UG Reader
Preface
U.G. Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends and admirers all over the world, died on 22 March 2007, at 2.30 p.m., at the villa of friends, in Vallecrosia, Italy. A few days before the end, his long-time friend, the noted Indian filmmaker, Mahesh Bhatt, had asked, ‘How should we dispose of your body?’ In the same vein as he had spoken about death and the body over the years, UG replied, ‘Life and death cannot be separated. When the breathing stops and what you call clinical death takes place, the body breaks itself into its constituent elements and that provides the basis for the continuity of life. So, nothing here is lost. In that sense there is no birth and no death for the body. The body is immortal.’
Seven weeks earlier, UG had fallen and this was the second such occurrence in two years. Although he did not suffer a fracture, he did not want such an incident to occur again which would make him further dependent on his friends. He refused medical or other external intervention. He decided to let his body take its own natural course. He was confined to a couch, surrounded by friends, and his consumption of food and water became infrequent and then ceased altogether. UG did not show the slightest signs of worry or fear about death or concern for his body even at the end of his life.
Mahesh Bhatt, along with the two American friends, Larry and Susan Morris, cremated the body in Vallecrosia. There was no chanting from the sacred texts, no death ceremony or funeral rites. Ten days before the end came, the large number of friends who had come from all over the world to see him had been advised by UG to return to where they lived. He had simply said, ‘Thank you all. It's time to go.’
The search, the ‘calamity’ and the birth of a new human being: a life sketch of U.G. Krishnamurti
Two months before the completion of his forty-ninth year, UG and Valentine happened to be in Paris. J. Krishnamurti was also there, giving his public talks. One evening, friends suggested that they go and listen to JK's talk. Since the majority, including Valentine, was in favour of the idea, UG relented and joined them. But when they got there, and realized that they had to pay two francs each to get in, UG thought it was ridiculous to pay money to listen to a talk however profound or spiritual. Instead, he suggested, ‘Let's do something foolish. Let's go to Casino de Paris.’
And to Casino de Paris they went. What happened to UG at the casino may sound stranger than fiction. Sitting with his friends and among the fun-lovers watching the cabaret, UG says: ‘I didn't know whether the dancer was dancing on the stage or I was doing the dancing. There was a peculiar kind of movement inside of me. There was no division there. There was nobody who was looking at the dancer.’ Eventually, after his thymus gland was fully activated, this was to become his everyday ‘normal’ experience; for instance, while travelling in a car, he would feel the oncoming car or any vehicle as if passing through his body.
A week after this experience, one night in a hotel room in Geneva, he had a dream. He saw himself bitten by a cobra and die instantly. He saw his body being carried on a bamboo stretcher and placed on a funeral pyre at some nameless cremation ground. And as the pyre and his own body went up in flames, he was awakened.
It was a prelude to his ‘clinical death’ on his forty-ninth birthday, and the beginning of the most incredible bodily changes and experiences that would catapult him into a state that is difficult to understand within the framework of our hitherto known mystical or enlightenment traditions. His experiences were not the blissful or transcendental experiences most mystics speak of, but a ‘physical torture’ triggered by an explosion of energy in his body that eventually left him in what he calls the ‘natural state’.
For seven days, UG's body underwent tremendous changes. The whole chemistry of the body, including the five senses, was transformed. His eyes stopped blinking; his skin turned soft; and when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm it produced a sort of ash. His senses started functioning independently and at their peak of sensitivity. And the thymus gland which, according to doctors is active throughout childhood and then becomes dormant at puberty, was reactivated. All the thoughts of man from time immemorial, all experiences, whether good or bad, blissful or miserable, terrific or terrible, mystical or commonplace, experienced by humanity from primordial times (the whole ‘collective consciousness’) were flushed out of his system, and on the seventh day, he ‘died’ but only to be reborn in ‘undivided consciousness’. It was a terrific journey and a sudden great leap into the primordial state untouched by thought.
– –
UG insists that this is not the state of a self-realized or god-realized man. It is neither the ‘Satori’ of Zen Buddhism nor ‘Brahmanubhava’ of the Upanishads. It is neither ‘emptiness’ nor ‘void’. It is simply a state of ‘non-experience’, but the inevitable sensations are still functioning. The reactivation of the thymus gland seems to enable him to ‘feel’ these sensations without translating or interpreting them as good or bad, for the interpreter, the self, ‘I’ doesn't exist.
UG says, ‘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....There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.’
Further, he says, ‘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 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.’
With his long, flowing silver-grey hair, deep-set eyes, Buddha-like long ears showing through his thinning hair, and fair complexion, UG looked a strange pigeon from another world. Speaking in non-technical language in a simple conversational style, informal and intimate, at times abusive, serene or explosive, his hands rising and moving in striking mudras, he carried the ‘authority’ of one who had literally seen it all.
– –
Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was born on 9 July 1918 in Masulipatnam, a small town in the state of Andhra Pradesh. His mother, who died seven days after he was born, is believed to have told her father, T.G. Krishnamurti, that her son was born with a high spiritual destiny. T.G. Krishnamurti was a prosperous lawyer and quite an influential person in the town of Gudivada. Taking his daughter's prophecy seriously, he gave up his lucrative career to bring up his grandson. He was a great believer in the theosophical movement and contributed huge sums of money for its various activities. The walls of his house were adorned with pictures of theosophical leaders, including one of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was then looked upon as the ‘World Teacher’. But this theosophist was also a firm believer in the Hindu Brahmincal tradition. He was a ‘mixed-up man’ in the words of UG. And so UG grew up in a peculiar milieu of both theosophy and Hindu religious beliefs and practices. Hindu gurus visited the house frequently and chanting and readings from the scriptures were held on a regular basis. There were days when readings from the Upanishads, Panchadasi, Naishkarmya Siddhi and other such religious texts would start in the early morning hours and go on until late in the evening. By the age of eight, UG knew some of these texts by heart.
With all this religious practice and exposure to theosophy at quite an early age, UG grew to be a passionate yet rebellious character. Brilliant and sensitive as he was, he could see through the games the elders played. They spoke of high ideals and principles, but their lives were in direct contradiction to what they spoke. One day, he saw his grandfather rush out of his meditation room in fury and thrash a two-year-old child because she was crying. The supposedly deeply religious grandfather's behaviour was quite upsetting to the young boy. Once, when he was hardly five years old, his grandfather, infuriated by his misbehaviour, had hit him with a belt. Livid with anger, the boy had grabbed the belt from his grandfather and hit him back, shouting, ‘Who do you think you are? How can you beat me?’ The grandfather never again dared to raise his hand against the boy.
A sense of disgust with religious rituals came early to UG. This happened when he was fourteen, during the death anniversary of his mother. He was in a rage at the hypocrisy of the priests who performed the rituals. He was expected to fast the whole day, as were also the Brahmin priests who performed the death memorial rituals. After a while into the chanting of mantras and rituals, UG saw a couple of priests get up and go out. Out of curiosity he followed them and noticed the priests, who were also expected to fast, sneak into a restaurant. Rushing back home, UG removed his sacred thread and threw it away, then went and announced to his grandfather that he was leaving home and needed some money.
‘You are a minor. You cannot have the money,’ replied the grandfather harshly.
‘I don't want your money. I want my mother's money,’ demanded the grandson.
‘If you go on this way, I'll disown you,’ the old man tried to scare the little boy.
The little boy, whose mind had grown much beyond the boys of his age, said coolly, ‘You don't own me. So how can you disown me?’
If UG was difficult for his grandparents to handle, he was kind and affectionate to his school friends and servants at home. As a boy he detested the caste discrimination practised at home. He observed that the domestic workers, who came from the lower caste, were fed with the leftovers of the food cooked the previous day. When his protest against such a practice had no effect on his grandmother, he went and sat with the workers one mealtime and insisted upon being served the same cold food. He was also quite sensitive to the problems of those of his school friends who came from poor families. With the pocket money he received or the money he occasionally stole from his grandfather, he would pay their tuition fees, and at times, even buy them school textbooks and shoes.
Perhaps the grandparents put up with his eccentricities because they knew he was precocious and believed that he was destined for higher things. In fact, UG says that he used to be constantly reminded about his great spiritual destiny by his grandfather. It is quite possible that UG also took his mother's prediction quite seriously and looked upon himself as a great guru in the making.
When he was about fourteen years of age, a well-known Sankaracharya of the famous Sivaganga Math visited T.G. Krishnamurti's house. The young boy was quite fascinated by the pomp and glory that surrounded the pontiff, and the great reverence he commanded from his disciples and admirers. He decided he wanted to be like the pontiff when he grew up. He was ready to throw away all his little desires, quit his studies, bid goodbye to his grandparents and follow in the footsteps of the pontiff, and hopefully become the head of the famous Math. He even dared to express his wish to join the pontiff. The pontiff only smiled and politely turned down his request. He was too young for the hard life of a sannyasi, and leaving home at his tender age would only cause unnecessary unhappiness to his grandparents, he said. However, he gave UG a Shiva mantra. UG took the pontiff's advice seriously and chanted the mantra 3,000 times everyday for the next seven years. Keen on achieving spiritual success and greatness, the boy chanted the mantra anywhere and everywhere, even in his classroom while the teacher chugged on with the lessons. What spiritual benefit the chanting had on him is not known, but it certainly did affect his studies and in the final exams of his SSLC, he failed in the Telugu language paper.
UG's grandmother, Durgamma, played as important a role as the grandfather in his upbringing, although she remains on the margins of UG's story. She was a woman of strong feelings, and made no secret of her likes and dislikes. She was illiterate, but a virtual repository of mythical stories and native intelligence. Giving an instance of it, UG says that it was from her he learnt the original or the etymological meaning of the concept of maya and other such Hindu concepts. But as a boy, it seems that he often used to be quite irritated and angry with her. He never called her ‘grandma’. The more she pleaded with him to at least once call her ‘Ammamma-Grandma’, the more stubborn he would become and even refuse to speak to her. Exasperated, once she is believed to have said that he had ‘the heart of a butcher’. True enough, one day he got so irritated with her begging and cajoling that he screamed at her, letting fly a string of abusive words in English he had picked up at school. A stunned grandfather later sighed thus with relief: ‘Thank God she doesn't understand English!’
In the story of UG, it is the grandfather who stands out as an imposing, formidable figure, who had to be demolished and reduced to nothing. But, in point of fact, he was a man of great strength and determination. If he had not taken his daughter's prediction seriously, if he had not loved his grandson, he couldn't have abandoned his lucrative career and devoted himself to the upbringing of this little maverick. He threw open his house to holy people not merely for his own satisfaction or spiritual pleasure, but because he must have believed that an early exposure to things spiritual would have a positive effect on the boy. Further, he not only took UG along with him every time he visited the Theosophical Society at Adyar, he also took young UG to various holy places, ashrams and centres of learning in India. He was a wealthy man all right, but he was no miser and spent generously on his grandson.
It was surely because of his encouragement and support that for seven summers, and a few more times in between, UG could travel to the Himalayas to learn classical yoga from the famous guru Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh. Ultimately the old man's efforts might not have led to the result he expected. That is a different matter. But, in hindsight, one can say that he did play an important role in the life of his grandson, in providing him with the necessary financial support and social security so that the young UG could pursue his interests without any encumbrance.
– –
It is not through the study of religious texts, nor through contemplation, but through a series of ‘shocks’ that UG, as a young man, developed disgust for rituals and philosophies, and decided to strike out on his own and find things out for himself. The words or teachings of the religious masters he had met, including those of his grandfather, did not correspond with their actions. Their beliefs and philosophies did not operate in their lives. They all spoke well, but theirs were all empty words. Still, the boy wanted to test the validity or otherwise of these ideas and beliefs before rejecting them.
He had to find out, to use UG's own words, ‘by myself and for myself, if there was anything to these teachings.’ Talking about that period and his own search and struggles, UG says quite candidly: ‘I did not know how to go about, I did not know then that wanting to be free of everything was also a want, a desire.’
After UG completed his schooling in Gudivada, he moved to Madras so that he could pursue his higher studies without any bother. By then UG had developed a fairly cordial relationship with Arundale and Jinarajadasa, the then president and vice-president of the Theosophical Society, and had no difficulty in finding a place to live in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. He lived there until his marriage in 1944.
UG took up a BA Honours course in philosophy and psychology at Madras University. But the study of the various philosophical systems and of Freud, Jung and Adler made very little impression on him. In fact, it didn't seem to have much bearing on the way he experienced life, or on the way he was ‘functioning’. ‘Where is this mind these chaps have been talking about?’ he asked himself. One day, he asked his psychology teacher, ‘We are talking about the mind all the time. Do you know for yourself what the mind is? All the stuff I know about the mind is from these books of Freud, Jung, Adler and so on that I have studied. Apart from these descriptions and definitions that are there in the books, do you know anything about the mind?’ It was an extraordinary and original question from a boy hardly twenty years old. The professor was naturally taken aback and perhaps a little intimidated too; nevertheless, he is reported to have advised UG to take his exams and just write the answers he had been taught if he wanted a degree. ‘At least he was honest,’ recalls UG.
It was during this three-year degree course at the university that UG made several trips to Sivananda's ashram at Rishikesh, both to learn yoga and to perform his tapas in the caves there. There were several caves in Rishikesh. Spiritual seekers or sadhakas would live in these caves to perform rigorous penance for years. UG had a little cave to himself, where, sitting cross-legged, he would meditate, at times, for ten to seventeen hours at a stretch. At that time, young though he was, UG experimented with his body by going without food or water for several days, pushing the body to the limits of its endurance. Once, he even tried to live on grass. This was the time he also came upon certain mystical states. These mystical experiences came and went, says UG, but deep within him there was no transformation; they did not touch the core of his being. It was indeed a period of great learning, excitement, and frustration too.
By then UG was in his twenties, a period of extreme restlessness and change. The study of philosophy and psychology had only added to his confusion and he had quit the university in great frustration. The training in yoga had left him high and dry. He had found that Swami Sivananda (eating hot pickles behind closed doors) was no different from several other yogis he had met. To make matters worse he became aware that he was in no way different from the others either. He had meditated and performed penance to no avail. He had come upon several mystical states, but to his horror he found himself still caught up in conflict, in greed. He found himself burning with anger all the time. And sex remained a nagging problem.
UG's own description of his situation at the time is telling. ‘I arrived at a point, when I was twenty-one, where I felt very strongly that all teachers – Buddha, Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna, everybody – kidded themselves, deluded themselves and deluded everybody. This, you see, could not be the thing at all – where is the state that these people talk about and describe? That description seems to have no relation to me, to the way I am functioning. Everybody says “Don't get angry” – I am angry all the time. I am full of brutal activities inside, so that is false. What these people are telling me I should be is something false, and because it is false it will falsify me. I don't want to live the life of a false person. I am greedy, and non-greed is what they are talking about. There is something wrong somewhere. This greed is something real, something natural to me; what they are talking about is unnatural. So, something is wrong somewhere. But I am not ready to change myself, to falsify myself, for the sake of being in a state of non-greed; my greed is a reality to me... I lived in the midst of people who talked of these things everlastingly – everybody was false, I can tell you. So, somehow, what you call “existentialist nausea” (I didn't use those words at the time, but now I happen to know these terms), revulsion against everything sacred and everything holy, crept into my system and threw everything out: no more slokas, no more religion, no more practices – there isn't anything there; but what is here is something natural. I am a brute, I am a monster, I am full of violence – this is reality. I am full of desire. Desirelessness, non-greed, non-anger – those things have no meaning to me; they are false, and they are not only false, they are falsifying me. So I said to myself I'm finished with the whole business.’
UG did not ‘shop’ around much, but, though briefly, he did shop around seriously. He was not only frustrated with swamijis such as Sivananda Saraswati, he was disgusted with himself too. His own sadhana (spiritual practice) and mystical experiences had led him nowhere. There seemed truly no way out and he became ‘sceptical of everything, heretical to my boots’. Studying UG's cynical state of mind and his intense agony, his friend, Swami Ramanapadananda, suggested that he should go and see Sri Ramana Maharshi who was then considered to be an enlightened soul, and an embodiment of the Hindu mystical tradition.
UG was not sure if it would be of any help to him. He thought he was finished with holy men; they only said, ‘Do more and more and you will get it.’ He believed he had performed the required sadhana; whatever he had done was enough. In fact there was nothing to these sadhanas, for they left you only in greater conflict and confusion. He was finished. For he had realized that the solutions offered were no solutions, and that the solutions themselves were the problem. Still, on Ramanapadananda's suggestion, he read Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, particularly the chapters related to Sri Ramana Maharshi. He was not convinced, yet, ‘reluctantly, hesitatingly, and unwillingly’, he agreed to go and meet the great sage.
Devotees and truth-seekers believed that it was enough to sit there bathed in the enveloping silence, and feel the presence of the sage in one's heart. And now, UG sat there on the tiled floor and wondered:
‘How can he help me?’ Ramanapadananda had assured him that like hundreds of truth-seekers before, he too would experience a penetrating silence and all his questions would drop away, and a mere look from the Master would change him completely.
At last the sage looked up and their eyes met briefly. But nothing happened. The clock on the wall registered the passage of time. An hour had passed. The questions had remained and there was no sign of UG's distress coming to an end. Two hours passed, and then UG thought:
‘All right, let me ask him some questions.’ He wanted nothing less than the ultimate freedom, nothing less than moksha. But he asked, ‘Is there anything like moksha?’
The sage answered in the affirmative.
‘Can one be free sometimes and not free sometimes?’
‘Either you are free, or you are not free at all.’
‘Are there any levels to it?’
‘No, no levels are possible, it is all one thing. Either you are there or not there at all.’ And then UG shot his final question. ‘This thing called moksha, can you give it to me?’ Ramana answered with a counter-question: ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’
No guru before had given such an answer. They had only advised him to do more of sadhana, more of what he had already done and finished with. But here was a guru, who was supposed to be an enlightened man, asking, ‘Can you take it?’
The counter-question struck UG like a thunderbolt. It also seemed an extremely arrogant question. But UG's own arrogance was of Himalayan proportions: ‘If there is any individual in this world who can take it, it is me.... If I can't take it, who else can take it?’ Such was his frame of mind. However, the absolute conviction with which Ramana had fired the question at UG had its effect. He had asked more or less similar questions of many gurus during his seven years of sadhana, and he knew all the traditional answers. He had even stumbled upon certain mystical states, yet the questions had remained unanswered. What was that state that all those people – Buddha, Jesus and the whole gang – were in? Ramana was supposed to be in that state! But then Ramana was like any other man, born of woman, he couldn't be very different, could he? But people said that something had happened to him.
What was that? What was there? He had to find out. And he knew in the very marrow of his bones, as it were, that nobody could give that state to him. ‘I am on my own,’ he told himself. ‘I have to go on this uncharted sea without a compass, without a boat, with not even a raft to take me. I am going to find out for myself what that state is...’
– –
The war years (1940s) were an extremely restless period for UG Krishnamurti. After quitting his BA Honours course at the Madras University, he was without a sense of direction. The meeting with Ramana had only deepened his anguish. The search, of course, did not end there, but he was going nowhere. The Theosophical Society seemed to be the way out, if only for want of a better option.
Even after leaving the university, UG continued to live in Adyar at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. But now he worked as the press secretary to the president, Dr Arundale. He would read newspapers, magazines and journals that came to the library from all over the world and choose reports and articles of interest and importance to be read by Arundale later.
He was nearing twenty-five years of age. Sex had remained a nagging problem, yet he had not rushed into marriage. It was a natural biological urge, but most religious traditions taught one either to deny it or suppress it. Sex was seen as spiritually debilitating, and ultimately an obstacle on the path to moksha. UG, of course, did not believe in the denial of sex, although he had practised abstinence. He wanted to see what happened to the urge if he did not do anything about it. All this only made his situation more difficult, and he was troubled by guilt. He never consciously entertained any thoughts about girls, yet sexual images persisted. Meditation on gods and goddesses only gave him wet dreams. Study of holy books and avoidance of aphrodisiacs were of absolutely no help. The so-called mystical experiences he had had in the caves of Rishikesh had failed to dissolve the sexual urge in him.
It was time to stop fooling himself and reckon with the fact of sex, to come to terms with the body's urge which can never be false. And so, in 1943, he married a beautiful Brahmin girl chosen for him by his grandmother. The very next day after the wedding, however, he realized that he had blundered. In his words: ‘I awoke the morning after my wedding night and knew without doubt that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.’ But there was no way he could undo the mistake now. He remained married for seventeen years, and fathered four children.
After his marriage, UG moved out of the Theosophical Society headquarters and took a house on a street close to the Theosophical Society and Elliott Beach at Adyar. And he continued to work for the Theosophical Society. In 1946, Jinarajadasa was elected the president of the Theosophical Society, and for three years, UG worked under him as the joint secretary of the Indian section. Later, in recognition of his oratorical gift, he was made a national lecturer. For nearly seven years, he travelled extensively in India and Europe on lecture tours. He spoke on theosophy at practically every college and university in India. Then he went on a long tour to Europe and North America. Going through the lectures he gave in Europe and India, one is surprised to see how a man who was so thoroughly frustrated with his own religious search and experiences, who had grown cynical of all religious endeavours and goals, adapted himself to the philosophy and activities of the Theosophical Society. Did he really take up this work for want of a ‘better occupation’, as he had said once? Was it like his marriage, with no heart in what he was doing? Was it all inevitable that he had to go through the whole process, that there was very little to choose from, or that it really did not matter one way or another?
