Further Remarks on UG
By JSRL Narayana Moorty
Once I said, “UG, at a certain level, I feel as if none of this is real, even UG is not real.” He replied, “Yes, UG is not real.”
The first time I had a clear inkling that there is no “person” inside UG was when I was visiting him in Corte Madera, California, in the early years of my acquaintance with him. It was a rare moment when I looked into his eyes, inside the pupils. What I saw was startling: it was a vast impersonal energy. No sign of a person and nothing which would recognize me as a person, either. I can never forget that deep inside those eyes what was moving was not anything I expected such as a reflection of me or something which would look at me and recognize me. It's no surprise that people often characterized UG as, “Nobody home!”
Now, when I look deep within myself, I see nothing but surging “energy” (I don't know what other term to use). Even the images and sounds I talked about in my recent paper are just waves surging from this energy. I don't exist there! That must be why I felt at times when I was close to UG physically that there was no separation between us. It's not that I am in that awareness or energy most of the time. But I know what the “bottom-line” reality is.
UG asserted more than once that the “division” which is millions of years old, keeps recurring, bringing “UG” into the picture and that it will never go away. It's that UG we saw from time to time, the “UG” who reacted to people and situations, sometimes through his own conditioning.
The Lion's Den: I was always a bit suspicious of and annoyed with UG's statements like “There is no such thing as matter,” “There is no space,” and “Thought interprets reality.” I felt that UG's talk of everything being an interpretation is like the Advaita Vedanta's assertion that “The world is maya.” “Interpretation” is a like a huge lion's den into which everything went and out of which nothing came.
I tested UG once on this: while I was visiting him in Palm Springs, I asked him: “UG, please raise your arm.” First, he was reluctant to comply, even after several requests. Finally, he did. I said, “See, I made some sounds, and you raised your arm,” meaning neither his raising the arm nor my instruction that he should do so is just an interpretation. (Of course, he would have said that my instruction was a mere noise.) He replied, “Your seeing of my arm being raised is also an interpretation.” Then I said, “I see what you did,” and didn't say anything further. His reply confirmed my suspicion.
As Mahesh and others have understood (I may have missed this point when I was debating with UG about the body), UG, in his last days, neither tried to end his life, nor did he do much to prolong it. He merely let it take its own course. In fact, this should throw a good deal of light on how he viewed his relationship with his body, particularly when he said, “The body does not want to go.”
“This is a dog barking”: UG would conclude many conversations by saying, “This is just a dog barking,” meaning that he is merely making sounds and the meaning is all made up (by thought). His statements about his body and people's responses to him are all just noise at a certain level (or from a certain point of view). Underneath, there are not even noises. No one is saying anything and nothing is being said. Not even consciousness or energy or waves, or noises and images. And of course, there are no bodies. There is no wakefulness, no dream and no sleep. There is no life or death either. It's a vast ocean of peace.
On the surface, it seems like UG was talking about living and dying, the body not wanting to go, and so on and so on. But that's all an appearance. There is a place where none of this is real, UG is not real, his living or dying is not real, and neither is ours. There is just this vast ocean of peace. You and I are part of it.
This morning I was lying in bed feeling all this. I also felt that I wasn't breathing. “It was being breathed.” The body is a surface phenomenon.
My Relationship with UG: What was my relationship to UG? Was he my friend, or was he a master or teacher to me? I have been interested in the teachers I mentioned in my Introduction (Gora, Chalam, J. Krishnamurti and UG) primarily because they helped me in my own investigations. At different times, their teachings spurred me to make advances in my thinking and ways of living, and thus to various degrees they have become an integral part of my intellectual life as well as my living. Gora, Chalam and UG all became my friends as well. Yet, I never hesitated to criticize them, especially Gora and UG. This applies to J. Krishnamurti as well. In other words, I never submitted myself totally to any of them. I didn't implicitly obey them nor did I uncritically accept what they said.
