Customer Reviews

Lives in the Shadow With J. Krishnamurti

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Radha Rajagopal Sloss's unique book is something of an unofficial biography of 20th century philosopher J. Krishnamurti and the events surrounding his career as a religious/philosophical teacher. The daughter of Rosalind Williams Rajagopal and husband D. Rajagopal, Radha Rajagopal Sloss's book is not a sordid expose, it is not graphic or insulting. It is simply a sincere account of her very real experiences growing up in amazing circumstances among amazing people. There is a lot of information here which isn't included in "official" biographies of philosopher J. Krishnamurti, which helps the reader get a better idea of the politics and humanness which even great men may be affected by. Author Sloss in fact, mentioned this tendancy of official biographies to ignore or excuse certain parts of Krishnamurti's life as a reason for penning this work.

Some of the controversy this book generated is due to the fact that certain students and followers of Krishnamurti believe that he was a living example of a perfect human. This volume disspells that myth, indeed, he looks quite human throughout this writing. It was interesting to find how Krishnamurti dealt with some of his biggest stressors, including financial disagreements with friend D. Rajagopal, and the pregnancy (by him) of his dear lover Rosalind Williams Rajagopal. Radha describes her love of "Krinsh" (Krishnamurti), who was like a second father to her, and how his increasing unwillingness to deal with problems damaged many relationships and people. Included are numerous letters to and from Krishnamurti, D. Rajagopal and Rosaling Rajagopal, and numerous other individuals who were active on the Theosophical movement or Krishnamurti's teachings. A very worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in history, philosophy, or the full history of J. Krishnamurti.

Actualy I would give this only 2-and-a-half-stars. I've read several K biographies, including this one and the response to this book by Mary Lutyens, "Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals." Like all the other biographies, this one, too, is helpful yet biased and highly incomplete. Sloss essentially gets almost all her facts (apparently) from her mother's version of the story, who obviously has a highly biased viewpoint. Sloss makes no attempts to get independent verification of most of her claims, although Lutyens and others admit to the basic fact that K *did* have a several-decade-long love (including sexual) relationship with Sloss's mother. But it's the details of that relationship that are in dispute. I'm very familiar with K's teaching on sexuality. He *never* claimed to be chaste nor taught *sexual* chastity, but rather a 'chastity" (purity) of mind. For him, sex was like any other desire--it's not a problem until we "make it a problem" such as by craving it, needing it, obsessing over it, demanding exclusivity with possessiveness, etc. So I see absolutely no inconsistency between his teachings and him having a sexual relationship with someone (or more than one person for that matter). As for the dispute between K and Sloss's father, Sloss's bias is blatant, such as she leaves out any explanation why her father insisted on bringing new lawsuits against K (such as a multi-million dollar defamation suit), she offers no explanation as to why her father was trying to keep control for himself over the recording of what were K's own teachings, and she doesn't offer any explanations for the allegations of embezzled funds which is why K and his new foundations were sueing Rajagopal to begin with (to recover the moneys). This book cannot be read without also reading Lutyen's book in response to this one "Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals" which shows, I think effectively, that Rajagopal had some serious emotional issues such as intense jealousy over K, which led to his obssessive attempts at controlling both the monies and the teachings themselves. So it's important for me to emphasize that when one looks at the best available evidence, from piecemealing together the facts from this book and others, that there seems to be *no* inconsistency yet that has been clearly shown between K's teachings and his life. Which is to say, looking at all the available evidence objectively as one can, it seems that K *did* live the teachings. *However*, unfortunately, one who wishes to understand K's life must do this sleuth work oneself. The biographies of K's "followers" like Lutyens and others are equally or even more biased as their biographies include almost no mention, let alone discussion, of the relationship between K and the Rajagopals, which clearly were some of the most major and important relationships K had during his lifetime. This would be like a biography of Lincoln that leaves out the civil war and it's impact on the man! It's inexcusable that anyone claiming to writee a biography of K would leave out all this major information shedding insight on Krisnahmurti and his life, especially when they themselves admit they knew much of this information at the time they wrote his biography! So the world still awaits a biography that gives a full, complete, detailed, honest and objective account of the entirety of K's life, rather than merely one person's limited recollection and perspective. Such a book would, I believe, clearly and unbiasedly show that a decades-long love affair and numerous lawsuits with Rajagopal in no way demonstrated a lack of K living his own teachings. I anxiously await such a biography.

I read this book many years ago and was quite shattered by it. It paints a vastly different picture of Krishnamurti the man than the one we are presented in the comparitively hagiographical accounts of Lutyens et al. However over time my view has changed. Krishnamurti never encouraged followers or worshippers of himself or anyone else. He never extolled chastity as an ideal and had a relatively liberal attitude to sexual relations. So I no longer feel that this account makes him a hypocrite. Also the author is plainly, clearly biased. She has an ax to grind and a score to settle. This, obviously, affects the entire account. Finally, however, the lesson is - don't project your ideal of perfection on ANYONE. It is reassuring for us to have a hero, someone we can tell ourselves has 'made it' and whose accomplishments we can hope to emulate. Well, don't! Krishnamurti himself always deprecated this. Much or even most of what he taught still stands. Just don't expect anything from it - which is a major part of the teaching. The hard part of modern spirituality is NOT to have beliefs WITHOUT falling into nihilism or materialism. This book is part of that hard teaching. There is the 'middle way' between the extremes of adulation, on one hand, and cynicism, on the other. This is what we must find. [If that sounds Buddhist, it is.]

