4.4. Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti (1896-1986) was universally known as a teacher, but is rarely considered a nature mystic despite the fact that this dimension of him is often noticeable. His obstinate refusal to adopt poetic terms or traditional Hindu terms (thought he knew them) gave his message an unusual strength, but the beauty in Krishnamurti's writings comes from his serenity of mind, and never more so than when he wrote about Nature. Perhaps the best of his many 'notebooks' is The Only Revolution, which introduces each section with keenly observed natural scenes, though not observed in the way that a naturalist would. Here are some examples:

The sun wasn't up yet; you could see the morning star through the trees. There was a silence that was really extraordinary. Not the silence between two noises or between two notes, but the silence that has no reason whatsoever the silence that must have been at the beginning of the world. It filled the whole valley and the hills.


The two big owls, calling to each other, never disturbed that silence, and a distant dog barking at the late moon was part of this immensity. The dew was especially heavy, and as the sun came up over the hill it was sparkling with many colours and with the glow that comes with the sun's first rays.


The delicate leaves of the jacaranda were heavy with dew, and birds came to have their morning baths, fluttering their wings so the dew on those delicate leaves filled their feathers. The crows were particularly persistent; they would hop from one branch to another, pushing their heads through the leaves, fluttering their wings, and preening themselves. There were about half-a-dozen of them on that one heavy branch, and there were many other birds, scattered all over the tree, taking their morning bath.


And this silence spread, and seemed to go beyond the hills. There were the usual noises of children shouting, and laughter; and the farm began to wake up.


It was going to be a cool day, and now the hills were taking on the light of the sun. They were very old hills probably the oldest in the world with oddly shaped rocks that seemed to be carved out with great care, balanced one on top of the other; but no wind or touch could loosen them from this balance.


It was a valley far removed from towns, and the road through it led to another village. The road was rough and there were no cars or buses to disturb the ancient quietness of this valley. There were bullock carts, but their movement was a part of the hills. There was a dry river bed that only flowed with water after heavy rains, and the colour was a mixture of red, yellow and brown; and it, too, seemed to move with the hills. And the villagers who walked silently by were like the rocks.


The day wore on and towards the end of the evening, as the sun was setting over the western hills, the silence came in from afar, over the hills, through the trees, covering the little bushes and the ancient banyan. And as the stars became brilliant, so the silence grew into great intensity; you could hardly bear it.


The little lamps of the village were put out, and with sleep the intensity of that silence grew deeper, wider and incredibly over-powering. Even the hills became more quiet, for they, too, had stopped their whisperings, their movement, and seemed to lose their immense weight [53].

For Krishnamurti, nature's appeal is in the silence that resonates between him and it. He, like Jefferies, was glad for the minimum of modern intrusion on nature, so that the human blended with it and did not jar. In the next extract it is clear how people and their obliviousness to nature pained Krishnamurti.

On every table there were daffodils, young, fresh, just out of the garden, with the bloom of spring on them still. On a side table there were lilies, creamy-white with sharp yellow centres. To see this creamy-white and the brilliant yellow of those many daffodils was to see the blue sky, ever expanding, limitless, silent.


Almost all the tables were taken by people talking very loudly and laughing. At a table nearby a woman was surreptitiously feeding her dog with the meat she could not eat. They all seemed to have huge helpings, and it was not a pleasant sight to see people eating; perhaps it may be barbarous to eat publicly. A man across the room had filled himself with wine and meat and was just lighting a big cigar, and a look of beatitude came over his fat face. His equally fat wife lit a cigarette. Both of them appeared to be lost to the world.


And there they were, the yellow daffodils, and nobody seemed to care. They were there for decorative purposes that had no meaning at all; and as you watched them their yellow brilliance filled the noisy room. Colour has this strange effect upon the eye. It wasn't so much that the eye absorbed the colour, as that the colour seemed to fill your being. You were that colour; you didn't become that colour you were of it, without identification or name: the anonymity which is innocence. Where there is no anonymity there is violence, in all its different forms.


But you forgot the world, the smoke-filled room, the cruelty of man, and the red, ugly meat; those shapely daffodils seemed to take you beyond all time.


