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#2771 - Wednesday, March 28, 2007
- Editor: Jerry Katz
Nondual Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Read the Highlights-inspired book, ONE: Essential Writings on Nonduality, edited by Jerry Katz http://nonduality.com/one.htm
Mukunka Rao sends notice of U.G. Krishnamurti's passing. It is from http://ugkrishnamurti.org
Remembering U.G. Krishnamurti
U.G. Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends
and admirers all over the world, is no more. The end came on
Seven weeks before, UG had a fall and injured
himself. This was the second such occurrence in two years. He
did not want such an incident to occur once again which would
make him further dependent on his friends for his daily
maintenance. So he refused medical or other external
intervention. He decided to let his body take its own natural
course. He was confined to bed and his consumption of food
and water became infrequent and then ceased altogether. ‘It’s
time to go,’ he declared, joined his palms in namaste,
thanked his friends and advised them to return to their places.
Only his longtime friends, the filmmaker, Mahesh Bhatt, Larry and
Susan Morris, and few other friends stayed back to guard his body
and do whatever was necessary when the end came. UG did not die
of any disease, although he suffered from ‘cardio-spasm’
for many years, which became quite severe in the last days of his
life.
UG did not show the slightest signs of worry or fear
about death or concern for his body even at the end of his life.
He did not leave any specific instructions as to how to dispose
of his dead body. ‘You can throw it on the garbage
heap, as far as I am concerned,’ he often would say.
Responding to questions on death, UG said, ‘Life
and death cannot be separated. When what you call clinical death
takes place, the body breaks itself into its constituent elements
and that provides the basis for the continuity of life. In that
sense the body is immortal.’
*
UG was born on
He did his schooling in the town of
Between 14 and 21 years of age, UG spent seven years
off and on with Swami Sivananda in Rishikesh practicing yoga and
meditation. He had various mystical visions and experiences
there, but he questioned their validity as he thought that he
could recognize them only on the basis of his prior knowledge he
already had about them.
In 1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and
met Sri Ramana Maharshi and asked him, ‘This thing called moksha,
can you give it to me?’ Ramana reply, ‘I can give it,
but can you take it?’ struck him like a ‘thunderbolt’
and set him up on a relentless search for truth that ended at the
age of 49 with a totally unforeseen result.
After leaving the university, UG joined the
Theosophical Society as a lecturer and toured the country giving
talks on Theosophy. Even after his marriage to Kusuma Kumari in
1943, he continued to work with the Theosophical Society and gave
lectures in European countries, until, in 1953, he realized that
what he was doing was not something true to his real self and
quit the post in disgust. After that, he met J. Krishnamurti, who
was by then famous as an unconventional spiritual teacher. For
two years, he met him now and again and got into fierce
discussions on spiritual matters, but later on, he was to reject
JK’s philosophy, calling it a ‘bogus chartered journey.’
During this period, UG also underwent a
life-altering, mystical experience, what he sometimes called a
‘death experience’. But he ‘brushed it all aside’
as of no importance and moved on, further probing and testing and
questioning every experience until he came into his own.
In 1955, UG went to
In 1972, UG gave his first public talk at the Indian
Institute of World Culture. He never again gave any public talk.
But he did not/could not stop people from meeting and talking to
him. He responded to their queries and answered their questions
in the way only he could. He usually stayed with friends or in
small rented apartments, but never stayed in one place for more
than six months. He gave no lectures or discourses. He had no
organization, no office, no secretary, and no fixed address.
Despite his endless repetition that he had ‘no message for
mankind,’ ironically yet naturally thousands of people the
world-over felt otherwise and flocked to see and listen to his
‘anti-teaching’. The first book, The Mystique of
Enlightenment—The unrational ideas of a man called UG,
put together by Rodney Arms, appeared in 1982. In 1986, he
went public and gave his first TV interview, which was soon to be
followed by several TV and radio interviews the world over. And
UG made publishing history by not allowing copyright on any of
his books saying, ‘My teaching, if that is the word you want
to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute,
interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even
claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of
anybody.’
In the last seven years during his stay in
Bangalore, he rarely engaged in serious conversations; rather he
started to do something else other than answer tiresome
questions, for he found all questions (except in the technical
area, which is something else) were variations of basically the
same question revolving around the ideas of ‘being’ and
‘becoming’. There used to be long stretches of utter
silence. It used to be embarrassing; also a tremendous relief
from the burden of knowing. And then UG would start playing his
enigmatic little ‘games’, or invite friends to sing,
dance, or share jokes. And the room would explode with laughter:
funny, silly, dark, and apocalyptic! At last freed from the
tyranny of knowledge, beauty, goodness, truth, and God, we would
all mock and laugh at everything, mock heroes and lovers,
thinkers and politicians, scientists and thieves, kings and
sages, including UG and ourselves!