However, at the end of the seventh year as a lecturer of theosophy, he grew frustrated with the work. It seemed to him that what he had been doling out in his lecture was just ‘second-hand information’. Anybody with some brains could do this work. It was not something true to his experience, true to his real self. And he quit the Theosophical Society.
UG's leaving coincided with J. Krishnamurti's visit to India to give his first talk after the war years, at Adyar. By his own admission, UG listened to JK's talks between 1947 and 1953. And from 1953, UG interacted with JK at a personal level, holding long conversations with him on several occasions. During that time, JK also met UG's wife and their children, and took a particular interest in the health of UG's eldest son, Vasant, who had been struck with polio.
JK was fifty-eight years old then, and UG running thirty-five. The relationship between UG and Krishnaji cannot exactly be categorized as one between a guru and a disciple, nor as one between two antagonists or rival gurus. But what comes through is that right from the beginning UG seemed to have had problems with JK's image as the World Teacher and his teachings. Often UG would react critically, harshly and scathingly against Krishnaji, exploding with fury like the mythical Shiva in a state of wrath, while Krishnaji would always behave like an English gentleman. But there is no denying the fact that Krishnaji and his teaching had had a great impact on UG, even if, gradually and progressively, he was to reject it all at the end.
Yet, every year for seven years, UG listened to Krishnaji, despite his doubts and troubles with Krishnaji's ideas and ‘insights’. There really was something to JK's teachings, yet he felt that they were somehow not true to his own experience, that they were falsifying him. But he was not sure of himself; he was not certain yet if what he had come upon by and for himself was true either. He lacked clarity and conviction; also, there were too many doubts and questions, all of which were to dissolve and disappear in the heat of the explosive experience, or what UG would call the ‘calamity’, in 1967.
In 1953, UG planned to go to the USA to get medical treatment for his son, Vasant. On hearing about it, JK offered to try his hand at curing Vasant. On a few occasions, JK had had used his healing hands and is believed to have cured people of what were then considered to be almost incurable ailments. UG was sceptical, and he warned, ‘I did hear a lot about your healing work. It doesn't work in this case. The cells in the boy's legs are dead.’ Yet, in deference to his wife's wishes, he relented. But JK's healing technique of massaging the boy's legs did not improve the boy's condition. After the experiment failed, UG left for America with his wife and son in 1955, leaving behind their two daughters in the care of Kusuma Kumari's elder sister.
It was indeed, both politically and culturally, an interesting period to be in America. But to UG, America was like a transit camp, a sort of preparatory ground before stripping himself of everything and going adrift in Europe. Meanwhile he tried to be a good father and make himself useful.
The money he had taken with him to the USA was just enough to meet the expenses of his son's medical treatment. But it was worth it, thought UG, for his son couldn't have received better treatment anywhere else. The doctors assured him that Vasant would be able to walk in a year's time. It meant they had to stay in the USA for another year, perhaps longer; so, with his resources diminishing fast, UG had to do something to earn some money. He took up what he was best at – lecturing. Unlike in India where his lectures had been for free, here he was paid one hundred dollars per lecture. He now even had a manager to arrange his lectures.
Vasant's condition did improve considerably with the medical treatment, and he was able to walk, dragging his diseased foot, without using crutches. UG continued to lecture in different parts of America, including four notable lectures on the major religions of the world, at the University of St Louis in Washington State.
On UG's home front at that time, however, there was no major change. His relationship with his wife was as good as it could be between the likes of him and Kusuma Kumari. With all his eccentricities and his spiritual quest, UG was not a bad husband and father. Kusuma Kumari, of course, always remained a devoted wife and mother. The only major problem that erupted now and then in the family was regarding money. UG was never good at managing his financial affairs or in handling money.
He gave around sixty lectures a year and at the end of the second year, he not only felt exhausted but also quite depressed with the whole lecturing business. Two incidents stand out during this period. A couple of days after his lecture on ‘The Meaning and Mystery of Pain’, he was laid up with mumps. The discomfort was quite unbearable and the pain almost too excruciating, yet he refused to see a doctor. As always he was overcome by a terrific curiosity to see into the structure of pain, as it were; after all, just a couple of days ago, he had given a lecture on the meaning and mystery of pain. This sort of curiosity would again and again drive him to probe and experiment with himself to find things out for himself, the same curiosity that had years ago made him eat grass during his tapas in the caves of Rishikesh, if only to find out whether he could survive on it. The pain, however, became unbearable and he lost consciousness. The story goes that he was rushed to a nearby hospital, but the doctors were not too sure as to the type of treatment he required. He lay there on the hospital bed, his body turning cold, and it seemed he was on the verge of death. Half an hour passed, and then suddenly he regained consciousness. He felt no pain or discomfort now; the body had cured itself of the illness!
A year after this, he began to lose interest in lecturing and began to wonder if there could be some other way of earning his livelihood. His manager, Erma, was shocked. He had become a celebrity of sorts and was in demand everywhere, and there was of course good money to take home after every lecture. But UG refused; suddenly, he no longer had the will to work.
Now the onus of earning money for the family fell on Kusuma Kumari. Since she had degrees both in English and Sanskrit, she found a job as a research assistant with the World Book Encyclopaedia. At the time Kusuma Kumari was pregnant with their fourth child, and she was not exactly happy about going out to work for a living. But there was no choice. Her initial fascination with the American lifestyle was gone. In fact, coming from a traditional Indian background, despite her degree in English, she found it difficult to relate to Americans, who to her seemed distant, queer and somewhat intimidating. Now, working with them only added to her misery. Yet, she carried on stoically, and sometimes she would bring her work home. She was required to make notes and answer queries on several aspects of Indian cultural and religious practices. UG, although not a ‘good husband’ in a traditional way, did help her out in her research work, reading the necessary books and answering these queries for her.
UG now stayed home, attending to the household chores and the needs of their handicapped son, Vasant. Friends would drop in at UG's place and hold discussions with him for hours on theosophy and Indian philosophy. After the birth of their fourth child, Kumar (1958), when Kusuma Kumari resumed work, UG did the babysitting.
After working for about two years, Kusuma Kumari quit her job in frustration and decided to leave America. The thought of her two daughters, who had been left in the care of her elder sister in India, troubled her all the time. And now, with her fourth child growing up in an ‘alien country’, without the benefit of the love and care of the elders and family members, and with no big change in the condition of Vasant, she worried about the future of her two sons. And to make matters worse, her husband was no longer the man she was married to seventeen years ago. He had changed and changed drastically and now he lived like a stranger at home.
The inevitable happened at the end of the year 1959. Kusuma Kumari decided to leave America with her two sons, even if it meant leaving without her husband. Her imploring that he too must return with them to India had no impact on UG. He bought her the tickets and handed over all of the money that was left with him. Kusuma Kumari and her two sons flew to Madras, and then, somewhere on the way to Pulla, in the train, she lost the box that contained UG's books, documents and almost all the letters he had received from important people. It was as if all of UG's past was being systematically erased, and his return made impossible.
Now, with his wife gone back to India, if UG wanted to stay on in the country, he needed sponsorship. The problem was solved when the World University offered him a job. He had been recognized not only as a brilliant speaker, but also as one with a brilliant and well-informed mind. His talents were found to be useful by the university which had planned to open hostels for its students in several parts of the world. UG had no choice; he accepted the offer and made his first trip to India.
When UG first came to Madras to ‘wind up’ his ‘show’ at Adyar, Kusuma Kumari met him and tried to persuade him to join the family. It was to be UG's last meeting with his wife. She had brought all her children with the hope that UG would, at least for the sake of his children, change his mind. But he was hard as stone; there was no going back. He was finished with his past.
A month later, UG went to Russia, and from there flew to some of the Central European countries he had not visited before. It seems he was getting fed up with his work, and visited various cities in Central Europe, not to do ‘business’, but as a tourist, as one eager to touch and know every important place on the world map. Actually, he had begun to drift. And when finally he landed in London, he was almost finished!
In London, UG began to aimlessly wander about like one who had lost his head. Some describe UG's phase in London as ‘the dark night of the soul’. UG disagrees, and most vehemently says that there was ‘no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling with urges, no poetic climaxes, but just a simple withering away of the will’.
His ‘will’ beginning to crack, when UG arrived in England, the winter had set in. With whatever money he had been left with he managed to find a place in Kedagin Square Apartments on Knight Bridge Road. During the day, to escape from the shivering cold and the boredom of staring at the four walls of his room, he would slip into the British Museum and spend the whole day sitting at the table next to the one where Marx had done his research for Das Kapital. UG was, of course, not interested in doing any research or reading books. He had in fact stopped reading books on philosophy and religion some years ago. Yet, to pretend that he was there to read something, he would pick up a thesaurus of ‘Underground Slang’ and immerse himself in it for several hours.
In the evenings, he would aimlessly wander the streets of London, reading signboards and the names and telephone numbers of the London call girls written or pasted on the walls, on telephone booths and even on trees.
Winter receded; the air grew warm and the day bright. The summer began and suddenly London had come alive. But nothing helped UG. Nothing changed. To make things worse he was running out of money.
Still, if only to somehow keep himself going, he had to do something. So, whenever an opportunity came his way, he started doing palm-reading for the immigrants (mostly from India and Pakistan), and at times, even giving cooking lessons for a fee. He could have, of course, managed to live on ‘the unemployment dole’, but he didn't. It was a desperate situation. And he couldn't help asking himself why he had become ‘a bum living on the charity of people’. It was quite insane! But he seemed to lack the will even to think of an alternative. He just let himself be blown like a leaf ‘here, there and everywhere’.
It was around this time that his wife died in India, the news of which reached UG almost six months late. There was nothing he could do except write to his children expressing his sympathy over the irreparable loss of their mother.
And he drifted along, seeing and not seeing, hearing and not hearing, almost like one who had lost his head. At times, he felt tired, but no hunger. And one day, he realized he had only five pence left in his pocket. He was finished. There was no place to go and there seemed nothing he could do. But, as his luck would have it, help came to him in the form of Swami Ghanananda, the head of the Ramakrishna Mission in London. It was during this time certain changes began to appear in UG's body. In 1953, he had brushed aside the mystical experiences he had undergone in the caves of Rishikesh and his ‘near-death experience’ at Adyar as of no great consequence. But now, it seems that all these experiences were to converge and build up as it were, and steadily begin to alter his being. From the traditional Hindu perspective it may be interpreted as the awakening of Kundalini energy, the ‘serpent power’. One day, while sitting in the meditation room of the Ramakrishna mission, he came upon the following experience. It was only the beginning. In his own words:
I was sitting doing nothing, looking at all those people, pitying them. These people are meditating. Why do they want to go in for samadhi? They are not going to get anything – have been through all that – they are kidding themselves. What can I do to save them from wasting all their lives, doing all that kind of thing? It is not going to lead them anywhere. I was sitting there and in my mind there was nothing – there was only blankness – when I felt something very strange: there was some kind of movement inside of my body. Some energy was coming up and out through the head, as if there was a hole. It was moving in circles in a clockwise direction and then in a counter clockwise direction. It was like the Wills cigarette advertisement at the airport. It was such a funny thing for me. But I didn't relate it to anything at all. I was a finished man. Somebody was feeding me, somebody was taking care of me, there was no thought of the morrow. Yet inside of me something was happening....
Indeed, the ‘new man’ was in the making, it was as if he was programmed for it from birth, or some mysterious force was slowly but surely leading him to it. But it was not going to be what he had imagined or thought it would be like. And that is the most mind-boggling, most enigmatic, part of his story.
In any case, his stay in London was over. He quit Ramakrishna Mission, moved on and landed up in Paris. He turned in his airline ticket to India and made a handy 350 dollars. For another three months he let his hair down and stayed at a hotel in Paris. And as he had done before in London, he wandered the streets of Paris and lived on varieties of French cheese, a habit that continues to this day, though it is in very small quantities now.
And again, as it happened in London, at the end of three months he ran out of money. There were no immigrants from India here for him to give cooking lessons to and make some money on the side, and no friends to approach for help either. However, with whatever little money he could scrape up, UG took a chance and reached Geneva. Again, like an amnesaic, he took a room in a hotel, and started wandering about.
Two weeks passed and yet again he found himself without money even to buy his meals, let alone pay the hotel bills. He had reached the end of his tether and there seemed no way out except going to the Indian consulate and requesting the authorities there to send him back to India.
Fortunately, he still had his scrapbook with him which saved him from being thrown out of the consulate. Reading through the praises heaped on UG by the American press, which included the high opinions of the notable Norman Cousins, and Dr S. Radhakrishnan, who was at the time the Indian ambassador to Russia, the vice-consul was quite impressed. But he was helpless, since UG could not be flown back to India at the expense of the government. The only alternative was for UG to write to his people in India and get some money. At that time, the head of Sri Ramakrishna Mission in Geneva, Swami Nityabodhananda, happened to be there in the vice-consul's chamber. The swamiji straightaway offered UG 400 francs to clear all his bills, and then turning to the vice-consul, he advised him not to treat UG as an ordinary person and to see what best he could do to help him. It seems the ‘inscrutable power of Sri Ramakrishna’ had yet again come to the rescue of UG.
Among the staff of the consulate was a rather unusual woman, Valentine de Kerven. She was sixty-three years old then and UG was seventeen years younger than she. Something about UG touched a deep chord in her. Talking to him a little later, her impulse or sudden resolve to help this strange man from India only grew stronger; she told UG that she could arrange for his stay in Switzerland, and if he really didn't want to go back to India, he shouldn't. For UG it was like a new lease of life and he accepted the offer without a second thought. In point of fact, there was no choice and UG let himself flow with the tide.
A few months later, Valentine gave up her job and the two lived like friends who had been separated for ages but were now reunited on the cusp of a new age. The pension Valentine received was not large but was sufficient to take care of their household expenses and travel. Upon UG's suggestion, she sold almost all her jewellery and antique art pieces she had collected over the years and put the money in the bank. Later, Valentine also set up a separate fund for UG's travels.
Valentine took care of UG, but had no idea of what was to come. The next four years were relatively calm. With all the time in the world and no pressing tasks to attend to, UG and Valentine went travelling outside Geneva. For UG, the search had nearly come to an end. He ate, slept, read Time magazine, occasionally travelled, and went for long walks either alone or with Valentine. It was what may be called the period of ‘incubation’. The body was preparing itself for the ‘metamorphosis’ that would challenge the very foundation of human thought built over centuries.
Though all his search for truth, for moksha, was at an end and he was not seeking anything spiritual or mystical, strange, ‘funny’ things had started happening to him. If he rubbed his palms or any part of his body, there was a sparkle, like a phosphorous glow. And when he rolled on his bed with unbearable pain in his head, again there would be sparks. It was electricity. The body had become an electromagnetic field. And he started suffering from constant headaches or from what he calls ‘terrible pain in the brain’. But UG did not discuss what was happening to him with Valentine. However, with all these physical changes and bouts of severe headaches that went on for over three years, UG began to appear much younger than his age. In photographs of him taken at that time, he truly looks like a young man of eighteen or twenty. But this was to change and he would start ageing after the completion of his forty-ninth birthday.
Every summer JK came to Saanen to hold his talks and discussions. With the exception of a few occasions when UG was dragged to these talks by his friends, UG kept a respectful distance from JK and his admirers. But then it so happened that almost every evening, inquisitive seekers would drop in at the chalet (where UG was living) to chat with UG. The chat would invariably turn into a fierce conversation on spiritual matters and UG would debunk the many spiritual concepts thrown at him and generally tear apart JK's teachings. And then gradually even Krishnamurtiites started to drop in on UG; if some came out of sheer curiosity to see who the ‘other Krishnamurti’ was, the others came either to clarify their doubts or challenge UG with ideas gleaned from JK's talks. This was to become a pattern every summer. Even JK's close associates would sometimes amble into the chalet, if only to quench their curiosity, among them Madame Scaravelli and David Bohm. Some, after extended conversations with UG, were to turn their backs on JK and become UG's close friends.
With all this, ironic and even mysterious as it may seem, on 13 August 1967, UG was dragged to listen to JK's last talk of the summer. UG sat there, under the huge tent, listening and not listening. At some point JK started saying: ‘... in that silence there is no mind; there is action...’
Stunned, UG listened, and suddenly it all seemed funny. JK was actually describing his state of being! How could that be? But it was true. So, ‘I am in that state!’ UG thought to himself. If that was so, then what the hell had he been doing all these thirty-odd years, listening to all these people, struggling, wanting to attain the state of Jesus, of Buddha, when in fact he had already been there! ‘So I am in that state’; the self-assertion, along with a sense of huge wonder, continued for a while. And then it suddenly seemed ridiculous to sit there listening to JK's description of his state of being. He got up and walked out of the tent. But he was not finished. He was in that state, certainly – state of the Buddha and all the enlightened masters. But what exactly was that state? The next moment the question transformed itself into yet another question: ‘How do I know that I am in that state?’ The question burned through him like a maddening fury. ‘How do I know I am in that state of the Buddha, the state I very much wanted and demanded from everybody? How do I know?’
The next day, still consumed by the question burning through his whole body as it were, he sat on a little wooden bench under a wild chestnut tree overlooking Saanenland with its seven hills and seven valleys bathed in blue light. The question persisted; the whole of his being was possessed by that single question: ‘How do I know?’ In other words, he had become the question. And it went on thus: ‘How do I know that I am in that state? There is some kind of peculiar division inside of me: there is somebody who knows that he is in that state. The knowledge of that state – what I have read, what I have experienced, what they have talked about – it is this knowledge that is looking at that state, so it is only this knowledge that has projected that state. I said to myself: “Look here, old chap, after forty years you have not moved one step; you are there in square number one. It is the same knowledge that projected that state there when you asked this question. You are in the same situation asking the same question, how do I know? Because it is this knowledge, the description of the state by those people, that has created this state for you. You are kidding yourself. You are a damned fool.” But still there was some kind of a peculiar feeling that this was the state. And yet again the question “How do I know that this is the state?” – I didn't have any answer for that question – it was like a question in a whirlpool – it went on and on and on...’
Then suddenly the question disappeared. He was finished truly and wholly. It was not emptiness, it was not blankness, it was not the void of Buddhism, and it was not the state that all the enlightened persons were supposed to be in. The question just disappeared.
The disappearance of the question marked the extinction of thought – thought crystallized and strengthened over centuries by cultures and religions. The ‘I’ linking up the thoughts, ‘the psychic coordinator collating, comparing and matching all the sensory input so that it could use the body and its relation for its own separative continuity’ was suddenly gone. Now, the link broken, the continuity of thought snapped, exploded, releasing tremendous energy: repairing, cleansing, invigorating, cathartic...
UG deliberately calls it a calamity for he doesn't want people, particularly the religious kind, to interpret it as something blissful, full of beatitude, love, ecstasy, or even as ‘Enlightenment’. No. It is physical, physiological; a torture. It is a calamity from that point of view.
For the next seven days, seven bewildering changes took place and catapulted him into what he calls the ‘Natural State’. It took another six months for the whole painful process to disappear altogether.
It was a cellular revolution, a full-scale biological mutation. It was the birth of the ‘individual’ in the natural state.
– –
Towards the end of 1967, UG visited Sringeri in Karnataka and happened to meet the Sankaracharya of Sringeri. Upon hearing of the bewildering physical changes come upon UG, the Sankaracharya, Sri Abhinava Vidya Tirtha Swami, had no doubt that UG was a jivanmukta and he is believed to have said, ‘I don't know of these things in my own personal experience.... It is very rare that the body survives the shock of such a thoughtless state. According to the scriptures, within three days or seventy-two hours after such an event the body dies. If the body could sustain its vital force and not die off, it must surely be for the sake of saving humanity.’
UG did not think he was a saviour. What had happened to him was not something he had sought, and it had happened despite all his search and sadhana. Now he just wished to stay put in some quiet place and let things be. The peaceful environs of Sringeri, on the banks of the Tunga River, seemed an appropriate place for him to retire. He listened silently to the swamiji for some time and then quietly broached the subject of his retirement. The Sankaracharya is reported to have said, ‘I will be responsible for getting you any place around here, if you so wish. But your idea of living alone will never work. Whether you stay in a jungle or in a mountain cave, people won't stop coming to see you.’
It was truly said. One could not hide a sun, nor could the sun choose to go incognito. UG abandoned his resolve to stay away from people. But the question remained: ‘What is there to say after a thing like this?’ Days passed, and then suddenly it occurred to him:
‘I will say it exactly the way it is.’
UG gave his first public talk at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore, in the month of May 1972. He never again gave any public talk, nor would he accept invitations to speak at universities or institutions. But he could not stop people from meeting and talking to him. He responded to their queries and answered their questions in the way only he could. During his lifetime, UG travelled to practically every country in the world. And this man with ‘no message’, ‘no teaching’ probably met and talked to more people than can be counted.
UG usually stayed with friends or in small rented apartments, but never in one place for more than six months. He gave no lectures or discourses. He had no organization, no office, no secretary, and no fixed address. Despite his endless repetition that he had ‘no message for mankind’, ironically, yet also naturally, thousands of people the world over felt otherwise and flocked to see and listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. The ‘shop’ was kept open from early morning to late evening for people to feel free to come without any prior appointment, and feel free to go whenever they wanted. ‘This is how it should be. There should be no special duration, prior appointment, and such,’ UG said, and his hosts everywhere maintained the rule without fail.
