The Other Krishnamurthy
Patriot, Ideas, September 14, 1986
By Frank Noronha
J Krishnamurthy is no more now. He has not left behind any successor either; for he never believed in one. But if identical names and surnames have any significance, can U G Krishnamurthy take his place?
‘UG’, that is how he is affectionately called by people who visit him. Most people who know UG would somehow will have known JK. They often draw a comparison between the two and say that their teachings are more or less similar. In fact, it used to be said that those who seek enlightenment or self-realisation must first go to JK and then come to UG.
But the fact is that both do not believe in any tradition or authority. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, there is no war of succession. Nobody succeeds nobody between them. In fact UG vehemently denies that there is any similarity between him and JK, except for the name.
When I used to visit UG sometimes I wondered whether there was any conspiracy between the two seers. For the structures of thoughts built by JK were mercilessly pulled down by UG. In the process the listener was the victim who was left high and dry.
According to JK “choiceless awareness” is all. He says most of the time we are not aware. That is why man is full of anger, envy, hatred and surrounded by such negative feelings. Awareness is the light that drives off darkness.
But what is this omnipotent state of ‘awareness’? It is no thinking, through the process of verbalisation, there is justification and condemnation of matters. JK says this kind of thinking will not solve any ‘basic’ human problems, though it has its own place in human affairs like that of science and technology. This is so because thought is the product of the past memory which tries to respond to the present challenges. To approach the present with the past – well, this is what is creating the problems. Awareness is what that should be put in operation all the time as it will bring out pure, unsoiled response to fresh challenges that arise in the present.
It used to be a slanging match on this topic with UG. He tells you “all this is undiluted phoney baloney.” According to him pure awareness without thought is an impossibility. The moment one knows one is aware, it becomes a thought. But before thought crops up in the mind, the quality of awareness is neither identifiable nor distinguishable. Thought cannot make awareness a part of it. Not only that, thought cannot even know whether awareness exists or not.
UG goes on to say that there is a constant process of thinking operating in us, one without a second. Everything we see or feel is immediately translated into thought. When you look at a chair or anything that passes your senses or whatever sensation that is felt inside of you (anger, jealousy, pleasure etc), it is at once named and churned out into thought. It is a very automatic process. If you are not doing this naming and thinking it is because you are preoccupied with the past or the future – it may be the office, home or betting on a football match. But one thing which we cannot help is this continuous process of thinking. This is what gives the feeling of ‘I-ness’, according to UG. Very near to Rene Descartes, indeed. He says “Cogito ergo Sum” meaning, “I think therefore I am.”
UG claims this process has somehow snapped in him, that is, the continuity of thought has broken. There is no process of thinking in him unless there is a demand for experience. This demand for experience can come in any form – hunger, trying to locate a place, answering a question etc.
This phenomenon which happened to him in Switzerland on his 49th birthday, he calls it a ‘calamity’. Calamity from our point of view, he says, “because coming into this state will blast every cell, every gland, every nerve. It is a chemical change coupled with unimaginable pain. An alchemy of some sort takes place.”
For UG, it is an indescribable state, but for the sake of communication, he calls it a ‘natural state’. “Stripped of all the machinations of thought, this is how you or anyone will function. When you are in this natural state, there is no more ‘self’ or ‘you’ or ‘I’ as it knows itself or experiences itself.”
How did this whole thing happen? He says, “I don't know. What makes one person come into this state and not another, I don't know. Perhaps it is written in the cells.” According to UG the whole phenomenon is acausal. It is not an act of volition on one's part. “There is absolutely nothing one can do. You can distrust any man who tells you how he got into this thing,” he says.
To the question whether there is anything called ‘enlightenment’ he says, since we are not interested in everyday things and the happenings around us, we have invented a thing called ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’, ‘Beyond’, and such things and we search for that. “There may not be any such thing at all. Whatever you know is what you've been told about. The knowledge you have about that. So you project that knowledge and whatever knowledge you have about the beyond, is exactly what you will experience,” he says. The knowledge creates the experience and the experience then strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle, according to UG.
