The Mistake of Enlightenment
Matrusri, Vol. 14, Nos. 2, 3 & 4, July 1979
Born in 1918 near Masulipatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurthi (he prefers to be known as ‘U-G’) was as a boy taken to see the Kaumara Nadi, the leaves of the Books of Bhrigu. It is believed that centuries ago Siva incarnated as Bhrigu, a psychic holy man who did penance out of his love for mankind, spending his years writing on palm leaves the astrological charts of many of the saints and sages to come. U-G's chart was there. The guardian of the books exclaimed, “This is the chart of a Jivan Mukta! His life will be lived in the spiritual pattern of seven-year cycles, and he will pass into enlightenment at the age of forty-nine.”
It might seem paradoxical to call U-G, who positively sneers at ‘enlightenment’, ‘self-realization’, ‘illumination’, ‘God-realization’, etc, an ‘enlightened man’. And yet it is an unaccountable fact that since his forty-ninth birthday he has been in what he calls ‘the natural state’ – and people interested in such phenomena call him ‘enlightened’.
He presently divides his time between India and Switzerland (for financial and climactic reasons, he says), talking freely with anybody who comes to see him. Some of his replies were collected under the title, “The Mystique of Enlightenment”. The title, he laughs, should have been, “The Mistake of Enlightenment.”Some excerpts follow.
The Beyond
Questioner: How can I go beyond this present state?
U-G: There is no beyond. Eliminate the beyond. It is because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, because you are not interested in what is there, that you have invented a thing called ‘the beyond’. You have searched for the beyond. Your attempt to bring what you call ‘the beyond’ into the present moment is the problem, if you want to call it that. There may not be anything called ‘beyond’. What is here is more important than the beyond.
What is it that creates, projects, the beyond, accepts the beyond? If anybody talks of the beyond, don't accept that know what I am looking at. Whatever I know is what I have been told, the knowledge have about that – so I am projecting this knowledge of it. In exactly the same way, what you call ‘beyond’ is created by the knowledge you have about that beyond. Whatever knowledge you have about the beyond is what you will experience. The knowledge creates this experience, and this experience strengthens that knowledge. This vicious circle goes on and on and on and on, and you will still be nowhere near the beyond. What you know is not the beyond. As long as you are continuing the way you have known yourself and experienced yourself, there is no beyond. If there is a beyond, this movement of ‘you’ is absent. The absence of that movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you. Why are you trying to experience a thing which cannot be experienced? (The questioner wanted to continue, but U-G said:) No dialogue is possible between us, and none is necessary.
The Natural State
U-G: What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences and so you want some new ones. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. Society has out before you the ideal of a perfect man. You have commandments to obey, and virtues to cultivate. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviours of mankind. So you try to control your thoughts, your behaviour – try to be something unnatural.
The natural state is not a thoughtless state. You will never be without a thought until the body is a very dead corpse. Thought is necessary for survival. But in this state thought stops choking you and falls into its natural rhythm. is no longer a ‘you’ who reads the thoughts and thinks they are ‘his’. We are all living in a thought sphere. Your thoughts 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 within you a secondary movement of thought which you call within you a secondary movement of thought which you call the ‘I’. This movement of thought is parallel to the movement of life and isolated from it. This is something very unnatural.
Can you look at what you call ‘I’? Look at it, feel it, touch it and tell me. How do you look at it? What is the thing looking at what you call ‘I’? This is the whole crux of the problem – the one who is looking at what you call the ‘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 our 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’, ‘holy', ‘beautiful’, that ‘you’ will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is finished. How do you understand? 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 is the instrument you have at your disposal with which to understand a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You pain to think. You translate what I have said in terms of the knowledge which you already have, because you want to get something out of it. Through thinking you cannot understand a thing. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are trying to do – trying to understand or change yourself is the state of being that I'm describing.
This state is not in your interest. You are interested only in continuity. You want to continue on a different level and function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You don't want to touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you’ – all of you: higher self, lower self, soul, atman, consciousness, subconsciousness – all of that.
It is the repetitive mechanism of thought that is wearing you out. So what can you do about it? That's all that you can ask. That's the one and only question. And any answer that I or anybody gives only adds momentum to that movement of thought. What is it you can do about it? Not one thing. It's too strong. It has the momentum of millions of years. You are totally helpless, and you cannot be conscious of that helplessness.
If you practise any system of mind control, automatically the you is there, and through this it is continuing. Have you ever really seriously meditated? If you do, you'll wind up in the looney bin. Nor can you practise mindfulness, trying to be aware every moment of your life. ‘You’ cannot be aware. ‘You’ and awareness cannot coexist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock 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. If you recognize what you are looking at, ‘you’ is there, again experiencing the old, what you know.
Printed and published by K. B. G. Krishnamurthy, Managing Trustee, Matrusri Publications Trust, Bapatla at Matrusri Printers, Bapatla. Managing Editor: K. B. G. Krishnamurthy. Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under Rn. No. 20919 66.
