Belief and Beyond


with no discipline, and no duty to perform,

like the formless sky, self-existent purity,

the avadhuta lives alone in an empty hut;

with a pure, even mind, he is always content,

he moves about, naked and free,

in the burning and bright awareness.

(Avadhuta Gita)


In 1986, after the death of Jiddu Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti went public with what he had to say. It was time to dismantle the old spiritual discourses or teachings, but not to erect or construct anything new in its place. It would not be a new interpretation, amplification or clarification of the old teachings, whether J. Krishnamurti's or Ramana Maharshi's, the Buddha's or the Upanishads'. Religious dross had to be cleared, the slate had to be wiped clean. So it would be a negation of all approaches.


He had made clear that there was no ‘method’ implied in either his negation or rejection of things; it could not be made into yet another approach. In point of fact, it would be neither a negation nor an assertion of anything. No apocalypse! No Kingdom of God cometh! No atman, no Brahman, no moksha, no nirvana! No sunyata either.


If the Upanishads quickened our minds, the Buddha urged and nudged us into enquiring the cause of sorrow, if Ramana teased and pressed us to find out who the questioner was, if J. Krishnamurti drove us to doubt and question all forms of authority and belief systems and come to truth through a process of rigorous negation, U.G. Krishnamurti took us deeper into the waters of self-enquiry, into the very heart of the problem itself, to reveal how even our so-called enquiry, our questions, even our negations, are shaped by the answers or solutions we already have.


~


Born on July 9, 1918 in Masulipatnam, a town in coastal Andhra Pradesh, U.G. grew up in a peculiar milieu of both Theosophy and Hindu religious beliefs and practices. With all the religious practices and exposure to Theosophy he had at quite an early age, U.G. grew up to be a passionate yet rebellious character, but with a strong spiritual streak in him. It was while pursuing an undergraduate honors course in philosophy and psychology at the University of Madras that his spiritual quest gained momentum.


During his three-year degree course, he spent summers in the Himalayas studying yoga and practicing meditation. Though he had certain mystical experiences, he realized that deep within him there was no transformation. He was still caught up in conflict and found himself burning with anger all the time. It seemed that he had meditated and performed penance to no avail. He quit university as well, he wanted nothing less than moksha. One day, in 1939, a friend suggested he meet Sri Ramana Maharshi. U.G. agreed and went to meet him. He asked Ramana, ‘Is there anything like moksha? Can you give it to me?’ Ramana said, ‘I can give it to you, but can you take it?’ The counterquestion struck U.G. like a thunderbolt. And he realized that nobody could give that state to him and he had to find it for himself. But the meeting with Ramana had only deepened his anguish. The quest, of course, did not end there, but he was going nowhere. The Theosophical Society seemed to be the only way out and he took up a job as a press secretary to the president of the society.


In 1943, at twenty-five years of age, he got married and started on a new assignment as a lecturer for the Theosophical Society in Madras (now Chennai). Traveling extensively in India and Europe he gave talks on Theosophy, but quit the post by the end of his seventh year. From 1953, he began interacting with J. Krishnamurti at a personal level, holding long and deep conversations with him on several occasions. It was during this period that he underwent a ‘near-death experience’ that altered his perception of life and eventually led him up to the ‘final death’ and awakening into the ‘natural state’ in 1967.


The period between 1953 and 1964 was a period of great changes and the beginning of the metamorphosis he would undergo in 1967. In brief, he went to the USA to get medical treatment for his polio-stricken son; took to lecturing to earn a living; broke away from his family; visited parts of Europe and then began to drift aimlessly in London, like a dry leaf blown hither and thither. Eventually he landed up in Saanan, Switzerland. The quest had come to an end now, his body had turned into something like rice chaff – burning, smoldering within, the fire slowly and steadily moving in circles towards the outer surface, as it were, preparing itself for the ‘metamorphosis’ that would challenge the very foundation of human thought built over centuries. He held out in a state of ‘masterly inactivity’ and ‘watchful expectancy’ and on 13 August 1967, on the completion of his forty-ninth year, biological changes began to manifest.


For the next seven days, these bewildering changes catapulted him into what he called the ‘natural state’. The whole chemistry of his body, including the five senses, was transformed. His eyes stop 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 the peak of their sensitivity. And the hitherto dormant ductless glands, such as the thymus, the pituitary, the pineal, which Kundalini Yoga calls the chakras or energy centers, were activated. And on the eighth day, he ‘died’.