UG, when asked about his antecedents says, “My background is worthless, it cannot be a model for anybody, because your background is unique.”
UG is no relation of JK. During his search for enlightenment, which existed because of his own illusions, he says he admired JK's teachings but now he calls it ‘archaic nonsense’.
UG was born in July 1918 in south India into an upper middle class Brahmin family. The family name being Uppaluri, he was given the name Uppaluri Gopalakrishnamurthy. His mother died soon after his birth and he was brought up by his maternal grandparents in the small town of Gudiwada near Masulipatnam.
UG was told that his mother had said just before she died that he was born to a destiny ‘immeasurably’ high. His grandfather took this very seriously and gave up his law practice to devote himself to UG's upbringing and education. His grandparents and their friends were convinced that he was a Yogabrashta, one who has come within inches of his enlightenment in a past life.
There was nothing very remarkable about his education, he says. When his grandfather died, UG left the University of Madras without completing his degree. In 1943, he was married.
Because of his background, he inherited the Theosophical Society and got involved in it. He was eventually elected joint general secretary of the Society of India.
UG was travelling all over the world lecturing. In 1955, he and his wife moved to the United States in search of treatment for his son's polio. By 1961, his money was finished and he felt beginning within him the tremendous upheaval which he could and did not wish to control and which was to last six years and end with the calamity (as he calls his entry into the natural state).
His marriage broke up, he put his family on a plane to India and he went to London. He arrived penniless and began roaming the city. For three years, he lived idly on the streets. His friends saw him as heading on a headlong course downhill, but he says that at that time his life seemed perfectly natural to him. Later religious minded people were to use the mystic phrase “the dark night of the soul” to describe those years. But in his view, “there was no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul wrestling with urges, no poetic climaxes but just a simple withering away of the will.”
Great people are always ahead of their times. Their contemporaries treat them like criminals. Perhaps because they disturb the status quo of the society. History is replete with examples; Socrates was poisoned and Jesus was crucified. JK of course is rightly referred to as the ‘seer who walked alone’. He did not create any serious problems for the society. Those who felt that they understood him simply marvelled at his dialogues and pretended almost near-self-realisation. While those who did not understand him brushed him off by dubbing his discourses as some sort of complex, abstract abracadabra.
Where can we place UG in this scheme of things? Well, he himself has a ready answer, “I'm no messiah or liberator of mankind. I have not set myself up in the holy business of liberating people. You have to liberate yourself and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I have no particular message for mankind. Whatever happened to me is such that you cannot share it with the world. That's the reason why I do not get up on a platform or give any lectures.
“I am only interested in describing ‘the state’ in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in holy business have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of energy looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination. It is an act of futility to relate my description of my state to the way you are functioning. When you stop all these comparisons what is there is your natural state. Then you will not listen to anybody.
“What is necessary for man is to free himself from the entire past of mankind, not only his individual past, that is to say you have to free yourself from what every man before has thought, felt and experienced – then only is it possible to be yourself.
“The whole purpose of my talking to you is to point out the uniqueness of every individual. Culture or civilisation or whatever you might call it, has always tried to fit us into a framework. Man is not man at all.”
If this is all that he has to say, why do people still flock to him? Some come to satisfy their curiosity while others to receive his ‘grace’. Maybe some others to ‘kill time’. But the fact that cannot be gainsaid is that there is something inexplicably ‘elusive’ which acts through people like UG. Call it ‘compassion’ ‘love’ or whatever. UG does not prefer these words. He says that they smack of “overuse and loaded meanings”. Perhaps it behoves of that ‘state’ not to flaunt help ostentatiously. Yet it flows – it flows without any distinction whatsoever. UG helps without helping and teaches without claiming to teach anything.
The ease one feels in the company of UG is incomparable. In his presence you can be absolutely naked without any defenses. This sense of feeling is not a self-projected one but an objective energy-experience. One can ride on it, swim in it, play in it or waddle in it without any purpose. Yes, it just ‘happens’.
