My Swan Song
What I have found of and by myself runs counter to everything anyone has said in any field of human thought. They have misled themselves and misguided everybody. You still fall for all that because if, for instance, you were to change your diet you would die of starvation. But I want to live forever! Can you keep me alive and healthy, the way I have lived for ninety years of my life? No? But that's all that interests me! When once it throws out everything that has been put in there by your filthy culture, this body will function in an extraordinarily intelligent way. It can take care of everything. If at any time I accept anything, it is not what the religious people have told me about the way the body functions, but what the medical doctors have found. Yet, what they do not know is immense, and they will never know how this body functions.
I have never taken any medicine nor have I ever seen a doctor. All the doctors who have advised me not to live the kind of life I had been living are now dead and gone. There is one exception – once, I had typhoid fever when I lived in Madras. My wife's brother was a top doctor in the General Hospital in Madras. The British had a wing in the hospital for themselves and nobody else was allowed to stay in the rooms in that wing. That year, however, they opened the wing to the general public. So my brother-in-law got me one room in it and another for my family members. In that room my wife and grandmother stayed. Three nurses took care of me taking turns every eight hours for a whole month, after which I walked out. Although I assert that all doctors should be shot, I don't advise others not to see a doctor. I don't know what I will do if I am in a situation where I want to prolong my life a little longer. So I would never tell others not to see a doctor.
I brushed aside everything born out of human thought. Everything they told me falsified me. And what you are trying to get you can never get, because there is nothing to get. What you are is a belief; if you let one belief go, you must replace it with another; otherwise, you will drop dead. I am telling you, a clinical death will occur. It is not the near death experience of those ‘near death’ scoundrels. So you better go and make money and enjoy the fruits thereof. All those filthy religious people are fooling themselves and fooling everybody, living on the gullibility and credulity of people, making an easy living, selling shoddy pieces of goods and promising you some goodies that they can never deliver. But you want to believe all that nonsense. It's a reflection on your intelligence that you fall for all that crap to which you are exposed.
Nobody has given me the mandate to save you people or save the world. The human species should be wiped out for what it has done to every other species on this planet! It has no place on this planet. If I am sure of one thing, it is that. If it were not for your destructive weapons, you would have been wiped out a long time ago. And you are going to be wiped out, because now others have the means to wipe you out. But you are not going to go gracefully without taking every form of life on this planet with you. With minimum means you can wipe out the maximum power.
The body knows what it needs to do to survive. If it does not have the means to survive, it goes gracefully. The only reason for this organism to exist is to give continuity to the human species. Sex is only for reproduction, but you have turned that into a pleasure movement. What else is sex for than reproduction? The human kind appeared on this planet and it thinks all this has been created for its use. You think you were created for a grander and nobler purpose. The human being is a more despicable thing than all the other forms of life on this planet. You are just an animal, but you are not ready to accept that. You are not more intelligent than the other animals.
The native intelligence of the human body is amazing. That is all it needs to survive in any dangerous situation in life. The native intelligence is what you are born with; the intellect is acquired from what they teach you. So, you don't have any words or phrases, or even experiences, which you can call your own. You have to use that knowledge that has been put in there in order to experience anything. There is nothing to your love: if you don't get what you want, what happens to your, ‘I love you darling, dearie, honey bunch, shnookie putsie, sugar britches, petite shu-shu, sugar booger?’ If you don't get what you want out of all that, what happens to your lovey-dovey? The only test for me is money. How free you are with your money? I don't mean, “How wasteful you are with your money?”
I have nothing to lose if the whole thing is wiped out. I have nothing to gain if it remains the same. The only relationship you have with anybody in this world is “What do I get out of it?” That's all you care about. Other than that, there is nothing to it. You all fool yourselves thinking that you are going to get something by hanging around me… ho ho ho! You're not going to get a thing because there is no need to get anything from anybody. You can't fit me into any religious frame. I don't need to fool people and thrive on their gullibility and credulity. Why should I? I'm telling you, you will lose everything! You are not going to get anything from anybody. There is no need for me to say you're not going to get what you want from anyone else either. That you will find out by yourself. But that you can't do either by your own effort or by your volition or by anything you do or do not do. That is not something that happens in the field of cause and effect.
Everything was thrown out of my system. I don't know how I was thrown off the merry-go-round. I went round and round and round. I was lucky – luck, not in the sense that when you go to a gambling place and win if you're lucky. They put me on a merry-go-round; I went on and on and on. I didn't have the guts to jump off. I was just thrown off like an animal thrown from the top of a tree. The animal just gets up and runs off. Fear makes your body stiff and then you will certainly break your limbs. My body is never stiff.
The demand for permanence – permanent relationships, permanent happiness, and permanent bliss – in any field and in any area of human existence is the cause of human misery. There is nothing to permanence. So don't be a damned fool! Go and make money. That's the only thing that impresses me – cash on the barrel! I told my grandparents this even as a little boy. I am in perfect harmony with this world, exactly the way it is. I will never break the laws, no matter how ridiculous the laws are. I told Bertrand Russell, “The H-bomb is an extension of your policeman; are you willing to do away with the policeman?” “You have to draw the line somewhere!” he said. I just said goodbye and walked out.
