The Natural State and Time

By Robert Carr

The Natural State is acausal; it just happens. –UG

Q: There is a thing called ‘thinking and being’. Where exactly the difference comes in here? It is said that, ‘knowing is being’, and ‘being is knowing’; that is the final state. I would like to request you to comment on this.

UG: Before we go into that subject, I would like to say one or two points. I say Living State. It is not my vague belief or particular fancy, but that living state is your natural state, which cannot be captured, contained, or expressed by the thinking mechanism. It cannot also become part of your conscious existence. It is just there. It cannot become an object of reflection. It is not something to be meditated upon either. But I do not want to use these technical terms.

First of all, I am not very familiar or acquainted with your traditional language. It may be possible for us to discuss it using basic English, free from philosophical, religious and psychological terms. It must be possible for us to use basic, very simple English, and try to understand the question raised here. Otherwise, the whole thing will turn into a logical dexterity, a debatable thing. That is not our purpose. I am not here to convert you into any new ways of thinking and that is not my object. At the same time I realize that there is one basic difficultly in conversations like this. It is very frustrating for you to understand what I am saying, because you are always concerned about reaching some goal and to change yourself into something. I have no plan or guide maps to give you off my sleeves. This is one difficulty. I cannot give you any readymade plan. I cannot take you on a journey with me, for I believe that there is no journey to make. I am not a journey man at all.

The second point is that you do not seem to realize that what you call “time and becoming”, have no relationship whatsoever with this “living state” I am talking about. They belong to a totally different category of thought. This is the biggest difficulty. So, how can we talk about these things? And yet it is possible to communicate, realizing that no communication is possible, because this is your natural state, too. No communication is necessary. Maybe, from here we can move and talk things over as before. You can disagree with what I am saying and you can say that it is nonsense, it doesn't work, or it does not fit into our system of thinking, it runs counter to all traditional thinking. I don't expect you to accept anything, and I am not here to convert you to any line of thinking. Through thinking, you cannot understand a thing. This is my basic point.

Q: Do you mean, understanding any piece of matter, or any piece of idea?

UG: Ideas we can understand through thinking, but a living thing can never be captured and it can never be understood by thinking.

Q: By living thing do you refer to the self, or to one's original nature?

UG: This is your nature state, I would put it that way.

Q: Do you mean, natural state of every person?

UG: Everybody. It is not the state of a realized man, or God-realized man, or some heaven-sent avatar. It is your natural state. The difficulty is that you want to understand my state. You are interested in trying to find out what is the state that is there behind the abstractions he is throwing in. That is what you want to know. As far as I am concerned, I don't see any difference.

Only when you ask these questions I wonder, why does he ask these questions? I have no questions of any kind inside of me, except the questions that I need to function in this world.

Q: The living state which you are speaking of is quite different from what we are actually feeling now. If that is natural to us also, then by knowing and having a description of that state, we feel we can also get into our natural state.

UG: The purpose of describing this state is only to make you see that what you imagine this state to be has no relationship whatsoever with the image you have of this state. What happens then? You seem to know a lot about this state.

Now, we come back to the point you raised. There is no difference between becoming and being. Becoming is a movement away from your natural state of being. But you say that there is another thing called being; but that so-called being is also becoming, it is not different from becoming, for the instrument which is used to understand yourself is exactly the same. The effort or attempt on your part to understand this ‘being’ is exactly the same. This is also taking you away from yourself. I don't know if you can see the paradox here?

Q: Dr. Rao raised a question in the beginning of the talk, ‘Is knowing and being the same’?

UG: What exactly do you mean when you say knowing and being are the same?

Q: If the knowing one is not there, is that the condition of being?

UG: We have the difficulty here to understand the basic words – knowledge and being – you all seem to be very familiar. Do you know spring rose, tulip, jasmine, rose, when you see one? Do you know what this is, that is there in front of me? This microphone, you have a knowledge about it. Do you understand? I recognize this and say this is a microphone, that is a jasmine, that is the tulip, that is the spring rose, that is rose. This knowledge is projecting what you are looking at. Independent of this knowledge, what is that? This is my question. Is it possible for you to look at it and say to yourself, that is spring rose, that is jasmine, that is rose, that is tulip. It is only for purpose of communication, we use this structure. If you want me to fetch a handful of jasmine, I go and bring jasmine and not a white flower or this or that. You understand. That knowledge is only for the purpose of communication.

