Stop!


Sunday Mail Magazine, Personality, December 24-30, 1989

By Parveen Chopra


Uppuluri Gopalakrishnamurti, known as UG, debunks all religions, gurus, teachings, and yet he confesses he is media crazy and predicts that in ten years time he will be on every TV talk show in the world. His biographies highlight the ‘calamity’ (akin to enlightenment?) that struck him at the age of 49, but he, now 72, denies that that experience is duplicable or communicable. Yet he has been incessantly talking to people all over the world.


We meet him at a house in Delhi's Lodhi Colony. It belongs to a person on the PM's PR staff, who has graduated to UG from the late Jiddu Krishnamurti. UG is known in India mostly as the guru of film people like Parveen Babi and Mahesh Bhatt. Asked about Babi's insanity, he claims he hasn't seen her now for five years. Finding an opportunity to fire another barb against Rajneesh, he asks, “This poor girl is called mad because she’s accused Amitabh Bachchan of poisoning her food. What about Rajneesh who has also been accusing Reagan and the US administration of trying to poison him?”


UG is a short, frail man and has no obvious trappings of a holy man. But he has a luminosity to his visage not unlike the other Krishnamurti's. But though he himself used to go to JK's talks and has borrowed quite a bit from him, UG has not created any organisation, does not even give lectures. He spends four months each in India, Europe and California. All he does is talk to people who come to him.


“I speak and am now going public more and more to warn against the utter uselessness of this holy business. All the gurus and bhagwans have created the false demand for enlightenment, liberation, transformation. They then sell techniques, meditations. I hold that there is nothing like mind, psyche or soul, so there is no question of transforming it. That is why I offer no teaching either—teaching assumes the possibility for a change,” he says very animatedly. Although he proclaims that he has not taken upon himself the task of saving mankind from anything, he speaks with a zeal, even gets excited.


“Man is part of nature but at some point was born self-consciousness which proved to be divisive as it created the categories of self and non-self. Then, religions instilled in mankind the delusion of grandeur: that the natural order has been created for his benefit. So now we exploit nature, and are ready to destroy everything—pollution and so on,” thunders UG.


All this may sound novel and radical to some, but bits and parts of it have been voiced by thinkers and scientists like Gregory Bateson (Ecology of the Mind), Alan Watts, John Cage. Gilbert Ryle had coined the term ‘ghost in the machine’ (in The Concept of Mind) arguing that because there is activity in the body machine, we deduce there is somebody running it. Mind, UG confirms, is merely the name given to the activity of the brain. Ego, a psychologist found out, is born in a child when he is referred to as an object by others.


U.G. Krishnamurti debunks God, religion, even culture. “There is nothing like enlightenment, so stop searching,” he says, recommending a natural state where the intelligence of the body takes over sans the stranglehold of thought


It is not known whether UG has picked up these sane, modern findings from others or realised them after his calamity. That there is no mind is also a tenet of Zen Buddhism, a non-traditional path of liberation. How the I, self, became an ontological entity, has been explained by some linguists like Benjamin Whorf and Alfred Korzybsky. Sentences are so structured in most modern languages that a subject has to precede the predicate. “The lightening flashes,” we say. But in some ancient languages like Hopi they only say “lightening”. Indeed, there are only processes, no perpetrators. There is only thinking, no thinker.


Even Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese text, blames it all on language. “Unnamed are Heaven and Earth, naming is the mother of ten thousand things.” We separate experiences, name them, we pluck one part of the continuum in nature, name it, thus separating it from others. From words that have referents in reality, we go into progressively abstract words and get embroiled in concepts like war, peace, State, Marxism and make a mess of things.


Remarks UG, “The root of the problem facing man is the false desires and goals set by culture. It could be enlightenment, peace of mind, progress, need to change the world.” So all our lives, we are endeavoring, seeking, searching. UG echoes what Herman Hesse said in conclusion in Siddhartha, “Stop searching, just be.” Buddha's life bears it out—he had to relinquish the ‘path’. So does UG Krishnamurti's.


Born in a Theosophist family, UG grew up in Adyar in Madras, where the atmosphere was soaked in spirituality. He did Yoga with Swami Sivananda for many years, even met Ramana Maharishi, but there was a rankling that something was wrong in all the traditional explanations and paths. Meanwhile, he got married, “because sex continued to trouble me”, and went to live in America and lectured on Theosophy. Soon he lost his interest to be somebody in the world, and started to wander meaninglessly. On his 49th birthday started an experience, which he explains purely in physiological terms, “It had no spiritual import,” he insists.


“I did not find the answers,” he now says, “but the hunger to find the answers burnt itself out.” He calls the episode a calamity, because both the experiencer and experiencing died. “There are no thoughts now, they arise in response to some everyday need.”


In the natural state he refers to, one is back in the primeval without the primitive and without volition. Then would he agree that the tribals enjoy this natural state? “No,” he points out, “the caveman also had the desire to understand and control nature. He was also violent. There is no difference between his axe and the nuclear bomb of our age.”


“What must precede the natural state,” UG says, “is the bonfire inside, of all that mankind has learnt, understood and experienced.” All that may be gets transmitted through the collective unconscious or the genetic pool or language. Moreover, the control of the body through thought has to stop—the body is naturally peaceful. The natural state is not blissful, he cautions. “The body cannot take an uninterrupted sensation. Thus, all meditations, sadhna is inflicting violence and pain on the body. What the body wants to retain is not this or that sensation, but sensitivity, perfect functioning of the nervous system.” All this sounds fine, but UG has no guidelines on how to achieve it. He himself only stumbled upon the natural state not because of but in spite of his background. He may be wrong in debunking techniques and gurus. Alan Watts, a free-wheeling East-West philosopher, believed that the enlightened teachers, even in traditional disciplines, do know that concepts like reincarnation, soul and enlightenment are humbug (even Rajneesh is credited with the statement: Enlightenment is to know that there is no enlightenment). All that they teach or do is just a trick necessary to snap the follower out of his illusions, delusions and cultural conditioning and into freedom.


So to sum up, all one should do is, according to UG (borrowing a Zen statement): “When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep. Above all, don't wobble.” The first part is easy enough. The rider is in the second sentence.

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