There is no need to change this world at all, and there is no need to change yourself either. I am not a sociable man, yet I am not anti-social. What I am trying to emphasize over and over again is that what has happened to me has nothing to do with the spiritual nonsense they preach; it doesn't have even a teeny weenie bit of spiritual content. It is a physical phenomenon pure and simple. Once this body is freed from the stranglehold of whatever is put in there either by spiritual teachers or secular teachers, or by those scientists and medical technology, it functions in a very efficient way.
At the time I was born, when my mother introduced herself to me as “I am your mommy” and hugged me and kissed me, I apparently kicked her; and she died in seven days after I was born. When they put me into the frame of an enlightened man, they said that the mother of such a child can never have any more children or sex, and that she would die. Actually she died of puerperal fever, but not because she gave birth to an enlightened man. They have to put such people into that frame of giving birth to an enlightened man. An enlightened man can never have sex because he cannot reproduce another one like him. Once an interviewer on television asked me, “Can't we take your sperm and make a woman pregnant?” I answered, “There is no sperm anymore.” Anandamayi stopped having her periods when she was twenty-one, after whatever had happened to her. She was a nice lady. She was a genuine article.
Your birth is not in your hands. You're here because your parents had sex. But I can say now that that your death is in your hands. There is no meaning in and no purpose to suffering. If a body is lucky enough to stumble into its natural way of functioning, it happens not through your effort, not through your volition; it just happens, but not by what you do or do not do. It is not even a happening within the field of cause and effect. ‘Acausal’ is the most appropriate word for it, because a happening can never be outside the field of cause and effect. If it stumbles into this of and by itself, such a body will be so unique that it will be unparalleled in this world and will function in an extraordinary way. Such a body has never existed before on this planet. You don't have to take my word for it. Be miserable and die in your misery. And such a man will be more spiritual than all the other claimants, but not in the ordinary sense of ‘spiritual’ – that nonsense must never be used. Spirit is only the breath as in “he breathed his last” – the word has nothing to do with the spiritual crap.
U.G. Krishnamurti
Vallecrosia, Italy
February 2007
Dancing with U.G. Krishnamurti (instrumental folk music track inspired by My Swan Song)
Eulogy
By Mukunda Rao
U.G. Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends and admirers all over the world, is no more. The end came on March 22, 2007 at 2:30 pm in an apartment built for him by his friends Lucia, Anita and Giovanni in their villa in Vallecrosia, Italy. As per UG's advice, with no rituals or funeral rites, the cremation was carried out the next day at 2:45 pm, in Vallecrosia, Italy. He was eighty-eight years old. UG is survived by his erstwhile family, comprising his two daughters, Usha and Bharati, and their respective families and his son, Kumar and his family. But his actual family is much larger than that, extending over the entire globe and consisting of numerous ‘friends’ to whom he has been closer than their own families and indeed their own selves.
Seven weeks before, UG had a fall and injured himself. This was the second such occurrence in two years. He did not want such an incident to occur once again which would make him further dependent on his friends for his daily maintenance. So he refused medical or other external intervention. He decided to let his body take its own natural course. He was confined to bed and his consumption of food and water became infrequent and then ceased altogether. ‘It's time to go,’ he declared, joined his palms in namaste, thanked his friends and advised them to return to their places. Only his longtime friends, the filmmaker, Mahesh Bhatt, Larry and Susan Morris, and few other friends stayed back to guard his body and do whatever was necessary when the end came. UG did not die of any disease, although he suffered from ‘cardio-spasm’ for many years, which became quite severe in the last days of his life.
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. He did not leave any specific instructions as to how to dispose of his dead body. ‘You can throw it on the garbage heap, as far as I am concerned,’ he often would say. Responding to questions on death, UG said, ‘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.’
UG was born on 9 July 1918, in a Telugu-speaking Brahmin family in Masulipatam, a coastal town in the state of Andhra Pradesh. He lost his mother when he was seven days old and was brought up by his maternal grandfather, who was a noted, wealthy lawyer and a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. UG grew up in a peculiar milieu of Theosophy and orthodox Hindu religious beliefs and practices. Even as a boy he was a rebel yet brutally honest with whatever he did.
He did his schooling in the town of Gudivada and then his B.A. Honours Course in Philosophy and Psychology at Madras University. But the study of the various philosophical systems and Western psychology made very little impression on him. ‘Where is this mind these chaps have been talking about?’ he once asked his Psychology teacher. It was something extraordinary coming from a student who was hardly twenty years old, particularly when Freud's ideas were considered to be the last word on human mind.
Between 14 and 21 years of age, UG spent seven years off and on with Swami Sivananda in Rishikesh practicing yoga and meditation. He had various mystical visions and experiences there, but he questioned their validity as he thought that he could recognize them only on the basis of his prior knowledge he already had about them. In 1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and met Sri Ramana Maharshi and asked him, ‘This thing called moksha, can you give it to me?’ Ramana reply, ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’ struck him like a ‘thunderbolt’ and set him up on a relentless search for truth that ended at the age of 49 with a totally unforeseen result.
