An Introduction to U.G. Krishnamurti

Heart of Yoga, August 6, 2020

By Rosalind Atkinson

Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti (9 July 1918 – 22 March 2007)

“The greatest living yogi I have ever met,” Krishnamacharya said of U.G. Krishnamurti. The fact that Krishnamacharya recognised U.G.'s realization of yoga is profoundly significant. Krishnamacharya, who was deeply informed of humankind's wisdom traditions from primordial to modern times, considered U.G. a living example of yoga, of which there are very few. U.G. brought clarity to the heart of yoga.

Raised by a philosophical grandfather who was deeply involved in the Theosophical Society, as a young man U.G. became a spiritual seeker for many years. He studied with Sivananda for seven years (until he found him hypocritically eating banned pickles in the cupboard in the middle of the night). He visited sages such as the great Ramana Maharishi, but was unimpressed by religious models that posed that some people were enlightened and others weren't, which he later called “the social model of disempowerment.”

U.G. soon was known as a brilliant speaker, and he became a follower of the older Jiddu Krishnamurti (no relation), who had rejected the spiritual organisation he was chosen to lead, declaring that “truth is a pathless land.” However, U.G. was critical of how J. Krishnamurti said this, yet still presented a path by sitting in a special chair giving long philosophical lectures. After 17 years of following J. Krishnamurti, he said he realised that “I was in the state he was talking about,” and walked out of the tent where the teaching was happening, whereup an “explosion” of life took place in his system as he stopped believing himself second to anyone. He later called it his “calamity” because the usual mind, the limiting structure of thought, disintegrated in him. He just walked away from the social dynamic that confined him as a seeker. He literally walked out of the tent.

“Calamity” was his word for “enlightenment” because he said it was nothing like the state of beatitude that is speculated about. A yoga process began for U.G. that he described as an immense and ongoing explosion of life, followed by spontaneous and beautiful body movements with the rhythms of breath. He described it as the whole body renewing itself after the clinical death of all limits of body and mind. The intrinsic polarity/collaboration of the male and female union of life took hold within him, and in his relationship with the outer world.

“People call me an ‘enlightened man’ – I detest that term – they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I've searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn't arise. I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.” — U.G. from The Mystique of Enlightenment

To cope with these feelings, U.G. sought help from Desikachar, who said “there is one person who might be able to help you – my father.” U.G. went to Chennai and studied with Krishnamacharya for three and a half years, before going to him with a problem: he found that the yoga he was doing very subtly “reversed his life current.” Krishnamacharya humbly admitted that this was outside of his realm of experience, and that he did not understand. U.G. loved Krishnamacharya for this honesty, and Krishnamacharya loved and respected U.G. because as a natural man, he was an extremely attractive person. U.G. had also been identified as a Jivanmukti (liberated person) by Hindu orthodoxy through the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram (like the Pope of Hindus), who Krishnamacharya also loved and respected. (Although U.G. would deny this, saying “there's nothing to be liberated from!”) Krishnamacharya therefore bowed to U.G. and accepted U.G.'s perspective, admitting to him that it was not in his own experience or understanding. U.G. loved Krishnamacharya because he said he was “an honest man” and later jokingly called him “my Guru” out of respect. Mark suggests that this humbling and yet beautiful encounter was a pivotal moment in the evolution of Krishnamacharya's teaching.

The two remained lifelong friends. In this way, U.G. held Krishnamacharya to the fire of his own teachings, insisting that yoga must be fitted to the person, not the person to yoga – not only in terms of asana, pranayama, and other forms of practice, but more importantly in the very psychology and mood of practice: that the person is already perfect and perfectly functioning, and the yoga is purely participation in this, not manipulation in any way.

U.G. was a fierce critic of the perfect person (or the God-realised person), and religious-seeking and yoga-seeking based on that model. He emphatically dismissed conventional yoga and all seeking. He was so certain about this that many around him were instantly relieved of their seeking by the force of his mere presence and logic. Many others, though, were bewildered because the usual assumptions of doctrine are so deeply ingrained in us as the axioms of our thought structure. We have been misled, or worse, brainwashed. This is why he was so fierce in his condemnation, standing in his own ground as life itself; and speaking (often shouting!) for the end of human delusion and suffering. Society's automatic assumptions that we have to find truth are so strong that many thought U.G. an enigma or iconoclast. However, those with no point of view to argue found him the most purely loving and natural person they ever met.

