End of the Search
The Times of India, in focus, 6 April 1991
By Ravi Balasubramaniam
Conversations with a man who looked into the heart of nothing
Looking to Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti for solace can be like journeying into the Sahara to escape summer. It doesn't help. He offers no real advise, no philosophy, no easy way out. He extends nothing.
Instead, UG, as everyone calls this 73-year-old man, throws the awful burden of life back at you.
An air hostess discovered this during one of his travels around the world. She had seen UG on television the previous night and thought of him as the great redeemer. In between sobs, she told him of a difficult relationship and asked for help.
UG replied that he could do nothing. She insisted on some advise – should she love her boyfriend, or should she leave him? “Why don't you,” said UG looking at her with his steady, hooded eyes, “why don't you open that door and just jump out?”
Krishnamurti laughs when he recalls the incident but there is no ring of triumph. His laugh is like his life. There is nothing in it which resembles joy, distress, relief or malice. It is simply there, till it disappears. You notice the sparkling white teeth, and the health and color of his skin. Then, his handsome face assumes its brooding majesty, a sort of Marlon Brando look in The Godfather.
“We are not really interested in getting rid of our problems,” says UG to no one in particular. A group of his admirers sits quietly by his side. “Because by getting rid of our problem we will also lose ourselves as we know and experience it.”
UG's ruthlessness flows from an incredible honesty but coupled with his good looks and peripatetic ways it has, often, resulted in his being misunderstood. The fact that he has been quoted out of all context (“Sex is violence,” “Love is fascist”) has also not helped. As for his followers – he hates the word – they have tended to see him as a spiritual hero who can blast their troubles away like an enlightened Rambo.
Krishnamurti constantly points out that he is as naked and defenseless as anyone else. For years now, he has refused to arrogate to himself the role of a guru. “What I have to say is of extraordinary importance to me,” says UG. “I am not interested in winning anyone over to my point of view. Nor is there a chance of anyone winning me over go theirs.”
A journalist once asked him what he would do if she tried to seduce him. “Try it,” he replied. It wasn't an invitation, nor was it a warning. “She thought I would give some kind of holy, fancy answer,” says UG. “I explained to her that I am the most vulnerable man, I don't know what I would do. What would I do if somebody came with a gun? I would probably kill him, I don't know. This body has to protect itself. The survival mechanism is there.”
The body as a living organism that is interested solely in survival and the mind as an entity that has no questions, no answers, nothing, are two of UG's central truths. When he discovered them, he had spent exactly 49 years of his life in pursuit of conventional goals like domestic bliss, a rewarding career and “enlightenment” as his orthodox Brahmin background defined it.
“I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” confesses UG. “My grandparents, who were lawyers, sweated it out to make their grandchildren comfortable.” He inherited 120,000 dollars from them in the 40s at a time when the dollar was about three and a half rupees. Later, he married a beautiful Brahmin girl, sired four children, earned fame as a lecturer for the Theosophical Society (The New York Times called him brilliant) and continued to believe that the Upanishads, yoga, sadhana, slokas, meditation, gurus, godmen, mystics, philosophers, abstinence, self-torture and much else would lead to salvation.
In 1955, he and his family moved to the United States. “Most people go to America to earn money, I went there to spend it,” remembers UG. They went in search of treatment for his eldest son’s polio. Six years later, the money was finished. And, as he says in his book The Mystique of Enlightenment (which he later called ‘The Mistake of Enlightenment’), “he felt beginning in him a tremendous upheaval which he could not and did not wish to control.” His marriage broke up, he put his family on a plane to India and went on penniless to London.
All through, he had searched for that elusive state called enlightenment. Living virtually on the streets of London and Paris, the search didn't stop. His wanderings took him to Geneva where he met a kindly older woman called Valentine de Kerven who allowed him to stay in her chalet in the Swiss village of Saanen.
Saanen was to UG what the bathtub was to Archimedes. It just happened. A state of being expressed itself as a law of life. In UG's case it was to become an intensely personal science whose equations even he could never fully express. Unlike with water, though, there was nothing buoyant about the feeling. Indeed, UG refers to it as the “calamity,” as “an atomic explosion” that makes you feel the way you do “when there is an earthquake inside you and realignments are taking place.”
He was sitting on a bench under a chestnut tree looking at the green valley and rugged peaks of the Saanenland, when it occurred to him. As he says in the book Mind Is a Myth:
“It occurred to me that I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, ‘Is there enlightenment?’ but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal, enlightenment, exists, I have had to search, and it is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something that does not exist. My search is at an end.”
Krishnamurti became truly free. It was a freedom that came from the definite knowledge that there is no self to discover, there is nothing to be transformed, there is no identity constantly demanding its continuity. There is only the body and memory which is stored in the neurons. The individual uses memory to maintain his nonexisting identity. There is no thought, only response to stimuli. The use of such thought to achieve goals produces thinking – and all the ills we see around us.
“Whether it is an American, German, Italian or Indian, the only thing everyone wants is happiness without one moment of unhappiness,” points out UG. “Everybody wants permanent pleasure without pain. And yet, the neurological system can't take it. When your goals and needs are the same, it all becomes very simple. Then, you have enough energy to devote to living problems.”
This mismatch between goals and needs, according to UG, is one of humankind's biggest failures. “This planet can feed 12 billion people even without the use of high tech,” he says, and asks: “Why are three-fourths of the present five billion underfed?”
Equally disastrous, in his view, has been religion with its automatic belief that the human species was created for a grander and nobler purpose than other creatures. “See what we do when we destroy rainforests in Brazil. We kill thousands of creatures with it. Look at what we are doing to the environment. Pollution, not overpopulation is our biggest problem.”
“I have opinions on everything,” admits Krishnamurti. “I have met so many people around the world, I know what is happening. Naturally, one question they throw at me is, ‘Why do I talk?’ I say why not? I am part of this world. This is the only world there is for me. I am only interested in focusing or spotlighting what really is the problem. If you are interested in a value system, there is not much that I can offer.”
Although he offers so little, UG gives so much away – literally, as money. His legendary fortune isn't so mythical. There is the 120,000 dollars that Valentine set up as his travel fund and he receives the interest on it every year: 4,000 dollars for his air tickets and 1,000 dollars a month as out-of-pocket expenses. His friends and admirers around the world give him a lot of money. He gives it all away.
In a couple of years, half the fund will go to a kindly Indian family that looked after Valentine in her later years. “Then I will have to go sit in some cave,” laughs UG. “I don't know what I'm going to do.” You search his face for a trace of worry, for some show of concern. The search ends immediately. There is nothing.
