Jiddu Krishnamurti

Founding member of Besant Hill School of Happy Valley in Ojai, California. Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on May 11, 1895 in Madanapalle, a small town in south India. He was adopted in his youth by Dr. Annie Besant, then president of the Theosophical Society. Dr. Besant and others proclaimed that Krishnamurti was to be a world teacher whose coming the Theosophists had predicted. He selected the Ojai Valley as a location for his teaching in the United States.

In 1929, however, Krishnamurti renounced the role that he was expected to play. He resigned as figure head of the Theosophists, and cut all ties to any notion of a religious or spiritual organization. This was followed immediately by a “core” statement, summarized as “Truth Is A Pathless Land: man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.” For the rest of his long life, he taught not as an authority but as an investigator looking into life’s fundamental issues through questioning all assumptions, and challenging his listeners to do the same. His talks and dialogues have been compiled and published in more than sixty books and translated into as many different languages.