U.G. pointed out how the thought structure of seeking is the very mechanics of mind that prevent you from noticing the wonder of your own reality. Insight into the habits of subtle or gross seeking release you from the mental and emotional patterning that hide the power, consciousness, energy and beauty that you actually are. It's a logic worth listening to. The model of the perfect person implies that everyone else is not perfect. This creates the mind that seeks for a future state and denies the present wonder of existence. It puts everyone on the “merry-go-round” of seeking, therefore denying each person's intrinsic perfection of reality itself, in which we all appear. Even trying to practice meditation creates the persona of the person who is trying to meditate. This becomes a very encrusted imagined identity that has no basis in reality.

As his friend, Mark Whitwell has felt inspired to communicate what U.G. brought forth. Mark says, “I have seen immediate relief response from thousands of every kind of person, many who were not able to meet U.G. nor perhaps would they have understood him if they had. I was particularly struck by U.G. saying that the model of the ‘perfect person’ that civilization's power structures are built upon is destroying humanity, and he predicted it! We have strayed a long way from indigenous wisdom cultures where if God or Spirit is proposed it is in all ordinary conditions of our natural world. Not elsewhere. Human disintegration and climate chaos are now tangibly obvious, hence the urgency for this communication to give humankind an alternative. Through the denial of life, humanity is insane and there are even many who are clinically insane and dangerous.”

U.G. was popularly known as a so-called “enlightened” man, so how could he be dismissive of the perfect person, ideal, or culture!? Isn't that what enlightenment means? He was known as a natural man, in the natural state. He was very attractive as one is attracted to a cat in a room, in the corner sun. Natural and at ease. Responding naturally to everything happening. A person without social strategy at all.

Ram Dass once went to visit U.G. and sat with him, enthusiastically presenting spiritual ideas and experiences. “Everything I said, you shot it down like skeet shooting,” he said, “but I have the feeling that you wouldn't hurt a fly.” Year later on Maui, Mark reminded Ram Dass of this encounter. “Tears came to his eyes,” recalls Mark, “as he remembered the meeting with U.G. He talked about U.G.'s special power to take away the seeking, he was very strong and get as gentle as a flower.”

U.G. clarified the very idea of enlightenment and all the archaic language of enlightenment that has entrapped humanity. He would have none of that language or allow any identification to land on him in any terms. He dismissed all such identification and anyone present or past assumed to have it.

In refusing to be identified as liberated or enlightened, U.G. clarified the very meaning of a Jivanmukti; a Jivanmukti or Buddha cannot be identified or described, requiring no identification or definition. In fact, the very nature of a Jivanmukti is that he or she is indefinable because they are at one with reality itself as it is, as we all are! U.G. clarified and purified yoga and the teaching function in the same way we might say the Buddha healed Vedic culture in ancient India from the heavy burden of ritual and superstition. U.G. would talk about how the historical Gautama Buddha did not want any remembering of him, no image, no teaching, no places of remembrance. In other words, no way or method to be left behind in his name. It is not required. But look what happened. Likewise, U.G. did not want to be remembered. He did not want any teachings left to create a method of becoming, because it is the method itself that creates the problem. In fact U.G. was fond of saying, “There is no need for a teaching. Life itself is doing a fantastic job of looking after you, thank you very much!”

U.G. is thought of as an enigma, but only to those still in an enlightenment model of thought. The perfect person of culture is so axiomatic to our structure of thought and all spiritual assumption, that U.G. seems an oddball to the social mind. To call him an enigma is the language of that limited structure, which seems very impenetrable. Many who came around him stayed in that axiom and treated him as an enigma; they didn't understand what he was saying and its implications. He stated: “There is no such thing as enlightenment,” clarifying that there is “only the perfection of life arising as each person and every thing.”

These statements left people confused in that archaic model of thought. They treat him as a mere curiosity and shuffle off his transformative words and presence as simply a puzzle, without hearing him. They either dismiss him or have no way of making use of what they felt in response to him. Or many take pride in having known him and glibly quote U.G., glamorising him in his critical dismissal of culture as if it were their own. They turn U.G. into a nihilist or into one more cultic guru, rather than understand the implication of his life.

