A Life Sketch of U.G. Krishnamurti
Body, Mind, And Soul — do they exist?
The Enigma of the Natural State
Anti-teaching: Calling It like It Is
Laughing with UG
Written and compiled by Mukunda Rao
mukunda53@gmail.com
The Search, the Calamity and the
Birth of a New Human Being: A Life Sketch Of U.G. Krishnamurti
Two months before the completion of his forty-ninth year, UG and
Valentine happened to be in Paris.
J. Krishnamurti was also there, giving his public talks. One evening, friends
suggested that they go and listen to JK’s talk. Since the majority, including
Valentine, was in favour of the idea, UG relented and joined them. But when
they got there, and realized that they had to pay two francs each to get in, UG
thought it was ridiculous to pay money to listen to a talk however profound or
spiritual. Instead, he suggested, ‘Let’s do something foolish. Let’s go to
Casino de Paris.’
And
to Casino de Paris they went. What happened to UG at the casino may sound
stranger than fiction. Sitting with his friends and among the fun-lovers
watching the cabaret, UG says: ‘I didn’t know whether the dancer was dancing on
the stage or I was doing the dancing.
There was a peculiar kind of movement inside of me. There was no
division there. There was nobody who was looking at the dancer.’ Eventually,
after his thymus gland was fully activated, this was to become his everyday
‘normal’ experience; for instance, while travelling in a car, he would feel the
oncoming car or any vehicle as if passing through his body.
A
week after this experience, one night in a hotel room in Geneva, he had a dream. He saw himself bitten
by a cobra and die instantly. He saw his body being carried on a bamboo
stretcher and placed on a funeral pyre at some nameless cremation ground. And
as the pyre and his own body went up in flames, he was awakened.
It
was a prelude to his ‘clinical death’ on his forty-ninth birthday, and the
beginning of the most incredible bodily changes and experiences that would
catapult him into a state that is difficult to understand within the framework
of our hitherto known mystical or enlightenment traditions. His experiences
were not the blissful or transcendental experiences most mystics speak of, but
a ‘physical torture’ triggered by an explosion of energy in his body that
eventually left him in what he calls the ‘natural state’.
For
seven days, UG’s body underwent tremendous changes. The whole chemistry of the
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. He developed a female breast on his left-hand side. His senses started
functioning independently and at their peak of sensitivity. And the thymus
gland which, according to doctors is active throughout childhood and then
becomes dormant at puberty, was reactivated. All the thoughts of man from time
immemorial, all experiences, whether good or bad, blissful or miserable,
terrific or terrible, mystical or commonplace, experienced by humanity from
primordial times (the whole ‘collective consciousness’) were flushed out of his
system, and on the seventh day, he ‘died’ but only to be reborn in ‘undivided
consciousness’. It was a terrific journey and a sudden great leap into the
primordial state untouched by thought.
UG
insists that this is not the state of a self-realized or god-realized man. It
is neither the ‘Satori’ of Zen Buddhism nor ‘Brahmanubhava’ of the Upanishads.
It is neither ‘emptiness’ nor ‘void’. It is simply a state of ‘non-experience’,
but the inevitable sensations are still functioning. The reactivation of the thymus gland seems to
enable him to ‘feel’ these sensations without translating or interpreting them
as good or bad, for the interpreter, the self, ‘I’ doesn’t exist.
UG
says, ‘People call me an “enlightened man”—I detest that term— they can’t find
any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is
no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I’ve
searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no
such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular
person is enlightened or not doesn’t arise….There is no power outside of
man. Man has created God out of fear. So
the problem is fear and not God.’
Further,
he says, ‘I am not a saviour of mankind. I am not in the holy business. I am
only interested in describing this state (the natural state), in clearing away
the occultation and mystification in which those people in the business have
shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time
and energy looking for a state which does not exist except in your
imagination.’
With
his long, flowing silver-grey hair, deep-set eyes, Buddha-like long ears
showing through his thinning hair, and fair complexion, UG looked a strange
pigeon from another world. Speaking in non-technical language in a simple
conversational style, informal and intimate, at times abusive, serene or
explosive, his hands rising and moving in striking mudras, he carried the ‘authority’ of one who had literally seen it
all.