Well, I read this and enjoyed it. Of course, I kept in mind the woman who wrote it, and her mother, had an axe to grind.

Krishnamurti was raised on money provided to him and two other people as future leaders of the theosophical society. The two other people were the parents of the woman who wrote this book. The three of them lived together, or at least in physical proximity, for decades.

Krishnamurti never preached celibacy for others that I ever heard. Sometimes he seemed to imply he was celibate. But if you really listened to him he basically said it didn't seem to matter in his life whether he was or wasn't.

Which clearly told me he was not celibate. I don't know why some people thought he was.

So, it turns out he had an affair with this woman's mother for twenty years. He was monogamous to that relationship and they admit he was very attentive and considerate. There was nothing tawdry about it AT ALL. Later, they broke up and this is where the bad blood comes in

Krishnamurti's life stayed bound up with these two people (sloss's mom and pop) through contractual ties, even after he broke up with his girlfriend (the mom). Too much familiarity breeds contempt and the people around krishnamurti in the sixties, seventies and eighties complained these two (sloss's parents) treated krishnamurti with contempt and were ultra bossy and overbearing to him. Some of these allegations about her parents were written in books (by Mary Lutyens).

Finally he managed to sever all ties with them after a court battle and endless negotiations.

It was the printed attacks on her parents that sloss is responding to in this book. She loved her parents, as rightly she should. However, she clearly twists some facts but can't completely quit being fond of krishnamurti as well.

Some things she says are darned strange. Krishna (please, I don't want to keep typing his whole name) had a full-blown kundalini process going most of his life. I saw him in person once (about a year before he died) and you'd have to be a real rhinoceros (thick skinned) not to feel the energy (prana/chi/shakti whatever you want to call it) radiating from him; yet at one point sloss and mommy dearest imply they thought it was fake. bizarre!

If they're serious then they spent all that time living with him and got basically nothing out of it. Weird. Like living with Picasso for twenty years but never bothering to pay any attention to that painting stuff.

Some of her attacks on him have merit. No one is perfect and he never claimed to be. If you want to know what they were, read the book.

Anyway, I just read this for the second time and I can't help liking krishnamurti a lot. This would make him throw up (his whole philosophy was to live without role models) but i find him a really excellent role model for sane, peaceful living.

He did hatha yoga (two hours worth!) every single morning, followed by a half hour of pranayama (yogic breathing), followed by meditation. (Kind of a shock to people who took his attacks on meditation too seriously). He also did "power walking" and was a strict vegetarian.

What struck me most about the three people whose lives are chronicled here is this: they weren't physically related to one another (the woman was american, the two men Indian), they were all vegetarian from early on and...they all lived to be over ninety years old! I read this book and quit eating meat.

Howdy,This book is very interesting indeed. Of course no one can say for sure if the book is correct or not but given that the Rajagopals knew Krishnamurti as well as anyone on earth I think there is grounds to give credibility to Mrs. Sloss' account. I've asked the Krishnamurti Foundation of America about the book. Their response wasn't "the book is a lie" but rather their response was "K's personality wasn't important, what he taught was important". They told me once K was asked "are you living the teachings yourself", K's response was "how would you know?"As a long time admirer of Krishnamurti I can say that these sorts of answers are unacceptable. Krishnamurti soooo many times would speak about the transcendent state of chastity and then say "these are not the problems of the speaker, these are your problems."Well, it seems like they were the problems of the speaker. If he had been honest about where he was in his grounded life with all of this I could be more accepting, but he wasn't. This, at least in part, makes Krishnamurti a hypocrit and makes me question everything else he has written. If K wasn't living his own teachings, is it any wonder he seemed to never find any of his "students" living them either.All "friends" of Krishnamurti owe it to themselves to read this book, in fact I consider it the most important book about Krishnamurti written because it dares to step outside of the carefully crafted Krishnamurti mystique. If the man can't walk the talk, how could he expect anyone else to. I don't judge him for his womanizing, I do feel that the "persona" he crafted over 60 years was, to be blunt, a partial lie. If his personality isn't important than neither are his insights about our personalities. No teacher's teaching is greater than the teacher's ability to actualize or "walk" the teaching.This has really burst my bubble about J. Krishnamurti, I always thought he was one of the ones carrying the flame, but alas his flame wasn't nearly as bright as we thought.Peace,John ( John-on-Maui@webv.net )

