The Enigma of the Natural State


By Mukunda Rao


Enlightenment Demystified

Salvation Is Physical

The Body Is Immortal

The ‘Calamity’


India boasts of a strong, 3,000-year-old enlightenment tradition. The Yogavashista speaks of seven steps to enlightenment, the seventh and final stage being moksha – the extinction of the individual, which sounds similar to the concept of nirvana, the final ‘extinction of the self’. Moksha also means release from the cycles of births and deaths, or complete and ultimate liberation from all ignorance and duality through realization of the Supreme or Universal Self and its identity with Brahman. There are, of course, various other descriptions of what constitutes moksha, depending upon the spiritual tradition one belongs to. Are they all speaking of the same state of being, in different words? Is there an ‘essence’ to moksha or liberation? How can realization of the Supreme Self be the same as ‘the extinction of self’ or nirvana?


Are there different kinds of enlightenment? Are there levels to it? Does such a thing exist at all? In 1939, when UG asked more or less the same question of Sri Ramana, the sage of Arunachalam is believed to have answered in the affirmative.


UG: Can one be free sometimes and not free sometimes?


Ramana: Either you are free, or you are not free at all.


UG: Are there any levels to it?


Ramana: No, no levels are possible, it is all one thing. Either you are there or not there at all.


After his ‘calamity’ in 1967, in the 1970s and the 1980s to be specific, UG used to offer ‘soft’ and not entirely negative answers to questions on enlightenment and questions concerning ‘spiritual’ matters. Today he straightaway rejects the idea of enlightenment. He says: ‘There is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the saints and saviours of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river!’


Yet, paradoxically, he also states: ‘But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in freeing or enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of knowing that he is a free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not something that can be shared with somebody, because it is not in the area of experience at all.’


Enlightenment Demystified


I believe there is such a thing as enlightenment but not in the sense in which it is talked about by most gurus and spiritual teachers in the world. It is, of course, as UG says, a state of being that cannot be shared with or communicated to others, as it is not in the realm of experience as we understand it. Still, if we have to approach the subject intellectually and suggest a functional definition of it in plain, non-religious terms, we could perhaps say that it is the cessation of all psychological conflicts, the dissolution of the self, and the birth of the individual into the natural state.


One prefers the term ‘natural state’ to ‘enlightenment’ for two reasons. One, it is a more creative term than the much-abused word ‘enlightenment’, which should help us understand at least intellectually this state of being, cleansed of the anti-intellectual, sanctimonious dross indulged in by religious gurus and apologists of religion. Two, the word ‘enlightenment’ is being used widely in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of enlightenment. This is not to say that one knows what enlightenment is all about or that there can only be one fixed meaning to it. Far from it. It is only to point out what enlightenment is not, just as, in the context of our current knowledge of life, we realize that it is a gross error to think that God created the earth and man in seven days (although there is no consensus even among experts as to how many billion years it took and how exactly life forms and Homo sapiens emerged on earth).


Enlightenment has nothing to do with world peace or with the kind of political and social changes we want to bring about to prevent our mutual destruction. It has nothing to do with our values of justice, equality, love, and even compassion. Gurus who claim to be enlightened not only deceive themselves but also mislead people by attributing non-existent ontological status and spiritual values to enlightenment.


In other words, enlightenment has nothing to do with being good or pious. The enlightened state is not a blueprint for a world order, much less for world peace. There is no religious or social content there, yet in its own way it could make a great social and cultural impact by quickening our insights into ourselves and the world. Genuinely enlightened persons, sages (not saints, gurus or even mystics), do not directly recommend any change in the world, or teach a better way of living. They only point out the errors in our perception of things, question our self-righteous ways of being and doing things, our precious ideas and ideologies, in short, our fragmented existence. They simply go on living as if nothing has happened, as if they are not concerned which the way the world goes, for deep in the marrow of their bones, as it were, they know that life goes on and it has its own ways.