Wherever he went and stayed, people met him in increasing numbers. There was absolutely no restriction. People could walk in and walk out as in a shopping mall. But there were no wares sold in this shop. People were of course welcome to ask him questions, even questions they dare not ask their parents, their spouses or their intimate friends, let alone their gurus and intellectuals. ‘Why do you speak? Where do you get money to travel so much? What do you mean you are neither man nor woman? What is there in your pyjamas? What is love? Do you have sexual urges? Do you have dreams? Why do you criticize and condemn the spiritual gurus? What is moksha? Aren't you an enlightened man? What is your teaching? Do you have a message?’ And so on and on. And he answered them all in the way only he could, and in his own inimitable style.
He didn't preach, for there was nothing to preach, nothing there to be changed. The questions thrown at him were often shot down. It was like skeet shooting. As Jeffrey Masson (the author of Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst and several other popular works) rightly puts it, ‘...everything he says or does is the mirror-image of what a traditional guru does, in reverse. He discourages you from touching his feet, he questions, subverts and laughs at your so-called spiritual sadhanas, your great ideals, if you have any, and uses every trick possible to stop you speaking further and never go back to him again. If you find him rude, insulting and blasphemous and feel hurt, then you are lost, you have entirely missed the “point”, and missed the man. You go to him not to “receive” but to lose, to drop your heavy baggage of ideas, to free yourself from, if you can, non-existing gods and goals. He is a blaze that burns and explodes everything that falsifies the unitary movement of life.’
In the last few years UG had wanted to do something other than answer tiresome questions, for he found all questions (except in the technical area, which is something else) were variations of basically the same question revolving around the ideas of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. He would curtly yet simply say, ‘Becoming something other than what you are is the cause of your misery....You will remain a man of violence as long as you follow some idea of becoming....You can't divide these things into two. The process you adopt to reach what you call being is also a becoming process. You are always in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do about this. Anything you do to put yourself in that state of being is a becoming process. That is all that I am pointing out,’ and that left people with nothing to say.
The conversation comes to an end. He has spoken enough! He has said what he wanted to say a million times. There is utter silence. It is embarrassing; it is also a tremendous relief from the burden of knowing. And UG would start playing his enigmatic little ‘games’, or invite friends (all are friends, no disciples, no followers) to sing, to dance, and to share jokes. Now, either one drops ones questions and abandons one's ‘becoming’, or one gets up and leaves. The room explodes with laughter: funny, silly, dark, and apocalyptic! We all mock and laugh at everything, mock heroes and lovers, thinkers and politicians, scientists and thieves, kings and sages, including ourselves, at our own silly yet agonizing struggle for non-existent things. We convulse with laughter. And suddenly, it seems, at last we are delivered from the tyranny of knowledge, beauty, goodness, truth and God.
– –
Truly, there was no teaching. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in our way of life. What UG was saying, he insisted, was outside the field of teachability. In point of fact, there was no teacher, no taught and thereby no teaching. There was no symbolism, no metaphysics, no mysticism involved in his words. He meant what he said, literally. There was nothing new in the language of UG. He did not coin any new words like philosophers and scientists do; he used simple, commonplace words, free of metaphysical overtones and spiritual content, to describe life in pure and simple physical and physiological terms so that it was de-psychologized and demystified, and the implication of what came through is quite revolutionary, to say the least.
Generally, in his freewheeling chats he did two things:
First, in physical and physiological terms he described the way he, the body, was functioning. He called it the natural state. It is the state of ‘primordial awareness without primitivism’, or the ‘undivided state of consciousness’, where all desires and fear, and the search for happiness and pleasure, God and truth, have come to an end. He insisted that it is not the state of a God-realized man or ‘enlightenment’. It is not a state of bliss or supreme happiness either. There is only the throb, the pulse, the beat of life. There thoughts emerge in response to stimuli or a question, and then burn themselves up, releasing energy. There is no soul, no atman, only the body, and the body is immortal. It is an acausal state of ‘not-knowing’, of wonder. And this is the way you, UG stated, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning.
Second, he described the way we function, caught in a world of opposites, constantly struggling to become something other than what we are, and in search of non-existent gods and goals. How we all think and function in a ‘thought sphere’ just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. How and why we have no freedom of action, unless and until thought comes to an end – but then, it is not in the interest of thought to end itself. Thought is self-protective and fascist in nature, and it'll use every trick under the sun to give momentum to its own continuity. Thought controls, moulds, and shapes our ideas and actions.
Idea and action – they are one and the same. All our actions are born out of ideas. Our ideas are thoughts passed on to us from generation to generation. And this thought is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life around us. That is why we create all these ecological problems, problems of pollution, and the problem of possibly destroying ourselves with the most destructive weapons that we have invented. There is no way out. The planet is not in danger. We are in danger...
– –
Who is this UG? What is he? Is it possible to say anything and describe him without making any comparisons, without locating him or his utterances, in the realm of the ‘known’?
It is true that when UG rejects the notion of soul or atman and declares that our search for permanence is the cause of our suffering, he sounds like the Buddha; when he negates all concepts and knowledge systems including his own statements, we may recall the great Buddhist, Nagarjuna, who negated everything including his own act of negation; when he blasts all spiritual discourses as ‘poppycock’ and thrashes the spiritual masters as ‘misguided fools’, we may think of the fiery and abusive words of the great ninth-century mystic of China, Rinzai Gigen, who declared, ‘I have no dharma to give.... There is no Buddha, no dharma, no training and no realization.... If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ When he speaks of ‘affection’ as ‘thuds’ felt in the spot where the thymus gland is located, we may relate it to Sri Ramana's declaration that the ‘true heart’ is located on the right side of the chest; and when he speaks of ‘wonder’ and the state of ‘not knowing’ we may wonder if this is what the Mother (of Pondicherry) tried to describe in her report of the bodily changes she had experienced between 1962 and 1973. Likewise we may connect some of his radical statements to certain expressions or declarations in the Avadhuta Gita, Ashtavakra Gita, the Upanishads and Zen koans, or compare them with the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj and even the postmodern ‘deconstructionists’. Or, persons grounded in nuclear physics may find similarities or parallels between UG's statements and the observations made in quantum physics. We could go on making such connections and comparisons but still it doesn't help us to get a handle on the mystery that is UG.
Of course, UG warns us against relating, for instance, his statements about time and space, order and chaos, birth and death to the observations made by scientists since, according to him, they are mere concepts to them and ‘they are observing certain things only through the mirror of their own thinking. The scientist is influencing what he is looking at. Whatever theories he comes up with are only theories; they are not facts to him.’ And as regards the past spiritual masters he said most emphatically, ‘I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. Do not compare what I am saying with what he, or other religious authorities, has said. If you give what I am saying any spiritual overtones, any religious flavour at all, you are missing the point.’
Does it mean that UG is utterly unique, without a parallel in the history of humankind, or that we should just listen to the utterly new and cathartic voice of the ‘natural state’ and not put whatever he says in any particular frame whether traditional or modern? How then can one understand his admonitions, his mind-boggling statements? Indeed, how is the problem and the beginning of mischief, since it throws us back into the old ‘frames’ of traditional discourses. Yet, we cannot help but ask questions. We cannot but respond to the challenge, albeit cautiously and without putting this ‘wild bird in constant flight’ into a cage, or on a pedestal.
Now, what does it mean to have a body that is in tune with the cosmos and be affected by whatever is happening in nature? What does it mean to be in a ‘declutched state’ or ‘state of not knowing’, or to feel all sounds emerging from within and have no sense of division at all? Was UG in the state of ‘primordial awareness’; was he the end result of the evolutionary process? Is this what the spiritual masters of the past hinted at but could not clearly articulate in the limited vocabulary of their times? Is this what the mystics and the religious gurus speculated about, but erred in institutionalizing the ‘teachings’, in building knowledge systems and inventing methods to reach it? Is then ‘liberation’ all about reactivation of the thymus, pituitary and pineal glands? Is it a biological mutation? In short, is ‘enlightenment’ physical after all? Truly, UG brought something utterly new and revolutionary into the world, into our consciousness, the implication and impact of which cannot be known today. His is the voice that is at once explosive, subversive and cathartic. In ‘bits and pieces’ we may yet find echoes of his voice in the teachings of the past masters. Perhaps we can say there was a need for the masters and they came in answer to the anguish and cries of their times, and marked a leap in human consciousness and the emergence of new ways of being and doing things. They have served their purpose and are gone. Period. Newton has to give way to Einstein and of course Einstein is not the last word in physics. That is not to say we must forget Newton or the past masters. Our learning can never stop. But there's no need to continue to build temples and set up organizations for them, and look upon them as perfect models. As UG would say, ‘There is no point in reviving all those things and starting revivalistic movements.
That is dead, finished.... All of them have totally failed. Otherwise we wouldn't be where we are today. If there is anything to their claims, we would have created a better and happier world.... We are partly responsible for this situation because we want to be victimized by them. What is the point in blaming those people?
There is no point in blaming ourselves either because it is a two-way game: we play the game and they play the game. But... you can't come into your own being until you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of self. To be really on your own, the whole basis of spiritual life, which is erroneous, has to be destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books like a bunch of drunks. It is not that at all...’
Of course that is not the way. We cannot destroy the past, for, we are the past. But we can refuse to be victims and stop playing games with ourselves. Religions have failed to solve our problems, and politics, that ‘warty outgrowth of religious thinking’, hasn't done better. Our problem lies in our solutions. No wonder UG challenged the very foundation of our cultures, and in particular, our so-called spiritual practices of ‘awakening’. Now, in the light of what UG says, can we really critically re-examine our past, de-psychologize and demystify our religious discourses and political culture, and possibly put ourselves on a different track wherein the search and struggle for non-existent gods and goals have come to an end?
The following excerpt is from the discussion UG had with the doctors and psychologists from NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Bangalore) and intellectuals who met him in Bangalore in the year 1976. Here, in this report, he is referring to his experiences in Gstaad (1967–1970), while he was staying with Valentine.
There was no search in me, no seeking after something, but something funny was going on …
During that time (I call it the ‘incubation’) all kinds of things were happening to me inside – headaches, constant headaches, terrible pains here in the brain. I swallowed I don't know how many tens of thousands of aspirins. Nothing gave me relief. It was not migraine or any of those known headaches, but tremendous headaches. Those aspirin pills and fifteen to twenty cups of coffee every day to free myself! One day Valentine said, ‘What! You are taking fifteen cups of coffee every day. Do you know what it means in terms of money? It is three or four hundred francs per month. What is this?’ Anyway, it was such a terrible thing for me.
All kinds of funny things happened to me. I remember when I rubbed my body like this, there was a sparkle, like a phosphorous glow, on the body. She used to run out of her bedroom to see – she thought there were cars going that way in the middle of the night. Every time I rolled in my bed there was a sparkling of light, [laughs] and it was so funny for me – ‘What is this?’ It was electricity – that is why I say it is an electromagnetic field. At first I thought it was because of my nylon clothes and static electricity; but then I stopped using nylon. I was a very sceptical heretic, to the tips of my toes; I never believed in anything; even if I saw some miracle happen before me, I didn't accept that at all – such was the make-up of this man. It never occurred to me that anything of that sort was in the making for me.
Very strange things happened to me, but I never related those things to liberation or freedom or moksha, because by that time the whole thing had gone out of my system. I had arrived at a point where I said to myself, ‘Buddha deluded himself and deluded others. All those teachers and saviours of mankind were damned fools – they fooled themselves – so I'm not interested in this kind of thing anymore,’ so it went out of my system completely. It went on and on in its own way – peculiar things – but never did I say to myself, ‘Well, [laughs] I am getting there, I am nearer to that.’ There is no nearness to that, there is no farawayness from that, there is no closeness to that. Nobody is nearer to that because he is different, he is prepared. There's no readiness for that; it just hits you like a ton of bricks.
Then [April 1967] I happened to be in Paris when J. Krishnamurti also happened to be there. Some of my friends suggested ‘Why don't you go and listen to your old friend? He is here giving a talk.’ All right, I said, I haven't heard him for so many years – almost twenty years – let me go and listen. When I got there they demanded two francs from me. I said, ‘I am not ready to pay two francs to listen to J. Krishnamurti. No, come on, let us go and do something foolish. Let's go to a striptease joint, the Folies Bergere or the Casino de Paris. Come on, let us go there for twenty francs.’ So, there we were at the Casino de Paris watching the show. I had a very strange experience at that time: I didn't know whether I was the dancer or whether there was some other dancer dancing on the stage. A very strange experience for me: a peculiar kind of movement, here, inside of me (this is now something natural for me). There was no division: there was nobody who was looking at the dancer. The question of whether I was the dancer, or whether there was a dancer out there on the stage, puzzled me. This kind of peculiar experience of the absence of division between me and the dancer, puzzled me and bothered me for some time – then we came out.
The question ‘What is that state?’ had a tremendous intensity for me – not an emotional intensity – the more I tried to find an answer, the more I failed to find an answer, the more intensity the question had. It’s like (I always give this simile) rice chaff. If a heap of rice chaff is ignited, it continues burning inside; you don't see any fire outside, but when you touch it, it burns you of course. In exactly the same way the question was going on and on and on: ‘What is that state? I want it. Finished. Krishnamurti said, “You have no way,” but still I want to know what that state is, the state in which Buddha was, Sankara was, and all those teachers were.
Then [July 1967] there arrived another phase. Krishnamurti was again there in Saanen giving talks. My friends dragged me there and said, ‘Now at least it is a free business. Why don't you come and listen?’ I said, ‘All right, I'll come and listen.’ When I listened to him, something funny happened to me – a peculiar kind of feeling that he was describing my state and not his state. Why did I want to know his state? He was describing something, some movements, some awareness, some silence. ‘In that silence there is no mind; there is action’ – all kinds of things. So I told myself, ‘I am in that state. What the hell have I been doing these thirty or forty years, listening to all these people and struggling, wanting to understand his state or the state of somebody else, Buddha or Jesus? I am in that state. Now I am in that state.’ So, then I walked out of the tent and never looked back.
Then – very strange – that question ‘What is that state?’ transformed itself into another question: ‘How do I know that I am in that state, the state of Buddha, the state I very much wanted and demanded from everybody? I am in that state, but how do I know?’ The next day [UG's forty-ninth birthday] I was sitting on a bench under a tree overlooking one of the most beautiful spots in the whole world, the seven hills and seven valleys [of Saanenland]. I was sitting there. Not that the question was there; the whole of my being was that question: ‘How do I know that I am in that state?’ There is some kind of peculiar division inside of me: there is somebody who knows that he is in that state. The knowledge of that state – what I have read, what I have experienced, what they have talked about – it is this knowledge that is looking at that state, so it is only this knowledge that has projected that state. I said to myself: Look here, old chap, after forty years you have not moved one step; you are there in square number one. It is the same knowledge that projected your mind there when you asked this question. You are in the same situation asking the same question, “How do I know?” because it is this knowledge, the description of the state by those people, that has created this state for you. You are kidding yourself. You are a damned fool.’ So, nothing. But still there was some kind of a peculiar feeling that this was the state.
The second question ‘How do I know that this is the state?’ – I didn't have any answer for that question – it was like a question in a whirlpool – it went on and on and on. Then suddenly the question disappeared. Nothing happened; the question just disappeared. I didn't say to myself, ‘Oh, my God! Now I have found the answer.’ Even that state disappeared – the state I thought I was in, the state of Buddha, Jesus – even that has disappeared. The question has disappeared. The whole thing is finished for me, and that's all, you see. From then on, never did I say to myself, ‘Now I have the answer to all those questions.’ That state of which I had said ‘This is the state’ – that state disappeared. The question disappeared. Finished, you see. It is not emptiness, it is not blankness, it is not the void, it is not any of those things; the question disappeared suddenly, and that is all.
Then thought cannot link up. The linking gets broken, and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes; every time a thought arises, it explodes. So, this continuity comes to an end, and thought falls into its natural rhythm.
Since then I have no questions of any kind, because the questions cannot stay there any more. The only questions I have are very simple questions (‘How do I go to Hyderabad?’ for example) to function in this world – and people have answers for these questions. For those questions, nobody has any answers – so there are no questions any more.
Everything in the head has tightened – there was no room for anything there inside of my brain. For the first time I became conscious of my head with everything ‘tight’ inside of it. So, these vasanas [past desires] or whatever you call them – they do try to show their heads sometimes, but then the brain cells are so ‘tight’ that it has no opportunity to fool around there any more. The division cannot stay there – it's a physical impossibility; you don't have to do a thing about it, you see. That is why I say that when this ‘explosion’ takes place (I use the word ‘explosion’ because it's like a nuclear explosion) it leaves behind chain reactions. Every cell in your body, the cells in the very marrow of your bones, have to undergo this ‘change’ – I don't want to use that word – it's an irreversible change. There's no question of your going back. There's no question of a ‘fall’ for this man at all. Irreversible: an alchemy of some sort.
It is like a nuclear explosion, you see – it shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing; it is the end of the man – such a shattering thing that it blasts every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment. Not that you experience the ‘explosion’; you can't experience the ‘explosion’ – but it's after-effects, the ‘fallout’, is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body.
– –
The natural state
This state is a physical condition of your being. It is not some kind of psychological mutation. It is not a state of mind into which you can fall one day, and out of it the next day. 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. Coming into your natural state will blast every cell, every gland, every nerve. It is a chemical change. An alchemy of some sort takes place. But this state has nothing to do with the experiences of chemical drugs such as LSD. Those are experiences; this is not.
– –
This state is a state of not knowing; you really don't know what you are looking at. I may look at the clock on the wall for half an hour – still I do not read the time. I don't know it is a clock. All there is inside is wonderment: ‘What is this that I am looking at?’ Not that the question actually phrases itself like that in words: the whole of my being is like a single, big question mark. It is a state of wonder, of wondering, because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it – all that I have learned – is held in the background unless there is a demand. It is in the ‘declutched state’. If you ask the time, I will say ‘It's a quarter past three’ or whatever – it comes quickly like an arrow – then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.
– –
You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always there within you, that is your natural state. Your trying to create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance within you. You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind and say to yourself that you are very peaceful – but that is not peace; that is violence. So there is no use in practising peace, there is no reason to practise silence. Real silence is explosive; it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. ‘Oh, I am at peace with myself! There is silence, a tremendous silence! I experience silence!’ – that doesn't mean anything at all. This is volcanic in its nature: it's bubbling all the time – the energy, the life – that is its quality. You may ask how I know. I don't know. Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way – it is conscious of itself.
– –
When I talk of ‘feeling’, I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breastbone. The doctors tell us that it is active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is reactivated. 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 – ‘I am that flying bird.’ 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.
– –
Is there in you an entity which you call the ‘I’ or the ‘mind’ or the ‘self’? Is there a coordinator who is coordinating what you are looking at with what you are listening to, what you are smelling with what you are tasting, and so on? Or is there anything which links together the various sensations originating from a single sense – the flow of impulses from the eyes, for example? Actually, there is always a gap between any two sensations. The coordinator bridges that gap: he establishes himself as an illusion of continuity.
In the natural state there is no entity who is coordinating the messages from the different senses. Each sense is functioning independently in its own way. When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to coordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a response, still there is no coordinator, but there is a temporary state of coordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart – not that it was ever there; but the illusory continuity – it's finished once and for all.
Can this make any sense to you? It cannot. All that you know lies within the framework of your experience, which is of thought. This state is not an experience. I am only trying to give you a ‘feel’ of it, which is, unfortunately, misleading.
When there is no coordinator, there is no linking of sensations, there is no translating of sensations; they stay pure and simple sensations. I do not even know that they are sensations. I may look at you as you are talking. The eyes will focus on your mouth because that is what is moving, and the ears will receive the sound vibrations. There is nothing inside which links up the two and says that it is you talking. I may be looking at a spring bubbling out of the earth and hear the water, but there is nothing to say that the noise being heard is the sound of water, or that that sound is in any way connected with what I am seeing. I may be looking at my foot, but nothing says that this is my foot. When I am walking, I see my feet moving – it is such a funny thing: ‘What is that which is moving?’
What functions is a primordial consciousness, untouched by thought.
– –
The eyes are like a very sensitive camera. The physiologists say that light reflected off objects strikes the retina of the eye and the sensation goes through the optic nerve to the brain. The faculty of sight, of seeing, is simply a physical phenomenon. It makes no difference to the eyes whether they are focused on a snow-capped mountain or on a garbage can, they produce sensations in exactly the same way. The eyes look on everyone and everything without discrimination.
You have a feeling that there is a ‘cameraman’ who is directing the eyes. But left to themselves, when there is no ‘cameraman’, the eyes do not linger but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness or a colour which stands out from whatever is around it. There is no ‘I’ looking – mountains, flowers, trees, cows, all look at me. The consciousness is like a mirror, reflecting whatever is there outside. The depth, the distance, the colour, everything is there, but there is nobody who is translating these things. Unless there is a demand for knowledge about what I am looking at, there is no separation, no distance from what is there. It may not actually be possible to count the hairs on the head of someone sitting across the room, but there is a kind of clarity which seems as if I could.
The eyes do not blink, except when there is sudden danger – this is something very natural because the things outside are demanding attention all the time. Then, when the eyes are tired, a built-in mechanism in the body cuts them out – they may be open, but they are blurred. But if the eyes stay open all the time, if the reflex action of blinking is not operating, they become dry and you will go blind; so there are some glands beyond the outer corners of the eyes, which are not activated in your case, which act as a watering mechanism. Tears flow all the time from the outer corners. Ignorant people have described them as ‘tears of joy’ or ‘tears of bliss’. There is nothing divine about them. By practising not blinking, one will not arrive in this state; one will only strain the eyes. And there are neurotics in mental hospitals whose eyes do not blink for one reason or another – for them it is a pathological condition. But once you are in your natural state, by some luck or strange chance, all this happens in its own way.
