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Jiddhu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF
HIS LAST JOURNAL
FOREWORD BY MARY LUTYENS

THIS BOOK is unique in that it is the only one of Krishnamurti's publications which records words spoken into a tape-recorder while he was quite alone. After the success of Krishnamurti's Journal, published in 1982, he was urged to continue it but, since by then his hand had become rather shaky (he was eighty-seven), it was suggested that instead of writing it, which would tire him, he should dictate it to himself. This idea appealed to him. However, he could not start at once because he was on the point of flying to India where he would have no time to himself. On his return to California, in February 1983, he dictated the first of the pieces contained in this volume into a new Sony tape-recorder.

All the dictations except one were recorded from his home, Pine Cottage, in the Ojai Valley, some eighty miles north of Los Angeles. He would dictate in the mornings, while in bed after breakfast, undisturbed.

Krishnamurti had first stayed at Pine Cottage with his brother in 1922, when it was lent to him by a friend, and it was there, in August, '22, that he underwent a spiritual experience that transformed his life. Soon afterwards, a Trust was formed to which money was subscribed to buy the cottage and six acres of surrounding land. In 1978 a beautiful new house was built incorporating the cottage in which Krishnamurti retained his original bedroom and a small sitting-room.

His dictations were not as finished as his writings, and at times his voice would wander away from the recorder to become rather distant, so, unlike his Notebook and Journal, some slight editing has been necessary for the sake of clarity. The reader gets very close to Krishnamurti in these pieces - almost, it seems at moments, into his very consciousness. In a few of them he introduces an imaginary visitor who comes to question him and draw him out.

The gist of Krishnamurti's teaching is here, and the descriptions of nature with which he begins most of the pieces may for many, who regard him as a poet as well as a philosopher, quieten their whole being so that they become intuitively receptive to what follows. There are repetitions, but these seem somehow necessary in order to emphasize his meaning, and they clearly show how every day was a completely new day to him, free from all burdens of the past.

Strangely, the last piece, and perhaps the most beautiful, is about death. It is the last occasion on which we shall ever hear Krishnamurti discoursing to himself. Two years later he died in this same bedroom at Pine Cottage.

M.L.