*
Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was born on 9 July 1918 in
Masulipatnam, a small town in the state of Andhra Pradesh. His mother, who died
seven days after he was born, is believed to have told her father, T.G.
Krishnamurti, that her son was born with a high spiritual destiny. T.G.
Krishnamurti was a prosperous lawyer and quite an influential person in the
town of Gudivada.
Taking his daughter’s prophecy seriously, he gave up his lucrative career to
bring up his grandson. He was a great believer in the theosophical movement and
contributed huge sums of money for its various activities. The walls of his
house were adorned with pictures of theosophical leaders, including one of
Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was then looked upon as the ‘World Teacher’. But this
theosophist was also a firm believer in the Hindu Brahmincal tradition. He was
a ‘mixed-up man’ in the words of UG. And
so UG grew up in a peculiar milieu of both theosophy and Hindu religious
beliefs and practices. Hindu gurus visited the house frequently and chanting
and readings from the scriptures were held on a regular basis. There were days
when readings from the Upanishads, Panchadasi, Naishkarmya Siddhi and other
such religious texts would start in the early morning hours and go on until
late in the evening. By the age of eight, UG knew some of these texts by heart.
With
all this religious practice and exposure to theosophy at quite an early age, UG
grew to be a passionate yet rebellious character. Brilliant and sensitive as he
was, he could see through the games the elders played. They spoke of high
ideals and principles, but their lives were in direct contradiction to what
they spoke. One day, he saw his grandfather rush out of his meditation room in
fury and thrash a two-year-old child because she was crying. The supposedly
deeply religious grandfather’s behaviour was quite upsetting to the young boy.
Once, when he was hardly five years old, his grandfather, infuriated by his
misbehaviour, had hit him with a belt. Livid with anger, the boy had grabbed
the belt from his grandfather and hit him back, shouting, ‘Who do you think you
are? How can you beat me?’ The grandfather never again dared to raise his hand
against the boy.
A
sense of disgust with religious rituals came early to UG. This happened when he
was fourteen, during the death anniversary of his mother. He was in a rage at
the hypocrisy of the priests who performed the rituals. He was expected to fast
the whole day, as were also the Brahmin priests who performed the death
memorial rituals. After a while into the chanting of mantras and rituals, UG
saw a couple of priests get up and go out. Out of curiosity he followed them
and noticed the priests, who were also expected to fast, sneak into a
restaurant. Rushing back home, UG
removed his sacred thread and threw it away, then went and announced to his
grandfather that he was leaving home and needed some money.
‘You
are a minor. You cannot have the money,’ replied the grandfather harshly.
‘I
don’t want your money. I want my mother’s money,’ demanded the grandson.
‘If
you go on this way, I’ll disown you,’ the old man tried to scare the little
boy.
The little boy, whose mind had grown much
beyond the boys of his age, said coolly, ‘You don’t own me. So how can you
disown me?’
If
UG was difficult for his grandparents to handle, he was kind and affectionate
to his school friends and servants at home. As a boy he detested the caste
discrimination practised at home. He observed that the domestic workers, who
came from the lower caste, were fed with the leftovers of the food cooked the
previous day. When his protest against such a practice had no effect on his
grandmother, he went and sat with the workers one mealtime and insisted upon
being served the same cold food. He was also quite sensitive to the problems of
those of his school friends who came from poor families. With the pocket money
he received or the money he occasionally stole from his grandfather, he would
pay their tuition fees, and at times, even buy them school textbooks and shoes.
Perhaps
the grandparents put up with his eccentricities because they knew he was
precocious and believed that he was destined for higher things. In fact, UG
says that he used to be constantly reminded about his great spiritual destiny
by his grandfather. It is quite possible that UG also took his mother’s
prediction quite seriously and looked upon himself as a great guru in the
making.