An enlightened person is not an avatar or saviour come down on earth to save humanity, or lead humanity to some promised land, or create the kingdom of God on earth. His or her utterances cannot be converted into a body of teaching and institutionalized. His social or political comments (which are made in response to people's queries and demands) do not carry timeless meaning or values. He lives and moves in a state that is outside the framework of our traditional modes of understanding. Enlightenment is what it is. It cannot be willed, or brought about by an act of volition. Perhaps it comes with the cessation of ‘will’, the stuff the self is made of. It is the natural state nature throws up now and then for reasons not accessible to our reason. Perhaps it is the last stage of evolution and yet, an utterly new expression of life.


Salvation Is Physical


The Mind of the Cells – or Willed Mutation of our Species, is a record of reports of the physical changes and experiences of the Mother of Pondicherry, which occurred over eleven years between 1962 and 1973.


It is a remarkable book that makes other books on mysticism sound like the mere prattling of a child. It is unique not because it is far superior to other texts on mysticism, but because it marks the end of mystical experience. It is an incredible journey on an uncharted sea. One could well call it a cellular journey into utterly new waters of life and intelligence, something the molecular biologists should want to discover and understand. But it is not something that can be seen or studied under a microscope in a laboratory, inside the fish bowl of one's mind.


But strangely, it is an incomplete journey, perhaps only to be carried forward by UG, to reach its final and full fruition and expression in his life.


Aurobindo said, ‘Man is a transitional being’, and that he has to be surpassed. We do not know if Aurobindo experienced this ‘transition’. We know his ideas of ‘overmind’, ‘supermind’, ‘superman’, and ‘supramental manifestation’. But did it happen to him? Or, was it only his prediction or, merely philosophical speculation?


Going by the Mother's reports, it seems it happened to her. She presided over this transition, this strange transmutation of the body, this bewildering mutation of the cells. It was something that was certainly not entirely in line with Aurobindo's ideas or predictions.


In 1953, the Mother made a statement to the effect that something new was beginning to take shape in her life. She said: ‘. . . a new world is born. It is not the old world changing, it is a new world which is born . . .’ although, ‘the old is still all-powerful and entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness’.


But it seems that only in 1962, when she fell ‘ill’, did she begin to notice strange changes taking place in her body. It actually was not an illness nor symptoms of illness. Something strange was going on within the cells of her body, ‘. . . a sort of decentralization . . . as if the cells were being scattered by centrifugal force . . .’. She would feel terribly weak at times, faint now and then, yet something untouched was fully conscious of what was happening. ‘. . .Witnessing everything . . .’, something like ‘matter looking at itself in a whole new way.’ This process went on for almost eleven years, until the day she passed away in 1973, at the age of ninety-five.


At first it seemed her consciousness was breaking out of its limits; it felt like waves, ‘not individual waves, rather a movement of waves’. It was almost infinite and strangely ‘undulatory’: vast, at times, very quiet, and there was a harmonious rhythm to it. ‘And this movement,’ she felt, ‘is life itself . . .’ and it moves by expansion: ‘it contracts and concentrates, then expands and spreads out’.


Something was trying to get established, an utterly new way or movement of life! It was the preparation of the body, of the cells, to mutate. It was not an act of volition. ‘You can't try to make it happen,’ said the Mother. ‘One can't make an effort, one can't try to know, because that immediately triggers an intellectual activity (habit) which has nothing to do with “that”.’


Then there came a sort of memory block. She did not know how to climb stairs, how to read and things of that sort. It seemed necessary to let go everything, all knowledge, all intelligence, all capacity – everything. The sense of separation was dissolving. Old habits were dying.


Taste, smell, vision, touch, sound – the sensory perceptions began to undergo a complete change. Perhaps ‘they belong to another rhythm,’ she suggested. It seemed curious and funny. ‘There is no longer “something seeing” but I am numerous things. I Live numerous things . . . I See clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open, and yet it is the same vision. It's physical vision, purely physical . . .fuller.’


Now and then she experienced a tremendous burst of energy that caused pain. At times she would feel that she was dying, that she was going to explode. It was not what religious people assume to be joy or bliss, but a sense of alarm, fear, anxiety, pain. ‘. . . It's really and truly terrifying . . . it's a hideous labour . . . it's truly a journey into nothing, with nothing, in a desert strewn with every conceivable trap and obstacle. You are blindfolded, you know nothing.’


