John Ziman's View of Science and the 

Nascent Science of Jiddu Krishnamurti





John L. Waters



February 22, 2002



© Copyright 2002 by John L. Waters. All Rights

Reserved



-------------------------------------------------------





In his article "What is Science?" John Ziman makes the

point that science is a social enterprise.  Ziman

writes that science "is knowledge, therefore

intellectual, conceptual, and abstract.  It is

inevitably created by individual men and women, and

therefore has a strong psychological aspect.  It is

public, and therefore molded and determined by the

social relations between individuals."(1)







Science isn't only social.  Scientists are a very

exclusive  and highly selective group of people.  To

appreciate this, go to a university and find out what

a student has to do to obtain a Ph.D. in science.  You

will find that only a small percentage of students can

jump through all of those hoops and attain

professional status as working scientists.  In

particular, all of the Ph.D. theses are composed by

individuals who are very proficient in reading and in

thinking verbally.  These men and women are very

specialized in their personal brain development. 

Indeed, professional scientists are a subculture, not

so much of "intelligent" people but of exceedingly

literate and articulate people.  And when a person is

"intelligent" but not literate enough to get a Ph.D.

the person is excluded from the scientific clique. 

Hence the exclusiveness.







Even so, there can and should be a new science which

includes or at least works with and studies

individuals who are not so bookish and so articulate,

but who may be very intelligent but just aren't able

to use their brains in the superliterate way that a

Ph.D. person uses his or her brain.  The new science

integrates the nonverbal-intuitive intelligence of

these comparative illiterates with the verbal-rational

intelligence of the  professional scientists.  Jiddu

Krishnamurti is an example of one such less literate

investigator and wise person.  Furthermore, Jiddu

Krishnamurti shared his research with a great many

persons, some of whom were scientists.  For example,

there is a video of Jonas Salk and Jiddu Krishnamurti

having a conversation.







A new science begins with new observations.  The

observations are repeated again and again, carefully

described, and put in a data file.  One of Jiddu

Krishnamurti's data files is a book entitled

"Krishnamurti's Notebook."  Here is a sample entry:







"A curious thing is happening; there is a heightening

of sensitivity.  Sensitivity, not only to beauty but

also to all other things.  The blade of grass

contained the whole spectrum of colour; it was

intense, dazzling and such a small thing, so easy to

destroy."(2) page 38







Here is another entry:







"woke up with that feeling of impenetrable strength in

one's eyes and throat; it seemed to be a palpable

state, something that could never not be there.  For

nearly an hour it was there and the brain remained

empty.  It was not a thing to be caught by thought and

stored up in memory to be recalled.  It was there and

all thought was dead."(3) page 36







In his youth Jiddu Krishnamurti was not a good

student.  He was punished regularly by his school

master.(4)  As an adult, Jiddu  Krishnamurti didn't

read other philosophers, or other technical books.(5) 

He sometimes read a mystery or a detective story.(6) 

His brain simply developed in a way which made him

wise and perceptive in the way that many "holy" men

are.  But exactly what way is that?  To understand

this kind of brain activity, more science needs to be

done by working professionals who aren't smug and

conceited, and thereby insist that a person like

Krishnamurti is just deluded or even psychotic. 

Krishnamurti sometimes had trouble with language, but

that doesn't mean he was stupid or crazy.







Other persons have sometimes experienced the

heightened sensitivity that Jiddu Krishnamurti often

talked about and wrote about.  Alan Watts says,







"The sky was in some way transparent, its blue quiet

and clear,  but more inwardly luminous than ever at

high noon.  The leaves of the trees and shrubs assumed

qualities of green that were incandescent, and their

clusterings were no longer shapeless daubs, but

arabesques of marvellous complexity and clarity..  The

interlacing of branches against the sky suggested

filigree or tracery, not in the sense of

artificiality, but of distinctness and rhythm. 

Flowers-- I remember especially the fuchsias-- were

suddenly the lightest carvings of ivory and coral."

(7)







Others have witnessed the same effect.  For example,

Orson Bean states:







"The sky over the East River... was a deeper blue than

any I had seen in my life, and there seemed to be

little flickering pinpoints of light in it.  I looked

at the trees.  They were a richer green than any I had

ever seen.  It seemed as though all my senses were

heightened.  I was perceiving with greater clarity.  I

walked home feeling exhilarated and bursting with

energy."(8)







About his mystical experience Jean-Joseph Surin says:







"on a number of occasions my soul was invested with

these states of glory, and the sunlight seemed to grow

incomparably brighter than usual, and yet was so soft

and bearable that it seemed to be of another kind than

natural sunlight.  Once when I was in this state, I

went out into the garden of our college at Bordeaux;

and so great was this light that I seemed to myself to

be walking in paradise.  Every color was more intense

and natural, every form more exquisitely distinct than

at ordinary times."(Huxley's paraphrasing.)(9)







Each of the preceding quotations suggests that there

is a sense of enhanced color and illumination which is

accompanied by a sense of wellness and fitness. 