When
he was about fourteen years of age, a well-known Sankaracharya of the famous
Sivaganga Math visited T.G. Krishnamurti’s house. The young boy was quite
fascinated by the pomp and glory that surrounded the pontiff, and the great
reverence he commanded from his disciples and admirers. He decided he wanted to
be like the pontiff when he grew up. He was ready to throw away all his little
desires, quit his studies, bid goodbye to his grandparents and follow in the
footsteps of the pontiff, and hopefully become the head of the famous Math. He
even dared to express his wish to join the pontiff. The pontiff only smiled and
politely turned down his request. He was too young for the hard life of a
sannyasi, and leaving home at his tender age would only cause unnecessary
unhappiness to his grandparents, he said.
However, he gave UG a Shiva mantra. UG took the pontiff’s advice
seriously and chanted the mantra 3000 times everyday for the next seven years.
Keen on achieving spiritual success and greatness, the boy chanted the mantra
anywhere and everywhere, even in his classroom while the teacher chugged on
with the lessons. What spiritual benefit the chanting had on him is not known,
but it certainly did affect his studies and in the final exams of his SSLC, he
failed in the Telugu language paper.
UG’s
grandmother, Durgamma, played as important a role as the grandfather in his
upbringing, although she remains on the margins of UG’s story. She was a woman
of strong feelings, and made no secret of her likes and dislikes. She was
illiterate, but a virtual repository of mythical stories and native
intelligence. Giving an instance of it, UG says that it was from her he learnt
the original or the etymological meaning of the concept of maya and other such Hindu concepts. But as a boy, it seems that he
often used to be quite irritated and angry with her. He never called her
‘grandma’. The more she pleaded with him to at least once call her
‘Ammamma-Grandma’, the more stubborn he would become and even refuse to speak
to her. Exasperated, once she is believed to have said that he had ‘the heart
of a butcher’. True enough, one day he got so irritated with her begging and
cajoling that he screamed at her, letting fly a string of abusive words in English
he had picked up at school. A stunned grandfather later sighed thus with
relief: ‘Thank god she doesn’t understand English!’
In
the story of UG, it is the grandfather who stands out as an imposing,
formidable figure, who had to be demolished and reduced to nothing. But, in
point of fact, he was a man of great strength and determination. If he had not
taken his daughter’s prediction seriously, if he had not loved his grandson, he
couldn’t have abandoned his lucrative career and devoted himself to the upbringing
of this little maverick. He threw open
his house to holy people not merely for his own satisfaction or spiritual
pleasure, but because he must have believed that an early exposure to things
spiritual would have a positive effect on the boy. Further, he not only took UG
along with him every time he visited the Theosophical Society at Adyar, he also
took young UG to various holy places, ashrams and centres of learning in India.
He was a wealthy man all right, but he was no miser and spent generously on his
grandson.
It
was surely because of his encouragement and support that for seven summers, and
a few more times in between, UG could travel to the Himalayas
to learn classical yoga from the famous guru Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh.
Ultimately the old man’s efforts might not have led to the result he expected.
That is a different matter. But, in hindsight, one can say that he did play an
important role in the life of his grandson, in providing him with the necessary
financial support and social security so that the young UG could pursue his
interests without any encumbrance.
*
It is not through the study of religious texts, nor through
contemplation, but through a series of ‘shocks’ that UG, as a young man,
developed disgust for rituals and philosophies, and decided to strike out on
his own and find things out for himself. The words or teachings of the
religious masters he had met, including those of his grandfather, did not
correspond with their actions. Their beliefs and philosophies did not operate
in their lives. They all spoke well, but theirs were all empty words. Still, the boy wanted to test the validity or
otherwise of these ideas and beliefs before rejecting them. He had to find out,
to use UG’s own words,‘ y myself and for myself, if there was anything to these
teachings.’ Talking about that period and his own search and struggles, UG says
quite candidly: ‘I did not know how to go about, I did not know then that
wanting to be free of everything was also a want, a desire.’
After
UG completed his schooling in Gudivada, he moved to Madras so that he could pursue his higher
studies without any bother. By then UG had developed a fairly cordial
relationship with Arundale and Jinarajadasa, the then president and
vice-president of the Theosophical Society, and had no difficulty in finding a
place to live in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. He lived there
until his marriage in 1944.