Yet his argument that dismisses the perfect person has a clear logic that is easily understood and is useful. People of any background can understand that life is a pure intelligence, power, and beauty. It is already given and arising as all of us. Many have been profoundly relieved from the “stranglehold of thought.” Once your attention is drawn to this sincere reflection, it is very helpful. It ends the idea of being less, trying to get more. He rejected all methods of “becoming.” Although U.G. can be difficult to penetrate, to hear him ends that structure of thought that is killing us and awakens a yoga transmission and process.

He called the conventional teacher-student relationship the “dynamic of disempowerment.” This keeps the student looking to become something, denying that they are already Something: that which is already the case, pure intelligence, beauty, and the power of Life arising as all life.

U.G. had a special skill, a power, presence, or siddhi that extracted the virus from his friends. Even for those who never met him, his words enable the mind to relax from its patterns of automatic assumptions. This initiates a yoga process. It implies the free movement of life (or prana) in you, as you, as life itself, in all. Yoga begins then as free participation in what you are and all relatedness. It is direct embrace of reality itself. That is what yoga is.

U.G. says, “I maintain there is nothing for you to attain.” Trying to attain something is the very mechanics of the mind that obliterates you noticing that you are a perfect arising of the power, intelligence, and beauty of life. Without this understanding, yoga practice is only part of the imposition on life, instead of participation in life. “Prana has its own intelligence and movement and knows exactly what to do to maximise itself.” Leave the body alone!

U.G. was helped greatly in his life by two important women, first Valentine de Kerven, who took him in at the time of his calamity and went on to travel with him for many years, and later Melissa Forbes, whom he referred to as “The Balance.”

The Influence of U.G. Krishnamurti on Yoga

Heart of Yoga, March 12, 2021

By Mark Whitwell

“You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditation, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.”— U.G. Krishnamurti

What to make of such statements?

There was no denying U.G. Krishnamurti was an unusual and extremely attractive person, in the way that a cat is attractive. He was a natural man.

Because I was a student of Desikachar and Krishnamacharya, a student of yoga, I had to relate what U.G. Krishnamurti was saying to yoga.

He made it easy, he spoke about it a lot and he sat on the ground with myself and with Melissa Forbes and showed us what natural movement looked like without any struggle, without any seeking.

It became clear that should any yoga arise, it is completely natural. It is what the body does naturally when it has been traumatised.

A body in a state of trauma will begin to move and breathe in beautiful rhythmic patterns with the breath. But this entire world of yoga has been linked to the spiritual and religious psychologies of working away on yourself trying to get somewhere.

Therefore the yoga is toxified by efforts in the mind and body to try and get somewhere.

This trying to get somewhere obstructs noticing the unitary condition that the body is already in. So if we take that seeking out of the yogas, the seeking trying to get somewhere, and know that it is a completely natural thing to do, an animal thing to do, to move and breathe and use the anatomy of the entire body to participate in the breath, then it is something quite different.

You can safely say that everyone has been programmed to seek through yoga. Trying to realise something through yoga.

People try to work out if yoga is “good or bad” as if the word itself did not encompass so many hilariously divergent practices, with potential for completely opposite moods of practice. I say that U.G. “held Krishnamacharya to the fire of his own teaching.” The yoga Krishnamacharya and Desikachar were sharing was undoubtedly Tantric — the union of opposites.

Yet there was some latent tension as this powerful tradition came filtered through their Vedantic Brahmanic cultural background. Krishnamacharya made great strides in his commitment to teaching women, his insistence on adapting yoga to the individual, and his refusal of orthodox positions of religious power for the sake of fulfilling his teachers' request for him to teach yoga — not a high status activity in India compared to other roles he might have held. Yet of course there lingered aspects of his own cultural framework — the longing search to combine with Ishvara, the Lord, in his case with Lord Vishnu.

U.G. himself was the embodiment of the union of opposites — literally half male and half female, like the mythic figure of the ardhanarishvara, half Shiva half Shakti. And Krishnamacharya saw this, and called him the greatest yogi he had ever seen. U.G. studied with Krishnamacharya for three and a half years to try and manage his energy after his ‘calamity’, so it was not a passing judgement. Krishnamacharya humbly admitted that U.G.'s objection to the yoga he taught — that it reversed his energy flow — was outside of his experience. This refinement of Krishnamacharya's yoga to completely remove all and any seeking is the priceless contribution of U.G. to yoga.