Love is like that. In it there in no time, space or identity. It is the identity that breeds pleasure and pain; it is the identity that brings hate and war and builds a wall around people, around each one, each family and community. Man reaches over the wall to the other man but he too is enclosed; morality is a word that bridges the two, and so it becomes ugly and vain.


Love isn't like that; it is like the wood across the way, always renewing itself because it is always dying. There is no permanency in it, which thought seeks; it is a movement which thought can never understand, touch or feel. The feeling of thought and the feeling of love are two different things; the one leads to bondage and the other to the flowering of goodness. The flowering is not within the area of any society, of any culture or of any religion, whereas the bondage belongs to all societies, religious beliefs and faiths in otherness. Love is anonymous, therefore not violent. Pleasure is violent, for desire and will are moving factors in it. Love cannot be begotten by thought, or by good works. The denial of the total process of thought becomes the beauty of action which is love. Without this there is no bliss of truth.


And over there, on that table, were the daffodils. (page 145)

This is vintage Krishnamurti, and not primarily a description of nature, but is included because it shows many of his concerns and how he related them to nature. In the daffodils he 'forgot the world'; for Krishnamurti, more like Jefferies than like Whitman, was not the 'rough' type that allows for the common, coarse and good-natured. The following passage shows again Krishnamurti's sensitivity to nature (he is speaking to Asit Chandmal):

"Have you noticed, sir, " he said, "that when you enter a forest, for the first time there is a strange atmosphere, as if nature, the trees, do not want you to enter. You hesitate, and say 'It's alright,' and walk in quietly. The second day the resistance is less. And the third day it is gone."


I do not communicate with nature, and so this was something I had never discussed with Krishnamurti [54].

5. Sartre, Reid, Jaccottet, Dillard

Before pulling together the strands of nature mysticism discussed so far, it is of interest to consider what a specifically 20th century contribution to it may be. Krishnamurti's writings do not have the usual literary or poetic motivations; his nature writings came partly from a spontaneous engagement with nature, but may also be seen as a vehicle for his teachings, given that he has rejected en masse the language of mystical traditions (he could easily have spoken of himself as jnani, or used the language of the Cloud of Unknowing, or that of Socrates, Vivekananda, or Ramana Maharshi, to give just a few examples). Sartre, Reid, Jaccottet and Dillard represent a random selection of writers of the 20th century who also use Nature; what is of interest is that we can characterise their work in terms of alienation instead of the romanticism of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tennyson for example, or the transcendentalism of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea we have perhaps one of the best expositions of this uniquely 20th century alienation (it has always existed of course, but one could say that with its coming-of-age in this century it has taken on a defined shape). Nausea's key scene takes place in a park where the protagonist, having come to a dead-end in his romantic and professional life, experiences what is commonly understood to be an inversion of the mystic experience, but one triggered by Nature, and so of interest to us. The likely genesis of the entire story is a bad mescalin trip that Sartre took in 1935 (recorded for us by de Beauvoir [55]), a theory supported by the frequent references to crabs and polyps in Nausea. The park scene is consistent with other descriptions of drug-induced states, but focuses on his natural surroundings, in particular the root of a chestnut tree, which he becomes. For Sartre (and most authorities, including Sartre, agree that it is autobiographical) the mystical experience of union is horrifying, characterised in terms of a sticky glue that permeates the park. He rejects it finally in favour of an immortality gained through literary striving.

Forrest Reid, an Irish writer, includes several 'nature-mystical' scenes in Peter Waring, one of which is quoted by Zaehner. Here are a couple of extracts:

And then a strange experience befell me. It was as if everything that a moment before had been all around me and external were now suddenly within me. The whole world was within me. It was within me that the trees waved their green branches; it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool [56].


The earth beneath me was living and breathing; and obedient to some obscure physical promptings I turned around and pressed my mouth against this dry grass, closer and closer, in a long silent embrace. It was just as well, perhaps, that there was no one to observe this exhibition of primitive and eternal instinct. I felt a passionate happiness and excitement. My head was hot; the salt sharp smell of the sea seemed to have set all my nerves thrilling and tingling; and I unfastended my shirt that my flesh might be naked. The past had slipped from me, and I lived in this moment, squeezing out its ecstasy to the last drop, as I might the juice of some ripe fruit. It seemed to me that I was on the brink of finding something for which all my previous existences had been one long preparation and search: I was fumbling at the door of an enchanted garden: in a moment it would swing open: already the perfume of unknown fruits and flowers was in my nostrils [57].

