- A Brief Krishnamurti Chronology (major milestones and related personnel background)
1895, K was born into a Telugu Brahmin family of 8 children. His mother, said to be a psychic who could see people's auras, insisted her eighth child was to be a rare and special human being. She died when K was 10, and his father was hired two years later as secretary by Theosophical Society (TS), then headquartered in Madras (now Chennai), India, which welcomed people from all religions.
According to the tenets of Hindu Orthodoxy, Brahmin were those who had arrived, through the law of karma, at the last and highest stratum of spiritual evolution, however this status had no guarantee of financial security, as Brahmin represented a spiritual rather than material elite.
Theosophy literally means "divine wisdom", which has links with philosophical schools that date back to antiquity. Pythagoras' sixth century BC religious community at Croton, in southern Italy, is said to have embodied theosophical ideals, which later influenced the work of Plato. At the root of theosophy lies the conviction that everything, manifested and unmanifested, created and uncreated, devine or material, emanates from a state of unity, transcendent reality, or godhead, is accessible to physical man through a process of mystical realisation, or union, and it is only within the experience of this unity that true wisdom is to be found. During the course of western civilization, adherents of such radical spiritual ideas have tended to compile their speculations and conduct their experiments in secret, to avoid persecution from the established religions.
The TS was found in 1875 in New York with three objectives:
1. To form a nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color;
2. To study comparative religions, philosophies and sciences
3. To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers latent in man.
WOA