UG
took up a BA Honours course in philosophy and psychology at Madras University.
But the study of the various philosophical systems and of Freud, Jung and Adler
made very little impression on him. In fact, it didn’t seem to have much
bearing on the way he experienced life, or on the way he was ‘functioning’.
‘Where is this mind these chaps have been talking about?’ he asked himself. One
day, he asked his psychology teacher, ‘We are talking about the mind all the
time. Do you know for yourself what the mind is? All the stuff I know about the
mind is from these books of Freud, Jung, Adler and so on that I have studied.
Apart from these descriptions and definitions that are there in the books, do
you know anything about the mind?’ It was an extraordinary and original
question from a boy hardly twenty years old. The professor was naturally taken
aback and perhaps a little intimidated too; nevertheless, he is reported to
have advised UG to take his exams and just write the answers he had been taught
if he wanted a degree. ‘At least he was honest,’ recalls UG.
It
was during this three-year degree course at the university that UG made several
trips to Sivananda’s ashram at Rishikesh, both to learn yoga and to perform his
tapas in the caves there. There were
several caves in Rishikesh. Spiritual seekers or sadhakas would live in these caves to perform rigorous penance for years.
UG had a little cave to himself, where, sitting cross-legged, he would
meditate, at times, for ten to seventeen hours at a stretch. At that time,
young though he was, UG experimented with his body by going without food or
water for several days, pushing the body to the limits of its endurance. Once,
he even tried to live on grass. This was the time he also came upon certain
mystical states. These mystical experiences came and went, says UG, but deep
within him there was no transformation; they did not touch the core of his
being. It was indeed a period of great learning, excitement, and frustration
too.
By
then UG was in his twenties, a period of extreme restlessness and change. The
study of philosophy and psychology had only added to his confusion and he had
quit the university in great frustration. The training in yoga had left him
high and dry. He had found that Swami Sivananda (eating hot pickles behind
closed doors) was no different from several other yogis he had met. To make
matters worse he became aware that he was in no way different from the others
either. He had meditated and performed penance to no avail. He had come upon
several mystical states, but to his horror he found himself still caught up in
conflict, in greed. He found himself burning with anger all the time. And sex
remained a nagging problem.
UG’s
own description of his situation at the time is telling. ‘I arrived at a point,
when I was twenty-one, where I felt very strongly that all teachers—Buddha,
Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna, everybody—kidded themselves, deluded themselves and
deluded everybody. This, you see, could not be the thing at all—where is the
state that these people talk about and describe? That description seems to have
no relation to me, to the way I am functioning. Everybody says “Don’t get
angry”—I am angry all the time. I am full of brutal activities inside, so that
is false. What these people are telling me I should be is something false, and
because it is false it will falsify me. I don’t want to live the life of a false
person. I am greedy, and non-greed is what they are talking about. There is
something wrong somewhere. This greed is
something real, something natural to me; what they are talking about is
unnatural. So, something is wrong somewhere. But I am not ready to change
myself, to falsify myself, for the sake of being in a state of non-greed; my
greed is a reality to me… I lived in the midst of people who talked of these
things everlastingly—everybody was false, I can tell you. So, somehow, what you
call “existentialist nausea” (I didn’t use those words at the time, but now I
happen to know these terms), revulsion against everything sacred and everything
holy, crept into my system and threw everything out: No more slokas, no more
religion, no more practices—there isn’t anything there; but what is here is
something natural. I am a brute, I am a monster, I am full of violence—this is
reality. I am full of desire. Desirelessness, non-greed, non-anger—those things
have no meaning to me; they are false, and they are not only false, they are
falsifying me. So I said to myself I’m finished with the whole business.’
UG
did not ‘shop’ around much, but, though briefly, he did shop around seriously.
He was not only frustrated with swamijis such as Sivananda Saraswati, he was
disgusted with himself too. His own sadhana and mystical experiences had led
him nowhere. There seemed truly no way out and he became ‘sceptical of
everything, heretical to my boots’.
