can't solve these problems at any level except totally. 

Comment: That's better! Now it is Krishnamurti who stands corrected by our Tibetan Meditation Master.  This confrontation has taken an unexpected turn.  One wonders how many Krishnamurti adherents gave deep attention to what just happened here. 

CT: Quite, yes. 

Comment: Graciously, Trungpa simply acknowledges that Krishnamurti has corrected himself and getting back on a more promising track with possibilities of a rich dialogue rather than the superior authority sorting out the pitiful conditioned exploiter from Tibet. 

K: That is, sir, to solve the human problem of disorder, does that need meditation - in the ordinary accepted sense of the word?

Comment: The "ordinary accepted sense of the word," 'meditation' is shallow and trite.  Trungpa would never agree that he is trying to promote such a thing, whether as a Tibetan Buddhist thing or something else.  So, he says,

CT: I wouldn't say in the ordinary, conventional sense of meditation, but meditation in the extraordinary sense. 

Comment: Fantastic! Krishnamurti's own pettiness about the subject of meditation is now fully exposed and Trungpa knows this. 

K: What do you mean by that, if I may ask?

Comment: Trungpa is now the teacher and Krishnamurti is tacitly admitting that the ground has gone out from under him.  Krishnamurti is losing the debate at this point and Trungpa is gaining more and more ground on the real issues in and around meditation. 

CT: The extraordinary sense of meditation is to see the disorder as part of the direction. 

Comment: The way of the essence of the human spirit, the inner man or woman, is to get involved in the karmic worlds and levels of confusion, disorder and suffering for greater awakenings, learnings and provocation of higher developments.  This deeply human inner journey is the innate way, path or direction implied by the whole adventure of birth and death repeatedly in bodies and minds over and over again.  It is an evolutionary learning project that we must each learn to recognize and work with in ourself when we awaken our higher intelligence, our Bodhichitta. 

K: To see disorder. 

Comment: Krishnamurti is kicking up a fuss again.  He wants to get rid of the idea of "the direction", which he does not understand.  He wants to focus everything only on his particular speciality of "seeing disorder". 

CT: To see disorder as order, if you like. 

Comment: Profound insight.  In the greater order or path of consciousness through the Universe, all episodes of disorder are anticipated and included as items and elements of necessary learning.  It is like a fuel that is taken in and burned by the fire of awakening meditation, which transmutes disorder into order.  Krishnamurti needs to come to grip with this contribution from Tibetan Buddhism.  But will he? Oh my, no!  He thinks he has to refute it!

K: Ah, no, to see disorder. 

Comment: Again, he wants to bring it all back to his usual theme of "seeing disorder" as if there is no deeper and vaster overriding issue in all this.  Krishnamurti is out of his depth and is desperately trying to get the kind of angle where he can control the discussion.  Yet again, Trungpa has to try and help Krishnamurti wake up to the greater issue, so he says:

CT: Well, if you see disorder it becomes order. 

Comment: Seeing, again, utilizes disorder as fuel on the Path of Seeing, which transmutes order into disorder.  In the Mahamudra teaching within the Tibetan tradition, this is called the Utilization Exercise.  Trungpa is well-versed in this aspect of higher awareness over two lifetimes from his own practice of Mahamudra.  He is now showing anybody who wants to see it, that Mahamudra takes what is best in Krishnamurti and then takes it further, higher and deeper.  Krishnamurti's predicament at this point in the confrontation is rather weak and dogmatic because he keeps refusing to take the next step in understanding on the deep issue that has emerged through Trungpa.  I myself deeply practiced Mahamudra and Utilization in my Tibetan life and I am eternally grateful to Tilopa and the entire lineage for the great boost this gave to my progress in meditation.  My own experience therefore tells me that Krishnamurti should listen more carefully to what Trungpa is saying, but Krishnamurti wants to keep it all within his more limited version of "seeing disorder" as a flat, one-dimensional, one track sort of meditative awareness that does not know what purpose the disorder is serving in spite of itself, so he says:

K: First I must see it. 

Comment: Trungpa never said that we are not to have clear seeing of disorder.  What he said, which Krishnamurti does not want to hear, is that we must also clearly see what that clear seeing is actually doing to disorder, how it is making use of disorder, transmuting it into order, fuelling itself with it as "the direction", the Inner Way of the Essence-of-being-human.  Krishnamurti is out of his league on the real issues here regardless of how "Tibetan" Trungpa likes to be! Who but the Tibetans can teach us the Utilization Exercise? We obviously cannot learn it from Krishnamurti, though he helps us get into position for it. 

CT: See it clearly. 

Comment: Trungpa is saying, "O. K. , let's fulfil your seeing-of-disorder trip.  If you really see disorder, will you not see what happens to the disorder when you are seeing it if you are really fully seeing it?"

K: So that depends, then, on how you observe disorder. 

Comment: Krishnamurti is getting closer, but cannot get through his internal barrier. 

