Adyar Pamphlet No. 36, 1913
Investigations into the Super-Physical
Annie Besant
All students should understand something about investigations into the superphysical, in order that they may avoid blind incredulity which accepts all, on the one side, and the equally blind incredulity which rejects all, on the other ..........
Our one great danger, as H.P.B. recognized, is the danger of getting into a groove, and so becoming fossilized in the forms of belief that many hold today ......... The Society (1) is intended, always has been intended, to be a living body and not a fossil, and a living body grows and develops, adapting itself to new conditions ...........
Nothing could be more fatal to a Society like ours than to hall-mark as true, special forms of belief, and look askance at anyone challenging them........ If the Society is to live far into the future, as I believe it will, it must be prepared to recognise now, quite frankly and freely, that our knowledge is fragmentary, that it is partial, that it is liable to very great modifications as we learn more and understand better .........
We are not dealing with theories, or flights of fancy or a mixture of the two but with records of observation ....
To proclaim one person as an infallible authority on a subject unknown to the proclaimer is to show fanaticism rather than reason. I would ask my own friends not to do that with me ......
It is interesting to notice that the matters on which considerable differences of opinion arise are matters which do not bear on life and conduct, but on those which, however interesting as knowledge, are outside that which is needed for the guiding of human life.......
Very few people analyse the complexity of what seems to them to be the very simple fact of sight. In most acts of vision there is little real sight and a great deal of memory. What we call "sight" is a complex, compacted of the translation of the impressions just made on the retina and the memory of the whole of the past impressions made by the same or by similar objects ......
Only well-trained and experienced seers will avoid the errors of looking at facts through a veil of their own thought-forms.
...... Generations far into the future, ourselves in new bodies, will still be extending the limits of the unknown; we do not want our limbs to be fettered then by appeals to our present researches, exalted into scriptures, used as walls to bar our onward progress then."
These quotes were supplied by P. Krishna, well known in the Krishnamurti-movement and an active member of the Theosophical Society. He writes in conclusion: " One can see the seeds of K's teachings in the above statement of Annie Besant. Perhaps Krishnaji was the only true disciple who took what she said really seriously. We need to be to him what he was to her! "
This was published in 1913, the same year Annie Besant lost the law-suit over custody of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Nityananda (his brother). It was also the year that Krishnamurti showed his independence for the first time by asking that Raja (Jinarajadasa) not be their tutor anymore. It is only two years after At the Feet of the Master was published and eleven years before The Path was issued. (2)
Footnotes
(1) Annie Besant means the
Theosophical Society (Adyar).
(2) From the Chronology given in "The Years of Awakening", on Jiddu
Krishnamurti's life, by Mary Lutyens, p. 293.