Page 103 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

I

first encountered Krishnamurti when I was eighteen years old,
studying Psychology at Delhi University. I was a young under-
graduate, in search of another way of life, filled with confusion
and yearning to be part of ‘something else’ which might help me
understand what life is all about. I was clueless as to how I might go
about this and wrapped myself up in traditional ways of approach-
ing what to my young mind appeared as the sacred. The pursuit of
religion in an organized form was all that was available to me in
my limited world of comprehending the sacred. An encounter with
Krishnamurti and several weeks spent in his presence revealed that
the sacred does not lie out there, to pursue which we need to aban-
don our lives; it is in fact present in the everyday, in our relation-
ships, and understanding ourselves is the first step in this journey.
Over the next few years, listening to Krishnamurti at Chennai,
Rajghat, Delhi and Rishi Valley, I began to see for myself that the
sacred is not something ‘set apart’, in another realm that we must
relentlessly pursue. The sacred may be viewed as unique and indeed
transcendent; but it is present in our ordinary lives, in social rela-
tionships, and in the tumult and chaos of our present. At the same
time, it is undoubtedly transcendent because it has a quality that
connects us to a realm of virtuosity, morality, and well-being. It is
in this sense that we may view the sacred as a secular space empty
of religious content.

The sacred in our lives

The sacred in the here and now, in our present, in our turbu-
lent experience of the everyday, is suffused not only with our
feelings of achievement and success but also with our pain, suf-
fering and alienation. In other words, we are fragmented beings
and as Krishnamurti puts it, “our relationship is a process of self-
isolation; each one is building a wall of self-enclosure, which
excludes love, only breeding ill-will and misery”. This self-enclosure

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