Everything seems right.  One doesn't have to assume

that this sense comes from God or is associated with

God.  One can just study this as a physiological

state, a state of altered activity in the brain.  Is

this good or bad?  Well, in the past, scientists were

not worried about whether quartz is good or bad. 

Quartz is just quartz.  Somehow when it comes to human

beings, though, the issue of good and bad creeps in

and that undermines science.  Modern psychology and

psychiatry therefore, are not really sciences. 

Psychology and psychiatry are more like police actions

supported by society to keep individuals in conformity

with socially-sanctioned right thinking and right

behavior.







Modern thinkers need to separate the descriptions of

this truly extraordinary sense with all the

philosophizing and the religion that so often goes

along with it.  The sense is so extraordinary at

first, when it comes on a person, the person has no

way of understanding it except as a miracle or a

manifestation of God.  Often the person isn't seeking

this experience or expecting it.  The altered

physiology just comes and effects the person whose

physiology it is.  If the person can't adjust to the

new physiology and integrate the new sense in with his

or her old senses and consciousness, then the sense is

soon lost and it becomes a mystery.  The person is

likely to speculate about  the extraordinary sense and

ruminate about it, and perhaps devise yet another

theological system.  What is missing is the new

science of what this sense is really about.







Jiddu Krishnamurti holds a prominent position among

the pioneers of this sense because (1) he was very

social and shared his perceptions and ideas with many

thousands of people each year.  (2) He described his

extraordinary sense many times over many years.  In

addition, (3) he advised people to be wary of teachers

who want you to just follow their ideas for no good

reason.  Krishnamurti went so far as to say, "Truth is

a pathless land," and you have to find the truth for

yourself.  But that is very close to the

independent-mindedness of a born scientist.  

Krishnamurti wasn't raised to be a scientist, though,

and he wasn't well educated in science.  Indeed he

never was a very good student in the sense of being

well-read and a master of all the fine technical

points of argument.







Despite his lack of literacy and sophistication in

philosophy and science, Jiddu Krishnamurti showed an

independent mindedness and a talent for description

which makes him a pioneer in the  nascent science of

intuitive perception and thinking.  Unlike Orson Bean,

Jakob Boehme, and Alan Watts, Krishnamurti cultivated

this extraordinary sense so that he experienced it

many times each week.  By reading "Krishnamurti's

Notebook," you will verify this is the case.  Watts,

Bean, Boehme, and others experienced this sense only

once or twice in their whole lives.







Another man who experienced this sense over a long

period is Gopi Krishna.  Gopi Krishna sensed that

everything was illuminated by a light which he felt

emanated from his own body.  Sometimes other people

sense this light coming out of the "holy" person. 

Richard Maurice Bucke called this the "subjective"

light.  But what makes it subjective may just be (1)

scarcely anyone is as developed as Gopi Krishna was or

Jiddu Krishnamurti was, and (2) training boys and

girls to use their eyes to read books and remember

names, words, and what they read may affect the

development of the brain so that the mature person is

blind to the light of a "holy" person unless the

mature person "loses his or her mind" and begins to

sense this illumination.  But then people say that the

person is crazy because they never learned anything

about this kind of illumination.







There's a problem here, because the professional

scientists have all become highly trained and highly

skilled in using their eyes and their brains in the

way highly literate people do.  Furthermore, if the

brain activity in a "holy" person is very different, a

highly literate person is likely to become deranged as

his or her brain activity changes.  An example of this

very thing happening is Gustav Theodor Fechner.







Gustav Fechner was a prominent scientist before the

age of forty, when he suffered from a mysterious

illness described in the book "Religion of a

Scientist" compiled and edited by Walter Lowrie.  In

this book is a description of the enhanced colors

Fechner saw in flowers after his vision and his brain

activity had been affected.  Fechner actually suffered

a psychotic breakdown which lasted two years.  This

happened after Fechner did some experiments on himself

which involved his looking at tiny black objects

illuminated by intense sunlight.  This suggests the

reaction Jakob Boehme experienced as he gazed into

sunlight reflected off a pewter vessel. Quoting

directly from Andrew Weeks:







"Abraham von Franckenberg gave an account that has

become legendary.  Surprised by a gleam, presumably of

sunlight, in a tin or pewter vessel, the shoemaker

began to imagine that he was seeing into the secret

heart of nature, into a concealed divine world. 

Intent upon clearing his mind of this "phantasy," th

perhaps so that he could resume his shoemaking labors,

the young man went out-of-doors.  Since the city was

small, he could easily pass through a nearby gate and

into the green countryside.  There, according to

Franckenberg, the rapt cobbler continued to see all

the more powerfully into the secret "center of

nature."  Forms, lines, and colors now bore some new

meaning for him.  In his own account, the strongest

emotional effect associated with the experience was

his sense of having been embraced by divine love: as

if life had been resurrected from death, he recalled

twelve years afterward."(10)







Often a new field of science has been started by one

or more persons who decide to investigate some

anomalous event.  By  anomalous event is meant some

event which occurs but it can't  be readily fit into

existing conventional science.  Conventional

scientists often ignore anomalous events.  For

example,  for decades, astronomers refused to study

meteors and meteorites.  Meteorites are stones, and

astronomers don't study stones.  Geologists study

stones.  So astronomers avoided the subject of

meteorites.  Finally, astronomical science had to

"bite the bullet" as it were and today astronomy books

talk about meteors and meteorites.