CT: Not trying to solve it. 

Comment: Intellect tries to solve it, but real awareness transmutes it.  Trungpa is trying to keep the inner door open for Krishnamurti to walk through, but Krishnamurti cannot get there, so he says:

K: Of course not.  Because if you try to solve it, you solve it according to a set pattern. . . 

Comment: Now he is back on his favourite theme of believing that Trungpa wants to impose some sort of Tibetan Buddhist "set pattern" on to meditative awareness and thus kill it.  So Trungpa can only rejoin with:

CT: A set pattern?

Comment: He sees that Krishnamurti is hardcore on his theme and can't get off it.  Trungpa is up against a stonewall.  He cannot fathom what 'a set pattern' has to do with the way awareness transmutes disorder.  He was perhaps a little stunned at this point that he cannot get a real dialogue with Krishnamurti on some of the deeper issues and implications of meditative awareness. 

K: . . . which is the outcome of your disorder, the opposite of your disorder.  If you try to solve the disorder it is always according to a preconceived idea of order.  That is, the Christian order, Hindu order, whatever order, socialist order, communist order.  Whereas if you observe entirely, what is disorder? Then there is no duality in that. 

CT: Yes, I see. 

Comment: Trungpa is clear that the best policy at this point is to just go along with Krishnamurti's theme and be very clear as to what the theme is about.  He is being very gracious again.  He realizes that he is there in Krishnamurti's scene and wants to be helpful, so he is now encouraging Krishanmurti to just be at his best and we will all see what there is there to see. 

K: How is one to observe this total disorder, in which human beings live? The disorder when you see the television, the commercials, the hectic violence, the absurdities.  Human existence is a total disorder - killing, violence and at the same time talking about peace.  So we come to the question: what is observation of disorder?

Comment: There is all this evil, violence and disorder in the stupid masses of humanity and their leaders.  That is obvious, but that is not all happening because a tiny minority are trying out Eastern teachings on meditation. 

K: Do you see it from the 'me' as separate from the thing that is disorder?

CT: That is already disorder. 

Comment: It is already established that the everyday 'me' operating as intellect through the impure, disturbed and noisy little material brain is an entity of disorder when it attempts to evaluate the state of the external world of humanity, the global problematique. 

K: Isn't it! So do I look at disorder with the eyes of my prejudices, my opinions, my conclusions, my concepts, the propaganda of a thousand years - which is the 'me'? Or do I look at disorder without the 'me'? Is that possible? That is meditation. 

Comment: Krishnamurti has now regained a little ground and his hammering Trungpa again about the mechanical, biological conditioning of the brain as a Tibetan 'me'.  He is asking how a Tibetan Buddhist belief system can be actual Bodhichitta, Awakened Consciousness.  This is a valid point and deserves a serious answer. 

K: You follow, sir? Not all that rubbish they talk about.  To observe without division, to observe without the 'me', who is the very essence of the past, the 'me' that says, 'I should, should not, I must, I must not. ' The 'me' that says, 'I must achieve, I must gain God,' or whatever it is.  So can there be an observation without the 'me'? You see, if that question is put to an orthodox meditator he will say, 'there can't' because the 'me' is there.  So I must get rid of the 'me'.  To get rid of the 'me' I must practice. ' Which means I am emphasizing the 'me'! Through practice I hope to deny practice, through practice I hope to eradicate the result of that practice, which is still the 'me', so I am caught in a vicious circle. 

Comment: This is a valid point.  If I believe in the Buddhist teaching of eradicating "ego" through believing and practicing in accordance with the beliefs and systematic theories of Buddhism, my very efforts to eradicate the Buddhist theoretical "ego" through Buddhist meditation practices will only strengthen the cognitive conditioning of being a Buddhist 'me' intellectually within the brain. 

K: So the traditional approach, as one has observed in the world, emphasizes the 'me' in a very subtle but strengthening way - the 'me' that is going to sit next to God - which is an absurdity! The 'me' that is going to experience Nirvana or Moksha or heaven, enlightenment - it means nothing.  So we see the orthodox approach is really holding the human being in the prison of the past, giving him importance through his personal experience.  Really it isn't a 'personal' experience.  You can't personally experience the vastness of the sea, it is there for you to look, it isn't your sea. 

