Reply #12: I found him in 1978 and was awed. [View All]

[vickitulsa]

Read my first Krishnamurti book the same summer I read Vince Bugliosi's Helter Skelter -- guess which book helped me sleep better nights?! ;)

I was also reading the Tao Te Ching and lots of other Lao Tzu that year, and a marvelous book by a physicist named Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics. A Zen take on subatomic particles and quantum physics. VERY interesting and brain-expanding stuff there; it's time I reread that one.

Then I picked up copies of the Don Juan trilogy by Carlos Casteneda and gobbled those down whole (heh heh), and topped it off with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's classic On Death and Dying and then a book about Timothy Leary's extremely academically sound and above board Concord Prison Experiment, where inmates were given LSD to determine if it could help reduce recidivism. Very interesting take on why it didn't work, and I totally agree with him on his conclusions.

Come to think of it, 1978 was a very interesting year for me all around, as it was the year I bought my first motorcycle, too -- a 1974 Moto Guzzi El Dorado 850, a road machine if ever there was one. Began my 30-year love affair with motorcycles, putting 3000 miles on that bike in just 30 days and none of it on a road trip!

Oops, I'm musing aloud again. But I have to say none of the above books I mentioned or any others I've read in my life that I can think of offhand have had as profound an impact on me as that first book by Krishnamurti. That's what I was wanting to say. :)

Not even Gibran's The Prophet, which I carried around like a bible for several years, affected me more than Krishnamurti. I read both his very early work (1954), The First and Last Freedom, and his Think on These Things, (1964). I'm wanting to get my hands on the much later collaborative work he did with quantum physicist David Bohm, The Ending of Time. I'm long overdue for some more Krishnamurti in my life!

For anyone who is interested in checking out the brilliant mind of this man, here's the best place I know of to read about him all on one page.

http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/index.php?page=103&nav=welcome&nid=103

Thanks for prompting me to talk more about him, even if that wasn't what you intended! ;)