He felt a tremendous burst of energy and all these energies seemed to draw themselves to a focal point from different parts of the body. It was a sign of approaching death. He stretched himself on his bed ready to die. Then a point arrived when it seemed as though the aperture of a camera was trying to close, but something was trying to keep it open – that was the ‘I’, the residue of ‘thought’ (the fear of death, fear of the unknown, the void, dramatized as Mara in Buddhist literature), refusing to die. Then, after a while, there was no ‘will’ to do anything, not even to prevent the aperture closing itself. And, it closed. His hands and feet turned cold, the body became stiff, the heartbeat slowed down, and he started gasping for breath and he ‘died’, only to be reborn in the state of ‘undivided consciousness’. For about forty years thereafter, and until his final departure from the body and this world, U.G. traveled the globe and wherever he stayed, people came to see him and to listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. He talked openly of the ‘natural state’ and responded to people's queries and answered their questions candidly, holding nothing back, ‘revealing all the secrets’.


His first (and last) public talk was given at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), in May 1972. He never again gave a public talk, nor would he accept invitations to talk at universities or institutions. He gave no lectures or discourses but he could not stop people from meeting and talking to him.


Though U.G. usually stayed with friends or in small rented apartments, he never stayed in one place for more than three or a maximum of six months. He had no organization, no office, no secretary, and no fixed address. Despite his endless repetition that he had no message for mankind, 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,’ U.G. would say, and his hosts everywhere maintained the rule without fail.


He often insisted, preferring the term ‘natural state’ over ‘enlightenment’, that whatever transformation he had gone through was within the structure of the human body and not in the mind at all. And, avoiding religious terms, he described the ‘natural state’ as a pure and simple physical and physiological state of being. It was an ‘undivided state of consciousness’, where all desires and fear, and the search for happiness and pleasure, God and truth, came to an end. And he never tired of pointing out that ‘this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning.’


The Saints Go Marching Out


In the ‘natural state’ of undivided or pure consciousness, even the so-called good thoughts, holy thoughts, mystical experiences, including visions of God or gods, are only ‘contaminations’ and therefore have to be flushed out. U.G. dubbed this experience as ‘the saints go marching out’.


It is interesting to note here that in the reports of experiences of sages, we are told about their visions of gods and goddesses and of enlightened masters such as the Buddha and so on, and how these spiritual entities affected the sages. Sri Ramakrishna, for instance, talked about visions of spiritual entities and how they merged in his being. Anandamayi Ma also often talked of visions of spiritual entities. At one time, during the early period of his career as the World Teacher, J. Krishnamurti, too, talked of feeling the great presence of the Buddha and how his being was filled by that presence. But in U.G.'s case, he reiterated that all these visions were flushed out. This is how he described the experience:


‘There are no purificatory methods necessary, there is no sadhana necessary for this kind of a thing to happen. The consciousness is so pure that whatever you are doing in the direction of purifying that consciousness is adding impurity to it. Consciousness has to flush itself out: it has to purge itself of every trace of holiness, every trace of unholiness, everything. … It's not a vision outside there or inside of you; suddenly you yourself, the whole consciousness, takes the shape of Buddha, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed, Socrates – only those people who have come into this state; not great men, not the leaders of mankind – it is very strange – but only those people to whom this kind of a thing happened. One of them was a coloured man, and during that time I could tell people how he looked. Then some women with flowing hair – naked. I was told that there were two saints here in India – Akkamahadevi and Lalleswari – they were naked women. Suddenly you have these two breasts, the flowing hair – even the organs change into female organs. But still there is a division there – you, and the form the consciousness has assumed, the form of Buddha, or Jesus Christ or God knows what.


‘But that division cannot stay long; it disappears and something else comes. Hundreds of people – probably something happened to so many hundreds of people. This is part of history – so many rishis, some Westerners, monks, so many women, and sometimes very strange things. All that people have experienced before you is part of your consciousness. I use the expression “the saints go marching out”; in Christianity they have a hymn, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” But here, they run out of your consciousness because they cannot stay there any more. This flushing out of everything good and bad, holy and unholy, sacred and profane has got to happen, otherwise your consciousness is still contaminated, still impure. Once it has become pure, of and by itself, then nothing can touch it, nothing can contaminate that any more. All the past up to that point is there, but it cannot influence your actions any more. All these visions and everything were happening for three years after the “calamity”. Now the whole thing is finished. The divided state of consciousness cannot function at all anymore; it is always in the undivided state of consciousness – nothing can touch that. You are back in that primeval, primordial, pure state of consciousness – call it “awareness” or whatever you like.’ (Arms, ed., 1982)


How do we understand this experience, which is actually no experience in the ordinary sense of the term? Does this mark the end of spiritual adventure, or do we see it as the end product of evolution, resulting in the emergence of a new human being in the state of pure awareness? Or, in other words, should we understand this as the final play of consciousness, wherein the consciousness empties itself of all its content and returns to its primal state? Could this really be the non-dual state of being? The state of Brahman, of moksha or nirvana?