– –
The personality does not change when you come into this state. You are, after all, a computer machine, which reacts as it has been programmed. It is in fact your present effort to change yourself that is taking you away from yourself and keeping you from functioning in the natural way. The personality will remain the same. Don't expect such a man to become free from anger or idiosyncrasies. Don't expect some kind of spiritual humility. Such a man may be the most arrogant person you have ever met, because he is touching life at a unique place where no man has touched before.
It is for this reason that each person who comes into this state expresses it in a unique way, in terms relevant to his time. It is also for this reason that if two or more people are living in this state at the same time, they will never get together. They won’t dance in the streets hand in hand: ‘We are all self-realized men! We belong!’
– –
There must be a living contact. If you walk out of the room, you disappear from my consciousness. Where you are, or why you are not here – these questions do not arise. There are no images here – there is no room for them – the sensory apparatus is completely occupied with the things I am looking at now. There must be a living contact with those things that are in the room, not thoughts about things that are not here. And so, if you are totally ‘tuned in’ to the sensory activity, there is no room for fears about who will feed you tomorrow, or for speculation about God, Truth and Reality.
This is not a state of omniscience, wherein all of man's eternal questions are answered, rather it is a state in which the questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for those questions.
– –
My body exists for other people, it does not exist for me. There are only isolated points of contact, impulses of touch which are not tied together by thought. So the body is not different from the objects around it, it is a set of sensations like any other. Your body does not belong to you.
Perhaps I can give you the ‘feel’ of this. I sleep four hours at night, no matter what time I go to bed. Then I lie in bed until morning fully awake. I don’t know what is lying there in the bed. I don't know whether I am lying on my left side or my right side – for hours and hours I lie like this. If there is any noise outside – a bird or something – it just echoes in me. I listen to the ‘flub-dub-flub-dub’ of my heart and don't know what it is. There is nobody between the two sheets – the form of the body is not there. If the question is asked, ‘What is in there?’ there is only an awareness of the points of contact, where the body is in contact with the bed and the sheets, and where it is in contact with itself, at the crossing of the legs, for example. There are only the sensations of touch from these points of contact, and the rest of the body is not there. There is some kind of heaviness, probably the gravitational pull, something very vague. There is nothing inside which links up these things. Even if the eyes are open and looking at the whole body, there are still only the points of contact, and they have no connection with what I am looking at. If I want to try to link up these points of contact into the shape of my own body, probably I will succeed, but by the time it is completed the body is back in the same situation of different points of contact. The linkage cannot stay. It is the same sort of thing when I’m sitting or standing. There is no body.
– –
The body has an extraordinary mechanism for renewing itself. 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 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 Chinese Tai 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.
– –
My talking comes out in response to the questions which are asked. I cannot sit and give a talk on the natural state – that is an artificial situation for me. There is nobody who is thinking thoughts and then coming out with answers. When you throw a ball at me, the ball bounces back, and that is what you call an ‘answer’. But I don't give any answers, this state is expressing itself. I really don't know what I'm saying, and what I'm saying is of no importance. You may transcribe my own talking, but it will make no sense to me, it is a dead thing.
What is here, this natural state, is a living thing. It cannot be captured by me, let alone by you. It's like a flower. This simile is all I can give. It just blooms. It's there. As long as it is there, it has a fragrance which is different and distinct from that of every other flower. You may not recognize it. You may or may not write odes or sonnets about it. A wandering cow might eat it, or it may be chopped down by a hay cutter, or it fades and is finished, that's the end of it. It's of no importance. You can’t preserve its perfume. Whatever you preserve of this is only a synthetic, a chemical perfume, not the living thing. Preserving the expressions, teachings or words of such a man has no meaning. This state has only contemporary value, contemporary expression.
– –
This state is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn't touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you,’ all of you – higher self, lower self, soul atman, conscious, subconscious, all of that. You come to a point, and then you say, ‘I need time.’ So sadhana comes into the picture and you say to yourself, ‘Tomorrow I will understand.’ This structure is born in time and functions in time, but does not come to an end through time. If you don't understand now, you are not going to understand tomorrow. What is there to understand? Why do you want to understand what I am saying? You can't understand what I am saying. It is an exercise in futility on your part to try to relate the description of how I am functioning to the way you are functioning. This is a thing which I cannot communicate. Nor is any communication necessary. No dialogue is possible. When the ‘you’ is not there, when the question is not there, what is is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.
What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state, it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence. Nobody need give it to you. Nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.
Why do I speak?
Why do I speak? Am I speaking? You know, it may sound very funny to you. I have nothing to say and what I am saying is not born out of my thinking. You may not accept this. But it is not a logically ascertained premise that I am putting across. It may sound very funny to you and you have put me in a very precarious position by asking me why I am talking. Am I talking? Really I am not, you see. There is nobody who is talking here. I use this simile of a ventriloquist. He is actually carrying on both sides of the dialogue but we attribute one side of it to the dummy in front of him. In exactly the same way, all your questions are born out of the answers you already have. Any answer anybody gives should put an end to your questions. But it does not. And we are not ready to accept the fact that all the questions are born out of the answers. If the questions go, the answers we take for granted also go with them. But we are not ready to throw the answers away because sentiment comes into the picture. The tremendous investment we have made and the faith we have in the teachers, are also at stake. Therefore, we are not ready to brush aside the answers.
Actually we do not want answers for our questions. The assumption that the questions are different from the questioner is also false. If the answer goes, the questioner also goes. The questioner is nothing but the answers. That is really the problem. We are not ready to accept this answer because it will put an end to the answers which we have accepted for ages as the real answers.
I am just singing my song; then I go. Whether someone listens to me or not it is not my concern. If nobody comes and talks it is alright with me. Believe me, my talking is only incidental. It is not aimed at liberating anyone. If you are not here it's all the same for me. I am not selling anything.
You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do but it is your doing not mine. I am not interested in anyone's search for happiness, romance or escape. There is no experience here. So how can there be these dramatic, crazy experiences? I have no way of separating myself from events. The event and I are one and the same. I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying. I have no claims.
You may very well ask why the hell I am still talking. I emphatically assure you that, in my case, it is not at all in the nature of self-fulfilment. My motive for talking is quite different from what you think it is. It is not that I am eager to help you understand or that I feel that I must help you, not at all. My motive is direct and temporary. You arrive seeking understanding, while I am only interested in making it crystal clear that there is nothing to understand. As long as you want to understand, so long there will be this awkward relationship between two individuals. I am always emphasizing that somehow the truth has to dawn upon you that there is nothing to understand. As long as you think, accept and believe that there is something to understand, and make that understanding a goal to be placed before you, demanding search and struggle, you are lost and will live in misery. The search is invalid because it is based upon questions which in turn are based upon false knowledge. Your knowledge has not freed you from your problems.
I don't want many people. I am trying to avoid all the seekers and if there are any finders they don't need my help. By allowing myself to be surrounded by those people I am inadvertently participating in the illusion that by carrying on a dialogue or a conversation with me they are getting something. So I discourage people. Even if they just come and sit around me I try to point out the ridiculous nature of this get-together. I try to finish it by saying, ‘Nice meeting you all,’ but still they don't go. They would sit with me for hours and hours. Even if I get up and go away they would be still there sitting and talking. They would be talking about what I did or did not say or what they thought I had said.
Still they keep coming back. Most of those who come to see me are religious buffs of all shapes, sizes and colours. Unless they have some sort of background in all this they can't be interested in this kind of thing. They only come to receive some confirmation from me about what they are interested in but they find that they are not getting anything from me. Still they continue to come. You have no idea of how many thousands of people have passed through the precincts of my homes.
Some of them are intelligent enough to realize that they are not going to get anything from me and that there is no point in hanging around. Others are not ready to accept what I emphasize, overemphasize and assert all the time, that whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. Some friends who have been with me for years say that they still have the hope that they are going to get something from me. This, in short, is the story of my life. If you destroy the authority of others, you in your own way become an authority.
My first sentence is negated by the second sentence, and the next sentence negates the second. If you want to understand what I am saying you must listen to me in disconnected frames, the same way that I talk. That's the way I am listening to you. Each is a separate, independent frame. Then you don't see any contradictions.
My interest is not to knock off what others have said (that is too easy) but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. This is why my talking sounds contradictory to others. I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can be expressed.
Anything you try to make out of my statements is not it. You sense a freshness, a living quality, to what is being said here. That is so, but this cannot be used for anything. It is worthless. All you can do with it is to try to organize it, create organizations, open schools, publish holy books, celebrate birthdays, sanctify holy temples and the like, thus destroying any life it may have had in it. No individual can be helped by such things. They only help those who would live by the gullibility of others.
In other words, I am trying to free you not from the past, the conditioning, but rather from what I am saying. I am not suggesting any way out because there is no way. I have stumbled into this and freed myself from the paths of others. I can't make the same mistake they did. I will never suggest that anyone use me as a model or follow in my footsteps.
My path can never be your path. If you attempt to make this your path you will get caught in a rut. No matter how refreshing, revolutionary or fantastic, it is still a rut, a copy, a second-hand thing. I myself do not know how I stumbled into this, so how do you expect me to give it to another? My mission, if there is any, is to debunk every statement I have ever made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I have said you will be in danger.
Is there a teaching/message?
There is no teaching of mine, and never shall be one. ‘Teaching’ is not the word for it. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability; it is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man – this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning.
The natural state is not the state of a self-realized, God-realized man, it is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is there – it is the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. By ‘life’ I do not mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses them to give continuity to itself.
Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage.
I've no message to give to the world. Whatever happens to me is such that you can't share it with the world. That's the reason why I don't get up on a platform or give any lectures – it's not that I can’t give lectures; I've lectured everywhere in the world – I've nothing to say. And I don't like to sit in one place, surrounded by people asking set questions. I never initiate any discussions; people come and sit round me – they can do what they like. If somebody asks me a question suddenly, I try to answer, emphasizing and pointing out that there is no answer to that question. So, I merely rephrase, restructure and throw the same question back at you. It's not game playing, because I'm not interested in winning you over to my point of view. It's not a question of offering opinions – of course I do have my opinions on everything from disease to divinity, but they're as worthless as anybody else's.
What I say you must not take literally. So much trouble has been created by people taking it all literally. You must test every word, every phrase, and see if it bears any relation to the way you are functioning. You must test it, but you are not in a position to accept it – unfortunately this is a fact, take it or leave it. By writing it down, you will do more harm than good. You see, I am in a very difficult position: I cannot help you, whatever I say is misleading.
What I am saying has no logic. If it has a logic, it has a logic of its own – I don't know anything about it. But you have necessarily to fit me into the logical structure of your thought; otherwise the logical structure there, the rational thing, comes to an end. You see, you have to rationalize – that is what you are. But this has nothing to do with rationality, it has nothing to do with your logic – that doesn't mean that it is illogical or irrational.
Is there such a thing as enlightenment?
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! I don't care. To realize that there is no enlightenment at all is enlightenment.
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.
To me what does exist is a purely physical process; there is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes, some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids, there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead, which doesn't show, but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden; in Europe it is blue. There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the neck. It's as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points, there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn't do anything or help the body to function in any way; it's just there.
This state is a state of not knowing; you really don't know what you are looking at. I may look at the clock on the wall for half an hour – still I do not read the time. I don't know it is a clock. All there is inside is wonderment: ‘What is this that I am looking at?’ Not that the question actually phrases itself like that in words: the whole of my being is like a single, big question mark. It is a state of wonder, of wondering, because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it – all that I have learned – is held in the background unless there is a demand. It is in the ‘declutched state’. If you ask the time, I will say ‘It's a quarter past three’ or whatever – it comes quickly like an arrow – then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.
When I talk of ‘feeling’, I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breastbone. The doctors tell us that it is active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is re-activated. 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 – ‘I am that flying bird.’ 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.
Is there a beyond or timelessness?
Is there a beyond? Because you are not interested in the everyday things and the happenings around you, you have invented a thing called the ‘beyond’, or ‘timelessness’, or ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’, ‘Brahman’, ‘enlightenment’, or whatever, and you search for that. There may not be any beyond. You don't know a thing about that beyond; whatever you know is what you have been told, the knowledge you have about that. So you are projecting that knowledge. What you call ‘beyond’ is created by the knowledge you have about that beyond; and whatever knowledge you have about a beyond is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience, and the experience then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of ‘you’ is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the ‘you’ is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?
The fictitious beyond, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence.
In the natural state the movement of self is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond but that can never be experienced by you. It is when the you is not there. The moment you translate, the you is there. You look at something and recognize it. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at the moment or else labelling. That is all that is there. The word separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the you. Otherwise, there is no space between the two.
Religion is a neurological problem
Religion is not a contractual arrangement, either public or private. It has nothing to do with the social structure or its management. Religious authority wants to continue its hold on the people, but religion is entirely an individual affair. The saints and saviours have only succeeded in setting you adrift in life with pain and misery and the restless feeling that there must be something more meaningful or interesting to do with one's life.
‘Religion’, ‘God’, ‘Soul’, ‘Beatitudes’, ‘moksha’, are all just words, ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple, harmonious physical functioning of the organism.
Love, compassion, ahimsa (nonviolence), understanding, bliss, all these things which religion and psychology have placed before man, are only adding to the strain of the body. All cultures, whether of the Orient or of the Occident, have created this lopsided situation for mankind and turned man into a neurotic individual.
Man has already messed up his life, and religion has made it worse. It is religion that really made a mess of man's life. You cannot exonerate the founders and leaders of religions. The teachings of all those teachers and saviours of mankind have resulted in only violence. Everybody talked of peace and love, while their followers practiced violence.
Religion is not going to save man; neither atheism nor communism nor any of those systems. Not only the teachings but the teachers themselves have sown the seeds of this violence that we have in this world. You can’t put them on a pedestal and say that they should be exonerated. The man who talked of love is responsible because love and hate go together. So how can you exonerate them? Why do you want to revive religion? What for? I am not condemning any particular thing. All are responsible for that. Talk of love is one of the most absurd things. There must be two. Wherever there is a division there is this destruction. Kindness needs two. You are kind to somebody or you are kind to yourself. There is a division there in your consciousness. Anything that is born out of that division is a protective mechanism and in the long run it is destructive.
Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. You see, good and bad, right and wrong are like the two ends of the spectrum, one cannot exist independent of the other. When once you are finished with this duality (I am using the word with much caution although I don't like to use it), when you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in it the danger is that you will always do wrong and if you don't do wrong it is because you are a frightened chicken. It is out of this cowardice that the whole religious thinking is born.
The whole structure of religious thought is built on the foundation of discipline. Discipline to me means a sort of masochism. We are all masochists. We torture ourselves because we think that suffering is a means to achieve our spiritual goals. That's unfortunate. Life is difficult so discipline sounds very attractive to people. We admire those who have suffered a lot to achieve their goals. As a matter of fact, the whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of suffering. Those who impose that kind of discipline on us are sadists and we are all being masochists in accepting that. We torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something.
Whatever man experiences – self-awareness, self-consciousness – he has sown the seeds of his total destruction. All those religions have come out of that divisive consciousness in man. All the teachings of those teachers will inevitably destroy mankind. There is no point in reviving all those things and starting revivalistic movements. That is dead, finished. Anything that is born out of this division in your consciousness is destructive, is violence. It is so because it is trying to protect not this living organism, not life, but the continuity of thought. And through that it can maintain the status quo of your culture or whatever you want to call it, the society. The problems are neurological.
Your highly praised inventiveness springs from your thinking, which is essentially a protective mechanism. The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests. There is no good or bad in this sense. Don't you see? All these bad, brutal, terrible people who should have been eliminated long ago are thriving and successful. Don't think that you can get off this merry-go-round or that by pretending to be spiritually superior you are avoiding any complicity. You are that.
Why is there fundamentalism?
The self-consciousness that occurred in the human species may be a necessary thing, I don't know. I am not claiming that I have a special insight into the workings of nature. You see for yourself. That's why I say that the very foundation of the human culture is to kill and to be killed. It has happened so. If one is interested in looking at history right from the beginning, the whole foundation of humanity is built on the idea that those who are not with us are against us. That's what is operating in human thinking. So to kill and to be killed in the name of God, represented by the church in the West and all the other religious thinking here in the East, was the order of the day. That's why there is fundamentalism.
We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs. We are not ready to throw them out. If we succeed in throwing them out we replace them with another set of beliefs, another body of discipline. Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today – in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism – are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture…. The Chinese – what horrors they have committed, you will be surprised. They killed scholars and religious people. They burned and buried the books of Confucius and other teachers.
We have used God to justify the killing of millions and millions of people. We exploit God. That's the positive aspect of it, not the negative. In the name of God we have killed more people than in the two world wars put together. In Japan, millions of people died in the name of the sacred Buddha. Here in India, five thousand Jains were massacred in a single day. This is not a peaceful nation! You don't want to read your own history – it’s full of violence from the beginning to the end.
Holy men and holy business
We have been brainwashed for centuries by holy men that we must control our thoughts. Without thinking you would become a corpse. Without thinking the holy men wouldn't have any means of telling us to control our thoughts. They would go broke. They have become rich telling others to control their thoughts.
The whole religious business is nothing but moral codes of conduct: you must be generous, compassionate, loving, while all the time you remain greedy and callous. Codes of conduct are set by society in its own interests, sacred or profane. There is nothing religious about it. The religious man puts the priest, the censor, inside you. Now the policeman has been institutionalized and placed outside you. Religious codes and strictures are no longer necessary; it is all in the civil and criminal codes. You needn't bother with these religious people anymore; they are obsolete. But they don't want to lose their hold over people. It is their business; their livelihood is at stake. There is no difference between the policeman and the religious man. It is a little more difficult with the policeman, for, unlike the inner authority sponsored by the holy men, he lies outside you and must be bribed. The secular leaders tell you one way, the holy men another way. It makes no difference: as long as you are searching for peace of mind, you will have a tormented mind. If you try not to search, or if you continue to search, you will remain the same. You have to stop.
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes, perpetrated on the gullible and credulous people everywhere, not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom– the holy men– but also by the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualization, living from moment to moment, and such rot. These absurd ideas are thrown at us as if they are something new.
You have been brainwashed by all those holy men, gurus, teachers and the so-called enlightened people that the past should die, should come to an end. ‘If you attain this, life would be hunky-dory – full of sweetness.’ You have fallen for all that romantic stuff. If you try to suppress the past and try to be in the present, it will drive you crazy. You are trying to control something which is beyond your control.
It is not only your past. It's the entire past, entire existence of every human being and every form of life. It is not such an easy thing. It is like trying to stop this flow of the river through all those artificial means. It will inundate the whole thing.
They talk very lightly of money as if it has no importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in their lives. These holy men are greedy, jealous, and vindictive bastards, just like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your children. These people want to live through their religious institutions.
What these gurus in the market place do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters.
Meditation is warfare
Meditation is a self-centreed activity. It is strengthening the very self you want to be free from. What are you meditating for? You want to be free from something. What are you to meditate on? All right, thought is a noise, sound. What is sound? You look at this and you say ‘This is a tape-recorder,’ so thought is sound. There is a continuous flow of thoughts, and you are linking up all these thoughts all the time, and this is the noise you can't stand. Why can't you stand that noise? So, by repeating mantras, you create a louder noise, and you submerge the noise of thought, and then you are at peace with yourself. You think that something marvellous is happening to you. But all meditation is a self-centred activity.
You have also been told that through meditation you can bring selfishness to an end. Actually, you are not meditating at all, just thinking about selflessness, and doing nothing to be selfless. I have taken that as an example, but all other examples are variations of the same thing. All activity along these lines is exactly the same. You must accept the simple fact that you do not want to be free from selfishness.
Meditation is warfare. You sit for meditation while there is a battle raging within you. The result is violent, evil thoughts welling up inside you. Next, you try to control or direct these brutal thoughts, making more effort and violence for yourself in the process.
You cannot find the seat of human consciousness
Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man.
This consciousness 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. Where is the seat of human consciousness?
You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting millions and millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness, they will never be able to find it out at all.
Culture is part of this human consciousness, so everything that man has experienced and felt before you is part of that consciousness.
It is really a mystery. All the experiences – not necessarily just your experiences during your span of thirty, forty or fifty years, but the animal consciousness, the plant consciousness, the bird consciousness – all that is part of this consciousness.
Consciousness is a very powerful factor in experiencing things, but it is not possible for anybody to find out the content of the whole thing – it is too vast. The genetic is only part of it. It is much more than the genetic.
Whatever you experience, however profound that experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced the bliss, beatitude – call it ‘ecstasy’, call it by whatever name you like, but somebody somewhere along the line – not necessarily you – must have experienced that, and that experience is part of your consciousness. You have to come to a point where there is no such thing as a new experience at all: somebody has experienced it before, so it is not yours.
The consciousness of the body does not exist. There is no such thing as consciousness at all. The one thing that helps us to become conscious of the non-existing body, for all practical purposes, is the knowledge that is given to us. Without that knowledge you have no way of creating your own body and experiencing it. I am questioning the very idea of consciousness, let alone the subconscious, the unconscious, the different levels of consciousness, and higher states of consciousness. I don't see that there is any such thing as consciousness. I become conscious of this (touching the arm of the chair) only through the knowledge that I have of it. The touch does not tell me anything except when I translate it within the framework of knowledge. Otherwise I have no way of experiencing that touch at all. The way these senses are operating here is quite different from the way we are made to believe. The eye is looking at the movement of your hand, and is not saying anything about that activity, except observing what is going on there.
What is awareness?