The body had become a battleground. A battle within the cells between the old habit and something new that was trying to emerge. In the Mother's words: ‘The battle begins to be fought deep down in the cells, in the material consciousness, between what we call “the will to haemorrhage” and the reaction of the cells of the body. And it is absolutely like a regular battle, a real fight. But suddenly, the body is seized with a very strong determination and proclaims an order, and immediately the effect begins to be felt and everything returns gradually to normal.’


It is the struggle of the body to cleanse itself of the habit developed over thousands of years of ‘separate existence on account of ego’. Now it has to learn to continue, without the ego, ‘according to another, unknown law, a law still incomprehensible for the body. It is not a will, it's . . . I don't know . . . something; a way of being.’


The way human beings have lived with a separative consciousness has been nothing but a habit. A bad habit! All that must be undone, the so-called laws of nature, all the collective suggestions, all the earthly habits. ‘It is nothing but mechanical habits. But it clings, it's really sticky, oh! . . . what appear to us as “the laws of nature” or “inescapable principles”, are so absurd, so ridiculous!’


And then the body falls into a rhythm all its own. It becomes transparent. ‘All vibrations pass through it freely. It no longer feels limited: it feels spread out in everything it does, in everything around, in all circumstances, in people, movements, feelings . . . just spread out.’ The Mother felt that the body was everywhere. ‘I am talking here about the cells of the body, but the same applies to external events, even world events. It's even remarkable in the case of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. It would seem that the entire earth is like the body.’


Everything is interconnected. Everything is one. The sense of separation is a complete falsehood, cause and effect only a figment of human imagination. ‘It isn't something you see or understand or know, it's . . . something you are.’ Consciousness or mind, divides everything up, but here, in the body, everything is one. Literally everything: ‘The speck of dust you wipe off the table, or ecstatic contemplation, it's all the same.’


The Mother felt it was something beyond what all earlier spiritual leaders had said till then, which is what UG reiterates today with absolute conviction and clarity. It was beyond moksha, beyond nirvana; it was something very physical. ‘Salvation is physical,’ declared the Mother. And she demanded to know: Why did the spiritual teachers of the past all seek liberation by abandoning their body? Why did they talk of nirvana as something outside the body? ‘The body is a very, very simple thing, very childlike,’ said the Mother. ‘It does not need to “seek” anything: it's there. And it wonders why men never knew of this from the start: why, but why did they go after all sorts of things – religions, gods, and all those . . . sorts of things? While it is so simple! So simple! It's so obvious for the body!’


When the Mother says ‘the body is very simple’ and that it does not need to ‘seek’ anything at all, she sounds very like UG. She confirms what UG has been saying for the last thirty years, when she asserts: ‘All the mental constructions that men have tried to live by and realize on earth come to me from all sides: all the great schools of thought, the great ideas, the great realizations . . . and then, lower on the scale, the religions; oh, how infantile all that seems! . . . Oh, what noise, how vainly you have tried!’


It is fairly clear that the ‘process’ took the Mother beyond even Aurobindo's philosophy of the supramental manifestation, as well as her own previous ideas about spiritual evolution before the actual physical changes began to take place. Still, her past kept popping up now and then, and she did refer, though reluctantly and hesitantly, to the idea of ‘supermind’ and ‘supramental’. It is surprising to note that even serious followers of Aurobindo have either completely ignored the Mother's report of these great physical and physiological changes, or interpreted them purely in terms of Aurobindo's philosophy.


One might quote from Aurobindo's writings and argue that he was the first to speak about the need, or rather the inevitability, of a physical transformation. Indeed, he was the first to say that if any radical change has to take place, it has to take place in the body, and he did prepare the ground for the Mother's transformation. Even otherwise, his interpretation of the Upanishads and his criticism of Sankara's Vedanta makes him one of our most radical mystic-philosophers. But all this should in no way distract us from the cleansing fact that the Mother, quite unwittingly as it were, went beyond Aurobindo's philosophy and beyond all known frames of spiritual reference. This would have certainly brought a smile to Aurobindo's face, for he would have intuitively known that something like this would happen; after all, didn't he repeatedly warn that what is to come in future will be something hitherto unknown and unexplored!


