In the 1920s, a messianic visitor to Hari's family home unveils the connection between Indian Independence movement and the astral plane. Nearly a century later, Hari travels to the orange groves of Southern California, where the guru made his home, to examine the globetrotting legacy of New Age spirituality.
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Pushkin. Sometime in the eighteen eighties, my great great grandfather built a hoveli, a large house in the city of Argra in North India. The house had many rooms built around a courtyard and a back garden filled with plants and trees. Outside there was a bustling market, but behind the high walls the house was its own secluded world. That world has gone now, but when I was a child, that was still there, and whenever we went to visit my grandparents in India, we would stay at the hoveli, the family home. To me, it was a magical place. Tribes of monkeys roamed through the trees and they often came into the rooms. You had to sleep with a stick beside your bed so you could stop the animals from stealing your shoes. Some rooms were no longer used. The furniture in them was coated with a thick layer of dust. Outside, the toilet block had spiders, which made it scary to visit in the night, even with a flashlight. There was electricity sometimes, but if you wanted hot water for a bath, one of the servants had to heat it and bring it to your quarters. A defining moment of my childhood was the shame of realizing that another little boy just my age had to carry a heavy bucket so I could wash. It was a house built for a household, a family, and the people who worked for them. My great grandfather had loved traditional Indian wrestling. When he inherited the house, he built a wrestling pit by the servants quarters in the garden. The pit was a sandy enclosure where matches could take place. One year, when I was eight or nine, a big tournament was held there and I was allowed to sit at the front of the out as enormous men with impressive curled mustaches oiled themselves up and grappled, competing for a prize given by my grandfather at the house. When everyone else was occupied, I would climb out of the windows and walk along ledges high above the street. And one day, maybe when I was ten or eleven, I found my way into a forgotten room in the compound. It had been my great grandfather's study. The shelves held a dusty jumble of books and papers. There were old photos, family groups, sports teams. A book was lying on the table. I only remember it because of the strange title, The Lives of al Signy by CW. Ledbetter and Annie bessent Al Signy A lcy o ne What did that mean? I doubt I read much of the book beyond the title page. It was published in twenty four I do remember the curious subtitle rents in the Veil of Time. You're listening to Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru and this episode is about gurus and disciples. It's about East and West. It's about a young Indian who didn't want to be the new Messiah. And it's about my family and how they discovered that fighting colonialism might involve making contact with being from the astrostra plane. Now years later, I know much more about the authors of the Lives of Our SciOne. Together they had become the leaders of a mystical religion. Their book is a record of the past lives of a boy whom they believed to be the new Messiah. Why that book was in my great grandfather's study is one of the strangest stories in my family. It's a story I've only recently begun to understand. But first, Young Indiana Jones has a question for his dad father. What they, well, Theosophists, believe in the commonality of all religions, what they call a brotherhood of man. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones was a TV series that ran in the nineteen nineties. It chronicled the globetrotting colonial youth of the fictional archaeologist from Raiders of the Lost Arc. It's kind of a weird show, very preoccupied by intellectual things. Young Indie Jones goes to Russia and meets Tolstoy in Vienna. His father takes him to the first psychoanalytical comp Friends, where they hang out with Freud and hung In one episode, Indie's father has been invited to India to give a lecture and they attend a meeting of a group called the Theosophical Society. They're interested in psychic and supernatural phenomenon. There's even a rumor they found them Assia some sort of great spiritual teacher. Maybe so, though Young Indies Governess dismisses the whole thing as flimflam. Anyway, Theosophy is much more than a subplot in an obscure televised prequelps. It's one of the strangest and most quietly influential religious organizations of modern times. If you've ever heard about aura's color therapy, clairvoyance, or spirit guides, you have Theosophy to thank. It's behind many of the ideas we associate with the New Age movement. Theosophy inspired some of the wildest pop culture of the twentieth century. The book found in my great grandfather's dusty study was the first sign I had that my family had been involved in it. It turned out to be woven into my life more deeply than I knew. Theosophy