India's Greatest Minds
U.G. Krishnamurti
(1918–2007)
This incident took place sometime in 1969. One evening, when his friends had gone out and U.G. Krishnamurti was alone in a coffee estate near Chickmangaluru, Karnataka, he heard a wild wailing of a child coming from the backyard and was drawn to the outhouse there. He went in and saw a woman beating her child. She hit the child so hard that the child almost turned blue. He could not intervene, because he simply could not move. There was no way he could stop the mother, for he felt a continuous movement inside of him, which embodied both the anger and frustration of the mother and the pain and suffering of the child.
Later that evening, when his friends returned and he told them about the incident, one of them asked why he did not intervene to stop the mother from beating the child. He showed them the marks of the beating on his back and said:
‘You are the child and you are the mother, which one you are and for which one the heart is beating, you do not know. There is one continuous movement here. Anything that is happening there is affecting you. This is affection, compassion. To bear and suffer; sorrow and pity excited by the misfortunes of another. You are affected by everything that is happening there. There is a flow of compassion both towards the child and to the mother. The one who is beating the child is me, and the child who is receiving the beatings is also myself. It is very difficult to communicate this to you.’
(Rao, 2005)
A similar incident took place sometime in the mid-seventies, when Krishnamurti, Valentine, his close associate, and a few other friends were staying in a hill station in North Goa. One morning, Krishnamurti and his friends climbed down a hill and sat at its foot, chatting. Valentine, who found the path down the hill too steep and slippery for her, decided against joining the group. It seemed like a wise decision, for it had been quite risky coming down the slippery path. The men now got to talking about what each one would have done if Valentine had decided to come with them and slipped and fallen. Krishnamurti said nothing.
After a while, Valentine came out of her cottage and ventured down the treacherous path, and indeed slipped and fell. Even the man who happened to be just behind her could not help her, let alone the ones sitting down. A stunned silence fell over the group as Valentine got up and limped down and joined the group. With a bemused smile U.G. Krishnamurti pointed out to the men that they did nothing even though each of them had said they would help her.
One of the members of the group asked him, ‘How come you yourself did nothing to help then?’ He said quietly, ‘I never said that I would give her a helping hand. If, however, you want to see for yourself how I myself was involved in that event...’ and he rolled up the leg of his trouser. They found scratches upon his knee similar to those found on Valentine's knee. (Rao, 2005)
His friends and admirers lovingly called him ‘U.G’. The media dubbed him a sage in rage, a cosmic Naxalite, anti-guru and so on. Sometimes, he jokingly called himself a ‘useless guy’, and seriously as an ‘unconverted member of the human race’, meaning he absolutely did not belong to or endorse any religion, any philosophy, any political ideology, or any -ism whatsoever. During his career as an ‘anti-guru’, U.G. dismantled all spiritual discourses and teachings, and refused to erect or construct anything new in its place. In his negation of all approaches to truth, he insisted that his teaching, if it could be called a teaching at all, implied no method and so it could not be made into yet another approach. He was a tremendous force, truthful and cleansing. A fiery embodiment of the non-dual state of being.
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Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was born on 9 July 1918 in Masulipatnam, a town in coastal Andhra Pradesh, India. His mother died seven days after he was born and he was brought up by his maternal grandparents. He grew up in a peculiar milieu of both theosophy and Hindu religious beliefs and practices. He completed his primary education in a school at Gudivada in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh and then went to Madras for higher studies. During his three-year degree course in Philosophy and Psychology at Madras University, he spent summer days in the Himalaya, studying yoga and practising meditation.
At this time, he came upon certain mystical experiences, yet deep within him, he realized, there was no fundamental change. He felt he was going nowhere either in his spiritual pursuits or academic studies and so in utter frustration he left the university. He had just stepped into his twenties and already he had started feeling utterly lost. However, one day, upon his friend's suggestion, he went to meet Ramana Maharshi. He asked Ramana:
‘Is there anything like moksha? Can you give it to me?’
Ramana said, ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’
No guru before had given him such an answer. They had only advised him to do more sadhana, more of what he had already done and finished with. But here was a guru, an enlightened being, asking, ‘Can you take it?’ The counter-question struck U.G. like a thunderbolt and he realized that nobody could really give that state to him, he had to find the truth for himself.
In 1943, at 25 years of age, he married and started working for the Theosophical Society, Madras. He travelled extensively in India and Europe and gave talks on theosophy. At the end of his seventh year with the society, he quit the post. Between 1947 and 1953, he listened to J. Krishnamurti's talks and interacted with him at a personal level. It was during this period that he underwent what he called a ‘near-death experience’ that altered his perception of life and eventually lead him up to a ‘final death’ and awakening in 1967.