What happened to the Mother was something she had least expected, just as UG had not expected his ‘calamity’ even in his wildest dreams! A careful consideration of the Mother's report reveals that all through these changes, she felt a sort of total helplessness, ‘choicelessness’, and had absolutely no precedence or frame of reference to which she could relate. ‘I don't know . . . can't say . . . have no idea . . . no words to express . . . blindfolded . . . you see, I feel I am right in the middle of a world I know nothing about, struggling with laws I know nothing about . . . it is something like a condition: the unreality of the goal – not its unreality, its uselessness. Not even uselessness: the non-existence of the goal . . . it happened in my bathroom upstairs, surely to show that it is in the most trivial things, in everything, continuously . . . You see, it's even fairly easy to pose as a superman! But it remains ethereal, it isn't the real thing, not the next stage of terrestrial evolution . . . So simple! It's so obvious for the body!’ Her admissions more than reveal her incredible journey into unknown waters of life and intelligence, and she did go beyond Aurobindo and her own ideas and beliefs before the process began.


We do not know. Perhaps the Mother did not live long enough for everything to change, for the process, the mutation, to complete itself. However, to use her own words: ‘. . . but some things changed and have never reverted.’


The Mother died in 1973. For UG the ‘calamity’ occurred in 1967. It was a full-blown mutation of the body, enabling the human being to become fully human. It was not a mystical experience, nor a Kundalini experience (though the Kundalini experience could just be the beginning, almost elementary). And it has nothing to do with the spiritual goal (as opposed to the material, the body) that the spiritual traditions of the world with their band of teachers have been proclaiming for centuries.


Evidently, this biological mutation, or ‘natural state’ as UG would call it, or ‘cellular revolution’ as the Mother would put it, is not entirely unprecedented. But now we have someone, in the shape of UG, to tell us, in clear physical, physiological and material terms, what it is all about.


The Body Is Immortal


The Bhagavad Gita, the approximately 2,000-year-old religious text of the Hindus, is certainly not considered to be a text on the subject of the immortality of the body. Rather, it is celebrated as a quintessential discourse on the immortality of the Universal or Supreme Self. Nevertheless, Chapter XI, on what is called the Universal Form or Self tells a different story. That is the paradox, the irony of ironies that the text conceals. After a longish discourse on the different forms of Yoga, and the Nature of Brahman and atman, Lord Krishna bestows on Arjuna a vision of his Universal Form. Arjuna beholds this terrific kaleidoscope of life with a borrowed ‘divine eye’. And what does he see?


He beholds the whole cosmos reflected in the body of Krishna with multitudinous arms, stomachs, mouths and eyes. It is boundless, with neither end nor middle nor beginning. Everything, all the innumerable forms of life are there, and in the centre is Lord Brahma resting on a lotus, surrounded by all the sages and the heavenly serpents.


The Sun, the Moon, and the heavenly planets blaze along, worlds radiate within worlds in a never-ending kaleidoscope, torrents of rivers flow relentlessly into thunderous seas, and behold, the flaming mouth licking up, devouring all worlds, all creatures; it is the body, with no beginning, middle or end, swallowing, burning itself up in an endless maya of creation and destruction.


There couldn't have been a better metaphor for the body. Many scholars and commentators on the Bhagavad Gita might find it difficult to accept this interpretation. However, the text reveals that truly, within the body is the cosmic dance of life. Rather, the cosmos itself is the body, and the different, immeasurable life forms, like bacteria in the bloodstream, like fish in the ocean, are rising and dissolving continually, floating, moving back and forth, up and down, with no beginning and no end.


Scientists, however, posit a point of time for the beginning of the universe and the evolution of the human body. We do not know. It is a matter of perspective. We always think in frames, in terms of time and space, cause and effect. It is an incorrigible human habit. But in actuality, says UG, what is there is a space-time-energy continuum, which has no end.