I am not particularly fond of the word ‘awareness’. It is misused. It is a rubbed coin, and everybody uses it to justify some of his actions, instead of admitting that he did something wrong. Sometimes you say, ‘I was not aware of what was going on there.’ But awareness is an integral part of the activity of this human organism. This activity is not only specifically in the human organism but in all forms of life – the pig and the dog. The cat just looks at you, and is in a state of choiceless awareness. To turn that awareness into an instrument which you can use to bring about a change is to falsify that. Awareness is an integral part of the activity of the living organism.
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Awareness is not a divided state. There are not two states, awareness and something else. There are not two things. It is not that you are aware of something. Awareness is simply the action of the brain. The idea that you can use awareness to bring about some happier state of affairs, some sort of transformation or God-knows-what, is absurd. Awareness cannot be used to bring about a change in yourself or the world around you.
All this rubbish about the conscious and the unconscious, awareness and the self, is all a product of modern psychology. The idea that you can use awareness to get somewhere psychologically is very damaging. After more than a hundred years we seem unable to free ourselves from the psychological rubbish, Freud and the whole gang. Just what exactly do you mean by consciousness? You are conscious, aware, only through thought. The other animals use thought. The dog, for example, can recognize its owner in a simple manner. They recognize without using language. Humans have added to the structure of thought, making it much more complex.
If you could be in a state of awareness for a single moment once in your life the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the you, would collapse and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at. That is awareness.
There is no self, no soul
The belief that there is a centre here, that there is a spirit here, that there is a soul here, is what is responsible for that belief that there must be something beyond.
Is there any such thing as soul? Is there any such thing as the ‘I’? Is there any such thing as the psyche? Whatever you see there, whatever you experience there, is created only by the knowledge you have of that self.
There is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind. That knocks off the whole list, and you have no way of finding out what you are left with.
Ideas of soul and life after death are born out of the demand for permanence. That's the basis of man's religious thinking. All religious thinking is born out of the demand for permanence.
When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realize, no psyche to purify, no soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument. You have invested everything in that – the soul, mind, psyche, whatever you wish to call it – and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick. You are finished.
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I may say that there is nothing to be changed, but the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there, in which you have to bring about a radical revolution, then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit or the self. What I assert all the time is that I haven't found anything like the self or soul there. This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me, ‘There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?’ You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.
Mind is a myth
There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind is conditioned. It is absurd, you see, to.... If there is a mind, it is bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind.
To me there is no such thing as mind; mind is a myth. Since there is no such thing as mind, the ‘mutation of mind’ that J. Krishnamurti is talking about has no meaning. There is nothing there to be transformed, radically or otherwise. There is no self to be realized. The whole religious structure that has been built on this foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realize.
The whole Buddhist philosophy is built on the foundation of that ‘no mind’. Yet they have created tremendous techniques of freeing themselves from the mind. All the Zen techniques of meditation try to free you from the mind. But the very instrument that we are using to free ourselves from the thing called ‘mind’ is the mind. Mind is nothing other than what you are doing to free yourself from the mind. But when it once dawns on you, by some strange chance or miracle, that the instrument that you are using to understand everything is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, it hits you like a jolt of lightning.
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The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually, there is no separation. I have no objection to the word mind but it is not in one particular location or area. Every cell in your system has a mind of its own and its functioning or working is quite different from that of the other cells.
Thought is bourgeois
Thought in its birth, in its origin, in its content, in its expression, and in its action is very fascist. When I use the word ‘fascist’ I use it not in the political sense but to mean that thought controls and shapes our thinking and our actions. So it is a very protective mechanism. It has no doubt helped us to be what we are today. It has helped us to create our high-tech and technology. It has made our life very comfortable. It has also made it possible for us to discover the laws of nature. But thought is a very protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same time, thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living organism.
It is thought that has invented the ideas of cause and effect. There may not be any such thing as a cause at all. Every event is an individual and independent event. We link up all these events and try to create a story of our lives. But actually every event is an independent event. If we accept the fact that every event is an independent event in our lives, it creates a tremendous problem of maintaining what we call identity. And identity is the most important factor in our lives. We are able to maintain this identity through the constant use of memory, which is also thought. This constant use of memory or identity, or whatever you call it, is consuming a tremendous amount of energy, and it leaves us with no energy to deal with the problems of our living. Is there any way that we can free ourselves from the identity? As I said, thought can only create problems; it cannot help us to solve them. Through dialectical thinking about thinking itself we are only sharpening that instrument. All philosophies help us only to sharpen this instrument.
Thought is very essential for us to survive in this world. But it cannot help us in achieving the goals that we have placed before ourselves. The goals are unachievable through the help of thought. The quest for happiness, as you mentioned, is impossible because there is no such thing as permanent happiness. There are moments of happiness, and there are moments of unhappiness. But the demand to be in a permanent state of happiness is the enemy of this body. This body is interested in maintaining its sensitivity of the sensory perceptions and also the sensitivity of the nervous system. That is very essential for the survival of this body. If we use that instrument of thought for trying to achieve the impossible goal of permanent happiness, the sensitivity of this body is destroyed. Therefore, the body is rejecting all that we are interested in – permanent happiness and permanent pleasure. So, we are not going to succeed in that attempt to be in a permanent state of happiness.
Thought to me is matter. Therefore, all our spiritual goals are materialistic in their value. And this is the conflict that is going on there. In this process, the totality of man's experiences created what we call a separate identity and a separate mind. But actually if you want to experience anything, be it your own body, or your own experiences, you have no way of experiencing them without the use of the knowledge that is passed on to us.
All the problems are artificially created by the various structures created by human thinking. There is some sort of (I can't make a definitive statement) neurological problem in the human body. Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can. Do you think these frontiers are going to disappear? They are not. Those who have entrenched themselves, those who have had the monopoly of all the world's resources so far and for so long, if they are threatened to be dislodged, what they would do is anybody's guess. All the destructive weapons that we have today are here only to protect that monopoly.
But actually ‘Is there a thought?’ the question is born out of the assumption that there is a thought there. But what you will find there is all about thought and not thought. All about thought is what is put in there by the culture. That is put in by the people who are telling us that it is very essential for you to free yourself from whatever you are trying to free yourself from through that instrument. My interest is to emphasize that that is not the instrument, and there is no other instrument. And when once this hits you, dawns upon you that thought is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, then there is no need for you to find out if any other instrument is necessary. No need for any other instrument. This very same structure that we are using, the instrument which we are using, has in a very ingenious way invented all kinds of things like intuition, right insight, right this, that, and the other. And to say that through this very insight we have come to understand something is the stumbling block. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless, because it is thought that has created what we call insight, and through that it is maintaining its continuity and status quo.
Where does thought come from? Is it from inside, or outside? Where is the seat of human consciousness? So, for purposes of communication, or just to give a feel about it, I say there is a ‘thought sphere’. In that ‘thought sphere’ we are all functioning, and each of us probably has an ‘antenna’, or what you call an ‘aerial’ or something, which is the creation of the culture into which we are born. It is that that is picking up these particular thoughts. You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting millions and millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness, they will never be able to find it out at all. I am not making a dogmatic statement or any such thing.
Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events. It is only the natural physiological sensations and perceptions that can move with the flow of life.
There is no such thing as looking at something without the interference of knowledge. To look you need space, and thought creates that space. So space itself, as a dimension, exists only as a creation of thought. Thought has also tried to theorize about the space it has created, inventing the ‘space-time continuum’. Time is an independent reference or frame. There is no necessary continuity between it and space. Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the ‘now’, the ‘eternal now’. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you attempt to look at the present, it has already been brought into the framework of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentum to its own continuity. Its essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and over again; this gives it an illusion of permanency. This permanency is shattered the moment the falseness of the past-present-future continuum is seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.
Feeling too is thought
Feeling is also thought. We want to feel that feelings are more important than thoughts, but there is no way you can experience a feeling without translating that within the framework of the knowledge that you have. Take for example that you tell yourself that you are happy. You don't even know that the sensation that is there is happiness. But you capture that sensation within the framework of the knowledge you have of what you call a state of happiness, and the other state, that of unhappiness. What I am trying to say is that it is the knowledge that you have about yourself which has created the self there and helps you to experience yourself as an entity there.
All your relationships, knowledge and experiences, all your emotions and feelings, all that romantic stuff, belongs entirely to society, not to you. You are not an individual at all. Only when you are free from what every man and woman has thought and felt before you will you become an individual. Such an individual will not burn books that men have made with great care. He would not be a rebel. All the accumulated knowledge, experience and suffering of mankind is inside of you. You must build a huge bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual. There is no other way.
Knowledge and experience
Whatever you experience – peace, bliss, silence, beatitude, ecstasy, joy, God knows what – will be old, second-hand. You already have knowledge about all of these things. The fact that you are in a blissful state or in a state of tremendous silence means that you know about it. You must know a thing in order to experience it. That knowledge is nothing marvellous or metaphysical; ‘bench’, ‘bag’, ‘red bag’, is the knowledge. Knowledge is something which is put into you by somebody else, and he got that from somebody else; it is not yours. Can you experience a simple thing like that bench that is sitting across from you? No, you only experience the knowledge you have about it. And the knowledge has come from some outside agency, always. You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society; there is no new experience.
Knowledge is not something mysterious or mystical. You know that you are happy, and you have theories about the working of the fan, the light – this is the knowledge we are talking about. You introduce another knowledge, ‘spiritual knowledge’, but – spiritual knowledge, sensual knowledge – what is the difference? We give the names to them. Fantasies about God are acceptable, but fantasies about sex are called ‘sensual’, ‘physical’. There is no difference between the two; one is socially acceptable, the other is not. You are limiting knowledge to a particular area of experience, so then it becomes ‘sensual’, and the other becomes ‘spiritual’? Everything is sensual.
You cannot communicate what you cannot experience. I don't want to use those words, because ‘inexpressible’ and ‘incommunicable’ imply that there is something which cannot be communicated, which cannot be expressed. I don't know. There is an assumption that there is something there which cannot be expressed, which cannot be communicated. There is nothing there. I don't want to say there is nothing there, because you will catch me – you will call it ‘emptiness’, ‘void’ and all that sort of thing.
Whatever is experienced is thought-induced. Without knowledge you can't experience. And experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle: the dog chasing its own tail.
Where, you ask, is this knowledge, the past? Is it in your brain? Where is it? It is all over your body. It is in every cell of your body.
Is there any meaning and purpose to life?
‘What is the meaning of life?’ It is not life that we are really interested in but living. The problem of living has become a very tiring business – to live with somebody else, to live with our feelings, to live with our ideas. In other words, it is the value system that we have been thrown into. You see, the value system is false.
The heart does not for a moment know that it is pumping blood. It is not asking the question, ‘Am I doing it right?’ It is just functioning. It does not ask the question, ‘Is there any purpose?’ To me, that question has no meaning. The questions, ‘Is there any meaning?’ ‘Is there any purpose?’ take away the living quality of life. You are living in a world of ideas.
Suppose I say that this meaninglessness is all there is for you, all there can ever be for you. What will you do? The false and absurd goal you have before you is responsible for that dissatisfaction and meaninglessness in you. Do you think life has any meaning? Obviously you don't. You have been told that there is meaning, that there must be a meaning to life. Your notion of the ‘meaningful’ keeps you from facing this issue, and makes you feel that life has no meaning. If the idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.
Why should life have any meaning? Why should there be any purpose to living? Living itself is all that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of living. You have been fed all this rubbish about the ideal, perfect, peaceful, purposeful way of life, and you devote your energies to thinking about that rather than living fully. In any case you are living, no matter what you are thinking about. Life has to go on.
Once a very old gentleman, ninety-five years old, who was considered to be a great spiritual man and who taught the great scriptures all the time to his followers, came to see me. He heard that I was there in that town. He came to me and asked me two questions. He asked me, ‘What is the meaning of life? I have written hundreds of books telling people all about the meaning and purpose of life, quoting all the scriptures and interpreting them. I haven't understood the meaning of life. You are the one who can give an answer to me.’ I told him, ‘Look, you are ninety-five years old and you haven't understood the meaning of life. When are you going to understand the meaning of life? There may not be any meaning to life at all.’ The next question he asked me was, ‘I have lived ninety-five years and I am going to die one of these days. I want to know what will happen after my death.’ I said, ‘You may not live long to know anything about death. You have to die now. Are you ready to die?’ As long as you are asking the question, ‘What is death?’ or ‘What is there after death?’ you are already dead. These are all dead questions. A living man would never ask those questions.
Is there such a thing as truth?
Truth is a movement. You can't capture it, contain it, give expression to it, or use it to advance your interests. The moment you capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something that cannot, under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self-denial is to enrich the priests. You deny yourself your basic needs while that man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated like a potentate. He, and the others in the holy business, thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians, similarly, thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.
Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own very natural state in which you always are. It's not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That is why I call this your natural state. You're always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction.
Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented the beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, enlightenment or whatever, and search for it. There may not be any ultimate truth. You don't know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it, and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience and the experience then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the ultimate reality.
There is no freedom of action
I maintain that man has no freedom of action. I don't mean the fatalism that the Indians have practiced and still are practicing: when I say that man has no freedom of action it is in relation to changing himself, to freeing himself from the burden of the past. It means that you have no way of acting except through the help of the knowledge that is passed on to you. It is in that sense, I said, no action is possible without thought.
So what is necessary is that the individual should free himself from the burden of the past, the great heritage you are talking about. Unless the individual frees himself from the burden of the past, he cannot come up with new solutions for the problems; he repeats the same old.... So it is up to the individual. He has to free himself from the entire past, the heritage which you are talking about – that is to say he has to break away from the cumulative wisdom of the ages – only then is it possible for him to come out with the solutions for the problems with which man is confronted today.
But that is not in his hands; there is nothing that he can do to free himself from the burden of the past. It is in that sense that I say he has no freedom of action. You have freedom to come here or not to come here, to study or teach economics or philosophy or something else – there you have a limited freedom. But you have no freedom to control the events of the world or shape the events of the world – nobody has that power, no nation has that power.
Man is memory
The mind is (not that I am giving a new definition) the totality of man's experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There is no such thing as your mind or my mind. I have no objection if you want to call that totality of man's thoughts, feelings, and experiences by the name ‘mind’. But how they are transmitted to us from generation to generation is the question. Is it through the medium of knowledge or is there any other way by which they are transmitted from generation to generation, say for example, through the genes? We don't have the answers yet. Then we come to the idea of memory. What is man? Man is memory. What is that memory? Is it something more than just to remember, to recall a specific thing at a specific time? To all this we have to have some more answers. How do the neurons operate in the brain? Is it all in one area? The other day I was talking to a neurosurgeon, a very young and bright fellow. He said that memory, or rather the neurons containing memory, are not in one area. The eye, the ear, the nose, all the five sensory organs in your body have a different sort of memory. But they don't yet know for sure. So we have to get more answers.
There is always a space between perception and memory. Memory is like sound. Sound is very slow, whereas light travels faster. All these sensory activities or perceptions are like light. They are very fast. But for some reason we have lost the capacity to kick that into the background and allow these things to move as fast as they occur in nature. Thought comes, captures it, and says that it is this or that. That is what you call recognition, or naming, or whatever you want to call it. The moment you recognize this as the tape recorder, the name ‘tape recorder’ also is there. So recognition and naming are not two different things.
We maintain the separation and keep up a non-existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity.
‘Who am I?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Does God exist?’ or ‘Is there an afterlife?’ all these questions spring only from memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own.
What you call the ‘act of knowing’ is nothing other than this accumulated memory.
Can you become conscious of anything except through the medium of memory and thought? Memory is knowledge. Even your feelings are memory.
To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal, and withdrawal is death.
Do you exist?
You don't exist. There is no individual there at all. Culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, has created ‘you’ and ‘me’ for the sole purpose of maintaining its own continuity. But, at the same time, we are made to believe that you have to become an individual. These two things have created this neurotic situation for us. There is no such thing as an individual, and there is no such thing as freedom of action. I am not talking of a fatalistic philosophy or any such thing. It is this fact that is frustrating us. The demand to fit ourselves into that value system is using a tremendous amount of energy, and there is nothing we can do to deal with the living problems here. All the energy is being consumed by the demands of the culture or society, or whatever you want to call it, to fit you into the framework of that value system. In the process, we are not left with any energy to deal with the other problems. But these problems, that is, the living problems, are very simple.
After all, you don't exist, and I don't exist. You and I have been created by the totality of those experiences, and we have to use them in order to function sanely and intelligently in this world.
One thing that I always emphasize is that it is culture that has created us all for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo and its continuity. So, in that sense, I do not see that there are any individuals at all. At the same time, the same culture has given us the hope that there is something that you can do to become an individual and that there is such a thing as free will. Actually, there is no free will at all.
Relationship is division
The problem is a problem of relationship. It is just not possible to establish any relationship with anything around you, including your near and dear ones, except on the level of what you can get out of the relationship. You see, the whole thing springs from this separation or isolation that human beings live in today. We are isolated from the rest of creation, the rest of life around us. We all live in individual frames. We try to establish a relationship at the level of ‘What do I get out of that relationship?’ We use others to try and fill this void that is created as a result of our isolation.
We are not honest, decorous and decent enough to admit that all relationships are built on the foundation of, ‘What do I get out of this relationship?’ It is nothing but mutual gratification. If that is absent no relationship is possible. You keep the relationship going for social reasons or for reasons of children, property and security. All this is part and parcel of the relationship business but when it fails and does not give us what we really want we superimpose on it what we call love. So it is just not possible to have any relationship on any basis except on the level of mutual gratification.
The whole of culture has created this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationships be based on love, but the most important elements are security and possessiveness. When your hold on the other weakens, the relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this lovey-dovey relationship all the time.
The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing and so does the other person's. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So when everything else fails we use this final, last card in the pack, love, with all the marvelous and romantic ideations around it.
Marriage is possessiveness
The institution of marriage is not going to disappear. As long as we demand relationships, it will continue in some form or other. Basically, it is a question of possessiveness.
The marriage institution will somehow continue because it is not just the relationship between the two, but children and property are involved. And we use property and children as a pretext to give continuity to the institution of marriage. The problem is so complex and so complicated. It is not so easy for anybody to come up with answers to the age-old institution of marriage.
Love is fascist
When everything fails, you use the last card, the trump in the pack of cards, and call it love. But it is not going to help us, and it has not helped us at all. Even religion has failed to free man from violence and from ten other different things that it is trying to free us from. You see, it is not a question of trying to find new concepts, new ideas, new thoughts, and new beliefs. But I am sure that the day has come for people to realize that all the weapons that we have built so far are redundant and that they cannot be used anymore. We have arrived at a point where you cannot destroy your adversary without destroying yourself. So it is that kind of terror, and not the love and brotherhood that have been preached for centuries, that will help us to live together.
What an amount of energy we are putting into making our relationship into a loving thing! It is a battle, it is a war. It is like preparing yourself all the time for war hoping that there will be peace, eternal peace, or this or that. You are tired of this battle, and you even settle for that horrible, non-loving relationship. And you hope and dream one day it will be nothing but love. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in the name of that how many millions of people have been killed? More than all the recent wars put together. How can you love thy neighbour as thyself? It is just not possible.
Love implies division, separation. As long as there is division, as long as there is a separation within you, so long do you maintain that separation around you. When everything fails, you use the last card, the trump in the pack of cards, and call it love... We say: I love my country, I love my dog, I love my wife, and what else. What happens? You love your country, I love my country, and there is war.
It is not going to help us, and it has not helped us at all. Even religion has failed to free man from violence and from ten other different things that it is trying to free us from. You see, it is not a question of trying to find new concepts, new ideas, new thoughts, and new beliefs.
What, after all, is the world? The world is the relationship between two individuals. But that relationship is based on the foundation of ‘What do I get out of a relationship?’ Mutual gratification is the basis of all relationships. If you don't get what you want out of a relationship, it goes sour. What there is in the place of what you call a ‘loving relationship’ is hate.
The whole music of our age is all around that song, ‘Love, Love, Love....’ But love is fascist in its nature, in its birth, in its expression and in its action. It cannot do us any good. We may talk of love but it doesn't mean anything.
Sex is thought
You may ask: Is not sex a basic human requirement? Sex is dependent upon thought; the body itself has no sex. Only the genitals and perhaps the hormone balances differ between male and female. It is thought that says ‘I am a man, and that is a woman, an attractive woman.’ It is thought that translates sex feelings in the body and says ‘These are sexual feelings.’ And it is thought that provides the build-up without which no sex is possible: ‘It would be more pleasurable to hold that woman's hand than just to look at her. It would be more pleasurable to kiss her than just to embrace her,’ and so on. In the natural state there is no build-up of thought. Without that build-up, sex is impossible. And sex is tremendously violent to the body. The body normally is a very peaceful organism, and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release, which feels pleasurable to you. Actually it is painful to the body.
But through suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into this state. As long as you think of God, you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy, whether he doesn't dream of women at night.
The peak of the sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all of the rest of your experiences are second-hand, somebody else's. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this? Why do you destroy the joy of sex? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity; but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.
Sexuality has to be put in its proper place
Sexuality, if it is left to itself, as it is in the case of other species, other forms of life, is merely a biological need, because the living organism has this object to survive and produce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that is totally unrelated to the living organism. But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in its nature, into a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against the pleasure movement. I am not interested in saying that you should condemn that or become promiscuous or use sex as a means of spiritual attainment; no. It is a very simple functioning of the living organism. The religious man has turned that into something big and concentrated on the control of sex. After that the psychologists have turned that into something extraordinary. All commercialism is related to sex. How do you think it will fall into its proper place?