starts with one of those great self invented people, Madame Helena Blavatsky. She was a minor Russian aristocrat, and it's probably significant that her mother was a romantic novelist. Though Helena Blavatsky herself wrote a number of books, her most stirring tale was her own life. She was the heroine of her own adventure story. She grew up in a drafty house in Ukraine, where her only pastime was curling up in the library and reading her grandmother's occult books. At the age of seventeen, she married a forty year old man who happened to be the vice governor of Yerevan in the Caucasus, a wild border region of the Russian Empire. Blavatsky's marriage lasted three months, then she ran away. Her father sent someone to bring her home, but she gave him the slip and did an almost unthinkable thing for a seventeen year old rich girl. In eighteen forty eight, she made it to the Black Sea, boarded a steamship and headed for Constantinople to start a new life. We don't exactly know how she supported herself, probably by working as a spirit medium. Madame Blavatsky was fond of putting her occult knowledge to use, contacting the dead on behalf of the living. So far, all I've told you is actually true. The rest of Helena Blavatsky's romantic story, well, perhaps not so much by her own account. She set off around the world looking for secret knowledge. She went to Syria, Mexico, Egypt, and India. She was badly wounded in a battle fighting alongside Italian revolutionaries. She was shipwrecked. She journeyed in a covered wagon across America. She rode bareback in a circus. She outwitted secret agents in Central Asia and played a major role in the Great Game, as people called the geopolitical power struggle between the Russian and British empires. Blevatsky climbed the Himalayas and studied in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in London. In eighteen fifty one, Blavatsky attended the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. There she had a vision of a spirit. This being Master Maria explained that he was one of the Great White Brotherhood. I know that sounds like a prison game, but the brotherhood was. Blevatsky reported a band of super beings who sely looked after the earth. From then on, Lavatsky was in regular contact with these so called ascended masters. They taught her, so, she said, the secrets of the Universe. Madame Lavatsky led an extraordinary opiated fever dream of a life. At a certain point, In a life like that, it becomes obvious that you should start your own religion. She called it the Theosophical Society. It aimed to be the vanguard of a new kind of universal human brotherhood. Theosophists were going to use the combined wisdom of the world's religions to discover hitherto unknown laws of nature. They would generally help humanity level up, turning us all into spiritual supermen and women. If you read theosophical descriptions of the ascended Masters, it's kind of like a cosmic boy band. Everyone has his own look. Jesus and the Buddhera in there, but so as Pythagoras and various other guys like Hilarion, a sexy Greek who's in charge of science, Kutumi, a fair skinned Kashmiri, and of course Maria, the spirit she met at the Crystal Palace. He's a flashing eyed Rushput prince. A plethora of leading men or for the leading lady, Madame Blavatsky. By the time she died in eighteen ninety one, her new religion was doing very well. Theosophy was Madame Blavatsky's gift at the future. Theosophical wizards and mystics were turning up in popular novels, along with shadowy groups like the Nine Unknown Men. By the early years of the twentieth century, the public was in love with stories about teams of beings with superhuman powers and missions to save the earth. The ex Men and the Avengers a director sentence of the beings in Blavatsky's Pantheon. DC's Green Lantern is part of an interstellar law enforcement agency that's like a cop version of the Great White Brotherhood. Superheroes are one theosophical legacy. Then, of course there's this, so it's safe to talk about flying saucers and people from outer space, the aliens. This is a news reporter called Jack Webster, who had a TV show in Vancouver in the nineteen sixties. People who may be circulating among us now, and who demonstrate their unearthly qualities if they choose you as one of their agents by disappearing and reappearing at will. The skeptical Glaswegian Webster is queuing up an interview he did with one of the early UFO contacts, a man named George van Tassel. Van Tassel ran a private airport out in the Mohave Desert at a place called Giant Rock. In fifty three, a spacecraft had landed on Van Tassel's runway. The aliens, beautiful humans dressed a little like ancient Greeks, had shared with him the secret of time travel. I say that what is occurring now has occurred before. There's many records of these ships landing throughout history, clear back into sandscript. When you realize we're dealing with a type of man that is almost as far above us and intelligence as we are above the lower animals, there is an anthing phenomenal in this at all. I researched UFOs and Van Tassel