Q: For practical utility, is that what you mean?

UG: It helps me to function in this world. I need that experience of others to function in this world. That's all. But I cannot use this instrument to understand what is there, the natural state.

Q: Do you mean my own natural state?

UG: Because that is something living and the structure I am using is dead.

Q: Does that mean, there is no place for thinking in this particular scheme of knowing one's own self?

UG: Through thinking you cannot understand your natural state. Through thinking you cannot solve your problems at all, because the problems are living. Through thinking, I can do something with a defective microphone, or the tape recorder there. This is the knowledge, this is the technical skill. This knowledge is necessary. But the illusion is that through this structure you are going to able to solve those living problems. This is the difficulty.

Q: Through this structure we are not able to know, that is again thought, isn't it?

UG: Yes. So, what I am saying is, the absence of what is going on there in you at this moment is the living state. The absence of that is the living state that I am describing. The difficulty is that there is nobody who is looking at this living state and describing it. This is the real difficulty.

Q: The moment you try to look at it there is no one there looking at all. Is that what you mean?

UG: What you are looking at is a thing which you know, which you have experienced before. Otherwise, you wouldn't know what is there. Then it begins to express itself in its own way.

Q: Do you mean to say that our knowledge is interfering in the natural state?

UG: All the time.

Q: What do you mean by that?

UG: You are that knowledge. Are you independent of that knowledge? The self you are talking of, is that independent of this knowledge? You are the living thing, that is what I am pointing out. But you are not living at all, you are a dead person. Are you ready to accept that? What I am saying is a threat to your existence, as you know it and as you experience it.

Q: What is life according to you? Can you define life?

UG: You'll use whatever I say to fit me into the framework of what Gaudapada has said, what Sankara has said, or what the Yoga Vasistha said, what the Bhagavad Gita says. So this will be another definition and probably you will give a lecture on the comparative study of all these definitions. Where is that going to lead you?

Q: What is learning then? How do we learn? We don't have anything in the past or any experiences, or anything to tell us. Then, what and how do we learn?

UG: You can learn only when the past does not interfere, but what you call learning is knowledge.

Q: Could knowledge be gained through languages and through experiences?

UG: Sure. But what am I going to do with that learning? I am going to use this knowledge, I am going to learn how to handle that machine there, so I need the technical know-how to handle this. That is learning.

Q: Is some basic material absolutely necessary to learn something?

UG: Basic material is there inside of you, whether you learn Latin, Greek or Tamil, or how to repair tape recorder, technical thing or something.

Q: All the chaos that is going on around us, is it because we are not in our natural state?

UG: The chaos is because of you. You want to change yourself tomorrow and not today. Change means always tomorrow. To be yourself, you don't need time at all. Tomorrow, I am going to be a marvellously religious man. My thoughts will lose their grip on me and I will be less and less angry, and be more and more gentle, soft, peaceful, tomorrow. It is fine with me, but I am dealing with what is there here and now.

Q: Is there then no present and past for you in the living state that you are saying?

UG: These are all very tricky questions. You are all past masters in this kind of matter. What do you mean past, present and future?

Q: I was like this, I will be like this, like that, and I am now like this, I will be like that tomorrow.

UG: How do you know that you are 46 years old now? At this moment, I want you to tell me, how do you know?

Q: I calculated from the time of birth of this body, and then arrived that I am 46 years old. We got the calendar, the time.

UG: You are giving me the explanation. You have a knowledge based upon this memory and the experience, so you put them all together and give a continuity. You are the same you were 15 years ago, that is your memory. In exactly the same way, the history of a nation is the memory, the collective memory of all the individuals. The memory tells you that you are the same person.

Q: Let us put the question in positive way. What is the incompleteness about our present way of life?