I am just pointing out the use to which we are putting that simple biological function. I am not condemning it. It is there, you see. Your talk of that as an expression of love has no meaning to me. We would love to put it that way because it is very comforting. If sex is used only for the biological purpose it is not really a devastating situation. If you leave it as it is it wouldn't be so horrible, the way you would like to put it, it would fall into its proper place. That is why we have invented all these other things – God, truth, and reality – which are nothing but ultimate pleasures.
Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely, mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like this. It has no other place in the functioning of the body. Thought always interferes with sex. It has become a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against it. After that it goes. Thereafter, what you are left with is the natural functioning of the glands. So we have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex and so the denial of it becomes such an obsession with people. In India, they even moved away from that denial and created what is called tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have, sex through tantra was considered the highest.
The fact is that the person is very much there even at the moment when there is peak sex experience. The experience has already been captured by your memory. Otherwise, you have no way of experiencing that as a peak moment. If that peak moment remained as a peak moment that would be just the end of sex. That would be the end of everything. The fact that you remember it as a peak moment and want to repeat it over and over again implies that it has already become part of your experiencing structure. You want it always and then want to extend it for longer and longer periods of time.
Desire and selfishness
Man is always selfish, and he will remain selfish as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. I have nothing against selfish people. I don't want to talk about selflessness – it has no basis at all. You say ‘I will be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a marvellous man’ – but until tomorrow arrives, or the day after tomorrow, or the next life, you will remain selfish. What do you mean by ‘selflessness’? You tell everybody to be selfless. What is the point? I have never said to anybody ‘Don't be selfish.’ Be selfish, stay selfish! – that is my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness. The rich man's distributing charity is also selfishness: he will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue of him there.
You hope that you will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking, because of that model of a saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that man has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don't believe that man at all! Such a man builds some organization, and lives in luxury, which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a fool in the world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That is why they are all aloof – because they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man – he never, never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than seeing the President of your country – that is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he is, not what he claims he is.
As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will pull you through, but you will die in hope just as you have lived in hope. That is the refrain of my doom song.
Politics has its root in religious thinking
All the political ideologies, even your legal structures, are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of man. It is not so easy to flush out the whole series of experiences which have been accumulated through centuries, and which are based upon the religious thinking of man. There is a tendency to replace one belief with another belief, one illusion with another illusion. That is all we can do.
It is the constant demand for permanence which cripples society. Because we all seek permanence inwardly, we demand that those things which we perceive to lie outside ourselves – society, humanity, the nation and the world – also be permanent. We seek out permanence through them. All forms of permanence, whether personal or collective, are your own creation. They are all an extension of the very same demand for permanence. But nothing is permanent. Our efforts to make things permanent go entirely against the way of nature. Somehow you know that you will not succeed in your demand for permanence. Yet you persist.
Human nature being what it is, what can you expect? Falseness of human values has ended up in the church, the monarchy and politics. We have elected and placed men in power, and with the very same power they will destroy everything. It is nothing but the power game. All heritage is born of a diseased mind. Man is corrupt and lays the blame at the feet of the coined word ‘heritage’. The unwillingness to change with the changing times you call tradition.
Traditional values and the military might of America cannot save anyone. You have grown up with the sense that America is the center of the world. You were better at everything. Today the glory is gone, you are an also-ran. You are another England! This is a blot on your national image. You are being overtaken by others. I am as terrified if the US gets dumped from its throne as you will be, what you would do is anybody's guess…. The Russian revolution is a total failure. That revolution is only a revaluation of a value system. They replaced one system with another system of values. Which system will blow up the world? It matters not who is going to blow up the world. The solutions to the world's problems do not rest with your bureaucrats or the big boys. They are muddle-headed and low-grade morons; so are the other leaders of mankind. You can't get rid of them. You have delegated your power to them, placed them in the seats of power, and handed over the most destructive weapons to them. The are the defense that turned against you.
Death of ideologies
I have more faith in the scientific community than all these jokers that are going around ‘saving’ mankind. We need to be saved from the self-appointed saviours of mankind. No, they are the ones responsible for the terrible situation we find ourselves in today. We don't realize that it is they who have created this mess for us. They had their day, and have utterly, totally failed. Still they refuse to take a back seat. That's it. We are stuck. You study the history of mankind: monarchies, revolutions, democracies, and more revolutions. Everything has failed us; everything is over. Not one ideology will survive. What's left for us? Democracy, the ‘noble experiment’, is over. Everything is over. We find ourselves in a situation where these issues will be decided by your boss.
Take the problem of starvation. One side says, ‘My political system will solve the problem of starvation in this world,’ and the other side says, ‘No, mine will,’ and both of them end up on the battlefield brandishing their atomic weapons. That is the reality of the situation. Everywhere, on every continent, there is confrontation.
The basic issue in the world, of course, is economic: Who will control the resources of this world? The nine rich nations of the world have been so used to controlling the resources of the world. They sit in Basel, Switzerland, and say, ‘Here is the price you must take for your products. Take it or leave it.’ A country like the United States may talk of freedom, democracy, and justice, but they would like to have military governments in countries like those of South America. They prefer to do business with militarized, authoritarian states. A military general is very useful to run those countries. That is a fact.
Revolution is only revaluation of the old
What kind of human being do you want on this globe? The human being modeled after the perfect being has totally failed. The model has not touched anything there. Your value system is the one that is responsible for the human malady, the human tragedy, forcing everybody to fit into that model. So, what do we do? You cannot do anything by destroying the value system, because you replace one value system with another. Even those who rebelled against religion, like those in the Communist countries, have themselves created another kind of value system. So, revolution does not mean the end of anything. It is only a revaluation of our value system. So, that needs another revolution, and so on and so on. There is no way.
Every human being is different. That is all I am saying. There is nobody like you anywhere in this world. I tell you, nobody! I am talking physiologically, you know. But we ignore that, and try to put everybody in a common mould and create what we call the greatest common factor. All the time you are trying to educate them and fit them into the value system. If that value system does not work, naturally revolutions take place. The whole idea of restructuring is nothing but a revaluation of the old value system. Revolution only means revaluation of our value system. It is the same thing. After a while things settle down, and then they go at it again. There is no improvement again. Or there is a slight improvement. But it is basically a modified continuity of the same. In that process what horrors we have committed, you know! Is it really worth all that? But you seem to think that it is. After killing so many people you go back to the same system, the same technique. What is the point?
The society in which we are living today considers certain actions as socially acceptable and certain other action antisocial. You may call yourself a rebel, a revolutionary and break away but you will certainly create another form no different and distinct from the structure in which you are caught up. There is no such thing as a revolution at all. What you call revolution is only a revaluation of your value system. The basic problem is the impossibility of fitting yourself into the framework, so you want to create another kind of framework, a new way of thinking but basically and actually and fundamentally there is no difference between the two.
Why are you so afraid of death?
What you call ‘yourself’ is fear. The ‘you’ is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear…. It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences, new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.
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When there is an actual physical danger, the danger of extinction of your physical body (which you think is yours), everything that it has as its resource gets thrown into that situation and the body tries to survive in that particular moment. Have you ever noticed that when there is a real physical danger your thinking mechanism is never there to help you? Never there. So you can plan ahead for every possible situation and be prepared to meet every kind of situation in your life, but actually when there is a physical danger, all your planning and all that you have thought about to be prepared to meet every kind of danger and every kind of situation is just not there. The body has to fall back on its own resources. If for some reason it can not renew itself and survive in that particular situation, it goes merrily and gracefully, it knows that nothing is lost.
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The balance of energy in nature has to be maintained for some reason. I don't know why. So death occurs only when there is a need for the atoms to maintain the balance of energy in the universe. It is nothing but a reshuffling of atoms. This organism has no way of finding out that it was born at a particular point of time and is going to die at another point of time, and also that it is living at this moment and not dead.
You shall not taste of death, for there is no death for you: you cannot experience your own death. Are you born? Life and death cannot be separated; you have no chance whatever of knowing for yourself where one begins and the other ends. You can experience the death of another, but not your own. The only death is physical death; there is no psychological death.
Your experiencing structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like – it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs knowledge, a similar past experience it can call upon for reference. You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non-existence. As long as you have known life, you have known yourself, you have been there, so, to you, you have a feeling of eternity. To justify this feeling of eternity, your structure begins to convince itself that there will be a life after death for you – heaven, reincarnation, transmigration of souls, or whatever. What is it that you think reincarnates? Where is that soul of yours? Can you taste it, touch it, show it to me? What is there inside of you that goes to heaven? What is there? There is nothing inside of you but fear.
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Creation and destruction are going on simultaneously. The birth and death of thought happen simultaneously. That is why I insist that there is no such thing as death at all. Even the body does not die. It can change form but does not cease altogether. Because death really does not exist it is impossible for you to experience it. What you experience is the void or emptiness you feel upon the disappearance of somebody's body. Death can never be experienced and neither can birth for that matter. In your natural state, where the body is allowed to function without the interference of thought, birth and death are going on all the time. There is no person and no space within to create a self. What is left, after the continuity of thought is blown away, is a disjointed and independent series of interactions. What happens in the environment around me happens in here. There is no division. When the armour you are wearing around you is stripped away, you find an extraordinary sensitivity of the senses that responds to the phases of the moon, the passage of the seasons and the movements of other planets. There is simply no isolated, separate existence of its own here, only the throb of life.
The body knows that it is immortal. I very deliberately use the word immortal because nothing there comes to an end. When what you call clinical death takes place, the body breaks itself into its constituent elements, it provides the basis for the continuity of life. It may not be of any consolation to the individual who is dying, but this body becomes food for the millions and millions of bacteria. So, even assuming for a moment that you resort to cremation, as they do in some countries, wherever you dump the ashes, the carbon which is the end result of the burned body, provides the basis for some tiny little flower coming out of the earth. So, nothing here is lost.
Is there anything to vegetarianism?
If you talk of vegetarianism and kill millions of people, that is the most immoral, unpardonable act that a civilized culture of human beings can ever do. Do you see the absurdity of the two?
Vegetarianism for what? For some spiritual goals? One form of life lives off another. That's a fact, whether you like it or not. He says his cat is a vegetarian cat, it doesn't kill a fly. Because of its association with vegetarians it has become vegetarian. For health reasons maybe one should. I don't know, I don't see any adequate reason why one should be a vegetarian. Your body is not going to be any more pure than the meat-eating body. You go to India, those that have been vegetarians, they are not kind, they are not peaceful. You will be surprised. Vegetarians can be more aggressive than the meat eaters. Read the history of India – it is full of bloodshed, massacres, and assassinations – all in the name of religion. So it has nothing to do with spirituality – what you put in there is not really the problem.
You feel good because you have given up meat-eating. But what's the difference? Why do you have to feel so good because you have given up meat-eating? That may be psychological, if I may use that word. If you want to go back to eating meat, it is a different story. If there is a craving, it creates a problem. If there is no craving, what’s the difference whether you eat meat or vegetables? One form of life lives on another form of life. How many millions of bacteria are crawling all over your body – the flora and the fauna? You will be surprised if they are magnified. They live on you. When it becomes a corpse, they will have a field day on this body.
You want to eat macrobiotic food, and someone else wants to eat something else. These commercials sell you all kind of things. Why should we feed the body? The body needs some energy, and that energy you can have from anything you eat, without the health food.
You can believe whatever you want to believe. Someone else believes something else. It is the belief that matters to people. You replace one belief with another. You eat ideas. You put ideas in your stomach. You can eat good ideas. Good luck to you.
The moment you ask, ‘How to live?’ and ‘What to eat?’ you have created a problem…. Everything is cultural. All your tastes are cultivated tastes. The body does not know what you are eating. The problem is you eat more than what the body needs. It's the overeating that is the problem. You eat for pleasure. Eating has become a pleasure-seeking movement for us.
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As far as I am concerned there is no difference between looking for varieties of food or looking for varieties of girls (or men, as the case may be).
What are psychic powers?
Whatever is there like a trying to express itself and blossom into a human being. The human being has lost all of the animal instincts, and he has not developed human instincts. What these people talk of – psychic powers, clairvoyance, clairaudience – they are all human instincts. And they are necessary because there are two things that the human organism is interested in. One: its survival at any cost. Why should it survive? I don't know; it is a foolish question to ask. That is one of the most important things: It has a survival mechanism of its own, which is quite different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second thing is to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism.
What is life?
You will never know what life is. Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions, but those definitions have no meaning. You can theorize about life, but that is a thing which is not of any value to you – it cannot help you to understand anything. So you don't ask questions like ‘What is life?’ you know. ‘What is life?’ – there is no answer to that question, so the question cannot stay there any longer. You really don't know, so the question disappears. You don't let that happen there, because you think there must be an answer. If you don't know the answer, you think there may be somebody in this world who can give an answer to that question.
‘What is life?’ – nobody can give an answer to that question – we really don't know. So the question cannot stay there; the question burns itself out, you see. The question is born out of thought, so when it burns itself out, what is there is energy. There's a combustion: thought burns itself out and gives physical energy. In the same way, when the question is burnt, along with it goes the questioner also. The question and the questioner are not two different things. When the question burns itself out, what is there is energy. You can't say anything about that energy – it is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way; it has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine; it belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life.
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Life is one unitary movement, not two different movements. It's moving, it's a continuous flux, but you cannot look at that flux and say ‘That is a flux.’ ... This is just a pure and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life, there is a response. The response and the stimulus are not two different movements: you cannot separate the response from the stimulus. The moment you separate the response from the stimulus, there is a division, it is a divisive consciousness that is in operation. So, it is one movement.
Life is like a great big dream
In a way the whole of life is like a great big dream. I am looking at you but I really don't know anything about you. This is a dream, a dream world. There is no reality to it at all. When the experiencing structure is not manipulating consciousness or whatever you want to call it, the whole of life is a great big dream from the experiential point of view; not from this point of view here but from your point of view. You see, you give reality to things – not only to objects but also to feelings and experiences – and think that they are real. When you don't translate them in terms of your accumulated knowledge, they are not things. You really don't know what they are. To you, in relation to the reality you give to things, you would call this state of not knowing a dream.
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Here there is no such thing as reality anymore, let alone the ultimate reality. I function in the world as if I accept the reality of everything the way you accept it. It's like water flowing. When there is an obstacle to the water, there is an action there, either it overflows or it takes a diversion, but here and now when I begin to walk in that direction, there is no question of an obstruction or anything there.
There are only answers, no questions
Try and formulate a question which you can call your own. This you will discover: they are not your questions at all.
Questions are there because you have a vague answer for the question.
Thought, as memory and knowledge, has created this mechanism. The only way it can perpetuate itself is to gather knowledge, to know more and more, to ask more and more questions. As long as you are seeking you will be asking questions, and the questioning mechanism only adds more momentum to the naming process …
The real problem is the solution
Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naiveté‚ and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.
Actually there are no problems, there are only solutions. But we don't even have the guts to say that they don't work. Even if you have discovered that they don't work, sentimentality comes into the picture. The feeling, ‘That man in whom I have placed my confidence and belief cannot con himself and con everyone else,’ comes in the way of throwing the whole thing out of the window, down the drain. The solutions are still a problem. Actually there is no problem there. The only problem is to find out the inadequacy or uselessness of all the solutions that have been offered to us. The questions naturally are born out of the assumptions and answers that we have taken for granted as real answers. But we really don't want any answers to the questions, because an answer to the questions is the end of the answers. If one answer ends, all the other answers also go.
Conditioning is intelligence
It is not possible for you to be without conditioning. No matter what you do, you are conditioned. The unconditioning that the spiritual gurus are talking about in the marketplace is a bogus affair. You will find out. Anything you do is conditioning. What you have to be free from is the desire to be free from conditioning. Conditioning is intelligence. This conditioning I am talking about is happening in a different way – not the ideations and mentations.
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Why should you stop the past from interfering with the present? You have been brainwashed by all those holy men, gurus, teachers and the so-called enlightened people that the past should die, should come to an end. ‘If you attain this, life would be hunky-dory – full of sweetness.’ You have fallen for all that romantic stuff. If you try to suppress the past and try to be on the present, it will drive you crazy. You are trying to control something which is beyond your control.
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It is not only your past. It's the entire past, entire existence of every human being and every form of life. It is not such an easy thing. It is like trying to stop the flow of the river through all those artificial means. It will inundate the whole thing. What is it that you can do? Anything you do in any direction, at any level, is perpetuating that.
Health, disease and pain
I think what we are actually doing is trying to treat the symptoms of what we call a disease. But my question is, and I always throw this question at the people who are competent enough – the doctors – What is health? What is disease? Is there any such thing as disease for this body? The body does not know that it is healthy or unhealthy. You know, we translate the ‘malfunctioning’ to mean that there is some imbalance in the natural rhythm of the body. But we are so frightened that we run to a doctor or to somebody who we think is in the know of things and can help us. We do not give a chance for the body to work out the problems created by the situation we find ourselves in. We do not give enough time for the body.
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But what actually is health? Does the body know, or does it have any way of knowing, that it is healthy or unhealthy? And what is pain? I am not asking a metaphysical question. They me pain is a healing process. But we do not give enough chance or opportunity to the body to heal itself or help itself, to free itself from what we call pain.
We are frightened, you see. We are afraid that something terrible will happen to us and run to a doctor to get rid of pain.
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That is what all these commercials are taking advantage of. They are exploiting the gullibility and credulity of people. It is not that I am saying that you should not go to a doctor or take the help of medicine. I am not one of those who believe your prayers will help the body to recover from whatever disease it has, or that God is going to be the healer. Nothing like that. Pain is part of the biological functioning of the body, and that is all there is to it. And we have to rely or depend upon the chemistry of this body, and the body always gives us a warning. In the early stages we do not pay any attention, but when it becomes too much for the body to handle, there is panic and fear. Maybe it is necessary for us to go to a person who is in the know of affairs and get a helping hand from him. That's all we can do. The patient can be given a helping hand. All treatment, whether traditional or alternative, is based upon the account of the symptoms narrated by the patient.
What is maya?
The Sanskrit word ‘maya’ does not mean illusion in the same sense in which the English word is used. ‘Maya’ means to measure. You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the centre is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic…. So, in that sense, anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.
You are not separate from that illusion. You are the illusion. If one illusion goes, it is always replaced with another illusion. Why? Because the ending of the illusion is the ending of ‘you’. That is the death. The ending of belief is the ending of the ‘you’ that is there. So, that is not the poetic, romantic death – of ‘dying to your yesterdays’. Physical death is the only way through which you flush out what your whole culture has put in there.
Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the you does not let the thought go and what gives continuity to this you is the thinking. Actually, there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is somebody who is thinking your thoughts, somebody who is feeling your feelings. That's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.
Whenever a thought takes its birth there, you have created an entity or a point, and in reference to that point you are experiencing things. So, when the thought is not there, is it possible for you to experience anything or relate anything to a non-existing thing here? Every time a thought is born, you are born. Thought, in its very nature, is short-lived, and once it is gone, that's the end of it. That is probably what the traditions meant by rebirth – death and birth and death and birth. It is not that this particular entity, which is non-existing even while you are living, takes a series of births. The ending of births and deaths is the state that they are talking about. But that state cannot be described in terms of bliss, beatitude, love, compassion and all that poetic nonsense and romantic stuff, because you have no way of experiencing what is there between these two thoughts.
The world you experience around you is from a point of view. There must be a point and it is this point that creates the space. So, anything you experience from this point is an illusion. Not that the world is an illusion. All the Vedanta philosophers in India, particularly the students of Sankara, indulge in such frivolous, absolute nonsense. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in relation to this point, which itself is illusory, is bound to be an illusion, that's all.
This point has no continuity. It comes into being in response to the demands of the situation. The demands of the situation create this point. The subject does not exist there. It is the object that creates the subject. This runs counter to the whole philosophical thinking of India.The subject comes and goes and comes and goes in response to the things that are happening there. It is the object that creates the subject and not the subject that creates the object. This is a simple physiological phenomenon which can be tested. For example, if there is no object there, there is no subject here. What creates the subject is the object.
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There is light. If the light is not there you have no way of looking at anything. The light falls on that object, and the reflection of that light activates the optic nerves, which in turn activate the memory cells. When the memory cells are activated, all the knowledge you have about that object comes into operation. It is that process which is happening there that has created the subject. And the subject is the knowledge you have about it. The word ‘microphone’ is the eye. There is nothing there other than the word microphone. When you reduce it to that you feel the absurdity of talking about the self. The lower self, the higher self, and self-knowing, self-knowledge, knowing from moment to moment, is absolute rubbish, balderdash! You can indulge in such absolute nonsense and build up philosophical theories, but there is no subject there at all at any time. There is no subject creating the object.
There is no such thing as 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. They kidded themselves and others. Down the centuries, the saints, saviours and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everyone else.
Perfection and absolutes are false. You are trying to imitate and relate your behaviour according to these absolutes and it is falsifying you. You actually are functioning in an entirely different way. You are brutal. You feel you must be peaceful. It is contradictory. That's all I'm pointing out.
Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the now, the eternal now. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you attempt to look at the present it has already been brought into the framework of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentum to its own continuity. It's essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and over again. This gives it an illusion of permanency. This permanency is shattered the moment the falseness of the past-present-future continuum is seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.
What is morality?
What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.
Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?