We are reminded of the oft-quoted passage from Whitman:

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled you head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.


Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of creation is love,


('Song of Myself', v. 5)

Sadly Reid's novel gives us only a few glimpses of nature-rapture: the second extract, as with a third beautiful passage, is brought on partly by the blooming of the protagonist's first-love for a young woman; when his romance fails he then attempts suicide by lying on the grass by the sea to catch pneumonia. The novel is a useful 20th century example of failed nature mysticism; we do not know why the experiences provide no lasting strength for the protagonist and suspect that their presence, though most likely an authentic record of the author's experience, was influenced by Jefferies (Jefferies' Bevis is mentioned in the novel). The form of alienation expressed in the novel is a mild one compared to that in Nausea (Reid's novel was first written in 1902, but rewritten under a new title in 1936, the time that Sartre was writing Nausea). We do not have a vocabulary or taxonomy of alienation in 20th century literature, but Reid's is at the honest/disappointment end of the spectrum if one did exist.

Philippe Jaccottet's alienation is of a different and more subtle order than either Reid's or Sartre's. The translator of his poems, Derek Mahon, refers to him as a secular mystic and says: 'Jaccottet's symbols are the elemental, pre-Socratic ones: tree, flower, sun, moon, road, mountain, wind, water, bird, house, lamp.' [58] Jaccottet's Nature is poorly-lit, usually at dawn, giving glimpses of elevation, but too ham-strung by a fear of death (absent in Sartre and Reid) to be called a nature mysticism. In a sad low-key way Jaccottet does communicate some of the beauty and eternity of Nature, but it is like the bloodless Christianity of the C. of E. transposed to a secular setting. He may be as subtle and obscure as Krishnamurti, but he is lost: perhaps this makes him more appealing.

Annie Dillard shows us a bolder and brighter Nature than Jaccottet; her alienation a little like Sartre's but more comfortable. There is a revealing passage in the introduction by Richard Adams to Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek: "If she were to feel much more deeply the misery, futility and waste of Nature which she describes so tellingly, she would go out of her mind; so would we all." [59] This reminds one of 'nature red in tooth and claw', which she does describe so well: perhaps the chapter on the weasel in Teaching a Stone to Talk is a good example. In it she comes face-to-face with a weasel and for a brief moment enters its fierce soul; she finishes by wishing that, like the weasel who bites into the neck of an eagle in its death-throws and whose jaws remains fixed there even when its bones have been bleached by the air and sun and dropped away, she could do the same with the sublime. Unlike the timid Jaccottet she is bold enough but cannot in the end do so: perhaps her sense of suffering is too strong (as shown in a passage about a burned man). Whatever the cause her alienation from Nature is shown most lyrically in 'A Field of Silence': she experiences the kind of silence that Krishnamurti described in the extract above, but finds no comfort in it:

I do not want, I think, ever to see such a sight again. That there is loneliness here I had granted, in the abstract but not, I thought, inside the light of God's presence, inside his sanction, and signed by his name [60].

Further on we find a resonance with Nausea:

When I turned away in this manner, the silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fields. The pastures on either side of the road turned green in a surrealistic fashion, monstrous, impeccable, as if they were holding their breaths. The roosters stopped, All the things of the worldthe fields and the fencing, the road, a parked orange truckwere stricken and self-conscious. a world pressed down on their surfaces, a world battered just within their surfaces, and that real world, so near to emerging, had got stuck. There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed [61].

This could easily have been from Nausea in fact: 'choked', 'monstrous', 'stricken and self-conscious', 'stuck', 'caught in the act and embarrassed' is exactly Sartre's language. But as well as the anthropomorphism we also find animism (both of Mercer's concerns!): she later describes the experience in terms of angels.