UG: I don't know the incompleteness. You make it incomplete by searching for something to complete. You feel that there is something lacking here, which means something incomplete.

Q: That is the feeling of everyone. He feels that he is not satisfied with what he is, and wants to get out of this dissatisfaction. It is natural of everyone to feel that way.

UG: You know why? Because you listen to chaps like me and that is your tragedy.

Q: How are we to learn anything without listening?

UG: Listen, this is false as far as you are concerned. What I am saying is false. You don't want to accept it because you always want to fit me into the framework of the Upanishads, the Yoga Vasistha, the whole list you have. If you don't do that, it is finished. You are not satisfied. You want to capture a thing which cannot be captured by the experiencing structure. My interest is to knock off that structure.

Q: When you say ‘finished’, do you mean that the structure is finished?

UG: The experiencing structure is not going to disappear. It is not a thoughtless state that you imagine. Thoughts are going to be there all the time. Thoughts will disappear only when that becomes a dead corpse. When that becomes dead, thoughts may not be there, I don't want to go into that because, the thoughts will continue in some other form. This is false as far as you are concerned. You don't seem to understand the falseness of this thing; this is true, valid to me. But it is false as far as you are concerned. Not only this is false as far as you are concerned, but you are also falsifying yourself.

Q: But you also say ‘That is my natural state’ as well, so how to make that true and valid?

UG: Where is the need for you to listen to this person because he is talking. It is just like asking as to why the breeze is blowing there. It is just there.

Q: There is then, no purpose in listening or learning or inquiring.

UG: There is a purpose.

Q: We would like to know.

UG: All right. Are you listening to somebody? You think you are listening, but actually you are listening to yourself. You are listening to yourself, when you are reading a book. You are listening to yourself because you make this noise inside of you. This so called reading is also listening. You read aloud inside, not outside. Otherwise you can't read a thing. So you create this noise, when you are listening to yourself. As long as you try to fit what I am saying into that framework, you are not listening to me at all.

Q: When you are in your natural state, the natural state that you are describing to all of us, and when we listen to that, we are listening to our own natural state back and that should help.

UG: No. That is your self-deception. It doesn't matter what you listen to, whether you are listening to a so called Self-realised man, or God-realised man, or holy of holies, or listen to the wail of a donkey over there, or the howling of a jackal, or barking of a dog. As far as listening is concerned it is exactly the same. Not that I place the solemn talk of a holy man on par with the howling of a jackal, or the barking of a dog. As far as the response of this human organism is concerned, it is just responding to the vibrations.

Q: Please explain this awareness and consciousness, which is a unitary movement which you speak of.

UG: Awareness and consciousness are the same, but you create a division in that consciousness and awareness by creating an entity, who is aware of a knowledge. Then it becomes object of your inquiry, object of your action.

Q: Is the division self-created.

UG: It is indulgence in thought.

Q: I am getting out of my self.

UG: You cannot do a thing about it. When you see that you cannot do a thing about it, it slows down in its own way, in a natural way without any help.

Q: The society is separate from me or I am the society?

UG: You think it is outside of you. You are the society. The society is not outside of you. Whatever you blame the society for, all that blame is there inside of you. You just blame. I don't blame the society. Society is what it is. I don't know, I have never been able to find out, how the society is separate from me, outside of me.

There is always a pause here all the time, it is always in a declutched state, that is the way you are functioning. It is not my special state, I want to point out this to you. That is your natural state, please understand this thing. It is not my state, I am not something marvellous, superior; I have not descended direct from heaven. This is all that I am pointing out. You don't want to be in your natural state. You are moving away in the direction of the society and you want to mould your life in terms of what the society expects of you, you want what the society wants of you.

Q: It is not true that we don't want, but we want also to be in that natural state, we don't want to move away, but to get into the flow of that natural state?

UG: Wanting is thinking. You want to be in your natural state. But how are you going to be in your natural state? As I said, wanting is thinking, whether you want to be a mutant, or you want to be in your natural state. And the only instrument you have at your disposal to pursue this goal is thought, and to describe that goal you use terms like thinking or being and becoming, to be, or to become or to be yourself. The ‘to’ seems to be a mischievous part of the language. ‘To be,’ I want ‘to be’ myself and so on.