Comment: An orthodox meditator trying to meditate in conformity to a tradition is existentially nothing but a social unit, a node of a collective unconscious.  Such a being does not have authentic individuality.  This is quite true.  Such a social unit is a prisoner of its past, its conditioning, so it is caught up in shallow curiosity, restlessness and idle chatter, as Martin Heidegger has pointed out in Being and Time.  Professor Aresteh brings out this same distinction in deeper Sufism between the Social Self and the Cosmic Self in his book, Rumi the Persian, where he shows that the genuine Sufi is that Dervish who has transcended his Islamic religious conditioning and attained to a Universal Truth state.  Juan Matus, the Mexican Seer, describes the social self as "the Tonal" and the spirit self as "the Nagual" in Castaneda's book, Tales of Power.  In original Chinese Zen, this is learning to transcend the "Guest-position" of the conditioned intellect and shift into the "Host-position" of the illuminated essence-of-consciousness, which is the Dharmakaya of Buddhahood.  So no tradition as such owns this insight.  How could that be? At the same time, it is certainly yet again not a "world first" with Krishnamurti.  Any collective unconscious is truly a vast and dark sea that owns its nodes, its conditioned members who have no real individuality or awakened causal essence of inner truth and therefore cannot own or truly perceive that vast and dark sea.  A tiny little wave of spiritual darkness or mass hypnosis is not an individual having a "personal experience". 

K: If you put that aside then the question arises: is it ever possible to see without the 'me', to observe this total disorder of human beings, their lives, the way they live, is it possible to observe it without division? Because division implies conflict, like India and Pakistan, like China and America and Russia, all that.  Division politically breeds chaos, division psychologically breeds endless conflict, both inwardly and outwardly.  Now to end this conflict is to observe without the 'me'. 

CT: I wouldn't even say observe. 

Comment: Trungpa is now trying to fall back on his previous insight about the transmutational quality of awakened awareness, but unfortunately he is himself now avoiding the seeing of the fact of attempting to be meditatively aware through a brain conditioned according to a tradition, such as Tibetan Buddhism.  He is not prepared to step out of his conditioning at this point, which is rather sad when we can see that his tradition understands things that Krishnamurti does not understand, but cannot actually understand Host-position of the Spirit Self.  So now it is Krishnamurti who is the teacher in this respect. 

K: To observe 'what is'. 

Comment: One cannot really see what is going on if one is looking according to a culture, a conditioning. 

CT: Well, when you oberve then you are judging. 

Comment: Now Trungpa is losing the debate in the area of Krishanmurti's real understanding of something important.  Krishnamurti means real, unconditioned seeing, not observing in accord with a conditioned cognitive perspective of a culture brain that judges in accordance with its belief system.  Now it is Trungpa who has a blind spot and is just not getting it.  So he speaks at cross-purposes himself, obviously rattled suddenly by what is happening on the issue of cognitive conditioning, the implication of being a Tibetan as a social self, a 'me', a Tonal, a mere Guest-position.  He does not want to let go off an identification with Tibet and his cultural mission to the West on behalf of his people, so to speak.  So he is putting Mahamudra into subservience to the tradition that has carried it.  He is "chewing the glass rather than drinking the wine", as a Sufi Master has put it. 

K: No, that is not what I mean.  You can observe through criticism, through evaluation.  That's partial.  To observe totally, in that there is no evaluation at all. 

Comment: Krishnamurti rightly corrects Trungpa on Trungpa's erroneous conclusion that "when you observe then you are judging. " Obviously, genuine observation or awareness is not in accordance with intellect and brain-conditioning with their prejudices and judgements, their automatic beliefs and disbeliefs. 

CT: A total observation.  Then there is no observer. 

Comment: Now Trungpa wants to bring everything back to the Buddhist belief in non-self, that in truth awareness there is no Self, whether cosmic or social.  This relapse into Buddhist dogma is woefully inadequate in the context that Krishnamurti has raised up.  An observer who has risen in Spirit to a higher and truer position of unprejudiced observation is still a very subtle observer.  Trungpa, like all Buddhists is dogmatically blind to the subtleties of selfhood on various levels of conscious being. 
For every vehicle or body of consciousness in any dimension on any level of existence there is always the experience of selfhood through memories and experiences pertaining to the level or body in question.  Theoretically there is no upper limit to the subtlety of Self.  What is a Host to a lower level of Guest is a Guest to the next upper dimension of Host.  Neither Krishnamurti nor Trungpa understand this, which keeps their debate somewhat bogged-down in scope. 

K: Therefore what is meditation then?

Comment: He wants Trungpa to now admit that fully awakened consciousness or inner truth or observational awareness is beyond intellect, brain and cultural conditioning of a meditator identified with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or any other religion, tradition, school or culture.  But Trungpa refuses to take such a dramatic step.  He is too heavily, personally invested in his Master Tibetan social adventure, which is Maya.  With all he has going for him from his practice of Yoga and Mahamudra from his previous life, this is a real shame.  He could have done more for Tibetan Buddhism through waking up beyond it without losing essential principles of Yoga and Meditation, just as Idries Shah would have done more for the Sufi Way by waking up beyond it.  And by this, I do not mean in the manner of Pir Vilayat Khan, who includes other traditional contributions as if they are mere subsets of the Sufi persuasion.  But to get back to our debate of Chogyam Trungpa Tibetan Buddhist Meditation versus Krishnamurti Non-Traditional Meditation. 

CT: That is meditation. 