in particular for my novel Gods Without Men. I discovered that almost all that first generation of contactees, people who claimed to have met aliens, were also involved in spiritualism or theosophy. One belief system that emerged out of the Soup of the West Coast UFO counterculture in the nineteen fifties involves the Ashtar galact Command, a team of super beings with many names familiar from Madame Lavatsky's pantheon, including Hilarion Ku to Me and the Great Beloved Commander in Chief Jesus the Christ. The Ashtar Galactic Command is still around today. I'll let British color therapist and spiritual teacher Hayden Crawford explain more. The Ashtar Command is an ethnic group of extraterrestrials, angels, and light beings, plus millions of starships, which act as coordinators over the space fleet over the Western Hemisphere. They are here to assist humanity through the current process of planetary cleansing, polar realignment, and ascension into the fifth dimension. I think that's reasonably clear. And then there's the Ethereous Society, the group of UFO enthusiasts founded in nineteen fifty five by Yogi Guru and former cab driver doctor George King. They're headquartered in Hollywood and London, but the real work gets done elsewhere. A top so called holy mountains like the wind Swept holds them down in devon site of their operation prayer Power. Picture this a friendly looking group of people, middle aged and retired, and dressed in all weather gear in case it starts to drizzle, sitting in folding chairs, communing with a great beyond. We send out energy from places like this to the world as a whole for healing, for peace, but we do it in cooperation with being from other planets. That's Richard Lawrence, the Ethereous Society's executive secretary. He's interviewed in a twenty seventeen documentary by Vice. Right, So, aliens, if you like, if you like, Yes, A number of the great spiritual figures of history, Buddha Shri krish were from other planets. In the documentary, Lawrence gestures to a strange object at the center of their circle, the prayer battery. It's the size of an old tripod camera, a brightly colored box with some cables and straps that definitely does not look like a prop in a late night movie. Has everybody been given the mantral we're going to use today? Good? Okay, that's great, So why don't we prepare ourselves then to become channels as the ethereans chant their prayers are stored in the battery. Later, this prayer power will be released in a jolt of good vibes directed at strife anywhere on Earth. In the past, the prayer battery has helped clean up oil spills, protected against hurricanes, and even in nineteen eighty one, kept the Soviet Union from invading Poland. Through this world, the prayer battery is a radionic device, a physical combination of theosophy and modern engineering. It was invented by a British cabby, George King, in nineteen fifty four. A voice told King he was going to be the representative of the ascended masters on Earth. King was already a serious practitioner of yoga. This is long before it was a mainstream lifestyle activity. He says, a famous Indian yogi walked through his locked door and initiated him into certain spiritual secrets. This type of turn from India to mysticism, to any number of incredible beliefs was already well worn by the time George King and his followers scaled holy mountains with their batteries. And it all goes directly back to a trip taken long ago by Madame Blavatsky. In eighteen seventy nine, records show that Blavatsky arrived on a ship into Bombay looking for enlightenment. Her effect on my conservative Indian family would turn out to be profound. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, came to India to meet Hindu mystics. She ended up selling her own brand of mysticism to the Indians. In England, they call this bringing coals to Newcastle. The Internet tells me that the closest American expression is taking sand to the beach, but Madame Blavatsky pulled it off. Theosophy became wildly popular in India. Theosophical meetings were one of the few places where British and Indians, the colonizers and the colonized could meet on equal terms around a shared worldview. And because of this, something unforeseen happened. Theosophy got political. The cranks and mystics who followed Madame Blavatsky got mixed up in the Indian independent struggle against the British raj. This is where my great great grandfather comes in. Pandit Adjudyanath Kunzru was a lawyer in the city of Argra, best known for the taj Mahal. He was from a wealthy family of high caste Hindus. In the one picture that exists of him, he's younger than I am now, maybe in his thirties. He has gentle eyes, but most of the rest of his face is obscured by a huge hipster beard. Like many educated Indians of his generation, my ancestor was torn into directions. When he was seventeen, Indian troops rose up against their British officers in Britain. This is known as the Indian Mutiny. In India they call it the First War of Independence. It was bloodily suppressed, and afterwards the British were determined that it wouldn't happen