After leaving the university, UG joined the Theosophical Society as a lecturer and toured the country giving talks on Theosophy. Even after his marriage to Kusuma Kumari in 1943, he continued to work with the Theosophical Society and gave lectures in European countries, until, in 1953, he realized that what he was doing was not something true to his real self and quit the post in disgust. After that, he met J. Krishnamurti, who was by then famous as an unconventional spiritual teacher. For two years, he met him now and again and got into fierce discussions on spiritual matters, but later on, he was to reject JK's philosophy, calling it a ‘bogus chartered journey.’ During this period, UG also underwent a life-altering, mystical experience, what he sometimes called a ‘death experience’. But he ‘brushed it all aside’ as of no importance and moved on, further probing and testing and questioning every experience until he came into his own.
In 1955, UG went to America with his family to get medical treatment for his son's polio condition. When his resources began to diminish, he took to lecturing for a fee. He gave talks on the major religions and philosophies of the world and soon came to be recognized as a fine teacher from India. But, as it happened before, at the end of the second year, he lost interest in lecturing and then the inevitable happened. His seventeen years of marriage came to an end. His wife returned to India with the children. And UG drifted from one thing to another.
After his aimless wanderings in London and Paris, like a dry leaf blown here, there and everywhere, he landed in Geneva and at last found refuge in Valentine de Kerven's chalet in Saanen. By then incredible experiences had started to happen to him and his body was ‘like rice chaff burning inside’. It was a prelude to his ‘clinical death’ on his forty-ninth birthday (in 1967) 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. For seven days, seven bewildering physical changes took place and he landed in what he calls the ‘Natural State’. It was a cellular revolution, a full-scale biological mutation.
In 1972, UG gave his first public talk at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. He never again gave any public talk. But he did not/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. He usually stayed with friends or in small rented apartments, but never stayed 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 naturally thousands of people the world-over felt otherwise and flocked to see and listen to his ‘anti-teaching’.
The first book, The Mystique of Enlightenment—The unrational ideas of a man called UG, put together by Rodney Arms, appeared in 1982. In 1986, he went public and gave his first TV interview, which was soon to be followed by several TV and radio interviews the world over. And UG made publishing history by not allowing copyright on any of his books saying, ‘My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.’
In the last seven years during his stay in Bangalore, he rarely engaged in serious conversations; rather he started to do something else 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’. There used to be long stretches of utter silence. It used to be embarrassing; also a tremendous relief from the burden of knowing. And then UG would start playing his enigmatic little ‘games’, or invite friends to sing, dance, or share jokes. And the room would explode with laughter: funny, silly, dark, and apocalyptic! At last freed from the tyranny of knowledge, beauty, goodness, truth, and God, we would all mock and laugh at everything, mock heroes and lovers, thinkers and politicians, scientists and thieves, kings and sages, including UG and ourselves!
Who was this UG? What kind of person was he? He was the most enigmatic person you could ever meet – at once kind and cruel, most loving yet stern, constantly talking about money, seeming to ‘extract’ it from friends, yet most generous in giving; seemingly abusive and punishing, yet showering affection on the same person the next moment; utterly carefree, yet worrying about what might happen to the person in front of him; directing people to act in specific ways, yet instantly accepting of any outcome; demonstrating the most incisive logic, yet making utterly contradictory statements. For a man who complained that we are constantly preoccupied with something other than what is happening at the moment, he endlessly talked about himself and his past. One could never fathom UG's true intentions behind his statements or actions.
His answers to our questions came straight like arrows, unsettling our minds. He was well known for striking down not only the edifices we have so carefully built in our own minds but the foundations of human thought as a whole. UG was truly enigmatic, subversive and revolutionary, and totally fearless. There was a unique energy with UG: in speech or in stillness it was constant and vibrant, and had a profound effect on those who were around him.
And let this be told: when UG rejected the notion of soul or atman and declared that our search for permanence was the cause of our suffering, he sounded like the Buddha; when he blasted all spiritual discourses as ‘poppycock’ and thrashed the spiritual masters as ‘misguided fools’, we thought of the fiery and abusive words of the great 9th 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…’ When he spoke of ‘affection’ as ‘thuds’ felt in the spot where the thymus gland is located, we related it to Sri Ramana's declaration that the ‘true heart’ is located on the right side of the chest.
Likewise we sometimes connected his radical statements to certain expressions or declarations in the Avadhuta Gita, Ashtavakra Gita, the Upanishads and Zen koans, or compared them with the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj and even the post-modern ‘deconstructionists’. We could go on thus, making such connections and comparisons, but that did not help us to get a handle on the mystery that was UG!
That mystery, that enigma, is no more. Once, a couple of years back, when Mahesh Bhatt had asked him, ‘UG, how would you like to be remembered?’ UG had said, ‘After I am dead and gone, nothing of me must remain inside of you or outside of you. I can certainly do a lot to see that no establishment or institution of any kind mushrooms around me whilst I am alive. But how do I stop all you guys from enshrining me in your brains?’