With UG, “being in a relationship” is a paradoxical phrase, either as a “student” or as a friend. He always maintained that there was no teaching, nothing to be learned from him. By the time I met him (I was about 46), I had pretty much “burned my bridges;” my investigations had already brought me to a standstill in a spiritual sense. UG gave a jolt to any complacency I may have had (and that was his effect on many others as well). His “negative” teaching of denying everything, combined with his elegant and persuasive speech, certainly lit a fire under me to continue to question my own world.
As a friend, again UG was an enigma. Because of our similar backgrounds and common mother tongue (Telugu), we sometimes shared a certain feeling of camaraderie. He was often quite attentive and hospitable to me and my family. Yet there was no lingering attachment or “relationship” on his part. I felt the extremes of both “oneness” and absolute “aloneness” with him that I have never felt with anyone else. Yet I have the greatest regard for UG as well as unbounded affection. So, in answer to my question, I have to look at these facets of “relating” with UG, and their effect on me, and just say that I had the good fortune to have both a most unique friend and teacher.
The main conclusion that might emerge from these different essays is that release or liberation, while being total, sudden, final and acausal in someone like UG (and I can think of others), might also be piecemeal, relative and provisional in others.
Freedom: Once, during a conversation, UG vehemently denied that there is any such thing as relative freedom. In fact, he at times even denied (although I doubt if he had meant it) that there is any such thing as enlightenment. UG also often said that you cannot strive for “enlightenment” or total freedom: “You do not choose it. It chooses you.” Nevertheless, he laid down some necessary conditions: the mind must be stultified to the point that all desire must be burned away and all movement in any direction must stop. This, in his view, is not an effect you can aim at or try to achieve. This may be so. Yet, the problem remains that the mind's nature is to seek, if not to seek goals, at least to seek to avoid pain. The question is whether one can give up seeking ultimate goals such as what UG might call “permanent happiness,” “nirvana” and what not. As UG always said, you don't really give up anything.
I might want to opt for shutting life down, renouncing everything that I am and all that I have, say my house, relationships, property, food (when I am hungry I will figure out where to get food), and so on. I could just walk away from everything. But would I be free from the goal of shutting life down? As UG says, it's the goal you have to be free from. But could I? Giving up the goal still presupposes a reason for the giving up, which is in itself a goal. Thus it becomes a game we play with ourselves. (As UG said, “the negative approach is still positive.”)
While we have persistent goals (or attachments), there are also moments when we can just simply surrender to the inability to let those goals go. That effortlessness, to my mind, lets one become detached from the goal itself. So, the distinction I am trying to make here is not just to try to let things go, but to discover in oneself a place where there are no goals and surrender oneself to the prospect of living without any goal. Once we see the state of mind where there are no goals of any kind, including being free or enlightened, then I think stepping out of the process of striving for goals is not such a hard thing to do.
While a total and final change to our thought process may be the “real” thing, I can't just sit on my hands and wait for it. For whatever it is worth, I have to live my life now, facing my problems and working things out, nevertheless not losing sight of what is fundamental in life. Regarding myself, I see a gradual evolution (or development, if you will) in this process and it may or may not culminate in a total transformation. For example, it's a lot easier for me now than before to let go of things and people.
I know such a release is at best relative and provisional and there is no finality about it. Total and final release can only come about when the will in some fashion or other withers away and that unfortunately is not in my hands. Can I say that I have attained some kind of a fundamental breakthrough, or release? I can make no claims to this. At times, I feel that with the limitations of my present makeup, physical and psychical, it may not possible for me to be anything other than what I am. That doesn't render what I have been discussing useless.
One of the facts of my life is that I too am conditioned like everyone else. UG used to say, “You can never be free from conditioning; conditioning is intelligence.” I don't know if these statements are indeed true. But I know that I do react and it may take me some time to let those disturbances to run their course. I can see that as long as conditioning operates, one must live in the world of duality. In that sense, UG himself, as far as I know, to the extent he was operating under his own conditioning, was also subject to moments of duality (as he would say, “‘UG’ comes into the picture”).
