Issue 135 | Correspondence | The Sun Magazine

Correspondence

I’m very pleased to send you and The Sun this check — part of the tithing program of the Foundation. Your magazine remains the most honest, least presumptuous and most interesting publication that comes across our desks. It is certainly worth contributing to.

Thank you for your dedication and steadiness. Keep up the good work.

All our best wishes for The Sun’s continued and fruitful existence.

Jill Wolcott One Earth
The Findhorn Foundation
Forres
Scotland

What Renée Weber [Issue 131, “Two People Taking Shelter In The Rain”] has done, possibly unwittingly, is to give readers a wholly one-sided account of one whom she perceives to be a great man. I had the feeling of being mentally masturbated for five and one-half pages, thereby being left with very little or nothing to grasp at the article’s end. It does, however, hold fast to Krishnamurti’s denouncement of knowledge, for we get none.

Krishnamurti holds science to be less good than evil. He speaks of human suffering, yet dismisses the fact that science and technology are the prime movements that have in the past, and shall in the future, transmit his ideas. Science may also lay claim to the fact that now we are able to feed more of the suffering humans per square acre than ever before.

Perhaps we should throw down this human heresy, and hastily retreat to better times, say, the Dark Ages, from which we could start our quest for happiness.

Another sore spot: Krishnamurti’s refusal to speak about subjects not of his choosing, for example, the Big Bang theory. It is most evident that a truly gifted and intelligent person will always communicate about any subject. Krishnamurti restricts the conversation to subjects he is able to speak on without appearing unknowledgeable or foolish. This, of course, is far from dealing in the present.

It is my estimation that, at this point in his life, Krishnamurti was but a narrow-sighted shell of whatever he may have been. Conducting the “non-interview” on his topics, on his home turf, and using physical means (the noted hand-holding) to disarm the “non-interviewer,” along with his disdain for the tape recorder (an accurate accounting device), puts Krishnamurti into a league with the best of soothsayers, card-readers, and encyclopedia salesmen.

This is not how two people taking shelter in the rain act.

Eric Erickson New York, New York

The first page of “Exile” [Issue 134] was delightful! But what a quagmire the rest of it became. Perhaps this is the first time I have ever felt pity for you, and found the feeling unusual enough to write what I’m writing now.

The feelings which accumulated within your consciousness in relation to your ex-neighbor could be somewhat accurately described as revulsion. These feelings became strong enough to move you into actions. Your actions (what you said to him), and the strong emotional tone in which you said what you said, were unacceptable in relation to the standards you have established by which you judge yourself. You behaved in a fashion quite inconsistent with the models of who you have defined yourself to be.

You acknowledged your feelings, but denied yourself the right to have them. The loser he became is within you, is a functional and inseparable part of you; yet you deny the right of the part of you which is him to exist. In your life, you have avoided the homeless, destitute reality he lives. But your life is so fragile, so transient, so subject to change. You could be like him. What has happened to him could happen to you. The possibility does exist. The person he is is the part of you you have locked outside, avoided, denied.

Your ex-neighbor’s affinity to you, after all these years, is his gift to you. He has come to show you what you needed to see, what you did not want to see — the part of you which is him, the part you have denied. What have you learned from his teachings?

The answer is not to let him in, love him, care for him (as you have been taught is good). This series of actions would have made you feel much worse, because it would have been in direct contradiction with your feelings, beliefs, and definitions you have of who you are and how your life should be. When you laid down the law, “If he wanted to visit me, and I wasn’t busy, he was welcome; but . . . ,” you lied, and you knew it; he knew it too. He is not welcome, whether you are busy or not, and both of you know it. Yet you can no more tell him the truth about how you feel than he can open up and talk to you. You and he are the same. You are in the same predicament he is in, and success and failure have nothing to do with it.

What is the answer? On the level where you were when you wrote “Exile,” there is none. How can you not judge others when you continually judge yourself? How can you find truth when you hold so many sacred definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, Sy Safransky and non-Sy Safransky? How can you accept anyone else when you deny so many aspects of yourself?

It is not possible for me to consciously alter, deny or describe the love I feel for you. Nor is it possible for that love to keep me from saying anything I may wish to say to you, in any manner I wish to say it. Nor is it possible for me to be the slightest bit concerned with how what I might say may affect your opinion of me. Nor is it possible for me not to love you.

Steve Erickson Troy, Idaho

I didn’t write about Broken Promises because I couldn’t get past the first sentence. Every time I sat down I wrote “Every broken promise is a broken heart” and that was it; nothing more came. Perhaps that would have been enough but I thought, “Why send that in? Everyone knows it.”

I didn’t write about Changing Beliefs because I was moving around, traveling during the holidays, but the holidays were very different this year and I wondered if that was because my beliefs had changed — not religious beliefs, nothing I could quite name. But something had knocked the bottom out of it, the deep tones; it all seemed shrill and hollow, surface tension on the top of the water, the frantic lust to consume, the ritual songs sung phonetically, no candles lit in real meditation, simply for decoration.

Everywhere I go, people are at a crux, standing at a crossroads. I see it probably because that’s where I am. Still in midair, beating my wings like crazy to stay aloft — looking for the place to light, and the way to make the landing. I know what I need, I know what I want, but not how to bring about the miracle . . . yet. When you were a kid, did you used to think about the elevator breaking and falling (maybe this is only for New York City kids) and how you could avoid getting hurt if you could just jump up in the air a second before it hit bottom? Or how come, if the earth is spinning all the time, you don’t jump up in the air and come down in Cleveland? I still think about these things from time to time. I think about you also from time to time, as I think of my other friends. I consider it a state of grace to be making a living (no matter of what size) doing something you love. That is the ground on which I wish to land. If I manage to stay aloft long enough the world may turn beneath me to that place.

My friends consider you my friend because you print my words and because you are my friend. It makes me very happy every time one of them sends in a subscription. Friends support each other in whatever way they can — that is almost a definition of friendship, I think.

The piece on your sad, lost friend was very moving. I was with you right up to the last sentence, then something said, “Wait a minute, you can’t ever show that kid the door.” Those wandering children wander within us forever, I think.

Renais Jeanne Hill Seattle, Washington
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