Page 147 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

y introduction to Krishnamurti came while I was at
art school studying photography in the late 1960s.
This was a wonderful time to be young; there was a
Mfeeling that everyone should re-invent themselves,
and the world at large. It was OK to make mistakes but not to
follow in other people’s footsteps—especially those of our poor,
bewildered parents. Of course, we tripped up all the time—we
were busy creating what we felt was an exciting, progressive cul-
ture, expressed in music, the arts and science.
A lot of that cultural wave was about the freedom to realise
our desires, but it did sweep away the lingering constraints that
held society to stale, post-War values and it broke down some of
the class barriers that were so prevalent in Britain. Krishnamurti
was part of the cultural landscape of that time; his revolutionary
approach chimed with a growing audience of young people.
I read every ‘K’ book I could find—and went to a talk he gave
in Wimbledon with my girlfriend. He spoke from a deep silence
which made a profound impression on me. I’d been educated at
a Quaker School where the gathered silence was the foundation
of their meetings. As a schoolboy I found it constrained and brit-
tle. The silence that emanated from Krishnamurti was something
totally authentic. I met him by chance after his talk, in a corridor in
the Town Hall, and exchanged a shy handshake—the first of many
as it turned out.
One element of his talk wouldn’t let me go—his assertion that
there had been no psychological evolution. We had better bath-
rooms, he said, but we were essentially the same tribal people we
had descended from thousands of years ago.
I had been bought up by very sincere, left leaning parents. They
had both been conscientious objectors in the War; they supported
Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement aimed at Indian indepen-
dence and spoke up for the left-wing causes of their day. I absorbed
the idea of human development—a world gradually improving

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