There are, of course, scientists today who have come round, however reluctantly, to more or less or ‘accepting’ this hard reality, yet, if only to keep their profession alive, they like to imagine that the universe has had a beginning and consequently should have an end, too. They say that the universe could be about thirteen billion years old, the Sun and the planets about four-and-a-half billion years old. And they like to suggest that it probably took hundreds of millions of years for the first life forms to emerge on earth, and billions of years more for Homo sapiens to arrive on this planet. We cannot be sure, of course. Still, if we were to believe, however arbitrarily, in this theory, then it logically follows that Homo sapiens, the human body, which has evolved over aeons from the ‘primordial soup’, must have everything of the world and the cosmos in it.


According to Paul McLean's work at the National Institute of Mental Health's Brain Research Centre, we have three brains in our skulls. All three separate structures are supposed to have developed over millions of years of evolutionary history on earth. First, there is the reptilian brain (identical to the brain found in all reptiles), which includes our spinal cord and the brain stem. Superimposed on this is the great limbic structure, inherited from the mammals; it is believed that this is our emotional-cognitive brain which handles emotional energies. Superimposed on this structure is the neocortex, which is five times bigger than the two animal brain structures and occupies almost eighty per cent of our skull. It is this neocortex, containing some ten billion neurons, which is supposed to be our thinking brain and which has made possible the so-called human progress from the stone axe to the aeroplanes to the atom bomb to quantum physics.


‘Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain,’ says McLean, with impish humour, yet with great philosophical implications, ‘we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile.’ Further: ‘In the popular language today, these three brains might be thought of as biological computers, each with its own peculiar form of subjectivity and its own intelligence, its own sense of time and space and its own memory, motor and other functions.’


When J. Krishnamurti talked of the necessity of mutation in the brain to bring about a radical change in human consciousness, did he mean the transformation of the three brains, in particular the animal brains? Interestingly, that is more or less what some neurologists are saying – that religion is the ‘property’ of the brain, that unless there is a fundamental change in the brain, the search for God, the related religious or spiritual beliefs, and the battles over religious identities will be with us for a long time. Even UG seems to suggest the same thing when he says that religion is a serious neurological problem. But a careful reading of his utterances tells us that he does not simply mean the brain, but the whole body. The brain is only a ‘reactor’. The reptilian brain, the limbic structure and the neocortex perform certain jobs or tasks, but by themselves they are passive. They have to be activated and it is the ‘I’, the activator, which uses them.


The traces of evolutionary history, the traces of animal traits or animal consciousness exist not merely in the brain but all over the body, in the trillions of cells of the body. To theorize further on what UG has been saying, the ‘I’ (the coordinator of thoughts), is a squatter; it uses the body for its own continuity, and it has superimposed itself on every cell of the body. In other words, the ‘I’ with its age-old memories and experiences, along with the animal consciousness, is deeply embedded in every cell of the body. That is what the Mother's report of her experience of cellular changes seems more or less to be saying as well. So then, the ‘I’, with all its fears and anxieties, its sense of lack and insecurity, the animal trait of aggression and even the survival instinct, has to go, has to be cleansed, if the human being has to begin truly to function as a human. The cleansing has to take place not just in the brain but in every cell of the body, on which the tremendous gravity of the psychological fear and lack in the form of the ‘I’ or the ‘self’ is superimposed.


To put it in the language of molecular biology, if mutation of cells is what caused the emergence of self-consciousness (the ‘I’, the neocortex), then it will be another mutation in the cells that will dissolve the ‘I’, which has outrun its original purpose and turned self-destructive.


That seems to be the only way out, failing which humanity seems to be doomed to destroy itself, along with the millions of other creatures living on this planet. If such a catastrophe were to occur, perhaps only the tough cockroaches will survive, mutate, and let nature start the evolutionary cycle again, for purposes only nature knows.


It is the stranglehold of thought, or culture, over the body – culture in the form of religious ideals, goals, political ideologies and so on – that has prevented the body from cleansing itself of these ‘bad habits’ to begin its natural, harmonious, non-destructive movement of existence. Just as disease-causing viruses enter the body and cause havoc, these thoughts have become parasites on the body, throwing the body out of its natural order. The body can sometimes battle the viruses and regain its balance, but it cannot do so with thoughts, for they have a stranglehold on the cells of the body. There has to be a mutation if these thoughts and their coordinator, the ‘I’, has to be destroyed before the body finds its freedom.


