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#2662 - Tuesday, December 5, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
In this issue Mukunda Rao responds to our article published in Highlights issue 2657: http://nonduality.com/hl2657.htm
Articles by or about Rao also appear in the following Highlights issues:
http://nonduality.com/hl2452.htm
http://nonduality.com/hl2643.htm
http://nonduality.com/hl2648.htm
Mukunda Rao is author of The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting U.G. Krishnamurti.
http://www.penquinbooksindia.com/Books/BookDetail.asp?ID=5947
Dear Jerry,
Sorry to say that so long as he remained Acharya
Rajneesh, Rajneesh was a brilliant expounder and interpreter of
religious ideas and spiritual traditions. He had this
extraordinary talent to connect Zen with Tao, Tao with Vedanta,
Vedanta with Science, and construct out of them illuminating
narratives. He was certainly unconventional and radical in his
methods, scintillating in his interpretations; indeed he was an
eccentric and controversial guru and did make people take notice
of him. And several thousands became his willing, at times,
blind, disciples too. But the day he appointed himself as the
enlightened master, as Bhagwan, he became an insufferable
megalomaniac. The proof of that is not far to seek. Listen to his
one-time disciples and several available reports on Rajneesh in
the media and books.
Anyway, Osho’s comments/criticism of U.G. Krishnamurti is understandable since it came after some of Osho’s close disciples left him and became friends of UG. However, what he says of or about UG is factually incorrect.
UG has never told people ‘to drop anger, to drop greed, to drop the ego’, simply because you cannot, for that which wants to ‘drop’ is anger/greed/ego!
UG did not stay/live with J Krishnamurti as his disciple for 12 years. There were of course several interesting encounters, dialogues and even arguments between the two. UG did respect and listen to JK’s talks but found JK’s ideas not true to his own experience, and ultimately rejected him as he rejected all other teachings/masters as well to come into his own and come upon the ‘natural state’.
UG’s meeting with Ramana was not like what Osho tries to make of it. As someone who was well acquainted with India’s ‘Enlightenment Traditions’, Osho should have been a little more creative in his understanding of the meeting between the two masters.
I hope the following quotes from UG should put at least a few things in perspective.
Man is always selfish, and he will remain
selfish as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. I have
nothing against selfish people. I don’t want to talk about
selflessness – it has no basis at all. You say ‘I will
be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a marvellous
man’ – but until tomorrow arrives (or the day after
tomorrow, or the next life) you will remain selfish. What do you
mean by ‘selflessness’? You tell everybody to be
selfless. What is the point? I have never said to anybody
‘Don’t be selfish.’ Be selfish, stay selfish!
– that is my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness.
The rich man’s distributing charity is also selfishness: he
will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue of
him there.
You have been told that you should practice
desirelessness. You have practiced desirelessness for thirty or
forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be
wrong somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must
be wrong with the one who has told you to practice
desirelessness. This (desire) is a reality; that (desirelessness)
is false – it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as
such can’t be wrong, can’t be false, because it is
there.
You hope that you will be able to resolve the
problem of desire through thinking, because of that model of a
saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that
man has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don’t
believe that man at all! Such a man builds some organization, and
lives in luxury, which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He
is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a fool in the
world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to
prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him.
You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That is
why they are all aloof – because they are afraid you will
catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid
that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man - he
never, never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more
difficult than seeing the President of your country – that
is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he
is, not what he claims he is.
*
You never look at the problem. What is the problem?
Anger, for example. I don’t want to discuss all those silly
things which these people have been discussing for centuries.
Anger. Where is that anger? Can you separate the anger from the
functioning of this body? It’s like a wave in the ocean. Can
you separate the waves from the ocean? You can sit there and wait
until the waves subside, so that you can have a swim in the
ocean, like King Canute who sat there for years and years hoping
that those waves in the ocean would disappear so that he could
have a swim in a calm ocean. That will never happen.
Where do you feel the anger, first of all? Where do
you feel all these so-called problems you want to be free from?
... the desires? The burning desires. The desire burns you.
Hunger burns you. So, the solutions you have or the means of
fulfilling them (desire and hunger) is very simple and makes it
impossible for that to burn itself out in your system. Where do
you feel the fear? You feel it here in the pit of your stomach.
It is part of the body. The body cannot take those high and low
tides of energy that is there in your body. So you are wanting to
suppress it for some spiritual or social reasons. You are not
going to succeed.
The sage, or seer, or whatever you want to call him, is in the state of undivided consciousness. He does not know that he is a free man so for him there is no question of trying to free others. He is just there. He talks about it and then he goes.
Gaudapada had no disciples. He refused to teach anybody. Great
teachers never use any authority and they do not interpret
anyone. The mystics help you to look at things differently, to
interpret things differently. You cannot become a sage through
any effort. It is not in your hands. A sage cannot have a
disciple. A sage cannot have a follower because it is not an
experience that can be shared. Even an ordinary experience you
can’t share with others. Can you tell somebody who has never
experienced sex what the sex experience is like?
