An encounter with a spiritual terrorist
The Sunday Post, July 3, 1994
By Ramesh KC
Is UG Krishnamurti a spiritual terrorist? This question has dogged me ever since I was acquainted with him. I still do not have the answer. I am really confused. Because UG's personality defies definition. In terms of his ‘teaching’, gleaned from responses to people's queries, UG does sound spiritual.
But he says, “There is no spirituality!” Reading and meeting UG gives us a kind of pleasure at the same time it leaves us with a stream of never-ending questions. UG's thoughts are mind-blowing and ego-shattering. We cannot escape easily from the onslaught of his iconoclastic arguments and seemingly irrational ideas.
Thousands of disillusioned and besieged spiritual seekers have come to meet UG at different places around the globe. It could be at a friend's apartment in India or America, a rented chalet in Switzerland, or a hotel room in Hong Kong or London where they find this seventy-six-year-old anti-guru, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth in 1918 in South India, on the move.
From his childhood UG displayed a rebellious nature coupled with an intense quest for mystical experience, which led him through a series of ultimately disappointing encounters with some of the more eminent religious and spiritual teachers of this century, to eventually become scathingly anti-philosophical, anti-religious and anti-society. In his forty-ninth year while staying in Switzerland, in the Saanen Valley, something happened to UG. It could be called reaching the spiritual point of no return and the disappearance into himself over an inner threshold into a kind of dimensionless anti-world of no experience. UG calls it his ‘calamity’. He describes its dimension in physical terms, and relates it to the functioning of his body. Most people who hear about this ‘calamity’, or encounter, tend to see it as ‘enlightenment’. UG vehemently rejects all such labels, but as yet he has not found one which comfortably fits his unusual condition. He probably never will.
UG hates all gurus and their quasi-followers. There is no room for utopians in his anti-world. UG has no publishing house, no ashram, no organization, nor a permanent address. He moves in the world like a migratory bird – Europe and America in the summer, India or Australia in the winter. Wherever UG goes he declares that the search for ‘truth’, ‘god’ and ‘enlightenment’ is just a waste of time. UG also lambasts mankind's so-called cultural heritage, its religions and their founders. He categorically states that, “Buddha was a crackpot and Jesus was another misguided Jew. Freud is the greatest fraud of the twentieth century,” while J Krishnamurti is for him its greatest phoney. Rajneesh and other self-styled gods are con men. Ashrams, UG calls “spiritual shops” and “supermarkets”.
UG is always trying to overthrow the evil empire of the soul, which thought has superimposed on life. He has found the quest for enlightenment to be nothing but a neurological problem. He states that there is no reincarnation, no spirit, no karma, no ego, no ‘I’ and no soul. For UG, the body is immortal, not the soul.
UG is not a relation of the other famous Krishnamurti, called Jiddu. Both of them, however, have a somewhat similar background, having grown up in a theosophical milieu during the heyday of the theosophical movement in India. Many people find a similarity in the views of these two Krishnamurtis, which UG of course, denies. Similar or not, UG is definitely more contradictory, more irritating and more hopeless in his expression.
Basically, UG has no hope for mankind. His message is that there is no message. He is not here to teach us, or to preach to us. Considering his expressed views, he has been called an “un-guru”, a “cosmic naxalite”, a “nihilist”, a “raging sage”, and sometimes, a “useless guy”.
There is something unique in UG which draws a demystified baby-boomer journalist like myself to him. I first met UG in Madras two and a half years ago and spent more than a week with him. During my stay, one of the things he said was that “Lord Rama and Krishna were deceivers.” This statement of his was like an explosion in my consciousness.
When I recently met UG in Bangalore, he was narrating stories of his recent trip to China. He was full of praise for that country, although it is a communist state. When I asked UG how he could praise China without mentioning its political dictatorship and ban on freedom of expression, he replied, “Why do you need freedom of expression? I don't need it. People like you need it. Do you think that you journalists are telling the truth to the people? I don't believe in your newspaper. You are all liars.” I received this statement again like a heavy blow. His radicalism shocked me but at the same time convinced me that the concept of radicalism is ours. It does not exist in him. That's why I find myself running after this man.
UG has often said, “thought is your enemy.” He tells us that we are prisoners of thought, which is imposed on us by society and culture. Therefore, he says, “Thought in its nature, form and origin is fascist.” UG maintains that a state of not-knowing is our natural state. ‘Mind’ is only a collection of our experiences, knowledge and information. He considers the highest art to be nothing but “a craft born out of sensuality.” “Sex,” says UG, “is violence and love is war.” Unconventional ideas like these spill out of UG at the slightest provocation. Thousands of people who visit him, while convinced that UG doesn't believe in anything, end up believing in his theory of doom.
In my lexicon, this man is a spiritual terrorist who wants to blow up all the rotten images of gods created by the frenzy of fertile minds. For me, there is nothing wrong in his terrorism. I, too, want to believe in not-believing. UG's maverick personality gives me solace and shows a way in this human jungle. UG is also loveable and, to some extent, understandable. But ultimately UG is not what we think or write about him.