Unfortunately, this kind of mutation cannot be willed. Nor can it be genetically engineered, for the ‘I’ is everywhere, and in every cell. It seems that we could perhaps open up the possibilities of that happening only if we stop and achieve a state of ‘do-nothing’ to further strengthen the already tremendous momentum of the destructive structure of thought.


There are already enough religions, enough political ideologies, and more than enough atomic bombs to blow up the earth. It is really ridiculous to talk of peace, love and compassion and then wage wars, absurd to believe in an all-loving God and then slit each other's throats in the cause of religious identity and in the name of the very same loving God. And it is plain fraud to talk of ‘development’ when evidently all that ‘development’ or ‘progress’ has done is to create a few billionaires and a powerful, predatory class, while hundreds of millions are forced to live a sub-human existence.


The rot has really gone deep into the very cells of our body. It is frightening.


Actually our problems are, as UG has been saying for more than three decades now, rooted in our so-called solutions: in our gods, our religious ideals, our political goals, our very notions of justice and health. It is the macabre dance of death played out by self-protective, fascist thought. There seems to be no way out unless there is a benign, biological mutation of the human body.


The ‘Calamity’


UG says that it happened to him despite his long search and sadhana, despite everything he did in all his forty-nine years before the ‘calamity’. He calls it a ‘calamity’ deliberately in order to discourage us from attributing any religious or spiritual meaning and value to what happened to him.


For truly and absolutely there is no religious or spiritual content there. It is a physical process, a physiological phenomenon, brought to fruition in the way nature works on a tiny seed to give rise to a gigantic tree. It is life finding its fulfilment. It is the completion of the journey of the ‘cells’ started some millions of years ago from the ‘primordial soup’. It is there.


Over seven days, seven different changes took place in UG's body. It was literally an explosion of energy, and UG cannot say whether it erupted from within the body or descended from outside; actually there was no outside and inside, it came from all sides, everywhere, in waves, in spirals, like a river in spate, like a tidal wave, penetrating into and breaking through every wall, every resistance; it was energy, atomic, repairing, cleansing the body, cleansing every cell of its age-old ‘habits’, the ‘accumulated knowledge’ of the traces embedded in it over thousands of years of evolutionary history; it was the flushing out of the virus of thought, memes. The accompanying pain and terror and other sensations of extreme discomfort were the death pangs of the ‘I’, the ‘self’.


It is of crucial importance to note here that the physical process or mutation was triggered by the dissolution of the question: ‘How do I know that this is the state?’ There was no answer. It was the end of all answers, all knowledge born out of the separative existence, cessation of all opposites; it was a tremendous crisis within the thought structure. It was a calamitous situation for thought, for the ‘self’, the build-up of a tremendous molecular pressure within the structure of the mind-body, and it could have release only in an explosion. In other words, with no answer coming, which is absolutely essential for the continuity of thought, it was as if the question itself, akin to matter, cracked and set off a series of explosions in the nuclear plant of the body, blasting every cell, every nerve and every gland. The anxieties and fears, the fantasies and wishes, the images and symbols, the ideas and concepts and world-views, all created and maintained and played out by the ‘self’ for its own continuity, all the sensory perceptions hitherto enslaved by the self for its own separative existence, the whole history of the body inscribed by the self on every cell, began to explode, burn and dissolve into nothingness. And thus, on the seventh day, the coordinator, the self, disappeared, and with it the body, constructed by thought, disappeared too.


It was an extremely painful process, almost like physical torture, and it took about three years for the process to complete itself and let the body fall into a new rhythm all its own, into what UG calls the ‘natural state’.


The natural state is also the state of ‘undivided consciousness’, says UG. With the sense of separation gone, and even the instinct of survival dissolved, the body is extremely vulnerable to everything around it; the body is ‘affected’ by all natural phenomena, be it an earthquake or the eclipses of the moon and the sun, or even when someone gets physically hurt. UG calls it the true ‘affection’. It is not spiritual oneness with the world, nor what is called the ‘atman becoming one with Brahman’. There is no religious or spiritual content there. It is a purely physiological phenomenon. With the sense of separative existence dissolved, the stranglehold of culture, the ‘I’, gone, the body is in tune with the cosmos.