Desikachar loved U.G. Melissa Forbes recalls being with U.G. when Desikachar would come to visit, and he would place his hands on U.G.'s chest and back, front and back of the heart, and just walk around like that for some time. U.G. would never let people touch him sycophantically or anything like that, so this was very unusual. It was a sincere love relationship.

Both Desikachar and Krishnamacharya had immense love and respect for U.G. U.G. was recognised by the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram as a Jivanmukti or liberated person, although he scorned and mocked such language himself, and this garnered immense respect within the Hindu world — besides which U.G. was just a naturally attractive and kind person.

U.G. would talk about “the nostril-holding arrogance of the yogis,” and to me this is similar to Krishnamacharya saying that the person who says they are a guru is not a guru. U.G. would throw deliberate provocation, insisting that all gurus should be “shot on sight, at sight.” If too many people started congregating around him, he would see the shoes gathered and say “this place is starting to stink like an ashram.”

He has a special siddhi to remove people's seeking for alternative realities, alternative states. Sometimes this was almost like a psychic surgery. A person would show up thinking that U.G. was gonna be the one to “do it” for them, awaken their kundalini and make them explode out the top of their sahasra or something. Instead, he would devastate their hopes by telling them they were not qualified to become enlightened, and that it did not exist anyway. In the wake of disappointment and even defensive anger, many many people found a new kind of freedom without their habitual search for other states and experiences.

U.G. was saying, I am saying, that you don't have to realise something through yoga, that there is nothing to realise, you are already the unity of life, and you can't deny that. It is a scientific fact, and you cannot deny that. You cannot deny that your body is an extraordinary intelligence in an extraordinary harmony with the cosmos already. You can't deny that the beauty of life is arising as you, as the whole body. It is already given.

“First the death must take place, then yoga begins. Yoga is actually the body's skill in bringing itself back from the state of clinical death.” — U.G.

So that mathematical statement is understood and heard, and you can go, “Oh ok, I'm good, I'm done, I'm happy sitting here in my house in lockdown. My body is a unity with the stars. With the entire Mother Earth, with the sun and moon, with the plant kingdom, with the water and earth, and any unseen conditions of the cosmos.” Because it's true!

Your body is in a profound harmony with all tangible and intangible conditions of the cosmos. And if you feel the factual truth of that statement, you will do a big exhale and go, okay, I'm good. Even at home in lockdown! And then, if any yoga does arise for you, it will be simple participation in this given reality, not a seeking.

The reason I stand for yoga, the yoga from Krishnamacharya and Desikachar but as refined by U.G., is that our patterned world of denial of life and the great mass patterning of society, the patterning of dissociation that causes us so much misery everywhere has to be deprogrammed somewhere.

We give these yogas to people and it deprograms them — it enables them to slough off the cultural patterns.

And I've got a plan for the whole world, that we all get deprogrammed from the lack of understanding, from the inability receive life.

There is a need to put this yoga into the world, so people can move and breath and reprogram their nervous system to relax. And then they might be able to hear this. Not a yoga of seeking. Not a manipulation of the body mind in any way.

“Real silence is explosive, it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. This is volcanic in its nature; it's bubbling all the time — the energy, the life — that is its quality.” — U.G.

With TKV Desikachar and his students atKrishnamacharya's Sannidhi

What U.G. Krishnamurti Did for Yoga

Heart of Yoga, July 23, 2021

By Mark Whitwell

“But it grieves my heart love

To see you tryin' to be a part of

A world that just don't exist

It's all just a dream, babe

A vacuum, a scheme, babe

That sucks you into feelin' like this”

–Bob Dylan, ‘To Ramona’

For thousands of years, humanity has suffered the proposal that Truth or God is absent and needs to be found. The population has been brainwashed into the pursuit of a transcendent Truth that supposedly lies ‘beyond the veil’ of ordinary, presently arising conditions.

In the belief that there is somewhere amazing to get to, the intrinsic wonder of ordinary conditions – the body, birth, sex, women, and death – is denied. The search for God obliterates our ability to notice the wonder that is already present in us, as us and around us.

Whether religious or no, the movement of mind toward an imagined future state is the axiom of all patriarchal cultures. Few are spared. It is the very source of human suffering.

Convinced of a future possibility of perfection, union with God, or permanent happiness (a.k.a. enlightenment), the mind tries to get us there with all its energy and intelligence; and the mind's urgent effort toward God as ‘other’ produces a tremendous stress in the body-mind.

“You can't imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body,” my friend U.G. Krishnamurti observed.

