UG Archive

Heart of Yoga, August 6, 2020 By Rosalind Atkinson Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti (9 July 1918 – 22 March 2007) “The greatest living yogi I have ever met,” Krishnamacharya said of U.G. Krishnamurti. The fact that Krishnamacharya recognised U.G.'s realization of yoga is profoundly significant. Krishnamacharya, who was deeply informed of humankind's wisdom traditions from primordial to modern times, considered U.G. a living example of yoga, of which there are very few. U.G. brought clarity to the heart of yoga. Raised by a philosophical grandfather who was deeply involved in the Theosophical Society, as a young man U.G. became a spiritual seeker for many years. He studied with Sivananda for seven years (until he found him hypocritically eating banned pickles in the cupboard in the middle of the night). He visited sages such as the great Ramana Maharishi, but was unimpressed by religious models that posed that some people were enlightened and others weren't, which he later calle...

U.G. Krishnamurti ( 1918–2007 ) Anti-teachings Aphorisms 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...