again. They set out to create a trustworthy Indian elite educated in British style schools and universities with a British curriculum. Adjudanath became part of this. He went to a government college where he learned English poetry, English history, the dates of the Battle of Hastings, and Magna Carta. It was drummed into the young men of this Indian elite that their own culture was backwards. All English schoolboys knew that Indians had barbaric gods with too many heads and arms. Indians burned widows on pires. Indians were passive and fatalistic. Unlike plucky Victorian Englishmen who had a candu spirit, Indians didn't try to change things because the state of the world was God's will. My great great grandfather internalized some of these feelings. He wished his country were more modern, but he also found he couldn't ignore the problems colonialism created. Indians had no voice in their own politics, and they were barred from joining the civil service that ran the country. On behalf of the Empress Queen Victoria English businessmen were making vast fortunes in India, but they spent the prophets back home. Ajudianath wanted social progress, the education of women, the end of child marriage. He was a strict vegetarian and was passionate about animal rights. He also became a rich man, so he did what rich men do when they want to voice their views. He started his own newspaper. It was called the Indian Herald. I have a Judynath's picture on the wall of my study, but it was only while I was researching this podcast that I found out that he'd had a newspaper. I couldn't believe it. No one in my family had ever mentioned it, though perhaps there's a good reason for that. It didn't go very well. A Judynath wanted a native English speaker to edit the newspaper, and somehow he hired a young itinerant American named Francis Marion Crawford, who, as far as I can see, was the eighteen seventies equivalent of a hippie backpacker. Crawford thought his job as a joke. According to him, my ancestors newspaper staff consisted of a baronet, a disqualified jockey, a drunken parson, a countess, a bank director, several struggling young barristers, and a host of others. The struggling barristers would have been a Judynarth's idealistic friends. Whatever really and at the Herald, Crawford and my great great grandfather soon fell out and the paper had bust. Crawford said the Herald lost money because it was too radical for the British and not radical enough for the Indian masses. Knowing what I do about A Judy Narth's views, that sounds about right. Despite his failures as a newspaper proprietor, a Judy Narth still wanted to work for his country. His chance finally came when he met one of the greatest eccentrics of Victorian India, a retired colonial official named Allan Octavian Hume. Hume was an obsessive ornithologist who has no less than seven birds named after him as Hume's leaf warbler, Hume's ground tip, Hume's short towed laugh, and so on. But more importantly for the future of India, Hume believed it was time for Indians to step up and take control. In typical victor in fashion, He expressed himself in verse, are he ss or archie freeman, he that grovel in the shade in your own hands? Rest the issues by themselves? Are nations made? The other thing about Hume, he was a theosophist and a close friend of Madame Blavatsky. Through her, he had personally received spiritual communication from two of the ascended Masters, Kut to me and Maria. The way it worked, he wrote letters to the Masters, which Blavatsky placed in a special wooden box. From there they dematerialized and were fedexed to the higher planes. The answers floated down from the ceiling or were found on the recipient's pillow. Though this is all rather silly, the Masters gave Hume a message that was to have profound political consequences. That told him that British India was in danger and it was up to him to save it. The cosmic balance between East and West had tipped too far toward the western side. It was up to him to correct it. How to do that by helping Indians gain more power, Hume put out a call for fifty good men and true, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, men like my great great grandfather. In eighteen eighty five, Hume started an organization called the Indian National Congress. The British authorities would instantly have shut down anything national started by Indians, but they found it much harder to muzzle the dissenting opinions of Allen Octavian Hume, a companion of the Order of the Bath and a distinguished member of the Imperial Civil Service. In eighteen eighty eight, the Congress met in Allahabad near Agra. I have a copy of the speech my great great grand father gave At the opening of the Congress. He defends his friend Hume. We mean to stick to mister Hume to the last, he says. His advice to us has always been loyalty and moderation, and yet he's been stigmatized as the most seditious man in India. A judianath affirms his loyalty to Queen Victoria. He points out that the Congress is only asking for the same rights as other subjects of the English Crown. There's also a defiant