The Reluctant Messiah
The Times of Deccan, Sunday Magazine, April 18, 1982
By N.V. Mukunda Rao
For U. G. Krishnamurthy what most gurus call “enlightened” is only the “natural state.” He says that the so-called “enlightenment” is a purely biological phenomenon, that only when we are completely free of culture, conditioning, religious thinking and intellect, can the body, with its own “extraordinary intelligence,” allow us to be in the natural state.
U.G. claims he has been living in this state since the experience which he calls the “calamity” occurred 25 years ago. Since then, he has never looked back. Spiritual “gurus” of all denominations are dismissed as either charlatans, frauds or enemies worse. He talks to whoever comes to him but doesn't care to teach.
U.G. is probably the most controversial of all the present-day teachers, a true “non-guru.” He is flanked by attributes such as “outrageous,” “infuriating,” and “a prophet of anti-wisdom.” Perhaps he is a teacher par excellence who is out to teach the world un-learning, which may be the dawn of pure wisdom.
In this report Mukunda speaks about this extraordinary man with the authority of one who knows the essence of U.G.'s “philosophy” or rather, “anti-all philosophies,” including his own if he has one.
“I am not a saviour of mankind. I am not in the holy business. I am only interested in describing this state (the natural state), in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the holy business have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.” –U. G. Krishnamurthy
How the Body Changed – and a Man Found Himself
In April of 1967 in his 49th year in Paris, persuaded by his friends, U.G. Krishnamurthy one day went to a “girlie show” at the Casino de Paris and there all of a sudden he felt something strange happening to him. He felt a peculiar movement inside of him and couldn't make out who was dancing on the floor – he or the dancer. That marked the beginning of the most astounding and almost incomprehensible mystical experiences (for lack of a better term) you could ever read in the history of mysticism.
They were not the blissful experiences most people speak of, but almost a “physical torture” triggered oft by an explosion of energy in his body which eventually put him in what he calls “the natural state.”
U.G.'s body began to undergo a tremendous change. In three years it fell into a new rhythm of its own. The Who chemistry of the body including the five senses was transformed. The eyes stopped blinking, the skin turned soft, when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm it produced a sort of ash. He developed a breast on the left-hand side. The most phenomenal change of all is that the senses started functioning at their peak sensitivity and the thymus gland, which doctors say is active from childhood through puberty and then becomes dormant, was reactivated.
This was not all. He had visions of Buddha, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed, Socrates, of women saints with flowing hair and naked, of the half-lion, half-man god of Hindus, the Greek god with a human head and the body of a seal. And then they were all flushed out of his consciousness, for even these sacred images, not to speak of the weird ones of Jungian “collective consciousness,” were all impure in the “natural state” and so they had to go. It was a terrible journey and a great sudden leap into the primordial state of consciousness untouched by thought.
In him the past of man, millions of years old, was liquidated and like the phoenix burning itself out and emerging new, the new man, the natural human being, neither a man nor a woman (Ardhanarishwara?) emerged from the ashes of consciousness burning itself out. To give an analogy from modern physics it's like two atomic particles colliding with each other out to form a new particle.
U.G. insists that this is not the state of self-realised or god-realised man or any sort of religious experience in the accepted form of mysticism. No. It is not Satori of Zen Buddhism or Brahmanubhava of the Upanishads; it is not “emptiness” or “void” either. It is a state of non-experience but the inevitable sensations are there, the reactivation of the thymus gland seems to enable him to feel those sensations there; you don't translate them as good or bad.
If there is a movement outside of you – a clock pendulum swinging or a bird flying across your field of vision – that movement is also felt in the thymus. There is no separation; if he closes his eyes, he says, some light seems to penetrate through the eyelids and also through an unseen, undetectable hole in the forehead. The light in India is golden, in Europe it is blue. And during the period of new moon the nerves around the base of his neck swell and take the shape of a cobra. There is nothing spiritual or mystical about these things, he maintains they are merely the attributes of “the natural state.” And this he believes happens to him in spite of all his search for truth and not because of it.
This strange man, now 63 years old, with flowing hair and deepest eyes and an extremely fair complexion, always in loose white jubba and pyjama, perfectly calm and at ease, speaking a thoroughly non-technical language in a simple conversational style, informal and intimate, his hands rising and moving in a peculiar rhythm, gives you an impression of belonging to another world.
Born in 1918, into a upper-middle class family Telugu-speaking family, he was brought up in a religious atmosphere by his grandfather. He learnt to repeat passages from the sacred scriptures, met several holy men who visited his place and found most of them to be hypocrites. He practised meditation and yoga, studied the scriptures and at quite an early age (all this happened between 14 and 21) went through several religious experiences. Yet he was unhappy.
He wanted moksha, freedom, yet he found himself still in conflict; sex remained a ghastly problem. “I think of God and Goddess and I have wet dreams.” This problem seemed to him more realistic and more important than moksha. However at the age of 21, he went to Tiruvannamalai and met the great Ramana Maharshi. “Can you give me what you have?” he asked him. “Yes,” replied the sage, “but can you take it?” What was it that he had, the young seeker wondered as he came out. He had to find it. He stopped shopping around for gurus and began to explore.
He joined the University of Madras and studied psychology and philosophy, but it gave no answers to his deep questions. One day he asked his professor: “We are talking about the mind all the time, we are studying so many books, Freud, Jung, Adler and the whole gang. But do you yourself know anything about the mind?” It proved to be not only an embarrassing question but a dangerous one. The practical-minded professor advised him to stop asking such questions and if he wanted to get a degree to merely take down notes, memorise and repeat them in the exams. The student was not interested and dropped out.