Today Western science, and specifically Western

medical science refuses to study "holy" persons.  One

reason is that there aren't many "holy" persons. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti and Gopi Krishna both were "holy"

persons.  Western science seems determined to "debunk"

all the claims made about "holy" persons.  If some

persons regarded as "holy" have used magic tricks to

fool people, that's compatible with the idea that the

"Messiah" will be a little child, ie, child-like and

even childish.  Children often lie and play tricks. 

This can have unfortunate consequences, though.  One

of these is that crtical thinkers will just dismiss

the whole phenomenon of "holiness" without thinking

deeply.







Western medicine lumps all anomalous perceptions into

the category of "psychotic" perceptions.  This is

comparable to identifying falling stones as "falling

stars."  Meteorites aren't stars at all, but to the

superficial eye, they look like stars as they flash as

points of light making a bright streak across the sky.

 So, too, the perceptions of illumination described by

Gopi Krishna, Jiddu Krishnamurti and other

"illuminated" persons can be called "psychotic"

perceptions, but just naming a phenomenon andgiving

this name a bad social connotation doesn't really help

us understand it.  In fact, many insane persons might

become "holy" persons if the experts knew best how to

treat psychotics.  Nevertheless, the psychologists and

the psychiatrists continue to think in the

conventional way and avoid this new science of the

nonrational nonretentive cognitive style (NNCS).







This is a new field of science because (1) Jiddu

Krishnamurti has created a book of records or data,

(2) other individuals including Gopi Krishna have

given their own descriptions of an illuminating event

and the descriptions are similar to the descriptions

Krishnamurti gave, (3) the recognized biologist Sir

Alister Hardy has publihsed a small book entitled "The

Spiritual Nature of Man" in which many hundreds of

anomalous experiences are described by hundreds of

different persons.  Hardy didn't engage in this

pioneer research until he was an old man and his

eminent reputation was firmly established.  Even so,

for reasons already given, many of today's working

scientists can't personally investigate the altered

brain activity without losing their very specialized

scientific acumen and their professional status, their

careers, and their  relatively high income.  The best

compromise is for a number of qualified scientists to

collaborate with persons like myself who are

intelligent and who have reconditioned their brains so

that they perceive this illumination that Krishnamurti

and others have described.







Summing up, there is a large number of less than

well-read individuals who are intelligent, but they

can't read well enough to become professional

educators working in a school or university.  The

perceptions in some of these persons have been altered

appreciably by a process which Jiddu Krishnamurti

described many times in the book "Krishnamurti's

Notebook."  Other so-called "mystics" have described

this same process, but working psychologists,

psychiatrists and other medical doctors haven't been

able to investigate the mystical experience well

enough to clearly define it's value.  Sample reports

are provided for the reader to review.  Since 1979 the

author has retained this perception and has studied

local individuals and tested them informally to see

how well they are able to sense in this extraordinary

way.  He has observed as a general rough rule that the

more bookish a person is the less able they are to

sense in this way and be intuitive enough to realize

that this extraordinary sense is genuine.  The next

step required to get sufficient evidence to prove the

legitimacy of this extrapordinary sense is to find

some professional scientists  who are interested in

working with semi-literate people.  Not even the

authors of books considered holy had or have true

comprehension of this important subject.







Footnotes and Bibliography:







1.  Ziman, John E.D. Klemke, Hollinger, Robert, Rudge,

David  Wyss with Kilie, A. David, Editors,

"Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science"

third edition, Prometheus Books Amherst, New York 1998

p 52







2.  Krishnamurti, Jiddu "Krishnamurti's Notebook"

Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1976 p 38.







3.  ibid. p 36.







4.  Sloss, Radha Rajagopal, "Lives in the Shadow with

J. Krishnamurti" Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,

New York 1993 p 22







5.  http://www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/K_bala.htm page

3 of 5 accessed 1/28/02 author S. Balasundaram







6.  http://www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/K_bala.htm page

1 of  5 accessed 1/28/02 author S. Balasundaram







7.  Watts, Alan "Nature, Man and Woman" Pantheon

Books, Inc. New York 1958 p 125







8.  Wilson, Colin "The Quest For Wilhelm Reich" Garden

City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981 p 165







9.  Huxley, Aldous, "The Devils of Loudun" (Chatto &

Windus, London 1970) p 353







10.  Weeks, Andrew, "Boehme" (Albany: State University

of New York Press, 1991) pp 1,2







10:30PM Friday, February 15, 2002







9:15PM Saturday, February 16, 2002







7:20PM Thursday, February 21, 2002







John L. Waters





The information on this page represents that of John Waters and not 

necessarily that of Humboldt State University. John Waters takes full 

responsibility for the information presented.





This page is maintained by: John Waters



  

TOP