6. A Nature Mysticism Delineated

Traherne, Jefferies, Whitman, and Krishnamurti are mavericks and stand outside of tradition (it is only a literary convenience that Whitman is grouped with the American transcendentalists). However between them they delineate a nature mysticism that the other examples looked at in this essay can only make a minor contribution towards.

What has not yet been introduced and which may be useful in this discussion is the Oriental concept of 'suchness', and its Western equivalent in Eckhart: istigkeit ('isness'). If we were to ask Krishnamurti what we get by the continued practice of his 'choiceless awareness' his answer could easily be (if he cared for the term): 'suchness'. If we were to characterise the base experience of the nature mystic we could again say: 'suchness'. Why though is Nature any better for an experience of 'suchness' than in a room, or with one's eyes shut? The characteristic of Nature that Krishnamurti dwells on is silence, and this silence is surely just as obtainable in a monk's cell as in a forest.

Or is it? Is there perhaps a certain silence in Nature that has nothing to do with sound or the lack of it, that resonates deep within the observer? Krishnamurti clearly thinks so. However, to reach this silence the 'suchness' of Nature has to penetrate many layers.

Traherne teaches the 'elemental' base of Nature mysticism: a thankfulness for air and light. Although he recommends us to enjoy the residue, even to the point of insatiability, the requirement is to be content with next to little. By clinging to 'air and light', like the Taoist clinging to the Tao, the residue is present in its naked form, without the 'poor mirror' of the mind that Underhill is so aware of. We are then presented with 'suchness.' Jefferies and Whitman both suggest Nature in its more complex forms: trees, skies, and brooks, to penetrate the many layers of our conceptualising and bring us to silent 'suchness.' For Whitman there is an indolent relationship with Nature; Jefferies however has to stride for many hours for Nature to bestow its 'suchness' on him; Krishnamurti simply took his own 'suchness' out to Nature.

The (greatly misunderstood) phenomenon of the silent mind is at the heart of mysticism, and if it comes through Nature then we may call it nature mysticism. The obstacles to the silent mind are legion, but in nature mysticism a hurdle that must be overcome, or come to terms with, is the perception of nature as 'red in tooth and claw.' A sensitive personality on the one hand a good candidate for nature mysticism is, on the other hand, quite likely to find the eternal drama of predator and prey abhorrent. Anthony Freeman seems to be of this view, though we do not know from his book of any more detailed reason for his rejection of Nature: perhaps it is simply part of the general Western outlook since the Enlightenment. The scenes, familiar to television-watchers of recent generations, of a lion pack killing and devouring a zebra, with their cat-muzzles soaked in blood and gnawing at the torn remnants of gristle and bone that used to constitute a shy herbivore; all this is too much. Our own pain and death have become so remote and obscenified that we can no longer contemplate them, and neither can we contemplate them in Nature. Looking again at our four main protagonists we find no fear of pain or death in any of their writings, though it is Whitman who deals most thoroughly with the issues. Here he talks of pain:

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.


(Song of Myself, v. 33)

This is not an easy passage to deal with, particularly the image of him leaning on his cane and observing. However, his long and selfless tending of the Civil War injured in the field and the hospital he helped many a soldier die in a more thankful and easy state of mind than would have been possible without his attendance and ministrations lend a legitimacy to his almost callous statement. Of death he repeatedly sings his indifference or even pleasure at the prospect (like Socrates); here is an example:

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try and alarm me.


To his work without flinching the accoucheur [midwife] comes,
I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.


And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons.


And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)


(Song Of Myself, v. 43)

This passage points to a possible knowledge by Whitman of reincarnation, and certainly for the Oriental religions reincarnation is a way of dealing with death. Dillard however clearly finds pain difficult to deal with, and perhaps Sartre's indifference can be put down merely to an indifferent constitution generally (either to his own or others' pain). There is a morbidity in Dillard however, and this is perhaps simply a part of modern alienation. The opposite tendency, that of romanticising Nature, has different problems. In a typical Romantic view the problems of pain and death are merely glossed over and the sublime and aesthetic dimensions predominate. There is also the possibility that Nature becomes the escape (perhaps more with Shelly than with Wordsworth for example) and that 'simple' Nature will not suffice. The view from a grimy city bedsit window of a single tree with two pigeons in it is a microcosm of Nature, surely sufficient for the nature mystic, while the great vistas of the Alps are just more of the same. (We saw earlier that Whitman pointed this out: for Whitman the simple human activity of building a house, fishing, or even hard to take a slave auctioneer at his work, all these also were his 'suchness' and part of Nature.) Krishnamurti on the other hand, a pessimist like Jefferies, saw Nature in contrast to the human: his daffodils more precious by far than the consumers of meat and swiggers of brandy in the restaurant.

