I recently watched The Top of the Lake, a 5 part miniseries, very well done and interesting from start to finish. But I was puzzled by the character of a 'guru', who seemed to mainly be condesdcending and belittling to her 'followers', and who's ideas were pretty harsh and cynical, and strange to boot. So I looked up the show's creators and found an interview with one of them (Jane Champion). In it she talks about where the idea for the guru in the program came from.

"She’s inspired by a gentleman who I really did know called not GJ but UG. His surname is Krishnamurti. You can find him on YouTube. I met him in Sydney and visited him a couple times in Switzerland, where he had an apartment. He struck me as the most unusual human I’d ever met, and I still to this day think that. I felt like in some ways this story is an homage to him. It’s hard to know how to describe this, but he has woken from the dreams. He lives in reality. To understand that you have to be a little bit interested in, I don’t know, spiritual thinking. Which is the basic idea that everybody is asleep and what you have to do is wake up. I just felt that he was the most free person I’d ever met who didn’t want something from you. Most people at the very least want your approval or something. "

I looked him up on youtube, and I felt that this was clearly a cult leader. As he spoke to the man interviewing him, I became more and more angry. No matter what the interviewer said, he treated him as though he couldn't possibly understand, and continued to say confusing things.

He was dressed in the typical guru style, with the longish hair, the jacket draped over his shoulder.

He just seems like such a creep to me, very deceptive.

I'm wondering if anyone else has any info or opinions on him?

What surprises me is that a famous woman like Jane Champion (won an Oscar for The Piano), who no doubt has plenty of money, would be taken in by him. She seems to be very intelligent and sensitive in a lot of ways, must have plenty of money. Yet, so easily duped?

I could ask the same about Will Smith. He seems to have everything, yet he becomes a Scientologist? I guess anyone can be drawn in and tricked......

Thanks

Read up more about him if you like.. far from a "cult leader", he was probably one of the most anti-guru spiritual types out there.. (dead now). He regularly told people to get lost and not follow him, which of course had the opposite effect of people flocking to him. Still, he was an interesting, quite eccentric sort of guy. Towards the later part of his life he was affected by dementia and was quite nonsensical and abrupt (which you probably saw on youtube). Really a non-issue these days.

Yes, a funny guy. Another funny Krishnamurti was Jiddu Krishnamurti. The funny thing is that his message was that no system can lead to the end of conflict. You cannot think your way out of conflict. He did a lot of thinking and a lot of talking, but he did not identify it as the self. He always refered to himself as the speaker. The speaker says, etc. etc.

I don't think that people get it. David Bohm got it, though. Or did he? It's like finding the Tao because if you think it's the Tao, then it's not the Tao. But it's all nonsense as both Krishnamurtis would agree. If they were alive. But their messages are alive in the human consciousness aren't they?