“Society has put before you the ideal of a perfect man. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages and saints, and so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

“Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you which you call the self. You are a living creature yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life. That is something very unnatural.” (The Natural State)

Although, he was recognized by the orthodoxy of Vedanta as a Jivanmukti (a liberated soul), U.G. would reject all such claims, terms and titles and was utterly unwilling to be identified with the cultural logics of religious or spiritual seeking.

Due to his steadfast refusal to abide the idea that one person could be senior to another (or second to another) within the hierarchies of spiritual/religious attainment, he gained the nickname ‘the raging sage’ – videos of U.G. yelling at people that their problems are not real can be found on YouTube. “The very fact that you are here is your problem,” he would say to seekers who came to his door looking for a boon.

U.G. declared and embodied the fact that everybody is in the natural state already; everybody is the wonder, harmony and beauty of the cosmos already; that the body does not care in the slightest for your samadhis and bliss-states; that Life does not come in the form of a problem or a solution or even a question; Life is simply happening in all its radiance and you are that: and that is the end of the story.

Although he remains relatively obscure within the worlds of mainstream yoga, U.G. made a significant contribution to yoga by clarifying for all time that yoga is participation in the natural state of the body and not a thought-created struggle for a future peace known as ‘enlightenment.’

The natural state of the body is the peace, power, harmony, relatedness, intelligence and extreme sensitivity that is always functioning as the body-mind of every person; the natural state is a perfect balance of strength and softness, male and female, receptivity and penetration. Yoga is to unqualify the whole body from the imposition of mind and let it bloom like a flower.

It was U.G.'s birthday on July 9th. He was a dear friend who is missed by many. What his life represented continues to flow into the world: the rejection of hierarchy; the disenchantment of exalted spiritual states; the blasting of spiritual commercialism; and a presence that was utterly loving as well as mischievous.

Thank you U.G.

Ram Dass Meets U.G. Krishnamurti

Heart of Yoga, November 26, 2020

By Mark Whitwell

U.G. Krishnamurti was a very interesting personality that is hard to understand. If you look at the few videos that are there he seems like an angry bastard, who is dissing everything spiritual.

U.G. would say things like,

“There are no steps to be taken, we are life itself. I am the power of the cosmos and so are you. If you think you have to take a step to realize it, you are only creating thought structures in your mind, and these thought structures have been used by people in power to manipulate humanity, the gullibility of the public, forever.”

Just before his fiftieth birthday, something happened in U.G.'s life that was extraordinary. One day, all obstruction left his body and mind and he started raging against the imposition of society,

“This is bullshit!”

And as he got older and a little elderly it was a little scary.

I remember once Ram Dass, the great baba Ram Dass who died the other day, visited U.G. Ram Dass used to travel around and visit all the saints and sages. It was his pastime and he loved doing it. The story was recounted to me in a lot of detail where Ram Dass met with U.G. and he would make propositions to him about the spiritual path, about attainments on the spiritual journey. And Ram Dass had a lot of stories and a lot of methodologies that he had collected in his spiritual life from people like Muktananda and Neem Karoli Baba, and the whole Indian tradition of spirituality.

But whatever Ram Dass would offer up, U.G. would blast it down.

“What a lot of crap,” he'd say, “Truth is a pathless land. If you are on a journey, if your trying to get to truth, then you are denying truth. If you are trying to get to God, you are denying God. The seeking for God is the active denial of God because here is God” (waves hand).

So Ram Dass says to U.G.,

“Whatever I propose you shoot down like skeet shooting.”

And he demonstrated: the clay pigeon goes up in the air and boom. U.G. would shoot down every spiritual proposal. And then Ram Dass added,

“But I feel like you wouldn't hurt a fly.”

This was often the atmosphere that was felt around U.G. Despite the ferocity of U.G.'s criticism of male authority and teachers of every kind there was a gentleness there. It's why I loved him so much. He had a special power or siddhi to pull out the rug from under a person's spiritual illusion, their spiritual ego.

I would see people come into a room with U.G. and they would offer him their spiritual proposition and he would reply:

“There's no way you are going to get enlightened, you are not qualified to get enlightened, just forget it!”

It was shocking to people. The paradox was that in that moment of U.G. pulling the rug out from under the spiritual ego there was relaxation. In that moment, you stop seeking. And that is enlightenment. Where there is no movement in the mind for future ideals, none. There is peace.