When Buddha said, ‘The eye, ear, nose, tongue, the body (all sense experiences) and ideas, or intellect consciousness are empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Thus it is said that the world is empty,’ was he describing the state of being wherein the consciousness had emptied itself of all ideas and images? Was Allama's vachana – emptiness sown in emptiness, growing in emptiness, emptiness emptying itself turns into emptiness – a poetic rendering of the same phenomenon?


‘You are back in that primordial, pure state of consciousness,’ said U.G. and described it simply as the ‘Natural State’. He often said that it was not a state of mind, rather it was a state of being where the binary mind was absent, where the search had come to an end, and the continuity of all kinds had ceased. A pure and simple physical and physiological state of being, where the body was in tune with the cosmos. A state of being where evolution had come to fruition. It was finished, complete.


To better appreciate this state of being, you'll recall the reports of how Sri Ramakrishna had visions of Rama, Sita, Christ and Muhammad, and that all these spiritual entities entered into him and created different states of bhava. And then, later, having finished with all the possible modes of bhava, under the guidance of Totapuri, Ramakrishna entered the state of nirvikalpa samadhi. In his words:


… as soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it severed it in two. There remained no more obstruction to my mind, which at once soared beyond the relative plane, and I lost myself in nirvikalpa samadhi.’ (Nikhilananda 2008)


But, later, by Ramakrishna's own admission, as per the command from the Mother Kali, he opted out of nirvikalpa samadhi and decided to remain in bhavamukha – a state of being intermediate between samadhi and normal consciousness.


All images, which are products of the mind or rather the mind itself, create the division, duality. Without duality there is no relationship, no devotion, no quest and no love. For reasons even sages cannot explain, some of them remain on the threshold short of the final step as it were; perhaps they are meant to stay in the state of bhava, of compassion, and as good boatmen to lead earnest questers to the other shore. There is no choice exercised in this matter, rather these things happen by themselves. It’s an enigma! But rarely do we see a sage completely dissolve into the state of absolute non-duality. Even here it is not a matter of choice. It has to happen! However, U.G.'s vision of ‘the saints go marching out’ seems to hold the key to understanding U.G. He was cleansed of all the images embedded in human consciousness from time memorial and was thrown into the state of primordial consciousness, or the state of perfect non-duality.


Non-duality is a burning awareness, it burns up all forms of division, all frames of thought that are trapped in binaries. This should explain why U.G. often dismissed even the Buddha and other sages, too. To many he sounded cynical, negative, even jealous, because with apparent disdain he rejected them all. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a living embodiment of non-duality in action. ‘You are unique,’ said U.G., ‘You are far ahead of the Buddha, Jesus and all these religious teachers put together. But this uniqueness cannot express itself unless the limitations are destroyed’ – unless you ‘touch life at a point never touched before.’


The Way It Is


We may roughly discern three phases in U.G.'s life and his ‘anti-teaching’. The first lasted from 1967 to almost the late '70s, when his approach may be characterized as raw, soft, tender and obliging. At this time, U.G. talked approvingly, though cautiously, of other sages and their teachings and certain religious texts. This was, in a sense, a different U.G., who was ‘open’ and persuasive, taking along or leading his listeners, ever so sympathetically and caringly, on a journey into the exploration of the functioning of the mind and the body. He would point out to them the irrelevance of methods and techniques for ‘self-realization’, the unnatural state and its problems, the natural state as a physiological state of being and how it could impact or change the world consciousness and so on.


During the second phase in the 1980s and '90s, he looked a sage in rage. His words were deep and explosive and cathartic. He was like fire that burned everything to ash so that a new beginning could be made, without the touch of sorrow. This was also the time that he went ‘public’ by way of giving TV interviews and radio talks in order to reach out to people in the wider world. All grand narratives and symbols of various religions and cultures, ideologies and philosophies were subverted or dismissed as so much garbage. There was nothing sacred or sacrosanct, nothing unquestionable or incontestable: subversion was the way, then subversion too was subverted and demolished. He was the ‘primordial being’, ‘unconverted member of the human race’, blasting every frame of thought, challenging the very foundation of human culture.


During this phase people would call him, especially in the media, a cosmic Naxalite, anti-guru and so on, and this image of him as a raging sage somehow got overemphasized and sort of fixed even in the minds of U.G. admirers, not to speak of the media and those who had only a vague idea of who he was and his teaching. It only showed how difficult it was to understand the non-dual truth he was trying to convey, caught up as we are in a dualistic mode of thinking and being and wedded to some ideal or the other. Like the Buddha – who knocked off all narratives as mere mental constructs and a hindrance to entering the state of nirvana – U.G., by exploding all our ideas and ideals, did not merely pull the carpet out from under our feet but also destroyed the very ground, apparently secure but false, on which we stood. He would not allow us to cling to any lie, because a lie is a lie and falsified our lives. The truth, howsoever hard, shattering and shocking, had to be brought to us.