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By morality I mean questioning your actions before and after. It is all social. For the smooth running of society these codes are necessary. These religious people have created a policeman inside you. Certain actions are termed good and certain other actions are termed bad either before or after you do them. That hasn't helped you in any way. It is thinking that has created the problem. Man's problem is basically the moral dilemma – questioning your actions before and after. It has become a neurological problem, not a religious problem. Even God is a neurological problem. God is the jumbled spelling of dog but the whole of your being is reacting to the word God.
All your beliefs, they are not just psychological, they are neurological. You don't know what is good. You know only what is good for you. That's all you are interested in. Everything centres around that; all your art and reason centres around that. I am not being cynical. That's a fact, nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying anything against it. The situations change but it is that which is guiding you through all situations. I'm not saying it is wrong, you see. If it is not so something must be wrong with you. As long as you are operating in the field of what they call the pair of opposites, good and bad, you will always be choosy in every situation. That is all, you cannot help that.
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder
What is beauty? Where is beauty? Is it in the object or in the eye? You project your idea of beauty on the object you are looking at. That is all. There is a beautiful sunset there. The moment you even say to yourself that it is beautiful, you are not looking at it at all.
Beaty is not in the object. It is not in the beholder's eye either. It is in the total abandonment of yourself.
So what is beauty? You really don't know. You wouldn't know what you are looking at. And in that state of not knowing what is there fills the whole of your being. That you may call beauty. But there is nobody who describes that beauty and says he is enjoying it. If you capture that in terms of your experiencing structure, it is lost.
You actually have no way of looking at the sunset because you are not separated from the sunset. The moment you separate yourself from the sunset, the poet in you comes out. Out of that separation poets and painters have tried to express themselves, to share their experiences with others. All that is culture.
Artists, Poets and Musicians
There is no such thing as an artist at all. He is just a technician. He or she has learned the technique of painting. They are just technicians, artisans, like carpenters, masons, etc.
Why do you want to place art on a higher level than craft? If there is no market for an artist's creation, he will be out of business. It is the market that is responsible for all these artistic beliefs. An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool to express himself.
All human creation is born out of sensuality. I have nothing against sensuality. All art is a pleasure movement. Even that has to be cultivated by you. Otherwise you have no way of appreciating the beauty and art that artists are talking about. If you question their creation, they feel superior, thinking that you don't have taste. Then they want you to go to a school to learn how to appreciate their art. If you don't enjoy a poem written by a so-called great poet, they forcibly educate you to appreciate poetry. That is all that they are doing in the educational institutions. They teach us how to appreciate beauty, how to appreciate music, how to appreciate painting and so on. Meanwhile they make a living off you.
Artists find it comforting to think that they are creative: ‘creative art’, ‘creative ideas’, ‘creative politics’. It's nonsense. There is nothing really creative in them in the sense of their doing anything original, new or free. Artists pick something here and something there, put it together and think they have created something marvelous. They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and ‘style’ are the only creativity we have. Each of us has his own style according to the school we attended, the language we were taught, the books we have read, the examination ms we have taken. And within that framework again we have our own style. Perfecting style and technique is all that operates there.
You will be surprised that one of these days computers will paint and create music much better than all the painters and musicians that the world has produced so far. It may not happen in our lifetime but it will happen. You are no different from a computer. We are not ready to accept that because we are made to believe that we are not just machines – that there is something more to us. You have to come to terms with this and accept that we are machines.
The human intellect that we have developed through education, through all kinds of techniques is no match for nature. They assume importance because they have been recognized as expressions of spiritual, artistic and intellectual values. The drive for self-expression is born out of neurosis. This applies to the spiritual teachers of mankind too. There is no such thing as a direct sense experience. All forms of art are nothing but an expression of sensuality.
Mentally different people
Some people who are in the All India Institute of Mental Health at Bangalore visited me. One of them is a top neurosurgeon. I asked him the same question, ‘Who is normal? Who is sane and who is insane?’
He said, ‘Statistically speaking, we are sane.’
That was quite satisfactory to me. And then I asked him, ‘Why are you putting them all there and treating them? How much help do you give them?’
He said, ‘Not even two per cent of them are helped. We send them back to their homes but they keep returning.’
‘Then why are you running this show?’ I asked him.
He said, ‘The government pays the money and the families don't want to keep those people in their homes.’
So, now we move on from there to the basic question, ‘Who is sane and who is insane?’ Sometimes such people come to see me. Even people who are hardcore cases come to me. But the line of demarcation between them and me is very thin. The difference seems to be that they have given up, whereas I am not in conflict with society. I take it. That's all the difference. There is nothing that prevents me from fitting into the framework of society. I am not in conflict with society. When once you are – I don't like to use the word ‘freed’ from – are not trapped in this duality of right and wrong, good and bad, you can never do anything bad. As long as you are caught up in wanting to do only good, you will always do bad. Because the ‘good’ you seek is only in the future. You will be good some other time and until then you remain a bad person. So, the so-called insane has given up and we are doing them the greatest harm and disservice by pushing them to fit themselves into this framework of ours which is rotten.
The roar of an ocean is silence
What is the ‘silence’ that you are after? Do you hear those trucks passing by on the road and the flushing of the toilet? Do you want to escape from all this and go and sit in the caves? There is noise inside you wherever you go.
What is this silence you are talking about? The silence operates there in the city market. When I am talking, it is the expression of the silence. You think there is no silence, when I am talking? You think there is silence when you close your eyes, sit in one corner and try to stop the flow of thoughts? You are just choked – that is not silence. Go to the forest – that roar is the silence. Go to a sea – that is silence. Go right into the centre of the desert – that is silence. A volcano erupting – that is silence. Not the silent mind trying to experience ‘silence’. Silence is energy bursting.
The peace there is not this inane dead silence you experience. It's like a volcano erupting all the time. That is the silence; that is peace. The blood is flowing through your veins like a river. If you tried to magnify the sound of the flow of your blood you will be surprised – it's like the roar of the ocean. If you put yourself in a sound proof room you will not survive even for five minutes. You will go crazy, because you can't bear the noises that are there in you. The sound of the beat of your heart is something which you cannot take. You love to surround yourself with all these sounds and then you create some funny experience called the ‘experience of the silent mind’, which is ridiculous. Absurd. That is the silence that is there – the roar – the roar of an ocean. Like the roaring of the flow of blood.
How can you understand that silence – chaotic or otherwise? Is it possible for you to capture that silence? When that silence starts operating through you, it is something extraordinary, something vital and living. This structure which is trying to understand the nature of it, capture it, contain it or give expression to it, cannot co-exist with it.
The difficulty is you seem to know a lot about this state – you have imagination. You imagine it to be what is described as ‘Silence is Brahman’ and begin to think about it. This imagination must go. That is something living and the structure which is trying to capture it is a dead structure. You are all dead. You are not living human beings at all. You have never known one living moment in your life. You are living the lives of your thoughts. All thoughts are dead – it doesn't matter whose thoughts – whether those of Sankara, of Ramanuja or of the hundreds of sages, saints and saviours we have had and perhaps have still. It is useless to try to understand that. How can you capture it?
If there is any such thing as silence, chaotic or otherwise, living or dead, it will begin to express itself. When it expresses itself you are not there. So, you will never know the nature of that silence at all. What you call silence is not silence at all.
The body is immortal
It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not concerned with ‘the afterlife’ or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply now. The fictitious ‘beyond’, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought's demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body's continuity. Both are utterly false.
The moment you die, the body begins to decay, returning back to other, differently organized forms of life, putting an end to nothing. Life has no beginning and no end. A dead and dying body feeds the hungry ants there in the grave, and rotting corpses give off soil-enriching chemicals, which in turn nourish other life forms. You cannot put an end to your life, it is impossible. The body is immortal and never asks silly questions like, ‘Is there immortality?’ It knows that it will come to an end in that particular form, only to continue on in others. Questions about life after death are always asked out of fear.
The human body, when broken into its constituent elements, is no different from the tree out there or the mosquito that is sucking your blood. Basically, it is exactly the same. The proportions of the elements may be higher in one case and lesser in the case of the others. You have eighty percent of water in the body, and there is eighty percent of water in the trees and eighty percent on this planet. So that is the reason why I maintain that we are nothing but a fortuitous concourse of atoms. If and when death takes place, the body is reshuffled, and then these atoms are used to maintain the energy levels in the universe. Other than that, there is no such thing as death to this body.
Thought is only a response to stimuli. The brain is not really a creator; it is just a container. The function of the brain in this body is only to take care of the needs of the physical organism and to maintain its sensitivity, whereas thought, through its constant interference with sensory activity, is destroying the sensitivity of the body. That is where the conflict is. The conflict is between the need of the body to maintain its sensitivity and the demand of thought to translate every sensation within the framework of the sensual activity. I am not condemning sensual activity. Mind, or whatever you want to call it, is born out of this sensuality. So, all activities of the mind are sensual in their nature, whereas the activity of the body is to respond to the stimuli around it. That is really the basic conflict between what you call the mind and the body.
Hinduism is not a religion
Hinduism is not a religion. It is a combination and confusion of many things. The actual word ‘Hindu’ comes from a lost non-Sanskrit word no longer in use. You wouldn't know anything about it. The invading Aryans who set up the Brahmanic social structure found the native Indians to have a dark complexion and called their religion the religion of the blacks – the ‘hindus’. The scholars and pundits may not like my interpretation, but it is correct and historical. Again, I repeat, Hinduism is not a religion in the usual sense; it is like a street with hundreds of shops.
I am not for a moment expounding Hinduism here or in India. In fact, they think that I am not a Hindu. Yet the Hindus are ready to accept what I am saying. They say, ‘What you are saying seems to be true, but the way you are putting things is not acceptable.’ They brush me aside. But at the same time they cannot totally brush me aside. They always try to fit me into their framework or reference point. If they cannot do that, the whole tradition in which they have a tremendous investment is at stake. So they necessarily have to try to fit me in that framework. So far nobody has succeeded.
Many philosophers in India have been asked about my statements, and they know that they can very well deal with any philosophy, any thinker, past and present, but they have some difficulty fitting me into any particular frame that they know of. What they say is, and I quote, ‘There is no way we can fit this man into any known cage. So what we have to do is let the bird fly.’
Material and spiritual goals – are they different?
There is no such thing as spirituality at all. If you superimpose what you call spirituality on what is called material life, you create problems for yourself. Because you see growth and development in the material world around you, you are applying that to this so-called spiritual life also. There is only one life…. This is a material life, and that other has no relevance. Wanting to change your material life into that so-called religious pattern given to you, placed before you by these religious people, is destroying the possibility of your living in harmony and accepting the reality of this material world exactly the way it is. That is responsible for your pain, for your suffering, for your sorrow.
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All civilizations, all cultures, place before you a goal, whether material or spiritual. There are ways and means of achieving your material goals but even in this respect there is a lot of pain, there is a lot of suffering. And you have superimposed on that what is called a spiritual goal. Christianity, for example, is built on the foundation of suffering as a means to reach your goal. What you are left with is only the suffering. And yet, you are not anywhere near the goal, whatever is the nature of your goal, whereas in the material world the goal is something tangible.
The instrument which you are using to achieve your material goal does produce certain results. By using that more and more you can achieve the desired results but there is no guarantee. The instrument which you are using is limited in its scope. It is applicable only in this area. So the instrument which you are using to achieve your so-called spiritual goals is the same instrument. You do not realize that all the spiritual goals that are superimposed on your so-called material goals are born out of your fantasy because you have divided life into material and spiritual. It doesn't matter what instrument you use to achieve your goal. Whether it is material or spiritual it is exactly the same.
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The spiritual people are the most dishonest people. I am emphasizing that foundation upon which the whole of spirituality is built. If there is no spirit, the whole talk of spirituality is bosh and nonsense. You can't come into your own being until you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of self. To be really on your own, the whole basis of spiritual life, which is erroneous, has to be destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books like a bunch of drunks. It is not that at all. It is a bonfire inside of you. Everything that mankind has thought and experienced must go.
The fundamental mistake
The fundamental mistake that humanity made somewhere along the line was to experience this separateness from the totality of life. At that time there occurred in man, which includes woman also, this self-consciousness which separated him from the life around. He was so isolated that it frightened him. The demand to be part of the totality of life around him created this tremendous demand for the ultimate. He thought that the spiritual goals of God, truth, or reality, would help him to become part of the ‘whole’ again. But the very attempt on his part to become one with or become integrated with the totality of life has kept him only more separate. Isolated functioning is not part of nature. But this isolation has created a demand for finding out ways and means of becoming a part of nature. But thought in its very nature can only create problems and cannot help us solve them.
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We don't seem to realize that it is thought that is separating us from the totality of things. The belief that this is the one that can help us to keep in tune with the totality is not going to materialize. So, it has come up with all kinds of ingenuous, if I may use that word, ideas of insight and intuition.
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When man first experienced the division in his consciousness, when he experienced his self-consciousness, he felt superior to other animals, which he is not, and therein sewed the seeds of his own destruction.
The psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture
The brain is not a creator. This is a statement which many people may not accept, but this is what I have found out. Thoughts come from outside. There are no individuals at all. It is culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, that has created all of us for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo.
At the same time, it has also created the idea that you must become something different from what you are. That is why you try to better yourself, improve yourself. You want to become something other than what you are. That creates this neurotic situation.
The neurosis in the human species is absolutely essential. We have to maintain this neurosis in order to function in this society. There is no other way that we can function in this society except to live in hope and die in hope. There are some people who have given up. But we force them to become functional in this value system we have created. We even push them to commit suicide lest they become manic-depressive individuals. We are solely responsible for driving all these people into a situation where they have to put an end to themselves. They don't want to be functional here. They have given up. That is the reason why I say that the psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture, because he is forcing all those people who have given up fitting into this value system. One of the tragic things that human culture has done to us is that it has placed before us the model of a perfect being. That perfect being is modeled after the great spiritual teachers. The human being modeled after the great spiritual teachers has totally failed. The model has not touched anything there. Your value system is the one that is responsible for the human malady, the human tragedy, forcing everybody to fit into that model.
What is keeping you from being in your natural state?
What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You want to be happy, either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences, and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.
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, saints and saviours of mankind. And so you try to control your behaviour, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.
We are all living in a ‘thought sphere’. Your thoughts are not your own; they belong to everybody. There are only thoughts, but you create a counter-thought, the thinker, with which you read every thought. Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you, which you call the ‘I’. This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life, but isolated from it; it can never touch life. 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.
Have you ever looked at that parallel movement of thought? The books on English grammar will tell you that ‘I’ is a first person singular pronoun, subjective case; but that is not what you want to know. Can you look at that thing you call ‘I’? It is very elusive. Look at it now, feel it, touch it, and tell me. How do you look at it? And what is the thing that is looking at what you call ‘I’? This is the crux of the whole problem: the one that is looking at what you call ‘I’ is the ‘I’. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand that ‘you’ or to change that ‘you’ into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvellous, that ‘you’ will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there, it's gone.
How do you understand this? I have for all practical purposes made a statement: ‘What you are looking at is not different from the one who is looking.’ What do you do with a statement like this? What instrument do you have at your disposal for understanding a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You begin to think. Through thinking, you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying, in terms of the knowledge you already have, just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing – trying to understand, or trying to change yourself – is the state of being that I am describing.
Speaking to yourself constantly is your problem
You must always recognize what you are looking at, otherwise you are not there. The moment you translate, the ‘you’ is there. You look at something and recognize that it is a bag, a red bag. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. Why does thought interfere? And can you do anything about it? The moment you look at a thing, what comes inside of you is the word ‘bag’, if not ‘bag’, then ‘bench’ or ‘bannister’, ‘step’, ‘that man sitting there, he has white hair.’ It goes on and on – you are repeating to yourself all the time. If you don't do that, you are preoccupied with something else: “I'm getting late for the office.’ You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at this moment, or else you are looking and saying to yourself, ‘That's a bag, a red bag,’ and so on and so on – that is all that is there. The word ‘bag’ separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the ‘you’; otherwise there is no space between the two.
Your emotions are more complex, but it is the same process. Why do you have to tell yourself that you are angry, that you are envious of someone else, or that sex is bothering you? I am not saying anything about fulfilling or not fulfilling. There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labeling brings into existence the one who is translating the sensation. What you call ‘I’ is nothing but this word ‘red bag’, ‘bench’, ‘steps’, ‘bannister’, ‘light bulb’, ‘angry’, ‘blissful’, ‘jealous’, or whatever. You are putting your bran cells to unnecessary activity making the memory cells operate all the time, destroying the energy that is there. This is only wearing you out.
This labeling is necessary when you must communicate with someone else or with yourself. But you communicate with yourself all the time. Why do you do this? The only difference between you and the person who talks aloud to himself is that you don't talk aloud. The moment you do begin to talk aloud, along comes the psychiatrist. That chap, of course, is doing the same thing that you are doing, communicating to himself all the time – ‘bag’, ‘red bag’, ‘obsessive’, ‘compulsive’, ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘greedy’, ‘bench’, ‘bannister’, ‘martini’. Then he says something is wrong with you and puts you on the couch and wants to change you, to help you.
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Why can't you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to the ‘you’.
You stand on your own
You are lost in a jungle and you have no way of finding your way out. Night is fast approaching. The wild animals are there including the cobras and still you are lost. What do you do in such a situation? You just stop. You don't move. As long as there is that hope that you can somehow or the other get out of the jungle, so long will you continue what you are doing, searching, and so long you feel lost. You are lost only because you are searching. You have no way of finding your way out of the jungle.
You can stop it in you. Free yourself from that social structure that is operating in you without becoming antisocial, without becoming a reformer, without becoming anti-this, anti-that. You can throw the whole thing out of your system and free yourself from the burden of this culture, for yourself and by yourself. Whether it has any usefulness for society or not is not your concern. If there is one individual who walks free, you don't have any more the choking feeling of what this horrible culture has done to you. It's neither East nor West, it's all the same. Human nature is exactly the same – there's no difference.
I am telling you to stand on your own. You can walk. You can swim. You are not going to sink. That's all that I can say. As long as there is fear, the danger of your sinking is almost certain. Otherwise, there is a buoyancy there in the water that keeps you afloat. The fear of sinking is the very thing that makes it impossible for you to let the movement happen in its own way. You see, it has no direction. It is just a movement with no direction. You are trying to manipulate and channel that movement along a particular direction so that you can have some benefits. You are just a movement without a direction.
You are unique
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals. Those who recommend that you forget your own natural uniqueness and be like someone else, no matter how saintly that person may be, is putting you on the wrong track. It is like the blind leading the blind.
When dealing with these yogins and holy men the first wrong turn you take is in trying to relate the way they are functioning with the way you are functioning. What they are describing may not be related to the way you are functioning at all. Uniqueness is not something which can be turned out in a factory. Society is interested only in the status quo and has provided all these so-called special individuals so that you'll have models to follow. You want to be like that fellow – the saint, the saviour, or the revolutionary– but it is an impossibility. Your society, which is only interested in turning out copies of acceptable models, is threatened by real individuality because it threatens its continuity. A truly unique person, having no cultural reference point, would never know that he is unique.
What nature has created in the form of human species is something extraordinary. It is an unparalleled creation. But culture is interested in fitting the actions of all human beings into a common mould. That is because it is interested in maintaining the status quo, its value system. That is where the real conflict is.
Man cannot become man so long as he follows somebody. What is responsible for man remaining an animal is that culture – the top dog, following somebody – that has not helped you at all. You want to be a cheap imitation of Sankara or Buddha; you don't want to be yourself. What for? I tell you, you are far more unique and extraordinary than all those saints and saviours of mankind put together. Why do you want to be a cheap imitation of that fellow? That is one of the myths. Forget it.
Discover your own path rejecting all others …
The path has to be yours. I don't want to use the term ‘path’, because it has mystical overtones…. ‘My’ path, Ramakrishna's path, Jesus's path, or the Buddha's path – they are all worthless. Nobody can come into this unless or until all the other paths are rejected by him. Then it becomes his own path. So, only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.
Just look at yourself and find out what the hell you are doing with yourself, how you are kidding yourself all the time – how you follow the path of this man, that man and the other man. You are not interested in my path. The path is not going to lead you anywhere. And the path is going to give you what that man has experienced.
What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist. This is the unfortunate situation. You are not getting anywhere. That is not the way at all. Then what is the way? There is no way. Anything I say you turn into a way and add to the momentum. That is not the way. That is not the path. It has to be yours.
All paths must go. As long as you follow somebody else's path, the path is the product of thought. So it is actually not a new path, it's the same old path, and you are playing the same old game in a new way. It is not a new game. It is the same old game that you are playing all the time, but you think you are playing a new game. You have to come to a point where you can't do anything at all.
No power outside of you
Psychic powers, clairvoyance, clairaudience – they are all human instincts. And they are necessary because there are two things that the human organism is interested in. One: its survival at any cost. Why should it survive? I don't know; it is a foolish question to ask. That is one of the most important things: it has a survival mechanism of its own, which is quite different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second thing is: to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism.
I can tell you that there is no power outside of you – no power. This does not mean that you have all the attributes that you read about of the super-duper gods; but there is no power outside of you. If there is any power in this universe, it is in you.
Courage to stand alone
Man has to be saved from the saviours of mankind! The religious people – they kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind. Throw them out! That is courage itself, because of the courage there; not the courage you practice.
Fearlessness is not freedom from all the phobias. The phobias are essential for the survival of the organism. You must have the fear of heights and the fear of depths – if that is not there, there is a danger of your falling. But you want to teach courage to man to fight on the battlefield. Why do you want to teach him courage? To kill others and get killed himself – that is your culture. Crossing the Atlantic in a balloon or the Pacific on a raft – anybody can do that – that is not courage. Fearlessness is not a silly thing like that.