Who was this UG? What kind of person was he? He was
the most enigmatic person you could ever meet – at once kind
and cruel, most loving yet stern, constantly talking about money,
seeming to ‘extract’ it from friends, yet most
generous in giving; seemingly abusive and punishing, yet
showering affection on the same person the next moment; utterly
carefree, yet worrying about what might happen to the person in
front of him; directing people to act in specific ways, yet
instantly accepting of any outcome; demonstrating the most
incisive logic, yet making utterly contradictory statements. For
a man who complained that we are constantly preoccupied with
something other than what is happening at the moment, he
endlessly talked about himself and his past. One could
never fathom UG’s true intentions behind his statements or
actions.
His answers to our questions came straight like
arrows, unsettling our minds. He was well-known for
striking down not only the edifices we have so carefully built in
our own minds but the foundations of human thought as a whole. UG
was truly enigmatic, subversive and revolutionary, and totally
fearless.
There was a unique energy with UG: in speech
or in stillness it was constant and vibrant, and had a profound
effect on those who were around him.
And let this be told: when UG rejected the notion of
soul or atman and declared that our search for permanence was the
cause of our suffering, he sounded like the Buddha; when he
blasted all spiritual discourses as ‘poppycock’ and
thrashed the spiritual masters as ‘misguided fools’, we
thought of the fiery and abusive words of the great 9th
century mystic of
That mystery, that enigma, is no more. Once, a
couple of years back, when Mahesh Bhatt had asked him, ‘UG,
how would you like to be remembered?’ UG had said, ‘After
I am dead and gone, nothing of me must remain inside of you or
outside of you. I can certainly do a lot to see that no
establishment or institution of any kind mushrooms around me
whilst I am alive. But how do I stop all you guys from enshrining
me in your brains?’
__________________________________________
UG Says
I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve.
Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about
change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed,
disconnected sentences. What is there is only your
interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now
nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am
saying. I have no claims.
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.
My teaching, if that is the word you want to use,
has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute,
interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even
claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of
anybody.
My interest is to point out to you that you can
walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really
handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But
you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so
that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you
can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’
- that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going
to fall.
People call me an ‘enlightened man’ -- I
detest that term -- they can’t find any other word to
describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out
that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that
because all my life I’ve searched and wanted to be an
enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as
enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular
person is enlightened or not doesn’t arise. I don’t
give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the
other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of
exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is
no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the
problem is fear and not God.
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.
God is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted
happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does
not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha,
liberation, and all that stuff are just variations on the same
theme: permanent happiness.
All your experiences, all your meditations, all your
prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the
self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in
the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self
also is a self-centred activity.
There is nothing there, only your relative,
experiential data, your truth. There is no such thing as
objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or
independent of our minds.
Mind or thought is not yours or mine. It is our
common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my
mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind,
the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by
man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all
thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all
share the same atmosphere for breathing.
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.
Human nature is basically violent, because thought
is violent. Anything that is born out of thought is destructive.
You may cover it up with all wonderful and romantic phrases:
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Don’t forget that
in the name of ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ millions
and millions of people have died, more than in all the recent
wars put together. But we now have come to a point where we can
realize that violence is not the answer, that it is not the way
to solve human problems. So, terror seems to be the only way. I
am not talking of terrorists blowing up churches, temples, and
all that kind of thing, but the terror that if you try to destroy
your neighbour you will possibly destroy yourself. That
realization has to come down to the level of the common man.
The real problem is the solution. Your problems
continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the
answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are
interdependent; your problems and solutions go together. Because
you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those
problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these
holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really
solutions at all. That is obvious. They can only exhort you to
try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand
on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can
do. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naiveté‚ and
treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they
do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on
buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.
I can never sit on a platform and talk. It is too
artificial. It is a waste of time to sit and discuss things in
hypothetical or abstract terms. An angry man does not sit and
talk and converse pleasantly about anger; he is too angry. So don’t
tell me that you are in crisis, that you are angry. Why talk of
anger? You live and die in the hope that someday, somehow, you
will no longer be angry. You are burdened with hope, and if this
life seems hopeless, you invent the next life. There are no lives
to come.
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.
TELLING IT LIKE IT IS:
A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in
this world.
Religions have promised roses but you end up with
only thorns.
Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same;
it is quick fix.
The body has no independent existence. You are a
squatter there.
God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes, too.
All experiences however extraordinary they may be
are in the area of sensuality.
Man cannot be anything other than what he is.
Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him.
Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same
spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer
than kissing cousins.
Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes.
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or
It would be more interesting to learn from children,
than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to
function.
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are
searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
You eat not food but ideas. What you wear are not
clothes, but labels and names.
The plain fact is that if you don’t
have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem
you don’t feel that you are living.
That messy thing called ‘mind’
has created many destructive things. By far the most destructive
of them all is God.
Atmospheric pollution is most harmless when
compared to the spiritual and religious pollution that have
plagued the world.
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique
individuals, where as culture has invented a single mold to which
all must conform. It is grotesque.