Q: You said before that we don't want to be in the natural state. Actually, I do want to be in the natural state.

UG: Alright. You say you want to be in your natural state. Explain what you mean by that. When will you be in your natural state, which means you need time; tomorrow. Do you know why you are not in your natural state? It is because of what you are saying now at this moment. All that you are saying has no relationship whatsoever to your natural state.

Q: That means I am moving away from my natural state.

UG: You are moving away from your natural state. How can you be in your natural state? You want to get this, you want to understand, you want somehow to place yourself in your natural state.

Q: I know. But I want to know more about you and understand your natural state.

UG: Why do you want to understand me? What is that you want to understand? Trying to understand me is the same thing, whether you want to understand me or you want to understand yourself, that is all I am pointing out. So, there is no understanding necessary to be in your natural state. As long as you want to understand yourself or you want to understand somebody, you are creating this problem for yourself. I don't know what is there to understand.

Q: Can you understand the clock (point to the clock) or do you have a problem reading the clock?

UG: I am looking at the clock all the time, but I don't read the time; that is all. I really don't know what that is.

Q: Can you give us the glimpse of the description of the natural state?

UG: Description of this state is the difficulty. I am describing all this in order to give you a feel of this state, where there is no reading of all this – figures, time, the numbers or the different colours there. (Pointing to himself) It is like the mirror, just reflecting exactly the way it is. But at no time, is there any need for this structure (pointing to himself) to read the time except, when there is a need to read the time or tell somebody or when somebody asks me a question.

You will be surprised that how this mechanism functions. You say, tomorrow at 4 o'clock there will be a meeting. Tomorrow just 1 minute before, the impulse comes, and then you look at the clock, its almost 4 o'clock.

Q: Do you mean all by itself?

UG: All by itself. So, you are a clock, it is all the time self-winding. You don't want to be there. The difficulty is the way I am trying to describe that state. And now we have established the use of first person pronoun, but it does not mean anything, except as part of the language structure. All this may be very misleading to you. That is not the way it is functioning here; I don't read the time there, the numbers; I really don't know what it is. There is nothing here (pointing to himself), it is just a mirror reflecting the things exactly the way they are. That is what I mean by saying that the response is in the challenge. It is outside.

Q: Is this because of detachment from everything?

UG: It is not the detachment or anything. It is not detachment at all. I am not introducing any religious content into it at all. Detachment, attachment, it is not any of those things.

Q: Do you mean our attention is somewhere else?

UG: You are occupied with something, so you don't look at it. Here (pointing to himself) it is always attentive. It is not that there is somebody who wants to be attentive, totally attentive and all that kind of thing. You cannot but help it, as long as the eyes stay open you cannot but look at the things exactly the way they are.

It is not because I am occupied with something else but because there is nothing here (pointing to himself) which reads the things. There is only a living contact, it is only a reflection of things exactly the way they are.

Q: Is there a need to translate things?

UG: That need comes to us always from outside. Why do you look at the time now? It is because we decided yesterday, or some days ago, that we will have breakfast at 8 o'clock, so today, we decide to change our time to 9 o'clock. The instructions are given to the computer machine (pointing to his body) and tomorrow at the same time it gives you the warning that now is the time for your breakfast or whatever you want to do.

Q: Does it happen outside? That's where the stimulus is and so the response.

UG: Yes, I think I have explained several times. You go to the balcony and look outside. There is nothing here inside which says that it is a beautiful valley, that it is one of the most beautiful spots in the world, as many would say. There is nothing here, it is just a mirror reflecting the things exactly the way they are. There is something there which you label as mountain, but there is nothing here inside which says that it is mountain, that it is a beautiful mountain. There is nothing here inside which translates any of those things, that is Gstaad over there, that is a beautiful mountain and all that. It is reflecting exactly the way the mirror is reflecting.