The ductless glands, located exactly in the same spots where, according to Kundalini Yoga, the chakras or energy centres are, have taken over the function of his body, says UG. He doesn't, of course, refer to Kundalini or use any spiritual terms to explain this phenomenon. The thymus gland, which is supposed to be active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant, is reactivated, and it is there that the physical (not emotional) oneness is felt or experienced. It is not, UG emphasizes, what the Hindus call the atman becoming one with Brahman and all that stuff. There is no spiritual content there. It is not unity of consciousness in the sense we want to understand it. It is just the absence of thought, the past, that enables UG to be in that state of oneness, which also means that he is (physically) affected by everything that happens around him. It is the natural, physical condition of his being. In UG's words:


“Sensations are felt there; you don't translate them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; they are just a thud. 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. The whole of your being is that movement or vibrates with that sound; there is no separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with that bird or whatever . . . There is no ‘you’ there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation, you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation. ‘Affection’ means that you are affected by everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something. The natural state is a state of great sensitivity – but this is a physical sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no ‘others’ for me, and so there is no separation.”


He also says that with the coordinator, the ‘I’, which uses the body for its own separative continuity, gone, the pituitary gland – called the ‘third eye’, ajna chakra (ajna meaning ‘command’) – is now in command over the body. With the coordinator gone, it is this ajna chakra or pituitary gland that gives the instructions to the body and enables the body to function in perfect tune with the world. Since there is nobody (no ‘I’) there to control or interfere with the functioning of the body, thoughts arise in response to a demand or challenge, and once the task is fulfilled, they undergo ‘combustion’ or burn themselves up and ionize, releasing energy. Hence, says UG, he is able to talk for hours on end and yet not feel tired or drained of energy.


But when there is no demand or challenge, no stimuli (stimulus and response being a unitary action), he is in a state of ‘not knowing’, a sort of ‘declutched state’. There is no self talking, thinking, or daydreaming, there is nothing there. But when a question is thrown at him, the response comes quickly and effectively, from what he calls his data or memory bank; it is immediate and it is mechanical. It is like a computer switching on and responding to queries by scanning its databank and coming up with an answer. There is nothing mysterious about it. It's the past, the memory – mechanical. There is nothing else there. If there is something else, there is no way of knowing it.


In other words, when there is no demand, he is in a state of ‘not knowing’. There is only sensory activity, pure and simple. Each of the senses work, independently (with no coordinator or coordination) at the peak of its capacity. Sensations are not interpreted as hard or soft, sweet or bitter, good or evil, spiritual or material. There is no difference between music and the barking of a dog, or the sound coming from the toilet. It is just sound, notes spaced out in a certain order, that is all. There is no interpretation, for there is no interpreter there.


Further, UG says that his vision is two-dimensional, flat, in frames, like a camera clicking away picture after picture, but with no linkage between these pictures. The third, fifth and tenth dimensions are figments of imagination, invented by thought, by the self for its own sake and for its own continuity.


Truly a marvellous machine, an amazing body. It is, put simply, the natural state! This natural state is not a spiritual state, not a state of enlightenment, asserts UG. It is not a state of bliss or perfect order. For order and chaos, cause and effect, birth and death are a simultaneous process. There is silence there, but it is like the silence of a volcano. It burns everything, leaving behind no trace. It is the movement of life, the ebb and flow of life that can never be captured by thought.


Moreover, UG's body is supposed to be hermaphroditic or androgynous: qualities of both man and woman coexist in it. A perfect union of animus-anima, man-woman in union, pictorially represented by the Indian tradition in the form of ardhanarishwara: one half (the right side) of the body as Shiva and the other half as Parvathi, his consort – an artistic illustration of the androgynous state! But UG rejects the comparison and simply states: ‘Here the body goes back into that stage where it is neither male nor female. It is not the androgynous thing that they talk about.’ However, when he says that his left side is female and responds to women and the right side is male and responds to men, he seems to imply that there is something in the traditional image of ardhanarishwara. As physical evidence of this male-female convergence in the body, there is even a dark line over his stomach upwards, as if to demarcate the male and the female in him.