Comment: He means according to the Buddhist dogma of "no observer".  He imagines he is now cleverly contradicting Krishnamurti and scoring one for Buddhism and the gang back home. 

K: That is meditation. 

Comment: Neither one is actually agreeing as what they are both seemingly affirming about meditation.  And even Krishnamurti, an unconscious previous Buddhist, likes the idea that there is "no observer. " They are both stuck at this point. 

K: So, in observing disorder, which is essentially meditation, in that observation there is order, not the order which the intellect creates. 

Comment: Oops! Why doesn't Krishnamurti then draw the obvious previous conclusion Trungpa had brought up that real awareness of disorder transmutes it into order? But at least Krishnamurti is almost accidentally getting there. 

K: So meditation is not a search for personal experience. 

Comment: In real meditation there are stupendous personal experiences! But that does not mean looked-for experiences in accordance with a belief or tradition.  The projecting of experience in accordance with imagination shaped by illusion, by belief, only veils and inhibits higher extensive experiencing.  So meditation as such is not an argument against personal experiencing as such. 
What is the point of Great Meditation if you cannot directly experience it but only have a theory or belief about it in accordance with Krishnamurti or Tibetan Buddhism? We must go beyond mere beliefs and theories to direct realization.  To see or experience for oneself is ultimate potency of personal experiencing which can and will unfold wonders in the subtler realms of existence. 

K: Meditation is not the search for some transcendental experience that will give you great energy to become more mischievous. 

Comment: A genuine Transcendental Experience does not make one "more mischievous".  The greater energy that emerges through Transcendental Experience is activated Divine Power within and through us.  Divine Power is a blessing for all.  It uplifts everyone and everything in the immediate personal environment.  The more Transcendental Experiencing going on in human beings, the better the world is going to be.  The real ugly mischief comes from those who deny Transcendental Experiencing or ignore it altogether in their pursuit of their selfish, conditioned and wrong aims in life.  Krishnamurti is on very stupid ground here when we consider his endless descriptions of his own "transcendental experiences" when he hears owls hooting in the valley late at night and so on.  If such experiences are not desirable, why does he endlessly describe his experiences of heightened energy of awareness to us? I have always been inspired by his experiences to unfold my own.  The real issue is how we seek higher experiences and with what intention.  In a way, intent is everything in all this.  Clearly, if we are seeking higher experiences for secondary social purposes, that will prevent or distort those experiences.  As one Sufi put it, "Truth must be sought for it's own sake and not your sake. " When the outer social self operating through the cunning brain is trying for occult powers to show off, that is one example of a secondary social purpose.  That is why the world is so filled with sickening would-be "healers" and "clairvoyant readers" and such.  Such emotional, shallow and vainglorious little social selves only prevent their own higher intelligence and wisdom from functioning, which prevents the really great, uplifting and liberating transcendental experiences.  No matter how much they can Heal or control their Dreaming Double, they are still far short of the genuine higher development of the truly divine realms of Being-Consciousness-Bliss.  The Second Attention, however admirably developed, is far short of the Fourth Attention, the Turiya Samadhi.  If all those healers would study the Third Attention teachings of Krishnamurti and Trungpa, they would learn to rise into Bodhichitta. 

K: Mediation is not personal achievement, sitting next to God. 

Comment: Only Christian mystics would want to "sit next to God".  Most people who try to take up meditation these days are people attracted to Buddhist Meditation or Hindu Yoga.  Bashing the silliness of pitiful Christian theology is not an argument against Buddhist Meditation or Hindu Yoga.  And again, in Mahamudra, the Great Attitude, one "achieves non-achievement" or what is called in Taoism, "doing without doing".  So bringing in the silly problem of Christian mysticism is hardly to the point here, but smacks of typical Krishnamurti pettiness and inability to appreciate his own historical seniors in the field of meditation. 

K: Meditation is then a state of mind in which the 'me' is absent, and therefore that very absence brings order. 

Comment: We have already been fully into this issue, but he is off again on one of his tirades.  Instead of dialoguing with Trungpa, he is lecturing and pontificating again. 

K: And that order must exist to go any further.  Without that order, things become silly.  It's like these people who go around dancing, chanting and repeating 'Krishna' and all that silly stuff.  That is not order.  They are creating colossal disorder!

Comment: When Chaitanya was getting spontaneously transcendental in Bengal with the chanting of "Krishna", that was not creating disorder in Bengal, but when people come over to the West and induce gullible non-Hindus to do that in the streets of America and Britain, it is indeed wholly silly, artificial and wrongly confrontational with the cultural conditioning of the land.  Whether there is order or disorder is partly a function of context.  A Buddhist temple in Bhutan with horns blowing and deep chanting going on has a somewhat uplifting effect on some of the practitioners and people in the organically natural audience, but if you build such a temple in Colorado or Scotland and carry out such stuff, it is no longer organically attuned, but a discordant alien invasion.  Sufi group zikrs carried out in Senegal with some practitioners levitating in ecstatic states is one thing, but a group of Westerners trying to do it in some rented hall in London is just a silly, pitiful imitation and second-hand usage of the mystical technology of another people.  Krishnamurti is therefore expressing an important half truth, but not a whole truth of what goes on within a tradition as opposed to what happens when the tradition tries to project itself into a foreign society.  Seeing these sociological issues is also part of sanity, of order. 