note. You know the strength of the opposition, he says, and you also know that it is fast losing its power for evil and dying out. As all unrighteous things sooner or later die. A Judianath had been influenced by Hume in more than politics. He had begun attending meetings of the Theosophical Society. He was still a relatively young man, only fifty two when he died suddenly of influenza. He left an intellectual legacy for his children, who all became ardent nationalists. Madame Blavatsky died at about the same time as Adjudynath, also of the flu Leadership of the Theosophical Society passed into the hands of another charismatic woman, Annie Bessant. She'd been a labor organizer in London, leading a famous strike of young women and girls working in terrible conditions at a factory making matches. Later, Bessant became a disciple of Madame Blavatsky and traveled to India. She took over the Theosophical Society with a lapsed Anglican priest called Charles Ledbetter. Led Better and Bessant with the oddest of odd couples, the fiery radical leader of the London match girl's strike and the former curate of Bramshott Village, who started talking to spirits and then ran off to Asia. One day in nineteen o nine, Ledbetter was walking on the beach when he saw a young boy who had, he wrote, the most wonderful aura he had ever seen, without a particle of selfishness in it. The boy's mother was dead, his father was very poor, and for whatever reason led Better became convinced that in this boy he had found the world teacher, the new Messiah. Not everyone agreed. At least one other, Theosophus described the child as dimwitted. And then there was the other issue. Ledbetter had already been expelled once from the Theosophical Society because of his sexual interest in young boys. The boy, Judu Krishna Murty, was very ansom. Early photos emphasized his fine features and soulful eyes. Very quickly led Better ascribed to him dozens of past lives. Somehow, Krishnamote's family agreed that he and his brother Nietzsya should go and live at the Theosophical compound in Adhya. There, led Better and Besson would tue to them and do further research into their past lives, which apparently stretched back twenty five thousand years from India to the lost continent of Atlantis. Krishnamoty was given a star name. He was Alcyone, the central star in the Pleiades constellation. Led Better began to publish an account of Krishnamurti's lives in a theosophical magazine. Eventually they were collected together into a book, a sort of reincarnation soap opera, in which all the characters were previous incarnations of senior Theosophists. It was this book, The Lives of Alcione, that I found in my great grandfather's study when I was a boy. To me, the real life of Krishna Murty is more interesting and affecting than the stories in the Lives of Alsiony. Annie Bessent and Charles led Better became the legal guardians of Krishna Mute and his brother Nitsya, even fighting a court case against their father. The Theosophists formed an organization, the Order of the Star in the East, to promote their young messiah. Krishna Murty was dressed in tailored suits from saval Row and plans were made to send him to Oxford. Christna Murty turned out not to be very academic, so the Oxford plan was dropped, though he himself was one of the ascended Masters, he never could hold a lot of the complex teachings in his head. In nineteen fifteen, Charles led Better left India run the Theosophical Society in Australia, where it was very popular. Chrishnamurtiu was relieved to see him go. Annie Bessant, who became a sort of substitute mother, combined her mystical interests with support for Indian independence. In the days when Hume was advising my great great grandfather, the ascended Masters, speaking through mystical letters seemed to be in favor of loyalty to the Crown. Now the Masters were sending messages from the astral plane enthusiastically supporting the corps for the British to quit India. Enter my great grandfather, rajnas the wrestling fan, whose copy of Bessend and Ledbetter's book I found in our old house. In nineteen sixteen, Rajnath was a delegate at the Indian National Congress along with both his brothers. The following year, Annie Bessant was elected as the chair. The Congress was gradually turning from an elite talking shop into a serious independence movement. By the nineteen twenties did the Krishna Murty, or just Kay as his followers called him, was traveling the world with Bessant, mixing in high society. Kay had become a startlingly handsome young man with a long, straight nose and sweat back hair. The Order of the Star of the East was now very wealthy. Thousands of people came to hear Kay speak. Sometime in early December nineteen twenty two, Krishna Murty and Annie Bessant were on a whistle stock tour of India. Kay hadn't been home for several years. He stayed the night in Argre and according to my family, it was our house that he stayed in. This was always spoken of as a great event, and it seems to have cemented Rajnath's loyalty to Theosophy. But though Krishna Moote was becoming world famous, there were