It seems to have happened to some people during the
course of history. Each one has given expression to that
uniqueness in their own way according to their background. It is
an expression of that background. Nature, in its own way, throws
out from time to time some flower, but this end product of human
evolution cannot be used by this evolutionary process as a model
to create another one. If it throws out one flower, that is it,
you see. You can’t preserve it. You can’t preserve the
perfume of that because if you preserve it, it will stink. The
evolutionary process or movement is not interested in using the
one that it has perfected as a model for further creation. It has
a creation of its own.
*
There is no teaching of mine, and never shall be
one. ‘Teaching’ is not the word for it. A teaching
implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of
thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation
in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of
teachability; it is simply a description of the way I am
functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of
man – this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of
thought, are also functioning.
The natural state is not the state of a
self-realized, God-realized man, it is not a thing to be achieved
or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is
there – it is the living state. This state is just
the functional activity of life. By ‘life’ I do not
mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses,
functioning naturally without the interference of thought.
Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs
of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the
activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses
them to give continuity to itself.
Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever
with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they
lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his
search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps
experienced those religious states. So can you. They are
thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go.
Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ
Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong
direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless
can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much
less given expression to, by any man.
That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis
situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage.
I’ve no message to give to the world. Whatever
happens to me is such that you can’t share it with the
world. That’s the reason why I don’t get up on a
platform or give any lectures – it’s not that I
can’t give lectures; I’ve lectured everywhere in the
world – I’ve nothing to say. And I don’t like to
sit in one place, surrounded by people asking set questions. I
never initiate any discussions; people come and sit round me
– they can do what they like. If somebody asks me a question
suddenly, I try to answer, emphasizing and pointing out that
there is no answer to that question. So, I merely rephrase,
restructure and throw the same question back at you. It’s
not game playing, because I’m not interested in winning you
over to my point of view. It’s not a question of offering
opinions – of course I do have my opinions on everything
from disease to divinity, but they’re as worthless as
anybody else’s.
What I say you must not take literally. So much
trouble has been created by people taking it all literally. You
must test every word, every phrase, and see if it bears any
relation to the way you are functioning. You must test it, but
you are not in a position to accept it – unfortunately this
is a fact, take it or leave it. By writing it down, you will do
more harm than good. You see, I am in a very difficult position:
I cannot help you, whatever I say is misleading.
Your very listening has destroyed the revolutionary
nature of this (his) breakthrough and has made this a part of
knowledge, tradition, because you are the tradition. The
listening mechanism that is operating there in you is the
tradition. …By the time this has been accepted, the need has
been created for somebody else to come and blast it. That is why
I am talking. The very expression of this has created the need
for something new to happen. That is its nature. That is the
purpose, if there is any purpose, not to create a following but
to create something new there. Something new is saving you from
the burden of the past. The moment it is given expression to, it
is old. Why be like those handing over the torch from one person
to another and maintaining the hierarchical structure.
In other words, I am trying to free you not from the
past, the conditioning, but rather from what I am saying. I am
not suggesting any way out because there is no way. I have
stumbled into this and freed myself from the paths of others. I
can’t make the same mistake they did. I will never suggest
that anyone use me as a model or follow in my foot steps.
My path can never be your path. If you attempt to
make this your path you will get caught in a rut. No matter how
refreshing, revolutionary or fantastic, it is still a rut, a
copy, a second-hand thing. I myself do not know how I stumbled
into this so how do you expect me to give it to another? My
mission, if there is any, is to debunk every statement I have
ever made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I
have said you will be in danger.
My interest is not to knock off what others have
said (that is too easy) but to knock off what I am saying. More
precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I
am saying. This is why my talking sounds contradictory to others.
I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the
first statement with another statement. Then the second statement
is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy
dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can
be expressed.
I don’t want many people. I am trying to avoid
all the seekers and if there are any finders they don’t need
my help. By allowing myself to be surrounded by those people I am
inadvertently participating in the illusion that by carrying on a
dialogue or a conversation with me they are getting something. So
I discourage people. Even if they just come and sit around me I
try to point out the ridiculous nature of this get together. I
try to finish it by saying, “Nice meeting you all,” but
still they don’t go. They would sit with me for hours and
hours. Even if I get up and go away they would be still there
sitting and talking. They would be talking about what I did or
did not say or what they thought I had said.
Still they keep coming back. Most of those who
come to see me are religious buffs of all shapes, sizes and
colours. Unless they have some sort of background in all this
they can’t be interested in this kind of thing. They only
come to receive some confirmation from me about what they are
interested in but they find that they are not getting anything
from me. Still they continue to come.