K: As the Christians are creating great disorder, as the Hindus, the Buddhists are. 

Comment: And let's not leave out the Muslim suicide-bombers and the technological atheist Americans and Brits who want to slaughter Muslims wantonly in the their quest for oil reserves.  The conflict and disorder of clashes between various conditionings and belief-systems is an increasing problem on the planet Earth.  It is incredibly evil, ignorant and uncosmic behaviour.  Nobody on any side of such bloody conflict will come out victorious. 

K: As long as you are held within a pattern you must create disorder in the world.  The moment you say, 'America must be the superpower,' you are going to create disorder. 

Comment: A prophetic insight considering current ugly aggressions coming from America against the rest of humanity on the Earth! He speaks rightly in regard to the level of the mass-hypnotized collectives of various ignorant, robotic conditioning in cultures.  But when Communist China raped and murdered and scattered Buddhist Tibet, were the Tibetans supposed to stop being Tibetans and become Chinese Communists? When they tried to set-up in India, did that mean they should become Hindus? When they try to set-up in various North American and European countries, are they supposed to become North Americans or Europeans? If they are to go beyond cultural conditioning, they will have to speak AUI, Cosmic Language, and not merely English like Krishnamurti.  Krishnamurti's semantic net of English in his neurocognitive system is a pseudo-liberation from conditioning.  The real way beyond mechanical cognition on Earth has not yet happened except in very rare, unknown individuals in contact with Extraterrestrial races in Shambhala type situations.  Neither Krishnamurti nor Trungpa really understand this, though Trungpa knows that the Great Guru, Padma Sambhava, "spoke to the Dakinis in the language of the Dakinis".  But his conditioning did not allow him to assess this information, for it is too cosmic and extraterrestrial for earthbound prisoners of cultural cognitive conditioning. 

K: So the next question is: can the mind observe without time and without memory, which are the material of the mind.  Memory and time are the material of the mind. 

Comment: Ah, but yet again this is a cosmological issue of levels of time and memory.  The higher dimension is always timeless and beyond memory in reference to the lower dimension of time and memory.  If the material brain with its time and memory is suspended, made silent, then the higher time and experiencing of subtle memory on the subtle plane can unfold in that flow of personal energy. 
If the subtle flow of dream-time and dream-memory is superseded in the supersubtle causal realm, then the supersubtle realm is no longer timeless and without memory for the causal experiencer, but only for experiencers on the subtle or physical levels of the dreamers and the sensers, the dead and the living. 
Then the Divine realm of the Fourth Attention is timeless and beyond causal memory of the time and memory operating on causal supersubtle levels.  The "timeless beyond memory" therefore always means "the dimension, level or tattwa beyond. " So Time and Memory are not an ultimate either/or as mystics like Krishnamurti try to dogmatically expound.  But if we can observe in the ordinary sensory waking state of the physical day that we are all too conditioned by brain-time and brain-memory, then there is hope of transcending all that and unfolding subtler perceptions in subtler flow of time. 

K: Can it observe without those two elements? Because if it observes with memory, the memory is the centre, the 'me'.  Right?

Comment: Right.  If I want to step up to a higher level of conscious being, then I must suspend the memory, time and 'me' of my present level, whatever that may be, whether physical or otherwise.  But if I had not experienced this directly for myself in shifting to higher planes of existence, it would be rather difficult to truly see the implications of what Krishnamurti is talking about, or what Juan Matus meant when he told Carlos Castaneda that he must "put an end to his internal dialogue in order to Stop the World. " This entire issue of Memory, Time and Selfhood is not merely philosophical and abstract, but requires Yoga and Meditation, whether traditional or otherwise.  Spiritual truth must be directly experienced and not merely believed or argued about intellectually. 

K: And time is the 'me', also time is the evolution of the brain cells as becoming. 

Comment: He should have said "as physical becoming".  There is still the issue of relativity of the levels, the dimensions or tattwas.  This has got to be understood or we are going to get bogged down in the brain states of intellectual opinions and fixations about all this.  Of course, when Krishnamurti got rid of Theosophy, he also got rid of these important issues.  He threw out the baby with the bathwater.  He gave himself a cosmolocal lobotomy and recommends the same to all.  That falls short of the kind of things we need to know and experience to work all this out for real. 

K: So can the mind observe without memory or time? Which is only possible when the mind is completely still. 

Comment: So far, so good, insofar as we are looking at brain-functions, but beyond that he has confusion as to the term "mind".  It has different meanings on different levels of Being. 

