‘Love is fascist in its birth and essence’
The Indian Post, Post Script Interview, Sunday January 7, 1990
By Mahesh Bhatt
“Why have you gone public, U G?” I asked as we headed for the city of Bombay from the airport. He was back – back after exactly 5 months, looking like a daisy in spite of his 22 hour flight from New York.
“You look bad, Mahesh – what's going on?” The question at first seemed totally out of context but with that U G had stripped me of my masquerade of ‘All is well’. Honestly, the past 10 hours had been exciting. I had somehow plodded through the night waiting for the landing of this unparalleled, uncommon, unique man.
I was silent. He smiled. It became impossible for me to hide from myself. When you are with him you have no place to hide. Trapped in the hell of my own making I found it impossible to persist with my query, something told me that a period of extended pain lay ahead of me.
There was a charged feel in the air. The nation had just gone to the polls. My mind wandered to what U G had said about Rajiv Gandhi in 1984. When the nation was euphoric having voted a young man to power. “Mr Clean will become Mr Filthy inside of two years. This is not a prophecy Mahesh. Don't you see the very system he is going to inherit is corrupt? Unless he becomes part of that system he cannot survive.”
Forty-eight hours and the election results would be out. The end of the Rajiv era seemed inevitable. The Opposition's victory was certain.
“What makes you feel that the new government is going to be different? Sorry, Mahesh, the game is the same, the play is the same, only the actors are different and the players are different.” His talk flattened my spirit. It made me sad – the continuous clamour of Bombay traffic stalled further dialogue.
Concealed joy, shy pride, stammered reverence sparkled on Parekh's face as he once again led us into his flat in Santa Cruz. The sight was familiar. This is the place where U G usually stays when he is in Bombay. Parekh, a retired electrical engineer and a top man of the Vipassana meditation group, is a charming man. His wife, Kaushalya, a simple Gujarati lady, is a faultless hostess. The manner in which U G effortlessly merges into each setting wherever he goes, all over the world continues to amaze me.
I was late. “Take these audio tapes before you go, Mahesh. These are all yours,” said U G as I headed for my film shooting. These tapes contained almost all the conversations he had with various groups of people in America. The shooting was a total fiasco. My ‘hero’ friend, Vinod Khanna, did not report for the shooting as usual. Lately I have been very worried about him. I have a gut level certainty that he is slowly erasing himself.
At high noon as I drove back from the shooting I heard the voice. “Welcome to New Dimensions – since this program is dedicated to seeing the world with different eyes, unaltered by different conditioning, we invited U G to be a guest. I don't know what we will talk about with someone who claims to have no answers or advise to impart – but join me for the next hour and find out as I speak with the provocative and enigmatic U G Krishnamurthy.” This seemed like the beginning of a new era. The programme would be heard by one million people, 300 stations in the United States, and 40 stations on six continents. The very thought of these faceless people listening to U G seems inconceivable. As the tape in my recorder rolled I was reminded of what U G and I had debated about almost 11 months ago.
It is January 1989 in Bangalore and the storm is beginning to brew. “Mahesh, give some ideas how I can free myself of this whole mess. If you are my friend I want your help. Nothing should remain after me – nothing. I don't want any kind individual to sell anything in my name or in the name of any organisation. The free air you see, you can take it! What right do you have to claim the property rights over the river that is flowing there? I have no destination, no arrival point. This has to be different. How it is going to be I really don't know. It will not be the same. I will say what I want to say without fear or favour, whether you like it or not. Mahesh, you and I know that the age of books is finished, audio is finished. This is the era of visuals, audio visuals. This is an incredibly powerful medium. I would rather talk to a faceless man there in the audience than to all these religious people who come to see me. Things cannot go on the same way they have gone on for these 21 years. I am going to use you as a medium. You want to use me and I want to use you. Clear?”
The coming events had cast their shadows. Things around him were changing – changing forever.
“I have no message for mankind. I cannot help you. You are doomed…” said U G when I met him accidentally 12 years ago.
“Go back to whatever you are doing. Your religion, your gurus, your drugs, your comforts. Live in misery and die in misery.” That encounter delinked me with my sordid past. Things were never the same for me after meeting this man.