signs that the new Messiah was contemplating his own independence movement. In the early nineteen twenties, Krishnamote's younger brother, Nietya, fell ill with tuberculosis. A theosophist offered a cottage in Ohi up in the hills north of Los Angeles. The healthy climate of California would be perfect for his recovery. In nineteen twenty five, Kay left his brother Nietya in Ohi, though Nietya was gravely ill. Reluctantly a Kay was on his way back to India to attend a massive rally of the Order of the Star. He stopped in England, where he met Senior Theosophist aboard ship. At port side, he received a telegram saying Nietzsche had died. Kay locked himself in his cabin and didn't emerge for some days. Much later, in an interview, Kay revealed that the English members had told him that if he accepted them as disciples, his brother would recover. What a joke he thought. Though he went on to India, this moment was the beginning of a total disillusionment with the movement and his role as the Messiah. Still, by nineteen twenty nine, Theosophy seemed as if it might turn into a global spiritualist church. The Theosophists arranged a big meeting at Omen in the Netherlands, where the Order of the Star had its headquarters. A wealthy Dutch donor had given them a castle. It was there rumor had it that would announce the names of twelve disciples, just like Jesus had. That is, whatever Vanard the wall is attempting to rue truth, he is lettered down LaMDA plating for those who are weak. But there was a problem. Kay hadn't chosen anybody. The list had been cooked up by Bessant and some other senior theosophists. Conveniently, their names were all on it. Kay told Bessant that he wouldn't cooperate, that he found their vanity absurd and disgusting. There's a photo of Christna Murty with Annie Besson opening the ceremony. They both look unhappy. Bessant is an old lady by this point, and she's dressed up like a Christmas tree with mystical embroidered robes and a mess of necklaces and pendants hanging around her neck. Christia Murty Movie Stars Suave has impeccably tailored double breasted jacket and a fashionably casual open necked shirt, and he bescent knows what's about to happen. Chrishna Murty gets up on stage and he drops the bomb. He tells the assembled crowd that he's not the Messiah. He doesn't want any disciples. Theosophy is a sham. The speech wasn't recorded at the time, but later on Kay was persuaded to repeat it for a newsreel crew. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any part whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should any organization deform to lead or cause people along in a particular path. Christna Murty says, you can't find truth by following leaders. You have to find it for yourself. He's giving back the castle and disbanding the organization. The Theosophists are at Paul Ledbetter, the old pedophile who found the beautiful boy on the beach, splutters that the coming has gone wrong. What did Krishnamurti do? Once he'd walked away from being the Messiah? He went to California. He settled in Ohio and made his home there for the rest of his life. He never stopped writing and giving talks. His presence in Ohio became one of the seeds for the West Coast counterculture that grew up in the fifties and sixties, a fusion of East and West that secretly owes so much to Madame Lavatsky and the Theosophists. The Ohi cottage is pretty modest. He can't help feeling that it was a reaction to the pomp and circumstance of his days in theosophy. Kay certainly wasn't a hermit. But though Christian Murty always had famous friends and followers, from Langston Hughes to Van Morrison, the trajectory of his life was towards quietness and meditation. Since the famous pepper tree that in the mid nineteen twenties that he sat under, and he kind of came to some kind of understanding or opening. This is Christie Lee, who helps run the Christian Murty Center in Ohio. It fell at a certain point and we thought it had died, but obviously it's you know, gave back roots. This needs actually the same tree. So the stump of the pepper tree is taller than I am, and it shoots out like a branch, a fully mature, beautiful tree with a canopy of shade. There was such profound calmness, both in the air and within myself, Christian Murty wrote, the calmness of the bottom of a deep, unfathomable lake. Like the lake I felt, my physical body, with its mind and emotions, could be ruffled on the surface. But nothing, nay, nothing could disturb the calmness of my soul. In Ojai Kay completed his transformation from a beautiful, rather vague, young dandy into a profound thinker. Christie Lee's husband, Up Sloater, directs the Christian emoti Foundation of America. I asked him how he'd characterized Kay's teachings. Unlike theosophy, there's no complicated metaphysical system, no rituals, no trances or incantations. He was constantly saying, look at yourself, look at what luke, at your thinking, at your thoughts, See how you're building up images. See how your consciousness is put together, and see how your consciousness is similar to other people's consciousness. And see how