K: And the traditional people realize this, so they say, 'we must practice in order to be silent. '

Comment: The miraculous Siddha, Tilopa, never said any such thing! Again, read his Song of Mahamudra that he gave to his disciple, Naropa.  I grow so weary of Krishnamurti's shallow assertions about what advanced people have said and done within certain traditions.  Such condescending arrogance! That kind of petty, self-enclosed attitude of "being beyond all traditions" is all too much a peculiar sort of ignorance and egotism.  We need to do better than that!

K: So control your mind - you know the tricks they play. 

CT: I don't see any particular importance in laying emphasis on the stillness of the mind because if one is able to see the non-dualistic way of looking at situations then you have further energy that will flow out. 

Comment: Trungpa is gently pointing out that though he is coming from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, that tradition does not get into neurotic brain-frustrations of brain-trying-to-put-a-stop-brain-functions.  Krishnamurti has lost it again, so now Trungpa is the teacher again, which allows Trungpa to sneak away from the fact of being too much a social self operating with an excessively culture-bound cognitive system.  Where is an end to all this?

K: You can only have further energy to flow, greater energy, when the mind is quiet. 

Comment: He avoids the issue of non-dualism which has just been brought up.  Properly speaking, nondualism is a function of Superconsciousness in the Fourth Attention of Divine Being beyond the causal level of Bodhichitta.  Krishnamurti does not want to go into that because it would actually bring the tradition of Vedanta into all this.  So he will have to go on confusing the levels of what he calls "mind".  Nevertheless, it not only releases greater energy to leap up to a higher level of being, it also requires greater energy to make such a leap, and hence the need for Kundalini Yoga and the validity of Shaktipat, transmission of higher energy being put down into a lower energy personal system to give it a boost if that system is on a high enough level of purity and readiness and able to make the right use of the boost, which is rare.  Immature people can actually become addicted to getting boosts from a much more energetic person, which can create a useless dependency rather than a development.  The Sufis have deeply studied this issue better than any other tradition on Earth, particularly in the Naqshbandiyya Order, so the earnest seeker of higher things should study carefully the way the Sufis handle relations between higher energy teachers and lower energy students to avoid the pitfalls of energy dependency without losing the necessary situations of transmission of the Baraka, the Blessed Energy or Kundalini Shakti. 

CT: But to put the emphasis on stillness. . . 

Comment: Trungpa is devastatingly pointing out for anyone who wants to hear it that Krishnamurti is himself caught up on a subtle level of wanting to make a stillness happen, though he wants to do it without what he calls "control".  Trungpa sees an obvious contradiction there. 

K: No, we said, observe disorder without the 'me', its memories, its structure of time, then in that quality there is a quietness of the mind which is observing.  That stillness is not an acquired, practiced thing, it comes naturally when you have order. 
      You see, sir, all one can do is to point out and help the person to the door, it is for him to open the door, you can't do any more than that.  This whole idea of wanting to help people means, you know, you become a do-gooder.  And a do-gooder is not a religious man at all.  Shall we go on with this?

Comment: Krishnamurti has brought his particular teaching to its peak here; it can't go any further.  He wants a stillness.  The stillness will not come from an effort.  But how then does the stillness come? He says that "order" will bring stillness.  But he has already said that only stillness, a detached attitude or position of timeless observation without a 'me' and its memories can bring about order.  So, in actually fact stillness and order rise together or there is disturbance and disorder.  The dog of cognition is chasing its own tail.  This is a vicious feedback loop.  Disturbance prevents order and disorder prevents stillness.  So where is the emphasis supposed to be and why?
      He is also trying to explain about teaching without being a teacher, helping people without being a helper, and so on.  He believes Trungpa cannot really help anyone because he is (a) stuck in being a culture-bound Tibetan, and (b) he is assumed to be a deluded altruistic do-gooder without the right orientation toward humanity.  So Krishnamurti assumes that he is utterly superior and in charge about all that has been brought up. 

CT: I think so.  There is a further thing that can be clarified, when you put emphasis on absolute peace. 

Comment: Trungpa sees the contradictory and vicious feedback loop in Krishnamurti's position on stillness and disorder.  He wants to break that down.  But will Krishnamurti take the necessary step?

K: Ah! I said sir, complete order is complete quietness of the mind.  Quietness of the mind is the most active mind. 

CT: That's what I want you to say!