Courage is to brush aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you. You are the only one, greater than all those things. Everything is finished, the whole tradition is finished, however sacred and holy it may be – then only can you be yourself – that is individuality. For the first time you become an individual.
J. Krishnamurti is playing the same guru game
To me there is no such thing as mind; mind is a myth. Since there is no such thing as mind, the ‘mutation of mind’ that J. Krishnamurti is talking about has no meaning. There is nothing there to be transformed, radically or otherwise. There is no self to be realized. The whole religious structure that has been built on this foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realize. To me, Krishnamurti is playing exactly the same game as all those ugly saints in the market whom we have in the world today. Krishnamurti's teaching is phoney baloney. There is nothing to his teaching at all, and he cannot produce anything at all. A person may listen to him for sixty, seventy or a hundred years, but nothing will ever happen to that man, because the whole thing is phoney. If the number of followers is the criterion of a successful spiritual teacher, JK is a pygmy. He's a mere wordsmith. He has created a new trap.
You want to smoke cigarettes, and there are always peddlers selling their own brands of cigarettes. Each one says that his is the one and only one, the best cigarette; and Krishnamurti comes around and says that his is nicotine-free. So the problem is not the gurus, but you. If you don't want to smoke, all these brands will disappear. These gurus are the worst egotists the world has ever seen. All gurus are welfare organizations providing petty experiences to their followers. The guru game is a profitable industry: try and make two million dollars a year any other way. Even JK, who claims he has no possessions, is the president of an eighty-million-dollar empire.
Yes, I am using 80 per cent of his words and phrases, the very phrases he has used over the years to condemn gurus, saints and saviours like himself. He has it coming. If he sees the mess he has created in his false role as world messiah and dissolves the whole thing, I will be the first to salute him. But he is too old and senile to do it. His followers are appalled that I am giving him a dose of his own medicine. Do not compare what I am saying with what he or other religious authorities have said. If you give what I am saying any spiritual overtones, any religious flavour at all, you are missing the point.
Choiceless awareness is poppycock. Who is the one being choicelessly aware? You must test this for yourself. J. Krishnamurti has gathered about him the spiritual dead wood of a twenty-, thirty- and forty-year club. What good is that? I lived with him for years, and I can tell you he is a great actor. ‘Gentlemen, we are taking a journey together’ – but you can never go on that journey with him. Whatever you do, it is always the same. What you experience with him is the clarification of thought. You are that thought. He is a do-gooder who should have given up long ago.
As long as you think you can see more and more clearly, I say you have seen nothing. J. Krishnamurti says, ‘Seeing is the end.’ If you say you have seen, you have not seen, because seeing is the end of the structure that says that. There is no seeing you can know. As long as you think you can understand or see the world around you more clearly, I say you will see nothing and understand nothing.
J. Krishnamurti has subtly enticed people into believing in a spiritual goal, a goal which moreover can be reached through specific techniques – ‘passive awareness’, ‘free inquiry’, ‘direct perception’, ‘skepticism’, etc. I reject the idea of transformation altogether. There is nothing to be transformed, no psyche to revolutionize, and no awareness you can use to improve or change yourself.
He is a showman par excellence and master of words. Krishnamurti's teachings may have sounded very revolutionary a century ago. But with the emergence of new revelations in the fields of microbiology and genetics, the ideas taken for granted in the field of psychology will be challenged. The ‘mind’ (which Krishnamurti's teaching assumes), the exclusive franchise of psychologists and religious teachers and all the assumptions connected with it will also be undermined.
No. What I'm saying has nothing to do with the negative approach that J. Krishnamurti uses. The problem is that what you call a ‘negative approach’ is a positive approach; you just call it a ‘negative approach’, but you have turned the whole thing into a positive approach. If it is a negative approach, it has to negate itself somewhere along the line. It is very essential to use the negative approach, but you unfortunately have turned the whole negative approach into a positive approach. That man is not responsible for that; anything this structure touches m, it must turn into a positive thing, because it is a product of positive thinking. So anything you listen to is turned into a method, a system – you want to get something through this. For example, somebody says there is a mind and you must uncondition your mind. How are you going to uncondition your mind? You are conditioning your mind through this lingo – that is all that is necessary for you to see. Don't blame the other chap. Leave him alone….
I'll sing this song the rest of my life until I drop dead; whether anybody listens to it or not is of no importance to me. So then you leave this chap alone: you never establish any relationship with this man. The moment you use this to get whatever you want to get, or to arrive at some kind of a destination, you are tricking yourself into the same old game – this you have to see. Seeing is the end – finished, you see. But you haven't understood a thing; you go there again and again. And you have only clarified your thoughts, and through this so-called clarification you have given strength to the continuity of thought – this is all that has happened. So, it is the hope that keeps you going. You have gotten into a habit, a routine: instead of going to church, you go there – that's all you are doing. If you see the absurdity of what you are doing, then there is a possibility of your saying to yourself ‘What the hell am I doing? What am I doing? How am I different? Why am I listening to this?’
Who is a genuine guru?
I am blocking every escape. Each outlet has to be blocked to put you in a corner. You must be choked to death, as it were. Only a real teacher can find that out and tell you, nobody else. Not those people who interpret the texts; all that is totally unrelated. Only such a man can talk. And such a man never encourages you because he knows that if this kind of a thing has to happen to somebody, that person will not need the help of anybody.
A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. The true guru tells you, ‘Throw them away and don't replace them. You can walk and if you fall you will rise and walk again.’ Such is the man whom we consider or even tradition considers to be the real guru and not those who are selling those shoddy pieces of goods in the marketplace today. It is a business It has become a holy business to people.
I am not condemning anything but as long as you depend upon somebody for solving your problems, you remain helpless. And this helplessness is exploited by the people who actually do not have the answers to your problems but they give you some sort of a comforting. People are satisfied with and fall for this kind of thing instead of dealing with the problems by themselves and for themselves. There is no need for me to free you or enlighten you because to do that I must have an image of myself and in relationship to that an image of you.
To be an individual and to be yourself you don't have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy we waste trying to become that! If that energy is released what is it that we can't do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world! It is so simple.
Saints and mystics
The saint or mystic is a second-hand man who experiences what the sages have talked about, so he is still in the field of duality, whereas the sages or seers are functioning in the undivided state of consciousness. The mystic experience is an extraordinary one because it is not an intellectual experience; it helps them to look at things differently, to feel differently, to experience things differently and to interpret the statements of the sages and seers for others.
The world should be grateful to the saints rather than to the sages. Had it not been for the saints, the sages would have been clean forgotten long ago. The sages don't depend upon any authority. This the sages talked about, and the saints – some of them – had experiences, and this became a part of their experience. They tried to share that through music and all kinds of things. But this is not an experience which can be shared with somebody else; this is not an experience at all.
Can Jesus, Buddha and such persons be our models?
Culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, has placed before us the model of the perfect being, which is the model of the great spiritual teachers of mankind. But it is not possible for every one of us to be like that. You are unique in your own way. There is no way you can copy those men. That is where we have created the tremendous problem for the whole of mankind.
We have been brainwashed for centuries that the end product of human evolution is the creation of perfect models such as the great spiritual teachers of mankind with their special behavioural patterns. But nature is not interested in creating a perfect being, only a perfect species. It is only interested in making a species more adaptable to changing environment. Nature does not use any models. The creation of the human species is an unparalleled event. But culture is interested in fitting all into a common mould, and that is the cause of our tragedy.
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals. The one who recommends that – to be like someone else and forget your own natural uniqueness – no matter how saintly that person may be, is putting you on the wrong track. It is like the blind leading the blind.
Sages are different
The sage, or seer, or whatever you want to call him, is in the state of undivided consciousness. He does not know that he is a free man, so for him there is no question of trying to free others. He is just there. He talks about it and then he goes.
Gaudapada had no disciples. He refused to teach anybody. Great teachers never use any authority and they do not interpret anyone. The mystics help you to look at things differently, to interpret things differently. You cannot become a sage through any effort. It is not in your hands. A sage cannot have a disciple. A sage cannot have a follower because it is not an experience that can be shared. Even an ordinary experience you can't share with others. Can you tell somebody who has never experienced sex what the sex experience is like?
You cannot become a sage through any sadhana; it is not in your hands. A sage cannot have a disciple, a sage cannot have a follower, because it is not an experience that can be shared. The sages and seers are original and unique because they have freed themselves from the entire past. Even the mystic experience is part of the past. Not that the past goes for such a man but for him the past has no emotional content. It is not continually operative, colouring the actions. This is the ultimate. You have to surrender yourself totally.
It is not surrender in the ordinary sense of the word. It means there isn't anything you can do. That is total surrender, total helplessness. It can't be brought about through any effort or volition of yours. If you want to surrender to something it's only to get something. That's why I call it a state of total surrender. It's a state of surrender where all effort has come to an end, where all movement in the direction of getting something has come to an end.
It seems to have happened to some people during the course of history. Each one has given expression to that uniqueness in their own way according to their background. It is an expression of that background. Nature, in its own way, throws out from time to time some flower, but this end product of human evolution cannot be used by this evolutionary process as a model to create another one. If it throws out one flower, that is it, you see. You can't preserve it. You can't preserve the perfume of that because if you preserve it, it will stink. The evolutionary process or movement is not interested in using the one that it has perfected as a model for further creation. It has a creation of its own.
Telling it like it is
We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet…. We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.
We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet.
The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.
When you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in this duality, the danger is that you will always do wrong.
In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of ‘energy’ in this universe, death occurs.
An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsmen. He uses that tool to express himself. All art is a pleasure movement.
There is more life in the chorus of the barking dogs than in the music or singing of your famous musicians and singers.
A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.
Religions have promised roses but you end up with only thorns.
It is terror, not love, not brotherhood that will help us to live together.
Meditation itself is evil. That is why you get evil thoughts when you start meditating.
Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is the very thing that can free you.
Atmospheric pollution is most harmless when compared to the spiritual and religious pollution that have plagued the world.
Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same; it is quick fix.
The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter there.
God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes, too.
When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say.
You have to touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that.
Until you have the courage to blast me, all that I am saying, and all gurus, you will remain a cultist with photographs, rituals, birthday celebrations and the like.
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes perpetrated not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom – the holy men – but also the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualization, living from moment to moment, and such rot.
The more you know about yourself the more impossible it becomes to be humble and sensitive. How can there be humility as long as you know something?
It is mortality that creates immortality. It is the known that creates the unknown. It is the time that has created the timeless. It is thought that has created the thoughtless.
You actually have no way of looking at the sunset because you are not separated from the sunset. The moment you separate your self from the sunset, the poet in you comes out. Out of that separation poets and painters have tried to express themselves, to share their experiences with others. All that is culture.
The feminist movement will not succeed as long as the woman depends on the man for her sexual needs.
All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in the area of sensuality.
Humility is an art that one practices. There is no such thing as humility. As long as you know, there is no humility. The known and humility cannot coexist.
Man cannot be anything other than what he is. Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him.
Inspiration is a meaningless thing. Lost, desperate people create a market for inspiration. All inspired action will eventually destroy you and your kind.
Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins.
It is a terrible thing to use somebody to get pleasure. Whatever you use, an idea, a concept, a drug, or a person, or anything else, you cannot have pleasure without using something.
Hinduism is not a religion in the usual sense. It is a combination and confusion of many things. It is like a street with hundreds of shops.
Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes.
Society, which has created all these sociopaths, has invented morality to protect itself from them. Society has created the ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. I don't accept them as such.
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.
As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centred individual.
The subject does not exist there. It is the object that creates the subject. This runs counter to the whole philosophical thinking of India.
When thought is not there all the time, what is there is living from moment to moment. It's all in frames, millions and millions and millions of frames, to put it in the language of film.
The man who spoke of ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is responsible for this horror in the world today. Don't exonerate those teachers.
Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologized.
Society is built on a foundation of conflict, and you are society. Therefore you must always be in conflict with society.
You know the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The red queen has to run faster and faster to keep still where she is. That is exactly what you are all doing. Running faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere.
The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought. It is acquired taste that tells you that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations.
The peak of sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all the rest of your experiences are second-hand, somebody else’s.
The problem with language is, no matter how we try to express ourselves, we are caught up in the structure of words. There is no point in creating new language, a new lingo, to express anything. There is nothing there to be expressed except to free yourself from the stranglehold of thought.
What you call ‘yourself’ is fear. The ‘you’ is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.
Food, clothing and shelter – these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
If not liberation at least a transistor
Once a harikatha dasa, a traditional teller of stories of Gods, famously called Bhagavatar throughout South India, visited UG. He came dressed in a white dhoti, a white shirt, a Kashmir shawl on his shoulders, and a rosary around his neck. He wore marks of vibhuti (ashes) on his forehead. In the middle of those marks, he wore a round red vermillion mark. He was over seventy five years old, yet looked healthy and strong. He believed UG was an enlightened man and addressed him as ‘Appa’ although UG was twenty years younger than him. UG never condemned the Bhagavatar's faith or beliefs. But, when at times UG started his tirade on human culture and civilization, immediately Bhagavatar would get up and run out saying, “Father, it's time for me to go. But I'll come again.”
One day, apparently overcome with emotion, the Bhagavatar held UG's feet begging, “Appa, no one else cares for me. Only you can show me the way to moksha.”
UG instantly held him up trying to prevent him from holding his feet. And then he asked, “You spent so many years with Ramana Maharshi. Why didn't you ask him?”
“At that time, I didn't have either that interest or yearning. Now, I feel I don't want anything else,” he answered.
UG said, “That's the only thing I cannot give. It's not something that someone can give and someone else can receive. You ask for anything else. I will give that.”
As soon as he said that, the Bhagavatar, a shy smile creasing his lips, asked UG to get him a small ‘foreign’ transistor. Bhagavatar's interest slipped fast from liberation to a transistor. But UG did not laugh.
No prior appointments
There is no need to wait for a fixed appointment or time to see UG, people come at different times. On Sundays, from morning until night various people continuously come and go. One day (in 1986) he was talking incessantly without a respite. The visitors came and left one after another. Even after it was past the time for lunch, the hall did not become vacant. When there was hardly any space for people to come and many stood out waiting to get in, UG stood up, and smiling, said, “This has turned into a barber shop. One after another, people come and get their hair cut. They have been coming since morning without a break.” Peals of laughter broke upon the crowd, but still nobody showed any sign of leaving. And UG sat back, saying, ‘Anyway, This is how it should be. There should be no special duration, prior appointment, and such.”
I like Madhvacharya the most because ...
In 1972, along with Valentine, UG visited Udupi, a place famous for temples and monastries. A senior swamiji of a famous Math who had heard about UG, invited him to accept his hospitality.
“If I come to your Math, would I have to wear clothing appropriate to your ritual rules? I wouldn't be allowed with my pajama and lalchi. Besides, Valentine also will have to come with me. She is a foreigner,” said UG, trying to discourage the swami from inviting him.
The swami reassured UG that he could come dressed just the way he was and of course bring Valentine as well. “But, please don't force me to sit with you to eat. That's all I ask,” he said, repeating his invitation.
UG, Valentine and friends were treated to a tasty meal with twenty-five delicious items. The swamiji sat in front of them while they ate their lunch. Later there was a discussion on many things. At one point, after listening to UG for a while, the swami said to his disciples, “That Krishna and this Krishna say the same thing.”
Then UG remarked, “Among the three Acharyas, I like Madhvacharya the most.”
The Adamara Math Swami was flattered with this remark, believing that UG was admiring his Guru and their tradition. “Why, UG, why?” he asked with excitement.
“It is because of Madhvacharya that Udupi restaurants sprung up all over the world. Whether we go to New York or London or some other place, thanks to those restaurants, I can find the idlis I need.”
A parliament of dacoits
Once, a noted journalist brought along a VIP who was responsible for the surrender of six hundred dacoits. The VIP spoke about his good work and how with great struggle he could get the dacoits surrender to the government. When he was finished there was profound silence and then quiet murmurs of appreciation from the little crowd. But UG looked at the man and asked simply, “Yes, but what about the six hundred dacoits you have put there in the Parliament?”
The man rose in a hurry, saying, “I will return when you are in a better mood.”
No need to touch anybody's feet, not even your own
Once, a pious old man, after listening to UG, with tears in his eyes, went down on his knees to touch UG's feet. Quickly UG withdrew his legs preventing the man from touching his feet. But the old man, not willing to give up, kept persisting. It was quite a funny tussle: one old man trying to touch the feet and the other doing his best to stop him.
At last, UG said, “No, don't do that, sir. Not only to me but to anyone else either. No one is worth that, believe me. How can I convince you that there is no power outside of you? I never touched anybody's feet, not even my own.”
Therapy is the disease
One morning, Dr. Modi, a renowned eye surgeon who had performed many eye operations free by setting up camps all over India, came to see UG. After a long chat over spiritual matters, the good doctor said, “Sir, I am fully blind. Please help me see.”
UG humbly replied, “I am not competent enough to do the operation. I can only tell you that there is nothing wrong with your eye and no operation is necessary.”
But when the doctor persisted that UG should suggest some therapy for his spiritual malady, UG said, “Sir, the therapy is the disease.”
– –
A long-time admirer and friend of UG once grandly declared that he thought UG was the only reliable and dependable friend he had in the whole world, and that he trusted UG so much that if at that minute UG asked him to jump from the window he would obey him blindly. UG immediately said, “Really? Let's go on the terrace. That's high enough for you to jump from.”
– –
One day, while having meal, UG poured some ghee in his rasam, looked at Shanta and said, “See how the ghee floats on this rasam! This reminds me of how your Shirdi Baba performed the miracle of lighting lamps on water. Obviously this is how the layer of oil must have floated in the tin pot.”
– –
Once, an old friend and schoolmate of UG, recalling his days with UG, recounted the night they both went to see the film Harishchandra, and how he was quite surprised to see tears rolling down UG's cheeks at the plight of the honest King Harishchandra. This did surprise many in the crowd and they stared at UG as if to ask if it was true that he shed tears. UG smiled and replied, “I was crying because of the poor Indians who have to live up to Harishchandra's lofty ideal.”
– –
A childless couple once came to UG asking for his blessings for a child, and UG as usual replied, “You don't need my blessings. All you need is to go to the doctor, to find which of you needs medical help.”
– –
One evening, surprising everyone sitting around him in the room, UG got into a playful mood. Louis, an American was sitting by his side. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, muscular guy, who looked more a WWF wrestler than a spiritual seeker. That day, he became the target of UG's mischief. One had never seen UG getting so childishly mischievous. Without his dentures, he looked a grandma playing pranks with her overgrown grandchild. He kept nudging, poking and hitting Louis all over his bulky frame. At one point, suddenly he stretched out his hand and ordered Louis to read his palm. Sometimes UG played this game with palmists, asking, ‘Tell me, where will I get my money from and how much?’ We were all familiar with this game of UG and so was Louis. Promptly now, Louis held UG's palm and then screwing up his mischievous eyes, said, ‘Look here, the lines here are in the shape of MW. Ah, M for money and W for wealth. You are lucky!’ ‘No,’ bellowed UG, ‘M means murder, and W means whacking.’ And he started whacking Louis hard on his tonsured head and bulky frame.
– –
Once, a religious man, who believed in miracles as the sign of the existence of God, asked seriously, ‘UG, what do you think of Jesus Christ walking on water?’
Smiling, UG replied, ‘Jesus walked on water probably because he did not know how to swim. Fortunately for him and unfortunately for others the water was only knee-deep. And in the story of the multiplication of the loaves of bread and fishes, he probably cut the bread into many smaller pieces.’
– –
“Are there any boots to walk on thorns?”
UG's reply came back crisp and direct, “There are no thorns.”
Unsatisfied, the woman pursued, “The thorns are very much there for me!”
With quiet patience he answered, “Stop looking for roses and there will be no thorns.”
– –
A famous man from the USA was curious to meet with UG to find out why some of his friends were going gaga about him. And one evening he did meet him in a friend's house. He asked UG straight, ‘I have heard quite a lot about you. I'm really curious. What do you do?’
UG replied simply, ‘I'm retired, sir.’
‘I'm retired too. What did you retire as?’
‘I was born retired.’
– –
A sweater for the spider
Once, an American friend had to leave to India with UG and was caught in a dilemma over the safety of her spider friend who was keeping her company over the past few weeks. She didn't want the spider hanging in her bath room, with one of his legs missing, to be killed by the cleaning woman the next day. So, carefully, delicately she picked the spider and put him outside near the steps. It was quiet cold and suddenly the spider seemed frozen out there. Worried she asked UG his opinion. UG scoffed at her insensitivity about American boys (soldiers) dying in the Middle East deserts and fussing over the safety of one spider in the bathroom.
The American friend said, ‘But I don't condone sending soldiers anywhere, don't condone anything my government does. It's just that I have grown attached to my spider.’
UG said, ‘Why don't you knit a sweater for the spider?’
– –
Hoping to be commended for his brave act, a friend told UG that he had taken down all the guru pictures in his room, all his ex-teachers, Zen masters, including a photo of UG.
UG laughed and said there would therefore be fewer lizards on the walls.
– –
An American who was visiting India for the first time and quite worried about the living conditions there asked UG whether she would need to get shots for India.
‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘we're not worried about your germs there.’
– –
At the end of an interview, quite fascinated by UG’s message, the interviewer burst out, ‘I just have to tell you that you're so incredibly handsome!’
UG laughed and said it was because he ate foods with preservatives, no health foods, no vegetables, didn't exercise and rarely slept.
Edited by Mukunda Rao, 2007
