“Don't follow me, I'm lost”
Everest Herald, Editorial/Opinion, March 3, 1996
Ramesh K.C. | Point of View
“If there is a God, why should God be on your side?” This is U.G. Krishnamurti, the spiritual terrorist and most rebellious personality I have ever come across. When he made this statement, it thundered in my consciousness.
Krishnamurti comes to India every year to avoid the cold in the West, and I happened to be with him only the winter of last year in Yercaud, South India.
As a journalist, writing on Krishnamurti is a difficult task. Words are insufficient to describe his personality. New jargon and coined terms were nonsensical for his state of mind. Trying to grasp his message is not unlike trying to catch a black cat in a dark room. Krishnamurti's message is really a “no message”.
“You have come all this way to the wrong man,” he said he said to me when I had gone to meet him to resolve some spiritual anxieties. For Krishnamurti, the answer was in the question. He had no interest in solving other people's problems.
Who was Krishnamurti? The question is difficult not only for his admirers but also for Krishnamurti himself. According to him, Krishnamurti does not exist as a person, and he is uninterested in creating an image for himself.
He disowns spirituality and holiness. He rejects all labels. When people around him talk about religion, he says bluntly, “All religious thoughts are created by Acid-heads.”
Having been born and brought up in a religious family, Krishnamurti found nothing as spiritual until his forty-ninth birthday in Saanen Valley he experienced a kind of “physical death”.
During this period many changes took place within his body. According to him, questions disappeared and his search came to an end. The search involved meeting some spiritual teachers, including J. Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi and Swami Shivananda. They failed to provide him with the answers.
In his seventy-seventh year he continues to travel all over the world. He never wastes more than six months in one place. Talking about his migratory bird-like experience, he says, “At least birds have a destination. Clouds don't have. These days, I am like a cloud.”
Krishnamurti jokes with his company whenever he is no longer interested in carrying on serious conversations. But his jokes are mind-boggling and ego-shattering, like the statement, “For me, every day is Sunday. I was born retired.”
During my stay in Yercaud, he said to his so-called friends like me (Krishnamurti neither loved nor hated anybody), “Don't follow me. I am lost myself. Get lost! Stay lost!” He says those lines every day like a prime mantra.
He insisted on the ephemeral nature of his words: “My words are like writing on water.” There are no doubts in him. His talks can range from disease to divinity. But this time Krishnamurti dwelt more on prostitution and priesthood.
Referring to Christianity, he jocularly commented, “Jesus walked on water because he didn't know how to swim. But unfortunately the water was just ankle deep.” About the cricifixion he said, “If Jesus could not save himself, how could he save mankind?”
Krishnamurti professes to those going in for spiritual healing or washing their polluted spirit that they are merely wasting their time.
Krishnamurti is against all of mankind's cultural and literary heritage. Searching for enlightenment for forty-nine years, he found nothing, no karma, no reincarnation, no enlightenment. “Consciousness, thought and memory are the same,” he said to us, “you cannot find memory, where is it?”
People who come to meet him and become friends have described him in various ways. An American friend termed him as “a vacant man.”
For Krishnamurti all of modern medicine and technology arose out of witchcraft. He dubs “money” as the modern god and equates the human mind to a computer.
When I asked him whether in the future technology would replace mythical gods, he said, “God was already replaced by technology, but we are not accepting the fact.”
I was stunned when he said pointing at a television screen, “The physical eye cannot see without the help of knowledge or mind. For physical eyes there are only dots, no image, no visual.”
My days with Krishnamurti were filled with moments of pleasure and pain. Listening to him face to face, one felt pleasure and laughter. But when pondering over his rebellious blasphemies one became shocked.
Krishnamurti is my weakness, a weakness I do not want to be free from. When I invited Krishnamurti to Nepal, he declined, saying, “As long as Nepal is a Hindu country I will not visit Nepal.” Whatever he says, it always means something for me. For many, Krishnamurti's non-philosophy is beyond comparison.
Paradoxically, Krishnamurti can stand for two meanings: a universal good and at the same time a useless guy. But with him one is not bothered about labels. I know that it does not matter with Krishnamurti either.
(The author is a freelance journalist and has edited the book Abichar in Nepali on U.G. Krishnamurti)