Studying UG’s cynical state of mind and his intense agony, his friend,
Swami Ramanapadananda, suggested that he should go and see Sri Ramana Maharshi
who was then considered to be an enlightened soul, and an embodiment of the
Hindu mystical tradition.
UG
was not sure if it would be of any help to him. He thought he was finished with
holy men; they only said, ‘Do more and more and you will get it.’ He believed
he had performed the required sadhana; whatever he had done was enough. In fact
there was nothing to these sadhanas, for they left you only in greater conflict
and confusion. He was finished. For he had realized that the solutions offered
were no solutions, and that the solutions themselves were the problem. Still,
on Ramanapadananda’s suggestion, he read Paul Brunton’s Search in Secret India, particularly the chapters related to Sri
Ramana Maharshi. He was not convinced, yet, ‘reluctantly, hesitatingly, and
unwillingly’, he agreed to go and meet the great sage.
Devotees
and truth-seekers believed that it was enough to sit there bathed in the
enveloping silence, and feel the presence of the sage in one’s heart. And now,
UG sat there on the tiled floor and wondered:
‘How
can he help me?’ Ramanapadananda had assured him that like hundreds of
truth-seekers before, he too would experience a penetrating silence and all his
questions would drop away, and a mere look from the Master would change him
completely.
At
last the sage looked up and their eyes met briefly. But nothing happened. The
clock on the wall registered the passage of time. An hour had passed. The
questions had remained and there was no sign of UG’s distress coming to an end.
Two hours passed, and then UG thought:
‘All
right, let me ask him some questions.’ He wanted nothing less than the ultimate
freedom, nothing less than moksha. But he asked, ‘Is there anything like
moksha?’
The
sage answered in the affirmative.
‘Can
one be free sometimes and not free sometimes?’
‘Either
you are free, or you are not free at all.’
‘Are
there any levels to it?’
‘No,
no levels are possible, it is all one thing. Either you are there or not there
at all.’
And then UG shot his final question. ‘This thing called moksha, can
you give it to me?’
Ramana answered with a
counter-question: ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’
No guru before had given such an answer. They had only advised him
to do more of sadhana, more of what he had already done and finished with. But
here was a guru, who was supposed to be an enlightened man, asking, ‘Can you
take it?’
The
counter-question struck UG like a thunderbolt. It also seemed an extremely
arrogant question. But UG’s own arrogance was of Himalayan proportions: ‘If
there is any individual in this world who can take it, it is me…. If I can’t
take it, who else can take it?’ Such was his frame of mind. However, the
absolute conviction with which Ramana had fired the question at UG had its
effect. He had asked more or less similar questions of many gurus during his
seven years of sadhana, and he knew all the traditional answers. He had even
stumbled upon certain mystical states, yet the questions had remained
unanswered. What was that state that all those people—Buddha, Jesus and the
whole gang— were in? Ramana was supposed to be in that state! But then Ramana
was like any other man, born of woman, he couldn’t be very different, could he?
But people said that something had happened to him.
What
was that? What was there? He had to find out. And he knew in the very marrow of
his bones, as it were, that nobody could give that state to him. ‘I am on my
own,’ he told himself. ‘I have to go on this uncharted sea without a compass,
without a boat, with not even a raft to take me. I am going to find out for
myself what that state is…’
*
The war years (1940s) were an extremely restless period for UG
Krishnamurti. After quitting his BA Honours course at the Madras University, he was without a sense of
direction. The meeting with Ramana had only deepened his anguish. The search,
of course, did not end there, but he was going nowhere. The Theosophical
Society seemed to be the way out, if only for want of a better option.
Even
after leaving the university, UG continued to live in Adyar at the headquarters
of the Theosophical Society. But now he worked as the press secretary to the
president, Dr Arundale. He would read newspapers, magazines and journals that came
to the library from all over the world and choose reports and articles of
interest and importance to be read by Arundale later.
