Each year, like Krishnamurti, I come to Gstaad in Switzerland, but not to give lectures nor to follow or imitate Krishnamurti.  My work here in Gstaad is to take the promising energy, the Kaif, of Krishnamurti’s meditations and his work with people here, and add my own presence and energy to all this so that it will be even more open, liberating and uplifting for real people who will need it to recharge and renew their spiritual journey.

Two days ago, one of my assistants saw Krishnamurti himself walking on the little path beside the river that runs along the road from Gstaad to Gsteig.  This wonderful path is full of Krishnamurti’s awareness and energy, which fills this beautiful Alpine valley and the nearby peaks.  This extraordinary beckoning ghost of Krishnamurti is an obvious invitation to any serious seeker to enter in to the directly experiential meditative perspective of Krishnamurti himself.  However, that itself is also just a gateway into what the ancient Buddhist Siddha, Tilopa, called Mahamudra, the Great Attitude, of effortless and relaxed total awareness beyond ego and its struggles.  So none of this is about clinging exclusively to the teachings of J. Krishnamurti or anyone else.  How can there be an open-ended magical journey, a Voidwalk, where there is clinging to a particular teacher or tradition?

It is a marvelous thing to pick an inspiring, energizing place where you are willing to be utterly open and receptive without practicing a method or trying to achieve a spiritual result, a miracle, a particular hoped-for or projected experience or occult achievement.  To simply relax and allow awareness to rise up and expand is strangely rather difficult at first because the seeking mind tends to train itself to various practices, struggles and efforts to force a personally spiritual result.  The seeker often wants to become suddenly and soon greatly improved and even impressive to others.  This greedy or social motivation does not easily calm down and allow greater reality to unfold in the consciousness.

The beauty of nature in the mountains has always been a mystical gateway for serious spiritual aspirants.  All the great holy places of the Himalayas are based on this simple fact of quiet, uplifting surroundings where the pace of life is less noisy and disintegrating, where the insanity of neurotic humanity is not as all-pervading as in the stinking, all-suffocating towns and cities of the Earth.  It is much easier to stop the brain and the world in a place where the brain and the world have already slowed down due to the natural, clear and higher atmosphere of certain mountainous regions on Earth.

Gstaad, like Gangotri in the Himalayas, is a pilgrimage place for those who want to cultivate samadhi or heightened awareness.  Both places are obvious spiritual resources for those who feel a call to make use of them.  Though Gangotri has more extraordinary ghosts than Gstaad, the energetic principle of Kaif (a Sufi term for spiritual radiation of a place, an object or even a physical person) remains the same.  If, for instance, you go to Po Chang, Huang Po or Kuei Shan mountains of ancient Zen Masters in China, you will also get a Kaif experience if you are receptive to it in the right way.  The Kaif principle is the essence of significant personal pilgrimage.  If done right, it will grow within you and reach a critical threshold where something very meaningful and useful to the Spirit is triggered in the Spirit, which has to do with the Descent-of-the-Spirit as explained in Castaneda’s book, The Power of Silence.

When I was a young man in America, over forty years ago, I once felt a call to go to Bear Butte in South Dakota, the main holy place of the Cheyenne Indians where Sweet Medicine received the Sacred Arrows.  Around dawn, I climbed up the sacred hill on a winding path.  Near the summit, the Sun came up and stopped me in my tracks.  This was the Kaif-moment.  Right there, my consciousness spread out endlessly and timelessly and the Sun spoke to me and instructed me on what I must do there.  My wife, who was waiting for me in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, said that a big orange light followed me all the way down the hill.  Later at the hotel in the nearby town I read in the local paper that the very next day there was going to be a special celebration of the Cheyenne Amerindians at Bear Butte where for the first time in over a hundred years the Sacred Arrows of the Northern Cheyenne and the Sacred Medicine Hat of the Southern Cheyenne were being brought together.  That was a significant Amerindian Kaif-recharging exercise that I was intuitively led to participate in.  I have always carried that with me ever since, both in my body and in a stone I picked up on the summit of the hill which looks like the profile of an eagle’s head.  Also, when I was nearing the bottom of the hill, feeling very charged-up in a state of heightened awareness, I suddenly noticed a big group of extraordinary ghosts of old passed-away Medicine Men and Medicine Women, so I sat with them for awhile, where they told me that they were having a special meeting and that it was their special meeting that had called me there.  They thanked me for coming and I thanked them for inviting me.  It was only later that I read about it in the newspaper.

During that period of my life, when I was living in northern Wyoming near Cody and the sacred Buffalo Heart Mountain of the Crow Indians, I would enter into a walking samadhi everyday on a special path I had created on the prairie there.  People visiting me there would notice that the path was glowing visibly at night with a long line of white light that could be seen from half a mile away.  That path had thus become imbued with the Kaif of my own intensifying samadhi there.  Maybe someday I will reveal that path so that spiritual seekers in North America from Canada, the United States and Mexico can make use of it.  Carlos Castaneda was shown my path and that place one time in a meditation he had with his teacher, Juan Matus.  This is because Juan Matus and I have a subtle connection as part of my present work on this planet.

There are many great Kaif-places on the Earth where aspiring souls with right receptivity can get a boost for their Spiritual Awakening and development.  One of those places is Gstaad, where the extraordinary ghost of Krishnamurti can sometimes be seen walking meditatively along the beautiful little river here. 

Another interesting Kaif-place is the grave of Georges Gurdjieff, the Armenian Sufi Master, in Avon near Fontainebleau in France, which I recently visited.  The grave is beautifully designed with a little stone bench one can sit right on the grave with, which I managed to do in spite of some overgrowth of tree-branches over the bench.  The first thing I noticed is that followers of the Gurdjieff Work never understood the function of Kaif at the grave of a Sufi, so they do not take care of that bench and cut the tree branches away.  The extraordinary ghost of Gurdjieff in Avon is not being drawn upon by those who could get a needed boost.  This sickening fact hangs like a heavy black cloud over France and Europe and the West in general.

One notices occasionally in Gstaad how old Krishnamurti imitators still cling to him and walk on the path alongside the river, doing their version of the Krishnamurti meditation.  That approach is not really helping much or doing anything for the Kaif of Gstaad.  It is like a shadow of the light.  So one has to be very watchful of this and not get caught in the shadow by attempting to interact with old Krishnamurti hands.  They are unreal social selves, old cultish belongers who never saw Krishnamurti in clear perspective of the big picture.  They will only drain your energy with their pettiness, their well-established spiritual complacency and futility.  They, like Gurdjieff’s followers, do not understand Kaif.  They remain asleep in the name of being awake.