Since that is a tremendously huge structure out there, the mountain, the consciousness expands to the size of that one. You understand? Because of this impact of the stimuli from outside, the huge thing suddenly makes the consciousness here, inside of you, to expand to the exact size. Because there is a horizon, there is tremendous expansion. If I say that, you will translate as if there is somebody who says to himself and experiences these things. It is unlike what you experience when you take a drug, it is not like that. There is nothing here. There is a sudden expansion of consciousness, and there is a tremendous movement inside you.

There is kind of a thud here, thud in the thymus, in the ductless glands you have, and all of a sudden there is a throb inside of you, which changes the pattern of your breathing. Suddenly you take a deep breath and that may be the reason why you have this expression breathtaking beauty. You have nothing to do with the beauty; you do not call it a beauty or anything. As long as you are there, there is a sudden change in your breathing pattern, you are only aware of taking a deep breath; that is all that is there. It is not an experience, it is not knowledge.

You listen to the sound, that sound of your breathing. Not that there is somebody who is doing it, but this listening apparatus is listening to the breathing. When I say that it is a breathtaking view, do not mistake that there is somebody here who says he is breathing. The listening apparatus is listening to this deep breath. But there is no coordination between these two.

The eyes have a tremendous vision here, that is to say, when you are looking into something, they are all eyes. You see from the bottom to the top of the sky there. That is all that you have. You have one big huge eye, as it were.

Q: It does not focus on anything.

UG: It does not focus on any particular thing. The whole eye, whatever is there is the eye. Something happens outside there, suddenly a glider comes, your attention is drawn to it – I hesitate to use the word attention, because you will immediately relate it to the state of mind, it is not the mind, something else is happening there. The nature of the eye is to focus on what is happening there outside. The rest of it is in the background. Now the sight is focussed. That is the way in which you are functioning. Since you are interested in focusing on certain things because you want to look at them, you are missing this.

He is scratching himself that is all that is there that is of interest to the eye. From those fantastically gorgeous phrases you may use for the mountain outside, the eye is focussed now on the scratching. That is all that is there for you. The scratching movement of his hand is all that the eye is concerned. You are not interested in looking at that anymore because that is the thing that you want to see. You do not sit and compose a poem and or get into a rapturous ecstatic state and describe the mountains, the foliage, leaves, the house, the background, nothing of that sort. Immediately the eye has moved on from there to this point. He has moved on, you are moving; distraction is its nature. That is to say, it is totally attentive, If, I use the word total attention you always mistake it as a state of mind.

Now there is something coming down and it has moved on. This is the movement of life. It is not just an ordinary mirror, but a living mirror reflecting the things exactly the way they are. The whole movement of your perception is what is happening there outside.

From the time the glider begins to descend you are moving there. But you are not interested in that anymore, because somebody else is nodding the head. So you have moved on from there to here, or from here to there, depending upon the way things are happening. You are moving without your doing anything, according to the way the things are happening outside.

Now there is wind, the tree is moving there. So from here, you are moving there. The other thing is the noises that are going on, this tape recorder (the body, the brain) is recording them all the time exactly the way as they are. I can sit there in the midst of the road and then go on talking the way I do here. The trains can come and go; you will be disturbed, but there is nothing to get disturbed here (pointing to himself). It is a totally different sense organ which is recording these songs, and the vocal chords are not in anyway coordinating this recording machine.

The eyes may be looking at something but there is no coordinator here at all inside, coordinating all these things. You might think that it is a funny statement, but that is the way you are naturally functioning. You are most anxious to get something out of what is there in front of you, so you focus on that and you are missing the whole thing.

Q: Are we being perpetually intercepted by one sort of a movement with another?

UG: There is no photographer here. There is nothing interested in taking or focusing on anything or any particular object.

Q: Does that mean consciousness wanders all the time?

UG: It is all void, because it is not different from what is there outside. There is a movement, a free movement. Now the sparrow moves there, so it cuts across the whole of your human consciousness. The bird is moving in this direction, cutting the whole thing off, your whole consciousness, as if you are cutting it with a knife. So it is exactly the same. It is not just the sparrow. Somebody moving the hand is exactly the same here. But you differentiate these things. Looking at the beautiful sunset is something more important to you than the movement of a sparrow.

The End of All Beginnings