These essays may seem to advocate adopting a method, practicing it and thereby trying to make progress toward a goal. It may seem as if I haven't become free from goal myself. (You might ask, “Or why write?”) Also, what I have written cannot but be taken as a “directive,” to use UG's term.
The Other Side of the Picture: If having goals is a problem, and yet UG says that you cannot give up anything (including goals) except in order to gain something in return, then my question is, why did he talk about anything at all? Why didn't he just say what he had to say once and walk away? If UG kept hammering away at these issues, dinning the same thing over and over again into people's ears, it may be that he was doing it so that it might have the effect eventually of people quitting their goal-seeking and their quests.
UG's common response to this dilemma was to say that when people asked him questions, the answers would come out of him as if from a machine, automatically. When involved in some discussion or debate, UG often ended the debate by asserting, “This is just a dog barking,” implying that there was no real debate going on, but rather that his words were merely coming in response to the other person's comment or question. He claimed that we “interpret” whatever he says or does according to our background, prejudices or predilections. There may be no problem with the words, his or others' – they simply being noises, and everything being mainly our interpretation. This response of UG may have been a consequence of his non-dual state, but it also had the effect of his being wrapped up in a bubble of immunity to criticism, challenge or personal involvement. You could either admire him or throw up your hands in despair.
People who heard or read UG often couldn't help but take what he said as being directives, either. He knew that. But he kept talking, knowing full well that people would interpret him in the ways they in fact do. His answer to the problem is to say, “Being exposed to what I say will unburden you.” For instance, UG told someone who was bothered by a neurotic fear of silence that he should change nothing but should merely accept his fear. And that person eventually did find relief by letting his fear be. To my mind, such changes are possible only because people have learned to let things go, especially their goals. That is indeed how their lives become unburdened.
My wife used to remark that while people would come to see UG hoping to unburden themselves from some kind of inner malaise, they often ended up “leaving behind more than they had bargained for.” That is, they would come hoping to divest themselves of a bothersome aspect of a problem, but did not expect to have their underlying attachments and conditioning, even their sense of self, exposed.
One of the common answers UG gave to people raising their problems in front of him was to say, “There are no problems. You have no problem.” If a person was saying he gets depressed, UG would say, “Be depressed!" or he would say, "Unless you are contrasting it with another state, where is the problem?” Or he would say, “You have problems only because you want two things at the same time. If you want just one thing (and are willing to do everything to get it), there is not a thing you cannot get.” When he himself was in a rage, he never looked at it as a problem. He just freely rode it out. In that sense he never wanted to change the given. He never moved out of his nonduality (except, in my opinion, when “UG” came into the picture).
Goals and Lettings Things Go: To come back to my own writing, what I have been trying to do is primarily to agree with what UG says about the illusoriness of goals (my writing should confirm this), yet, at the same time, I am trying to work out the nitty-gritties of it (i.e., how goals exert power over us). My talk of “letting things go” may sound like I am advocating a method. It's rather a “non-doing” without any specific goal in mind, done only because one is confronted with a problem or set of problems. You might say that this, i.e., becoming free from a problem, is indeed a goal and is bound to set up a duality in one's mind between oneself and the problem one is trying to deal with. I agree, and that's where I point to the idea of “surrendering to a problem” (including to the inability to give up a goal). In other words, although your intention (or goal) is to solve a problem to begin with, you realize at some point that as long as you are attached to the goal, you cannot truly solve the problem.
Notice that in view of my analysis of mental states, it should be clear that I am not advocating any advancement toward or achievement of some goal. Rather, I am talking about repeatedly letting things go. In that sense there is a progress or evolution, but not in any sense of gaining something. In fact, the “letting go” will surely backfire if one does it with a view to achieve some result or gain something or attain a state (even if it is just to become free from a problem). If one has in view any solution outside of the problem, that surely would set up a duality and throw one headlong back into the problem.