Why, I wondered was he now agreeing to appear on all these radio and TV programmes? He had also been interviewed by Omni, the reputed American magazine. What had triggered off this new romance with the media? Why was he using the ‘fame machine’? When fame, publicity etc are of no use to him? What was going on?
The day wore on and as scene followed scene these questions continued to torment me. Then just like that out of nowhere the cloud burst…
U G, why are you going public? Why this change?
“I want to communicate to people that what I am saying has no religious content. So far I have failed in doing that. I don't want to be stigmatised as a religious teacher. You first stick that filthy label of enlightenment on me and then judge my actions according to that. I don't want to talk to Krishnamurti's widows, Rajneesh divorcees and religious buffs of all shapes, colours and sizes. How can you call me a god man when I say god is irrelevant? They cannot be interested in what I am saying. Go to the gurus and buy comfort. I don't give a damn for all those teachers who existed before me. I am going to say that until the end of my days. They were con men, they conned themselves into that and conned the whole of mankind and we are going to pay a heavy price for their con game. I am not interested. You can make a living, sell Buddha, sell a prostitute. She is better. She has a very important place in this society. You may condemn it. Whether you sell a hope or a dream or a drug, you are all drug peddlers. I cannot falsify what I have come into, for anything in the world.”
Do you mean to say that all the other leaders of mankind falsified themselves?
“I don't know and I don't care. It has not produced results. The misery is created by the teachers of mankind. If humanity has to be saved from the chaos of its own making, it has to be saved from the saviours of mankind, and I am not one of them. Why should nature or some cosmic power, if there is one in this world, need the help of somebody as an instrument to help others? You are as much an expression of that power. Every dog, every pig, you, me and everybody, even Hitler was an expression of the same thing.
“For centuries you have been made to believe that you are a cripple. When I see someone here who can walk I tell him look here, I was also made to believe that I was a cripple. Somehow through some miracle my crutches dropped off… fell off. I say drop the crutches. You may fall but I know you will rise. I will not give you a helping hand saying, ‘Look here – I'll take you all on a journey.’ All those journeys of J Krishnamurti were bogus chartered flights. Sorry!”
Don't you see that you are destroying the very foundation of human thought? You are taking away from us our sense of purpose.
“Life is fire, it does not tolerate anything dead. Your ideas are dead. They falsify life. Every thought is fascist in its nature. Anything born out of thought is destructive. For some reason we are made to believe and we have accepted that belief which is passed on to us from generation to generation that we are here for a grander purpose, a nobler purpose other than the rest of the species on this planet. I maintain that we are here not for any grander purpose than the garden slug out there or the mosquito that is sucking your blood. Thought has separated us from the singleness of life. It has isolated us from the rest of the species on this planet and it has given us the idea we are something different. We believe that the whole thing has been created for our purpose and we have a right to take advantage of the superiority of this thought and do whatever we want to do on this planet. I am not particularly proud of the human species on this planet.
“We would do anything that the animals would not do. The survival of one form of life on the other form of life is a fact of nature, but we kill for an idea. The whole of our civilisation and culture is built on the foundation of kill or be killed, in the name of God symbolised by the church and all the other religious institutions and in the name of political ideologies symbolised by the state. Man is expendable.”
What about relationships – love?
It is just not possible to establish any relationship with anything around including the near and dear ones, except on the level of what you get out of this relationship. The whole thing springs from isolation. You see we are isolated from the rest of creation, from the rest of life around us. So we use others to fill this void that is created as a result of our isolation. So you have to use an idea, you have to use a person or anything to fill this void. Without relationships we are lost. All relationships are based on mutual gratification. As long as they can be directed to serve my personal happiness, there is no conflict, and we also demand that our happiness be permanent. In the very nature of things this is impossible.
“There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them continuity. Therefore you are always in conflict and yet society demands not just relationships but permanent relationships. For love there must be two. I love somebody and somebody else loves me. Wherever there is a division there can't be any love. We are trying to bridge this gap which we find horrible, with this fancy idea that there must be love between two individuals. I love my wife, I love my country, I love my dog…what is the difference? This may sound very cynical but the fact of the matter is that there is no difference. You love your country, I love my country and there is war. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, and in that name how many millions of people have been killed? When once love fails to establish the perfect ideal relationship between two individuals what we are left with is hate. Love is fascist in its birth, in its content, in its essence, in its expression and in its action. When everything fails, you use love to achieve your goals. Which is pleasure.”