Radha Sloss wrote this book primarily to expose Krishnamurti's affair with her Mother, Rosalind Rajagopal, therefore if someone is looking to learn more about K's life, this book will not provide him/her with much insight. It is obvious that Radha is basically a spokesperson for her Mother and her attitude towards Krishnamurti, though he was like a Father to her, turns into contempt and resentment as the affair begins to fall apart. Rosalind's letter exchange with K. is not available for legal reasons and though it seems conceivable that they did have an intimate and affectionate relationship that lasted for many years, it also becomes quite obvious that Rosalind was extremely jealous, possessive and obsessed with K. and this book served her as a way to vindicate her pain after the affair ended. It's sad that such private matters had to be exposed, especially for K., who was already dead when the book was published and could not respond to any of the allegations. Krishnamurti himself never claimed he was chaste; he just claimed his private life wasn't important. His intimate relationship with Rosalind based on mutual love and friendship shows no contradiction or hypocrisy in his teachings. It is important to understand that it wasn't really an affair, since Rosalind and Raja never had a true marriage (right after Rosalind gets pregnant Raja in fact announces to her that there is no need to live as man and wife anymore, and many passages refer to Raja's tacit consent to this romantic relationship between his wife and K.). Raja's and Rosalind's marriage seemed more of an arrangement based on a profound bond of friendship, friendship that had indeed existed between all three of them (K., Raja and Rosalind) for many years before any romantic bonds were established.
I read the book in hopes of learning more about who K. was, but felt a bit disgusted with the petty details of personal conflicts which Radha was trying to settle in the public eye.

This is a delightful book. Krishnamurti had always seemed forbidding and austere and not fully human to me, which of course made his enlightenment, if that's the word for it, seem very remote and unlikely of attainment by ordinary men. (So you'd think a book which humanizes K would be welcomed by his followers--but you'd be wrong.)
Anyway, we see in Radha's book that he _was_ in fact an ordinary man--and a very likable one, in my own opinion. It's very clear that Radha had a conflicted view of her "Krinsh," who, through her childhood was much more of a father to her than D. Rajagopal. A certain disillusion with K informs the later part of the book, but I think it's evident that she also had a deep love for the man. That very fact would certainly explain the sense of betrayal she has about K after the breach between her parents and K, because that breach also alienated her from this man who had been a kind and devoted father-figure to her when she was young. Obviously that hurt, as did the discovery that K did not deal very well with quotidian human conflict and trouble--which is part of what made him an ordinary human. It must have hurt K too, who, lacking the psychological resources to deal with it, withdrew from Radha as well as her parents. (After enlightenment, the laundry, as they say, and K chose to hide the laundry rather than wash it and air it out. But, given his upbringing and background, how could anyone have expected otherwise?)

So Krishnamurti had flaws, and serious ones. Are we shocked? Well, some people are, but I don't see why. I mean, the overall depiction of K in this book is of a good and kind man who has failings that are not in the nature of things shocking at all.

Do any of the revelations here invalidate K's "teaching," as he called it? Not at all. So why the outrage?

Puzzling, isn't it?

Despite Krishnamurti's repeated misgivings about hero worshiping of Gurus, we're back to square one. What personal difference does it make to an individual whether Krishnamurti was a philanderer or a monk? Why should one be bothered with his presumed shortcomings, when he always carefully distanced 'the speaker' from the message? Did he ever ask for the reader's, or the listener's approval of his personality? Did he ever say 'follow me'?

If someone begins to idolize him after reading his work, and is later shattered to read criticism ( that might be true ) of his person- then the whole point of Krishnamurti's writings is lost on the reader. If one cannot differentiate between the message and its bearer, (s)he does not yet possess an unperturbed mind to dispassionately contemplate.

Let's face it- the greatest human beings are imperfect and fallible. Their greatness is not in the absence of, but despite their failings. Even Ram(a), considered to be an ideal man, the greatest spiritual figure in Indian lore, made questionable decisions. Those great men after whom the major religions are based, also will find critics.

People have asked of Krishnamurti- 'If he cannot live it, who can?'
And if they cannot separate the man from the message, have they asked of themselves- 'If this were true, and if I could not forgive this man after all he has done, who could I forgive?'

I recently read this work by Mrs. Sloss. I've read many Krishnamurti works and willingly read this book as it presents a different opinion of the man. The conclusions as to Krishnamurti's motives, etc. are entirely imaginative in my humble opinion. It may have been a good sell had it not been so blatantly biased, basically the ramblings of a jilted lover filtered through her daughter who seeks to weave a very tall tale indeed. Shame, shame. While I would not recommend buying this book, if you must read it, borrow it instead!! In addition though, please read another book after that provides a most excellent response by Mary Lutyens called "Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals." Only then will you be able to determine for yourself what the real story is!...

I read the book with interest and an open mind. The conclusions the author makes are often unfounded. There are some interesting historical descriptions and the most important contribution of the book was to depict that K was actually a human - and in my mind that made him even greater, because being a human he understood the human condition. But the author appears to constantly want to attack K for being a human and many of her conclusions seem to be inaccurate and unfounded - at least they are not presented with much solid logic.