U.G. the Unique Destroyer
Mid Day, Philosophising, December 13, 1990
By Vinod Dhawan
His words are searing, scalding bombs, or as Terry Newland says in his introduction to Mind is a Myth, a book of conversations with U.G. Krishnamurti, “He lobs grenades into the very citadels of our most cherished beliefs and aspirations.”
To the uninitiated it might seem as the ravings of a madman. Take a sampling: “Making love is war; cause and effect is the shibboleth of confused minds; yoga and health foods destroy the body; the body not the soul is immortal; there is no communism in Russia, no freedom in America and no spirituality in India; service to mankind is utter selfishness; Jesus was another misguided Jew and Buddha was a crackpot; mutual terror and not love will save mankind; attending church and going to the bar are identical; there is nothing inside you but fear; communication is impossible between human beings; God, love, happiness, the unconscious, death, reincarnation and the soul are non-existent figments of our rich imagination; Freud is the fraud of the 20th century while J. Krishnamurti is its greatest phoney.”
For a moment it seems that like some others, the aim of U.G. is to shock us into changing ourselves. Perhaps he has a philosophy, a message to give. “I have no message for mankind,” says U.G. “I can never sit on a platform and talk. It is too artificial. It is a waste of time to sit and discuss things in hypothetical or abstract terms.” Then why does he talk? “What am I to do? You come, I talk. Do you want me to criticize you, to throw stones? It is useless, for you are affected by nothing…. My talking is the direct result of your questions. I have nothing here of my own, no obvious or hidden agenda, no product to sell, no axe to grind, nothing to prove.”
Perhaps they all say that. But this man means it. Here is the first instance of a book having no copyright. He declares, “My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.”
U.G. spent most of his formative years around Adyar, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Madras, and inevitably under the shadow of J. Krishnamurti. Steeped in religious lore, some experiences led him into a healthy disdain for religiousness and an acute sense of what he was later to call “the hypocrisy of the holy business.” By the age of 21 he was convinced that all holy men were phonies and were taking people for a ride. He married, but dissatisfied, became a drifter, “with neither past nor future, neither family nor career, nor any sort of spiritual fulfillment.”
Then, at age 49 sitting on a bench alone, looking at the green valley and rugged peaks of the Oberland in Saanen, Switzerland, it occurred to him:
“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 fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.”
At that moment all questions disappeared and U.G. ceased to act any longer via the separative thought structure.
His most acidic remarks are reserved for his ex-mentor and namesake J. Krishnamurti: “There is no transformation, radical or otherwise. That buffoon talking in the circus tent there offers you a journey of discovery. It is a bogus charter flight. There is no such journey. The Vedic stuff is no more helpful. It was invented by some acid heads after drinking some soma juice. J.K. is more neurotic than the people who go to listen to him.
“You may be sure of one thing – he who says he is a free man is a phoney. The thing you have to be free of is the ‘freedom’ discussed by that man and other teachers. You must be free from ‘the first and last freedom’, and all the freedoms that come in between.”
In a recent book, Thought is Your Enemy, edited by Frank Noronha of Delhi, U.G. says: “I maintain that thought, in its birth, in its content, in its expression and in its action is fascist. It is very aggressive. The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purposes of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.”
What if we did not have this kind of thought?
“Probably we would have become extinct and nature would have created a better form of human species on this planet.
“The whole of our culture and civilisation is built on the foundation of kill or be killed, first in the name of God, symbolised by the Church and all other religious institutions, and then in the name of political ideologies, symbolised by the State.”
On desires, he says it is the desire to reach a particular goal, an all important goal, that must go, not the countless petty little desires. The only reason you try to manipulate or control the petty desires is as part of your strategy to attain the highest goal, the desire of all desires. “Eliminate that main goal and the others fall into a natural pattern and pose no problem for you or the world.”
“There is no such thing as an absolute. It is thought, and thought alone, that has created the absolute. Absolute zero, absolute power, absolute perfection, these have been invented by the holy men and ‘experts’.
“Down the centuries the saints, saviours and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everybody else. Perfection and absolutes are false.
“There is no such thing as God. It is the mind that has created God out of fear. There is no ultimate reality, no God-nothing. Fear itself is the problem, not ‘God’. Wanting to be free from fear itself is fear.
“The man who practices virtue is a man of vice. There is not a virtuous man in the world. All men will be virtuous tomorrow, until then they remain men of vice. Your virtue only exists in the fictitious future.”
And finally, he says, “There is already peace in man. You need not search. The living organism is functioning in an extraordinarily peaceful way. Man's search for truth only ends up disturbing and violating the peace that is already there in the body.”
