A photo of Geetha Balakrishna

Geetha Balakrishna

Muscat, Oman

The Disappearing “I”

So, from childhood you can see the influences I've had. I've had Hinduism in the house. And then I went to a convent school. And then I listened to the lectures of J. Krishnamurti from childhood where I was  taught about dissolving the “I,” which never made any sense to me. And it never did in all these decades until recently. In fact, I would say it was a couple of years ago when the book titled, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle fell into my lap—inadvertently—and in a flash I understood what J. K. had always been preaching. I finally understood the first book my mother gave to me, Freedom from the Now, and said, "Read this. Maybe it will make some sense." 

So my faith today is perhaps impacted by all of this. I've come to believe in the power  within me more than anything else. And if I do not have that power, then I will never be able to fathom, understand, feel, experience, what God is about.

It has been a battle; believe me, it has been a battle. But I am not going to give it up until I fully understand what this 'I' within me is all about. My mom lived a life of surrender, patience, and sacrifice. My brother who has been more my mentor, although he is younger to me, has been a guide. He has been pretty ruthless in his handling of me, you know, when I go the wrong way, when I think in the wrong way. So these influences have been working on me, and every now and then I feel there is a need for me to sit and evaluate and find out: "Hey! Where are you heading?" "What is it that you're looking for?" "Is this what you want?" "What is your goal?" So I need to do this every now and then so that I don't end up being pretentious, a runaway seeker.”

Daniel’s Reflection

I met Geetha Balakrishna in Muscat, Oman in the Arabian Gulf, just east of the United Arab Emirates. It was still early in my journey with Portraits in Faith. I was delighted to hear about her growing up with a mix of Hinduism in her home, Catholicism in the convent school she attended, and a mother who constantly exposed her to the writings of J. Krishnamurti which Geetha admitted she did not understand until she read Eckhart Tolle’s book decades later, as an adult.

Geetha’s insistence that the Higher Power she sought was inside of her and must be found inside of her to have any understanding of God intrigued me. I had only heard of Krishnamurti; never studied him, and had only nominally been exposed to Eckart Tolle after he was made popular by Oprah. I am grateful to Geetha for inspiring this exploration of what Krishnamurti and Tolle had to say about God and why it must be found inside, not outside of ourselves. 

Jidda Kirshnamurti was born in 1895 in southern India. He lived until 1986 and had been groomed to be a world leader for the late 19th century Theosophical tradition. He’d  rejected that tradition and established his own school of thought, although he encouraged people not to hold anyone in authority including himself.  Krishnamurti’s essential philosophy is that people must diminish their attachment to the “I” or “me,” because it is the ego representation of the self. He asserts that the self is isolating and the ego-self cannot be in true relationships with others.  

In a video interview I watched, I loved the way Krishnamurti described how true spiritual love with others is the God force that heals the self, the “I” of false identity:

…the self can have no relationship with anybody. The self in its very nature is an isolating process and it may be an abstraction of actual reality. Is it a series of structures put together by thought? The self, the me, the egoistic action, is tearing the world apart. Perhaps we don’t see that. That self identifies as a Jew, as a Hindu, as a Muslim, as a Christian, as a scientist, and so the very nature of the self and its movement is to be isolated.   

So, is it possible to eliminate altogether the feeling of isolation? Krishnamurti says:  

“It [the answer]  may be love. And it may be the one central factors that totally dissipates the self. That word, love, is such a misused word.  it has been spat upon, made into such an ugly thing: “I love my husband but I fight with him.” “I love my wife but I can’t tolerate her; must have a divorce.” “I llove my country but I’m ready to kill everybody else.” “I love God but  I will torture anyone who doesn’t believe in God.” That word, love, is something very sacred. Then you might say, “How am I to have that love?”  You can’t. It is something you cultivate day after day, being kind, generous, doing social work, going off to some unfortunate country and helping the poor and all that. You see, it’s one of those strange things. …The only thing that totally, completely dissolves the self is love. Not ‘I love everybody;’ that’s again another trick of the brain. “I love one, therefore I can love all.”  That’s another trick of the brain but to have the beauty of love in your heart.  And when there is no sense of isolation, then the other perhaps is, and then the self is not. (1)