Comment: Krishnamurti has now agreed to step into a real aspect of meditation that Trungpa has understood better. 
     Trungpa points out that, yet again, he is now the teacher who just gave a boost to Krishnamurti's perspective on meditative states of consciousness.  The Indian tradition of Samkhya would help here.  Consciousness, chitta, is still within the realm of matter, so it can be basically in one of three states: Tamasic, dull and sluggish or asleep; Rajasic, disturbed, disorderly, distracted, unsteady, flighty and restless; Sattwic, clear, calm, serene, observant, aware, watchful, sane and orderly.  Now picture a fan.  In the tamasic condition, the electricity is off and there is very little movement if any; in the rajasiccondition, the electricity is off but there are gusts of wind coming through the window at random which causes the blades to visibly move now and then at various speeds in a chaotic manner; in the sattwic condition, the fan is turned on and the blades are moving at such a tremendous consistent speed that the blades are invisible, they are just an homogenous blur.  So the fast speed has a dynamical stillness that is also paradoxically superactive, dynamic.  Hence, for there to be the necessary stillness and order, the consciousness has to be brought up-to-speed.  This implies the need for a requisite level of energy in the cognitive system itself.  It is not just about the brain and intellect thinking about various words and meanings in and around the subject of "meditation".  Thinking and discussing meditation in a low energy personal state will not really do anything dynamically real about all this. 

K: It's the most dynamic thing, it isn't just a dead thing. 

Comment: This is a beautiful moment because Krishnamurti and Trungpa were able to genuinely come together on an important point. 

CT: People could misunderstand. 

Comment: Trungpa is very aware of where they have arrived, which is an agreement about the meditative state of consciousness that transcends both tradition and anti-tradition, effort and non-effort. 

K: Because they are only used to practice which will help them become - that is death.  But a mind that has gone, inquired into all this in this way, becomes extraordinarily active and therefore quiet. 

Comment: Krishnamurti, within his own terminology, has accepted Trungpa's important insight on the dynamical aspect of necessary cognitive stillness.  So Trungpa emphasizes this acquiescence that has taken place in Krishnamurti's consciousness by saying:

CT: That's what I mean, yes. 

K: It's like a great dynamo. 

CT: yes. 

Comment: Krishnamurti is appreciating the Tibetan Meditation Master insight into meditation.  This is an admission of fundamental defeat in the debate about meditation itself, but the issue of Trungpa's clinging to Tibetan identity as a culture bound 'me' is still outstanding.  So what is Krishnamurti going to do about all this?

K: The greater the speed, the more the vitality.  Of course, Man is seeking more energy, he wants more energy, to go to the Moon, to go and live under the sea.  He is striving for more and more and more.  And I think the search for more does lead to disorder. 

Comment: Defeated in the encounter, Krishnamurti collapses into one of his usual themes about the state of collective human ignorance and its globally abusive projects.  He tries to put enlightened personal transformation and evolution, including the necessary energization of Kundalini Yoga and Mahamudra dynamical meditation on the same level as the heedless, greedy, corrupt, ambitious and materialistic humanity of the pitiful planet Earth.  This is wholly inappropriate and away from the whole point of the discussion of meditative states of consciousness.  He is just falling back on familiar old worldview commentaries of his that he has always expounded for years.  He wants closure in and around his particular position as a world influencer.  This is his messiah complex given to him by Leadbeater, Besant and the Theosophists kicking up again, which is wholly irrelevant to Truungpa's more modest, sane and healthy approach of being part of a good spiritual lineage with a relevant contribution to make about meditation. 

K: The consumer society is a disorderly society.  The other day I saw some paper tissue, Kleenex, which was beautifully decorated. 

Comment: Now he is really losing it.  Trungpa must have thought to himself at this point, "Poor fellow, all this has driven him mad.  He can't cope with where the discussion went. "

K: So our question is: does the observation of disorder bring order? That is really a very important point because for most of us effort is demanded to bring about order.  Human beings are used to effort, to struggling, fighting, suppressing, forcing themselves.  Now all that has led to disorder, socially, outwardly and inwardly. 

Comment: Trungpa is not recorded as saying anything more in the encounter.  Why not? It is rather probable that he had to give up on taking things any further because Krishnamurti is now in the all- out lecturing and pontificating mode again, trotting out all his usual stuff again and trying to appear as if he is making the ultimate summary of what the discussion has been about.  This is a terribly sad little episode here at the end. 

K: The difficulty with human beings is that they never observed a tree, a bird, without division.  Since they have never observed a tree or a bird totally they can't observe themselves totally. 

Comment: Now Krishnamurti wants each of us to identify with the stupid, heedless, insensitive, materialistic, disturbed, disorderly, unobservant and unmeditative, undevelopmental and unregenerate human masses who are destroying themselves and their planet.  Why does he want this identification with only the lowest level of humanity? Again, there are at least seven levels of humanity.  What level we are actually operating on is the real issue here, which Krishnamurti is covering up. 

K: One can't see the total disorder in which one lives, there is always an idea that somewhere there is a part of me that is order which is looking at disorder. 