The last ten years before U.G.'s death may be characterized and the phase of playfulness and laughter. Since all expressions were false, even to say something was false was false, there was only rejection wholly and totally, and there was laughter. There were the sweet and delightful giggles of Krishna, the drinker of milk, and the attahasa or apocalyptic laughter of Siva, the drinker of poison. From the heights of Kailasa everything turned comical.


‘Comedy,’ wrote Lee Siegel, ‘challenges notions of meaning, strives to undermine all hermeneutics and epistemologies, and exposes the ambiguities inherent in any knowing and feeling. In the world of comedy, absurdity itself is the logos. The senselessness of the universe makes comic sense. Laughter expresses the comic understanding that nothing is ever really understood.’ (Siegel 1989)


However, the essential thrust in his approach was always the same. He described the way we functioned in the unnatural state, 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 are thinking and functioning in a ‘thought sphere’, just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. How and why the self, which is self-protective and fascist in nature, is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life around us. Preferring the term ‘natural state’ over ‘enlightenment’, he insisted that whatever transformation he had gone through was within the structure of the human body and not in the mind at all. And he described the natural state as a pure and simple physical and physiological state of being. 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. It is an acausal state of ‘not-knowing’.


If on the one hand he marked a creative continuity of the enlightenment traditions of the Buddha, the Upanishadic and later sages of India, on the other hand, U.G. marked a radical departure from the enlightenment traditions in the way he de-psychologized and demystified the notion of enlightenment, and redefined it as the ‘natural state’ in physical and physiological terms. More importantly, by knocking off all grand narratives and epistemologies, he offered us not only release from the tyranny of sacred symbols and ideas, gods and goals, but also a foretaste of that vast emptiness.


The Last Days


He died on 22 March 2007 in Vallecrosia, Italy, on the Mediterranean coast close to the French border. In many ways, the way U.G. died, rather the way he decided to pass away, reminds us of the way the Buddha died, by going away from the cities and towns where he taught, in a remote place called Kusinara, with only Ananda as his companion and witness. Perhaps the Buddha went away to this far-off place because he was finished with his teaching, because he did not wish all his words to be converted into sacred mantras, into a religion, and himself converted into a god. But that was not to be, and that is quite another story.


After he came into the natural state, U.G. had said, ‘This is the way to live.’ And the way he lived and moved in the world for the next forty years was a living example of the natural state, or what may be called non-duality in action. Responding to questions on death, U.G. would often say, ‘Life and death cannot be separated. When 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. In that sense the body is immortal.’ And true enough, during his last days, he said, ‘This is the way to die,’ and he died the way he lived, with no fear, no anxiety, with no self in operation there. He withered like a tree, like a leaf turning yellow and falling off. He was eighty-eight years old.


Anti-Teaching


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.


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?


~


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.


Mind Is a Myth


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.


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Mind or thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing.


~


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.


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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.


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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 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.


~


You have, through ideation and mentation, created your own thoughts which you consider to be yours, just as when different colours are mixed into various hues, but all of them can be reduced to the seven basic colours found in nature. What you think are your thoughts are actually just combinations and permutations of the thoughts of others.


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.


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.


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You have been told that you should practice desirelessness. You have practised desirelessness for thirty or forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be wrong somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must be wrong with the one who has told you to practice desirelessness. This (desire) is a reality; that (desirelessness) is false – it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as such can't be wrong, can't be false, because it is 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.


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.


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 anti-social, 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.


~


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.


Briefly Telling It Like It Is


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.


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Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is the very thing that can free you.


~


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.


~


All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in the area of sensuality.


~


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.


~


By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.


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As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centred individual.


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Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and de-psychologized.


~


Society is built on a foundation of conflict, and you are society. Therefore you must always be in conflict with society.


~


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.


~


Food, clothing and shelter – these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.


~


The day man experienced the consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other forms of life, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction.


~


You eat not food but ideas. What you wear are not clothes, but labels and names.


~


If you do not know what happiness is, you will never be unhappy.


~


Thoughts come in waves, it is all over, you pick only thoughts you want.


~


Cause and effect are not two different things, they are one. It is the mind that separates the two.


~


You formulate questions from the answers you already have.


~


You are not at peace with yourself then how can you create peace in the world?


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There is no relationship between what you are thinking and how you are living and it is this that isolates you from the movement of life and causes pain and suffering.


~


You never listen to anybody, you are always listening to yourself. You translate everything in terms of your own knowledge and experience.


~


All moral absolutes, all moral abstractions are falsifying you.


~


It is the search that is creating the disturbance, the division in your state of consciousness. That is violence. Your holy thoughts are same as the thoughts of a fascist dictator.


~


To become somebody else you need time, to be yourself it doesn't need time.


~


Throw away all the crutches, you don't need any help, you can walk by yourself.


(Mukunda Rao, ed., Bangalore, 2019)

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