It is pertinent is that J. Krishnamurti did not believe in God and his philosophies were non-theistic. He didn’t believe in “beliefs” but he believed that it was in relationship to others and diminishment of the self that people could tap into the God energy. He thought all humans needed was inside of themselves, but not the ego “I” selves:

That’s very easy to love God because it’s an abstraction and has not much meaning.  But if you love, that very love is God; that very love is sacred. You won’t go outside to look for God. (2)

This concept is powerful. In my own despair,  I searched outside of myself for a HIgher Power that could restore me to sanity. Geetha taught me a valuable lesson that day I interviewed her that that Higher Power is the same as  the spirit inside of me…and that I access that Power by loving others and diminishing my ego identity and concerns of my  capital S ‘Self.’

So then I  was intrigued to explore the modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, and how his teachings made what Krishnamurti said more accessible. Tolle was born Ulrich Leonard Tolle in 1948. He changed his name to Eckhart after a profound spiritual experience (the name change was perhaps to honor the German philosopher Meister Eckhart).  At 29, Tolle was experiencing long-term depression, but a profound inner transformation and inner peace came upon him one night in 1977. He wrote his first best seller, The Power of Now, about the philosophies that became apparent to him through that spiritual experience. Oprah Winfrey chose his books for her now famous book club. She interviewed him many times on her show.

Tolle lays out the very same concepts Geetha spoke of to me. His premise is that “our true selves are the formless Consciousness, which is Being, which is God. We are all One, and we are all God.” (3) Importantly, Tolle then addressed the cause of most personal suffering:

All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of me or us. That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end, you always create misery. It's as simple as that. When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.(4)

So, I have to actually see that my identification with the “I” (my thoughts) keeps me in the dark. It’s taken me many years to see that I am not my thoughts.  This helps me identify with the Divine essence, not my personality. And this concept helps me better understand how my thoughts create the concept of “the other” for I use my thoughts and the “I” to judge and keep other people separate and away from me.  Tolle says:

How quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to come to a conclusion about them. It is satisfying to the egoic mind to label another human being, to give them a conceptual identity, to pronounce righteous judgment upon them. Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in certain ways—conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment. That is not who they are, but that is who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they are. To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a prison not only for the other person but also for yourself. If her past were your past, her pain, your pain, her level of consciousness, your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace. The ego doesn’t like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength. ...The ego's need (is) to be periodically in conflict with something or someone in order to strengthen its sense of separation between me and the other, without which it cannot survive. Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role? What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer? (5)

How funny that Tolle says we must get beyond our minds if we are going to grow and be at peace with ourselves and other people. I love these three  final quotes from Tolle that bring this all together for me:

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.” (6)

 “All the things that truly matter—beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace—arise from beyond the mind.”  (7)

“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.” (8)

Maybe that is the starting point—recognizing  programmed dysfunction— to see God and “other” people as external. Thank you, Geetha Balakrishna, for taking me on this journey into the thoughts of J. Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle. The three of you have expanded my ways of thinking.

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az9aM4J22yA&t=13s

    Ojai 1981 - Question #4 from Question & Answer Meeting #3. This channel is managed by the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust​​, UK​, and by the Krishnamurti Foundation of America.

    (Daniel transcribed portions of this video to get this quote.)

  2. https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/2nd-question-answer-meeting-32 

    Public Question & Answer 2 Madras (Chennai), India - 31 December 1981

  3. Eckhart Tolle (trying to find the reference)

  4. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter 5

  5. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter 8-9

  6. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter 1

  7. Eckhart Tolle A New Earth, Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose (2005)

  8. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose (2005) page 14

Back to the interview