that's the root of all conflicting in society and conflict inside you, under your root of human suffering. Another person who works at OHIO is Michael Kronin, who used to be Christiana Murty's personal chef. He would hear Kay rail against organized religion a lot. He said, Look, I'm not starting a new religion. This is not a new religion. I am not an authority, you know. I'm not having sacred scriptures or any of that. The only thing that approaches what you might call a device is observe. Observe yourself, be aware of your own reactions, be aware of how you are conditioned. This feels intuitively right to me. I feel a connection to Christiana Murty. Partly it is because I admire what he did, how he had the courage to be simple, to reject or the messianic flimflam of theosophy. But my sense of connection also goes back to something much simpler. Listen for a moment to Krishna Murty's accent as he reads out his speech disbanding the Order of the Star. I am concerning myself with the only one essential thing, the true freedom of man. I would help him to break away from all limititians. That clipped, old fashioned accent of K's that's very familiar to me. I heard it in the mouths of older Indian men, men of my grandfather's generation, who had been taught English by British teachers in the last days of the raj. I remember being startled once when I was at the house in Arga. An old man, a friend of my grandfather, came walking toward me, supporting himself with a stick. He was dressed in a shawl and a lungi with a cap on his head. Hello, he said, you don't happen to know the latest score in the cricket that East west accent. I didn't understand until recently how marked my family had been by theosophy. Various older relatives were astrologers and homeopaths. I have an uncle who's a retired army officer but gives out a business card advertising his skill in the mystic science of namology. My father was different. He became a doctor, a scientific rationalist, and it's his spirit I'm inherited, not the mystical side. In Ohi, Michael Cronin takes me into Kay's personal library, where the books are just as he left them. The Ways of White Folks by length and Hughes. This is actually quite a oh my goodness, an interest in wonder, Sincerely, Lengthston Hughes, Carmel, Highland, September eighteenth, nineteen thirty four. Like most writers, when I walk into a room, my eyes are drawn to the bookshelves. In Ohi, it's impressive to see all the various editions of works by and about K. But you can also tell a lot about someone by what they like to read. So when I'm taken into Christian Murty's study, I'm immediately intrigued. Yeah, I was a Jack Higgins. The Igor has landed. He was a great fan of these kind of books. Yeah, I was a Jack Higgins. Oh yeah, We've got The Freelance Spy, the Wolfling, the Scream of the Dove. Yeah. So he was pop fiction, that's what. Yeah. Sometimes I remember he asked me, you know, I mean not here, but in over where the lunch was served, and he said, sir, could you go to the local bookstore and maybe by by a couple of books by Leon Urus, you know, and I would buy some of those. I mere Garden Ruins and oh yeah, Tom, these books James Bond, the Scottish thriller writer Aliston McClain, and Leon URIs, who wrote a lot about World War Two. They're mucho trashy entertainment. I think this is the moment that Christian Murty really comes into focus for me. He didn't just reject being the Messiah because he had some philosophical belief in simplicity. He was simple, he was ordinary. He spent the second half of his life turning himself into an ordinary person. My family house in Argre is gone now. Sometime in the nineteen nineties it was torn down and all the books and papers vanished. Every time I think about that, I experienced a pang of loss, all that lost knowledge, all that history. Let the cottage, you know, Hi, I decide that I'm okay with it. This is a place to let things go, to allow the past to slide into forgetfulness. Maybe the thing to do would be to follow Kay's example and sit under the pepper tree reading Tom Clancy, enjoying the afternoon sun. Chrishnamuti was not exactly hiding out in California, not an exile, but many others were, and they hated the sunny state. To find them, we have to leave behind the orange groves of Ojai for the freeways of la I don't know how you feel generally. What are your feelings generally about literary pilgrimage. Is it something you you're always up for? I am always up for it, and I'm always disappointed. Fun Son and lots to complain about optimism. Pessimism that's next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Rider Also and Hunter Braithway. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Spatial Relations. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti, also known as Lipp Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Carlie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor into the Zone as a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know. The best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcasts. You could even write a review. See you next week. I'm Harry KUNZRN