In brief, he went to the USA to get medical treatment for his polio-stricken son, took to lecturing to earn a living, and, after his wife and sons went back to India, visited parts of Europe on work and then began to drift aimlessly in London, like a dry leaf blown hither and thither. Eventually he landed up in Saanen, Switzerland, and let go of everything. The search for truth had ceased by then. Nonetheless, as fate would have it, on 13 August 1967, on the completion of his forty-ninth year, he experienced biological changes begin to manifest in him. For the next seven days, seven bewildering changes took place and catapulted him into what he called the ‘Natural State’.
In seven days, the whole chemistry of his body, including the five senses, was transformed. His eyes stopped blinking, his skin turned soft, and when he rubbed any part of his body with his palm, it produced a sort of ash. His senses started functioning independently and at peak sensitivity. The hitherto dormant ductless glands, such as the thymus, the pituitary, the pineal, which Kundalini Yoga calls the chakras or energy centres, were activated. And on the eighth day, he went through a ‘death’ experience, only to be reborn in the state of ‘undivided consciousness’.
For about 40 odd years until his death, U.G. travelled the world, and, wherever he stayed, people came to see him and to listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. He talked openly of the Natural State and responded to people's queries and answered their questions candidly, holding nothing back, ‘revealing all the secrets’ (Arms, 1982).
He gave his first and only public talk at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore, in May 1972. He usually stayed with friends or in small, rented apartments. He gave no lectures or discourses. He had no organization, no office, no secretary and no fixed address.
He often insisted on using the term ‘Natural State’ rather than ‘Enlightenment’, for he asserted that whatever transformation he had gone through was within the structure of the human body and not in the mind at all. And, avoiding religious terms, he described the Natural State as a pure and simple physical and physiological state of being. It is the ‘undivided state of consciousness’, where all desires and fear, and the search for happiness and pleasure, God and truth, have come to an end. In addition, he never tired of pointing out that ‘this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning’ (Arms, 1982).
If, on the one hand, U.G. marked a creative continuity of the enlightenment traditions of the Buddha, the Upanishadic and the later sages of India, on the other hand, he marked a radical departure from the enlightenment traditions in the way he de-psychologized and demystified the notion of enlightenment and redefined it as the Natural State in physical and physiological terms. More importantly, by knocking off all grand narratives and systems of knowledge, he offered not only release from the tyranny of sacred symbols and ideas, gods and goals, but also a foretaste of the vast emptiness.
U.G. often 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.’ He died on 22 March 2007 in Vallecrosia, Italy, on the Mediterranean coast close to the French border. He was 88 years old. (Bhatt, 2009).
There is no teaching of mine, and never shall be one. ‘Teaching’ is not the word for it. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability; it is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man – this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning.
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The natural state is not the state of a self-realised, God-realised man, it is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is there – it is the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. By ‘life’ I do not mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses them to give continuity to itself.
The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually, there is no separation. I have no objection to the word mind but it is not in one particular location or area. Every cell in your system has a mind of its own and its functioning or working is quite different from that of the other cells.
Mind or thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing.
The body which is immortal. The moment you die, the body begins to decay, returning back to other, differently organized forms of life, putting an end to nothing. Life has no beginning and no end. A dead and dying body feeds the hungry ants there in the grave, and rotting corpses give off soil-enriching chemicals, which in turn nourish other life forms. You cannot put an end to your life, it is impossible. The body is immortal and never asks silly questions like, ‘Is there immortality?’ It knows that it will come to an end in that particular form, only to continue on in others. Questions about life after death are always asked out of fear.
The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.
A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.
Religions have promised roses but you end up with only thorns.
Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is the very thing that can free you.
God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes, too.
When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say.
It is mortality that creates immortality. It is the known that creates the unknown. It is the time that has created the timeless. It is thought that has created the thoughtless.
All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in the area of sensuality.
Man cannot be anything other than what he is. Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him.
Inspiration is a meaningless thing. Lost, desperate people create a market for inspiration. All inspired action will eventually destroy you and your kind.
Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins.
Hinduism is not a religion in the usual sense. It is a combination and confusion of many things. It is like a street with hundreds of shops.
Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes.
Society, which has created all these sociopaths, has invented morality to protect itself from them. Society has created the ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. I don't accept them as such. By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals. As long as you are doing something to be selfless, you will be a self-centred individual. Society is built on a foundation of conflict, and you are society. Therefore you must always be in conflict with society.
It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function.
Food, clothing and shelter – these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
Man eats for pleasure. Your food orgies are not different from your sex orgies. Everything that man does is for pleasure.
Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.
You eat not food but ideas. What you wear are not clothes, but labels and names.
If you do not know what happiness is, you will never be unhappy.
Cause and effect are not two different things, they are one. It is the mind that separates the two.
You formulate questions from the answers you already have.
You are not at peace with yourself and how can you create peace in the world.
All moral absolutes, all moral abstractions are falsifying you.
To become somebody else you need time, to be yourself it doesn't need time.
(Collated from Arms, The Mystique of Enlightenment, ed.; and Rao, The Biology of Enlightenment)