I am writing more in the spirit of explaining the structure of problems and gaining an insight into how we relate ourselves to them rather than trying to provide a solution or method which can be mechanically applied to rid ourselves of them. Of course, just as with UG, this too can easily be misconstrued as advocating and teaching a certain method, a path, a practice and so on.
To me, what words one uses doesn't really matter. What matters are the facts: one can be relieved from the burden of one's past by becoming free from specific problems as well as problems in general, and land in a field of awareness (energy, if you will). This “landing” is a function of our ability to relax totally to the point where nothing matters, including living, dying or enlightenment. For me, when I stop caring for any problems or solutions by letting things go (and letting the problems be), I not only relax totally, but the problems disappear; I am then in the field of mere awareness or awareness of the body. The body is itself a surface phenomenon.
When the relaxation is deep enough, even my awareness of the body as such merges into a general awareness. I can feel the tension in my head when I am in the middle of a problem and when I let things go, my attention goes back into the spine area in the back of my head, instead of being caught in the top of my head. Thus my system relaxes and that helps the energies in my body flow freely. I am hoping this possibility of stepping out of things can be used by others as well. In that sense, these essays are hopefully within the realm of understanding and communication.
I believe what I have written here sufficiently highlights the meaning and importance of effortlessness. UG often said that any movement of the mind, in any direction, will make you stray from your natural state. I have explored the problems encountered in trying to achieve the natural state while trying to keep that goal in mind and making use of various methods. It seems any effort in this area is ultimately futile. Of course, even this can be construed as some kind of positive teaching or offering of a method, but unfortunately, nothing that is written or communicated can escape that fate. The human “hearing” mechanism is such that the very language creates a goal and looks for a directive.
Thought and Knowledge: The final problem I have to deal with is thought – namely, that any of one's relaxing is an activity of thought, driven by the motivations of the self. For instance, how do I really know whether I am totally relaxing or giving up everything? How do I know whether I am in a state of being merely aware of the body? Isn't this whole enterprise driven by thought? If it is, one cannot be said to be really free of the self as long as there is the self in the background, calculating and contriving. Indeed, I have myself raised such a question to UG: how does he know whether he is free from thought? What told him? Couldn't one say that the self, and hence knowledge, has always been there in the background? UG's answer always was that he didn't know, that Life knows itself.
Sometimes he said he knew it (that he was free from thought) now (when he was talking), but didn't know it then (when it was happening). My answer is somewhat similar to this last answer of UG: although one starts with the motivation of the self, one realizes that as long as there is any motivation to be free one cannot be free. But when one is free, there is an awareness of freedom; and when thought and knowledge operate, then one knows that he or she has been free. Of course, such knowledge can trigger further motivation and duality, but that's in the nature of things.
Differences: Therein lies the essential difference between UG and me. With UG, the freedom was permanent and final. (You could say there was a change in his “hardware.”) The getting rid of motive had become automatic. (In this context he would say, “thought cannot enter; it will get burnt up every time it enters.”) In UG there was a perpetual state of unknowing in which knowledge occasionally entered and created a temporary duality of UG and the other. In me, it's freedom that is occasional.
There is something else that is totally different about UG. I felt at times that UG was a mere appearance and that some force or power from another dimension was operating through UG. Thus, to my mind, UG represents the unknown. We get hints of this when we know that UG's words and deeds are not what they seem to be, and have effects which are unfathomable to our ordinary knowledge and experience. I have no problems with that unknown. To that, I totally surrender myself and pay homage. And I have no way to speak of or account for it. I just simply am awed when I sense its presence.
In spite of these differences, I feel that the attempt here is not futile. Although the release that I experience may be only provisional and may lack the finality of the liberation of UG, it shows possibilities of freedom in everyday life.
Despite any differences, I have always felt there is a fundamental unity between UG and me. Underlying us is the unity of life, of existence or whatever you may call it, as was attested to so many times by my sense of being in the same “field of awareness” when I was around him, where there was (and is) neither UG nor me. I know that some others had similar experiences.
