The Reluctant Sage


The Statesman, March 4, 1988

By Reshmi Ray


He has no claims to enlightenment, makes no promises of salvation, says he has nothing to share…yet people flock to him. What really is this man called U.G. Krishnamurti? A seer or a saint? “Godman” or saviour?


“A sage – a philosopher of sorts” is how he describes himself. Born into a wealthy South Indian family in July 1918, he struggled for a long time to “find the answer” – like many others before him. He tried all the conventional methods, read the holy scriptures, went into samadhi and even what they call nirvikalpa samadhi. But the question remained unanswered – so he rejected all those things. “Enlightenment,” he says, “is all poetic romantic phoney stuff.”

Through it all

UGK rejects everything – all models, values and theories of the collective conscious heritage that humankind holds so – he does so with the confidence of a man who has seen through it all.


“We have placed before ourselves the model of a perfect man – be it the Buddha or whoever – given him a stamp. We have all licked him and stamped him out of existence. What you are left with is empty words and phrases. He – this man, is the problem.”


“Human values are false” he goes on to add. “The fear that if you are freed from human values then life would be horrible is not true. These values are false and they have falsified your life….”


“I don't claim insight into anything – insight blurs,” he asserts. Then what is it that happened to him in his 49th year?


Smilingly UGK replies: “A calamity!”


How?


With characteristic candour he says: “I just stumbled into a situation where the very thing I had been struggling to free myself of – the answer to my question – did not exist anymore.”


“It was not an experience. An experience can be shared, but this wasn't one; so I have nothing to share. I simply respond to questions asked of me.”


Indeed this man looks the very embodiment of serenity. The smile is ready and the gaze unblinking on a face gently framed with grey hair. He sits on the ground alongside his listeners, not perched on a pedestal like a guru, speaking without rancour yet with eloquence.


Dubbed variously as “outrageous”, “raging sage” and even “prophet of anti-wisdom” he makes one wonder why, in today's world, he has found such staunch followers in people as diverse as film stars and bureaucrats. What exactly is the ethos of this reluctant sage?


“Thought is what comes between man and his ‘natural state’. The natural state just happens. No communication is possible and none is necessary. The only thing that is real to you is the way you are functioning. In the natural state there is no entity who is coordinating the messages from the different senses – each is functioning in its own way. There is no continuity…what functions is a primordial consciousness untouched by thought.”


Unequivocally he adds that “thought is what put man at the pinnacle of creation – and that is the very thing that will destroy him. That is reality: the writing is on the wall.”


And he adds, “The dream that you are going to be living in a nuclear-free world is not going to be a living dream – there will be no historians left to apportion the blame to this side or that – a few cockroaches will survive, that's all.”


So what about the answers? What will save humankind if not either thought or religion?


Says UGK: “Each individual has now the responsibility, not any nation – he the individual has to find out his own answers. That is why every individual is the saviour – not collectively. If he can find out a solution for his problems, maybe there is some hope for mankind as a whole.”


No Message


What does he impart to those who come all the way to listen to him in Switzerland or the USA or as lately, in New Delhi? Perhaps his pragmatic view of the future – and the individual's role in it – strikes a responsive chord.


“I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself. What I have to say will not help you do it.”


“I have no message,” he concludes. “All I can say is: save the world from all these saviours!”

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