Comment: We must never deny that higher and deeper part of our being that is natural, innate meditative silent observation of the truth of things, for it is only by stepping into that place in ourselves that we can have meditation, which is awakened consciousness, Bodhichitta.  It is the true evolutionary element within a human being.  Without this better part of ourselves, who are what could listen to and genuinely understand higher teachings, whether Krishnamurti's or Chogyam Trungpa's or anyone else's, such as my particular commentaries today? It is the awakening of this better, higher aspect within our being that is our fundamental spiritual opportunity.  If a human being is utterly without soul and conscience, without a causal body, then indeed there is just total disorder, total evil of harming others and oneself without the slightest chance of coming to a better way of being. 

K: So they invent the higher self,

Comment: The higher self is real, however asleep, however unactivated so far.  It is not just an "invention" of some cognitively prejudiced and ignorant fools.  Krishnamurti does not understand the actual meaning of Self on any level of existence.  He is still imprisoned subconsciously in Buddhist dogma.  He is caught up in the invented notion of No-Self, Anatman.  Recursive levels of Guest-and-Host are not comprehended by him, as I have already pointed out. 

K: which will bring about order in disorder - God is in you and pray to that God, he will bring about this order. 

Comment: Recognition of the Godself, which is Ishwara Pratyabhijna in Kashmir Shaiva tradition, is not about praying, but a real, direct and indispensable glimpsing experience of the divine level of existence in oneself, the Fourth Attention, however brief and unsustainable that glimpse may be.  The inner God must be directly revealed, not stupidly prayed to! Krishnamurti is mixing up his traditions and religions at random here, which instead of making a point only betrays his colossal deliberate ignorance of (a) what is really going on in the higher planes of our actual and potential existence, and (b) what different traditions have come to understand about all this. 

K: Always there is this effort. 

Comment: It would be hard to locate some idiot on the planet actually making the theologically confused sort of effort that he has described. 

K: What we are saying is that where there is the 'me', the world outside or the world inside, there is not only division, but that brings about conflict, that division creates chaos and disorder in the world.  Now to observe all that totally, in which there is no division, such observation is meditation.  For that you don't have to practice, all that you have to do is to be aware of what exactly is going on inside and outside, just to be aware. 

Comment: He has said that we are each in a state of total disorder, total unawareness and that we have no inner element of order and awareness basically within us that we could awaken into greater dynamical presence, and no inner God to recognize in ourself beyond all this which could empower our evolutionary aspiration.  Yet we are supposed to come up somehow with a simple awareness that does not practice or improve anything in our everyday being that might bring enough energy boost to get up-to-speed for real meditation.  Fortunately, things are neither this flat and bleak, but they are not quite so simple as Krishnamurti's all-rejective dogma either.  When he says, "just be aware", who or what manner of being does he imagine he is saying this too? It is like a "one size fits all" shoe he wants us each to put on our mind. 
      On the positive side of Krishnamurti, he always pointed out quite thoroughly all the stupidities and dangers of remaining caught in the cognitive trap of culture-bound conditioning.  For this we can all be grateful.  Tradition-bound, petty pseudospiritual authorities from the East have brought a lot of silly exploitation and counterproductive societal conflicts and misunderstandings in the West.  Yet not all sages and yogis from the East, spiritual masters, have been of that common, deplorable ilk.  We will never rightly put all these issues on one level only.  We need to deeply understand what Krishnamurti has said, but we also need to deeply understand what other relevant spiritual leaders have also said.  Once one is neither clinging to nor rejecting anyone or anything useful, one then needs to become very clear as to who or what is useful to what degree in what zone of our evolutionary path.  Sometimes a teacher can help with this to some degree and we should let ourself recognize the teacher and learn how to learn from such a teacher.  At other times we are in a region of our development where no appropriate teacher is available and we have to learn for ourself what we have to learn for ourself.  Issues of context and timing then put all this beyond the "either/or" dogmas that are usually adhered to by immature people and their influencers.  Neither the cults nor the cult-bashers are of any real evolutionary use, but only demonstrate the sociological illusions and tensions of confused human beings who stagnate in ignorance.  If we will stop entrapping ourselves in our beliefs and disbeliefs and learn to at least stop smoking and drinking coffee or alcohol, we might get clear enough and clean enough to make it to real Yoga, Meditation and Samadhi, regardless of what kind of theoretical or traditional emphasis we want to give to such things of the Way, the Tao, the Tariqa.  In the vastness of Total Existence, the Dharmadhatu, there are infinite traditions, languages and spiritual schools on infinite planets of aspiring human beings with infinite variable cognitive conditions and types of organic sensory bodies.  Our tiny little temporary speck of a world in all that has no ultimate authority in it, whether Krishnamurti or anyone else, including myself.  We do not need an ultimate authority.  We need to learn how to learn, we need Self-realization and Self-awakening.  We need truly cosmic Clarity.  Whoever or whatever helps us come to this in ourself should be gratefully recognized and accepted with receptive humility, which has nothing to do with gullibility or emotional clinging without self-responsibility and necessary personal work and effort.  Ultimately we each get what we have earned on any level of existence of our concern.  The Law of Karma must become an Existential Enlightenment.