What do you have against pleasure, ecstasy?
“Nothing. Ecstasy is a chemical disturbance in the body. It's a drug. The body is not interested in ecstasy, bliss, beatitude etc. It is trying to get rid of all that, because all these things destroy the sensitivity of the physical organism. If desire is a hormone what happens to your ethical code?”
So where does all this leave me? What am I without purpose, relationships, love?
“Unfortunately humanity has placed before itself the model of a perfect man. The perfect man is born out of the value system we have created, and that value system is born out of the behaviour patterns of our great teachers of mankind. Every human body is unique. Nature is not interested in creating a perfect being but its interest is to create a perfect species.”
If every one of us is unique, that implies that if there is something like enlightenment, that also would be unique.
“Exactly! That is what I am trying to emphasise. It is just not possible for us to produce ‘enlightened’ people on an assembly line. If you look at history, even a country like India which prides itself as a land of spirituality has produced very few enlightened people. But unfortunately in the marketplace we have many claimants who say that they are enlightened and are out to enlighten everybody. There is a market for this kind of thing. But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in enlightening or freeing anybody. He has no way of knowing that he is an enlightened man or a free man. He cannot share whatever he has come into with anyone because it is not in the area of experience at all.”
Where do you think we are going U G?
“We are moving progressively in the direction of total destruction. We somehow have tremendous faith that thought will help us change the course of events. This faith I maintain is misplaced. This human body is not interested in learning anything. All that is necessary for the survival of this organism is already there. There is tremendous intelligence in there and all you have acquired through your intellect is no match to the intelligence of the body. The human brain is not interested in anything that we are interested in. All those ideations which are an imposition of culture is of no importance to it. It is so dull you will be surprised, it is not interested in any experience of any kind. What it is interested in is to help the functioning of this body, intelligently and sanely. The brain is not a creator. It is only a reactor.”
What about ‘creativity’ of the mind U G?
“The creativity that you are talking about is totally unrelated to the creativity of life. Life is creative, it does not use any model. Everything that we call creative is an imitation, copy of something that is already there, it is second-hand.”
In short we are doomed?
(Laughs) “The obvious need not be restated. The constant use of neurons which is memory to maintain the identity is the human problem. If you do not do something, which we don't want to do, nature will take care of the problem by destroying both mind and identity. Which is not euphemistically described as Alzheimer's disease which is going to be deadlier than cancer, AIDS and all the diseases put together (Mahesh laughs). This is not a laughing matter, Mahesh.”
Time to leave. U G will be leaving tomorrow. This appetite for self-destruction floods every pore of my being. This disintegration of me, myself and I will be complete only with my physical death. I am tired of living and scared of dying.
I wander out into the night. The street dogs know that I am one of them. I stand by a fire with strangers. The night is cold. Flames rush up in yellow sheets. Sparks glitter in all our eyes. All the men I stand with are drunk. The fire holds us, comforts us all. “Are you Mahesh Bhatt?” asks someone. “Yes,” I say. They smile. They are happy to have me amidst them. I wonder why. Why? Am I not happy to be with myself? The faces look haggard. The eyes shine – eventually there was sleep which was not welcome.
U G says, “As long as you are there, you are dead… and if by some accident this you, as you know yourself, is absent even for a trillionth of a second, that is when you will touch life. But you will never know what is there. You will never say you are alive, living. It is only a dead man who says he is living.”
A new flame invigorates me – “Life is fire, it burns everything that is dead,” said U G. That quiet afternoon when we were all alone. Free of some dead wood – I feel alive, naked, on my own.
As I dropped him that evening to the airport I was an embodiment of pleasure and pain. Somewhere in the crowd we lost one another. With great effort without saying “Bye” to him I headed back – back to life, taking the road of reality. Something tells me “Buddy you are going fast nowhere”.
