THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

An Excerpt from Chapter Twenty-Three

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

I attended meetings at the Boston Theosophical Society on the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), an Indian philosopher and spiritual author. In his early life, he was groomed to be the new World Teacher, but he later graciously rejected that prestigious mantle and disbanded the organization offering it.

He had much to say about our biased perception of life.

His dialogues were verbose, elaborate, and complex. It took deliberate effort to stay with him until his meaning finally became clear. Essentially, he proposed that humans are biased from birth, accumulating personal impressions and experiences that distort reality.

We rarely see things as they truly are, and false perceptions stir powerful emotions. A painting of the Virgin Mary or a Pietà carving can drive us to our knees in prayer, though the one is only a painted canvas and the other is a carved marble stone — each no more than physical matter carrying a borrowed meaning. In that sense, the world we move through may be more of a mental projection than fact, more illusion than reality.

Krishnamurti taught that this prejudicial fog could be reduced through the daily practice of silent contemplation. He called it Choiceless Awareness—a conscious state free of bias, desire, expectation, and preconceived notions, offering a return to the sacred stillness and clarity of a newborn.

What he described is not a blending of religions—only the philosophical observation that facts of consciousness, when examined without bias, echo across all religious traditions. Perhaps this is why Jesus Christ said, to enter the kingdom of heaven, one must become as a little child, where truth is not warped by personal history with its accumulated biases.

I recall my first attempt as a child to read the hour hand of a wall clock, when time had no meaning for me. Now, in old age, memory compresses my weeks so tightly that a month feels like a handful of days. Indeed, time itself may simply be an adult-shaped illusion. Isaac Newton assumed its absoluteness and uniform flow, but in Albert Einstein’s deeper universe, time bends and stretches with circumstance and gravity.

One anxious man feels time dragging; another, equally anxious, feels it sprinting—proof that the observer shapes the moment. A scientist can, merely by observing a quantum physics experiment, affect its outcome.

In contemplative stillness, we relearn what a babe already knows … that time is weightless, almost beside the point. The mind can slow it to zero while the clock is ticking, so that an hour becomes one second—or the reverse, when fear whirls the gears and each second weighs like an hour.

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
—Matthew 18:3

IFrom the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.

Visit www.RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com and pass it forward.