If UG's body is truly both male and female, or neither purely male nor female, then it challenges our knowledge of the human body. It also certainly goes beyond the understanding of the left and right brain as having different faculties and functions, according to the present-day neurosciences. In view of UG's experience and what he has said, it seems that it is not merely the right and left hemispheres of the brain but the entire left and right sides of the body (the two brains being only vital parts of them) that respond in different ways, with their different faculties (‘intelligence’ would be more appropriate) and functions.


To UG, death is a continuous phenomenon. His body is supposed to go through death almost every day, and come back to life. It is the body's way of renewing itself. He says:


“This is necessary because the senses in the natural state are functioning at the peak of their sensitivity all the time. So, when the senses become tired, the body goes through death. This is real physical death, not some mental state. It can happen one or more times a day. You do not decide to go through this death; it descends upon you. It feels at first as if you have been given an anaesthetic: the senses become increasingly dull, the heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold, and the whole body becomes stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It happens differently every time. The whole process takes forty-eight or forty-nine minutes. During this time the stream of thoughts continues, but there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you ‘conk out’: the stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut lasts – it is not an experience. There is nothing you can say about that time of being ‘conked out’ – that can never become part of your conscious existence or conscious thinking.


“You don't know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment, you could decide not to come back. When the ‘conking out’ is over, the stream of thought picks up exactly where it left off. Dullness is over; clarity is back. The body feels very stiff – slowly it begins to move of its own accord, limbering itself up. The movements are more like the Chinese T'ai Chi than like Hatha Yoga. The disciples observed the things that were happening to the teachers, probably, and embodied them and taught hundreds of postures – but they are all worthless; it is an extraordinary movement. Those who have observed my body moving say it looks like the motions of a newly born baby. This ‘conking out’ gives a total renewal of the senses, glands and nervous system: after it they function at the peak of their sensitivity.”

In the natural state there is no conflict, no fear, no desire, and all search of whatever kind comes to end. There is only the simple yet vibrant movement of life. It is the fulfilment of life. It is life. There is nothing supernatural about this state. UG is no superman, no God or avatar come down to save humankind. UG cannot be a model for others, and one cannot convert his utterances into a body of teaching to be followed by others. Perhaps UG's state is the end product of evolution, life at last finding itself! In UG's words: ‘Nature, in its own way, throws out, from time to time, some flower, the end-product of human evolution. This cannot be used by the evolutionary process as a model for creating another.’


Now, one may ask here, how does UG know this?


‘I don't know,’ says UG, ‘life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way – it is conscious of itself.’


The Mundaka Upanishad speaks of this state using the metaphor of two birds. The two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the individual self and the immortal self, are perched on the same tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.


The notion of the ‘immortal self’, a much-abused term, is misleading. Perhaps we can simply call it ‘awareness’, an integral part of the activity not only of all organisms but of all forms of life. It is there, functioning in a tree and the birds that perch on it, as much as in a human being. And there is nothing more one can say about it, for it cannot be conceptualized or converted into a philosophy, for it would be like trying to catch the wind in one's palm and giving it a name and form.


“This consciousness (or awareness) which is functioning in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same. In me it has no frontiers; in you there are frontiers – you are enclosed in that. Probably this unlimited consciousness pushes you, I don't know. Not me; I have nothing to do with it. It is like the water finding its own level, that's all – that is its nature. That is what is happening in you: life is trying to destroy the enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience, which is not of its nature. It's trying to come out, to break open. You don't want that. As soon as you see some cracks there, you bring some plaster and fill them in and block it again. It doesn't have to be a so-called self-realized man or spiritual man or God-realized man that pushes you; anything, that leaf there, teaches you just the same if only you let it do what it can. You must let that do. I have to put it that way. Although ‘let that do’ may imply that there is some kind of volition on your part, that's not what I mean.


But we don't let things be, or ‘let that do’. We theorize and build traditions around that ‘awareness’ and hope to achieve what cannot be achieved. For it is not something to be achieved, or willed into existence. In other words, there is no need to achieve or realize what is always already there. And so UG warns: ‘Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning. But what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are.’


The Other Side of Belief, 2005

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