Marriage came later. His wife had degrees in English and Sanskrit. Like most men he was a “dominating husband.” They had four children. By now he had joined the Theosophical Society led by Annie Besant and close companion C. W. Leadbeater and came in close contact with Jiddu Krishnamurti who had been proclaimed by Annie Besant the “messiah” of the 20th Century. U.G. toured around the world giving lectures in theosophy though his heart was not in it.
The inevitable happened. The marriage broke up in 1961, he fell out of the Theosophical Society, left JK and for three years wandered about London “like a man with no head, blown about like a dry leaf.” This long “dark night of the soul” ended not in the dawn of the Upanishadic Bliss or the discovery of “the space within the heart” but in a “calamity,” an utterly non-religious biological mutation.
A Swiss lady, Valentine, gave him shelter. He is now settled in Switzerland and friends look after his needs. Otherwise, he says, he should be working to earn a living. Every winter he is in Bangalore taking a temporary residence at Basavangudi. Wherever he goes in the world, all kinds of people meet him from students to scientists.
U.G.'s experiences and his teachings pose a great challenge to the religious traditions all over the world. They cannot be dismissed as merely a semantic problem as some apologists of mysticism might argue. In the light of this, much of what goes in the name of mysticism is mythology. It seems the greatest harm done to mysticism by the religious leaders has been their attempt to connect mystical experience with moralistic ideologies and equating it with truth. As shown by U.G. and as rightly pointed out by that honest mystic, Agehananda Bharati, mystical experience is not any more important or sacred than say several, scientific, poetic and other experiences which combine the cognitive, the orectic and the affective.”
But the popular belief that all mystical experiences are noble, elevating and sacred has invested the mystics with a dubious aura. In the eyes of people a mystic becomes a perfect man with supernatural power to change the world. In fact mysticism is amoral and apolitical, value-free; mystical experience of any sort carries no ontogical implication. In other words, the value of mysticism is intrinsic and not teleological.
U.G. cannot be easily grouped with the mystics. He belongs to a whole different order of mystics. He has refused to play the role of a “messiah” and discouraged all attempts to build an organization around him. Unlike JK he doesn't believe in transforming the world through his teachings. He is not like the leaders of popular religious cults such as Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, Rajneesh, and Chinmayananda. He has no system of thought or philosophy to offer people to achieve peace, intelligence, love, realisation or bliss. In fact he believes that the world could never be transformed for good through these systems. Human consciousness has millions of years of momentum and cannot be changed through any system. The attempt to find the seat of human consciousness or the origin of thought is an exercise in futility for it can never be known.
There are thoughts, or a “thought sphere” in which we all function; we don't create thoughts but each one of us pick our particular thoughts and create a thinker, the “I.” This “I,” the center of consciousness is “bourgeois,” always perpetuating itself in one form or the other and it destroys the possibility of a human being evolving into a “complete man” if there is such a thing in human nature.
In this context, the concept of an Avatar or a Saviour descending on earth in human form to change the world and of various political ideologies having the capacity to transform the world into a paradise become a piece of romanticism. According to U.G., an Avatar strictly speaking ought to be our enemy for, if the world has to be saved from the present crisis, he should aim at destroying our culture which is nothing but controlled though posing the greatest hindrance to our evolution. But we need not fear, says U.G. Mankind will survive the present danger as it has survived for millions of years and this not because of brotherhood or love but because of fear, of the terror of liquidating ourselves.
But surely this is a neurotic condition. Arthur Koestler in Janus: A Summing Up writes, “At some point during the last explosive stages of the biological evolution of homo sapiens something went wrong, that there is a flaw, some potentially fatal engineering error built into our native equipment – more specifically, into the circuits of our nervous system – which would account to for the streak of paranoia running through our history.” He believes that the only way out of this could be through the combination of “benevolent hormones or enzymes” or by inducing chemical changes in the human body.
U.G. gives expression to the same idea when he says, “Somewhere along the line probably thought was necessary but now it has become the enemy of man.” In a discussion with staff members at Bangalore's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in 1976, U.G. admitted that there could be an evolutionary force built in to human nature, pushing him onwards into becoming a “complete man.” But culture and to a greater degree religions, he said, have made it impossible for him. And man is doomed to remain incomplete and schizophrenic unless there is a biological mutation. And this could perhaps be possible if the ductless glands – which Hindus speculated to be in the psychic body and called them chakras – are actuated.
If U.G. has to be taken seriously – there is no reason why he shouldn't – then we find ourselves in a cul-de-sac. And our race is an “aberrant biological species” afflicted by a neurological disorder. What we call human progress seems a peripheral phenomenon and behind the veneer of our civilisation lie intact our barbaric qualities. The human cortex with billions of neurons that has made possible this apparent progress of man from the Stone Age to the present one, from primitive mythology to the Theory of Relativity has also been responsible for putting man against man.
Almost everything man has done has resulted in deepening his alienation and insecurity. He hasn't been able to transform himself completely though, from the dawn of civilisation the world has never lacked inspired reformers. Most disturbing of all, the greatest crimes against humanity have been committed not out of man's selfishness greed or hatred but in the name of loyalty, patriotism and devotion to “transpersonal ideas” as Koestler puts it. These facts make us believe again and again that the fatal error must lie in the structure of the mind itself. The only way out of this “neurotic hiatus” could be, as U.G. says, through a biological revolution. But the how of it has remained a big question. It appears to be far beyond the scope of contemporary biology. Yet our hope seems to lie in it rather than in spirituality.