The occult nature of a teacher like Rudolf Steiner represents yet another view of Nature that is problematic. There is not space here to go into this in detail other than to mention his view of incarnation generally as a kind of 'fall' (consistent with Anthroposophy as esoteric Christianity). Another problem with Steiner is the anthropomorphic view of natural entities as 'sleeping' human entities: Mercer is worried by any kind of anthropomorphism in Nature mysticism. Our four main protagonists certainly do not promote such a view, though Whitman seems faintly sympathetic to a animist outlook. Blake, Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme also have 'occult' views on Nature and need to be compared with each other and Steiner.


7. A Pedagogy

If we pick up on Mercer's contribution of reflecting on how a nature mysticism may be pursued then what could form the basis of a pedagogy in it? There is only space here to venture a few remarks on this, but we could begin by imagining a purposeful placing of oneself in a 'natural' situation: it may only be a city park, but preferably a less-populated area of the countryside, perhaps with woods, fields and streams. What would turn a walk in the park or country into a fruitful exercise in nature mysticism? We could turn first to Traherne to lose our preoccupation with the tinsel and baubels of the world (whatever these may represent to one), and to be grounded in the air and light. We might consider Whitman's 'Lessons of a Tree' and his 'sociable-silent' relationship with them; if our mortality is preoccupying us then we might recall his contentment to become manure, and to 'reach to the polished breasts of melons.' With Jefferies we might look at our own limbs and see them as the distillation of the 'designless loveliness of the trees,' and also feel somewhere within a soul that 'cannot be dipped in time.' With Krishnamurti we might look at the hedgerow, with its harmonious balance of the living and dying that make eternal Nature, and fall deep into its silence.


8. Conclusions

Mystics of the first rank are rare and often misunderstood: nature mystics of the first rank are even rarer. This makes any delineation of nature mysticism problematic, though its undercurrent in secular life is strong and helps support its definition. We have seen that concepts such as 'suchness' and silence of the mind are relevant; the outlook of the nature mystic as related to the via positiva is useful, though not necessarily implying optimism. Nature can teach a simplicity; it also teaches a lesson of the immortality of the Whole through the birth and death of individuals: this means a deep contemplation of one's own pain and death however.

Nature mysticism has boundaries with the occult and paranormal, with the sublime and with the aesthetic: these boundaries need to be explored in more detail. Its relationship to other forms of mysticism need to be explored: for example a nature mystic with a devotional orientation (Traherne and perhaps Whitman) differs from a nature mystic with a jnani orientation (Jefferies and Krishnamurti). While a full-blown nature mysticism is rare its presence in a nascent form is widespread in the world's literature, and the reasons for its failure to blossom are there to be discovered in that literature. Anti-nature also needs to be explored, including Huysman's Against Nature, D.H.Lawrences' attacks on nature in Studies in Classic American Literature, and a whole range of modern writers including Quentin Crisp.

References for Part 3
[53] Krishnamurti, J. The Only Revolution, New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1970, p.24
[54] Chandmal, Asit, One Thousand Moons - Krishnamurti at Eighty-Five, New York: Abrams 1985, p. 19
[55] Beauvoir, Simone de, The Prime of Life, London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962, p. 169
[56] Reid, Forrest, Peter Waring, London: Faber and Faber 1937, p. 47
[57] Reid, Forrest, Peter Waring, London: Faber and Faber 1937, p. 95
[58] Jaccottet, Philippe, (Trans., Derek Mahon), Selected Poems, Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1987, p.11
[59] Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, London: Jonathon Cape, 1975, p. xvi
[60] Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk, London: Pan Books, p. 134
[61] Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk, London: Pan Books, p. 135