He
was nearing twenty-five years of age. Sex had remained a nagging problem, yet
he had not rushed into marriage. It was a natural biological urge, but most
religious traditions taught one either to deny it or suppress it. Sex was seen
as spiritually debilitating, and ultimately an obstacle on the path to moksha.
UG, of course, did not believe in the denial of sex, although he had practised
abstinence. He wanted to see what happened to the urge if he did not do
anything about it. All this only made his situation more difficult, and he was
troubled by guilt. He never consciously
entertained any thoughts about girls, yet sexual images persisted. Meditation
on gods and goddesses only gave him wet dreams. Study of holy books and
avoidance of aphrodisiacs were of absolutely no help. The so-called mystical
experiences he had had in the caves of Rishikesh had failed to dissolve the sexual
urge in him.
It
was time to stop fooling himself and reckon with the fact of sex, to come to
terms with the body’s urge which can never be false. And so, in 1943, he
married a beautiful Brahmin girl chosen for him by his grandmother. The very
next day after the wedding, however, he realized that he had blundered. In his
words: ‘I awoke the morning after my wedding night and knew without doubt that
I had made the biggest mistake of my life.’ But there was no way he could undo
the mistake now. He remained married for seventeen years, and fathered four
children.
After
his marriage, UG moved out of the Theosophical Society headquarters and took a
house on a street close to the Theosophical Society and Elliott Beach at Adyar.
And he continued to work for the Theosophical Society. In 1946, Jinarajadasa
was elected the president of the Theosophical Society, and for three years, UG
worked under him as the joint secretary of the Indian section. Later, in
recognition of his oratorical gift, he was made a national lecturer. For nearly
seven years, he travelled extensively in India
and Europe on lecture tours. He spoke on
theosophy at practically every college and university in India. Then he went on a long tour
to Europe and North America. Going through the
lectures he gave in Europe and India,
one is surprised to see how a man who was so thoroughly frustrated with his own
religious search and experiences, who had grown cynical of all religious
endeavours and goals, adapted himself to the philosophy and activities of the
Theosophical Society. Did he really take up this work for want of a ‘better
occupation’, as he had said once? Was it like his marriage, with no heart in
what he was doing? Was it all inevitable that he had to go through the whole
process, that there was very little to choose from, or that it really did not
matter one way or another?
However,
at the end of the seventh year as a lecturer of theosophy, he grew frustrated
with the work. It seemed to him that what he had been doling out in his lecture
was just ‘second-hand information’. Anybody with some brains could do this
work. It was not something true to his experience, true to his real self. And
he quit the Theosophical Society.
UG’s
leaving coincided with J. Krishnamurti’s visit to India to give his first talk after
the war years, at Adyar. By his own admission, UG listened to JK’s talks
between 1947 and 1953. And from 1953, UG interacted with JK at a personal
level, holding long conversations with him on several occasions. During that
time, JK also met UG’s wife and their children, and took a particular interest
in the health of UG’s eldest son, Vasant, who had been struck with polio.
JK
was fifty-eight years old then, and UG running thirty-five.The relationship
between UG and Krishnaji cannot exactly be categorized as one between a guru
and a disciple, nor as one between two antagonists or rival gurus. But what
comes through is that right from the beginning UG seemed to have had problems
with JK’s image as the World Teacher and his teachings. Often UG would react
critically, harshly and scathingly against Krishnaji, exploding with fury like
the mythical Shiva in a state of wrath, while Krishnaji would always behave
like an English gentleman. But there is no denying the fact that Krishnaji and
his teaching had had a great impact on UG, even if, gradually and
progressively, he was to reject it all at the end.
Yet,
every year for seven years, UG listened to Krishnaji, despite his doubts and
troubles with Krishnaji’s ideas and ‘insights’. There really was something to
JK’s teachings, yet he felt that they were somehow not true to his own
experience, that they were falsifying him. But he was not sure of himself; he
was not certain yet if what he had come upon by and for himself was true
either. He lacked clarity and conviction; also, there were too many doubts and
questions, all of which were to dissolve and disappear in the heat of the
explosive experience, or what UG would call the ‘Calamity’, in 1967.
In
1953, UG planned to go to the USA
to get medical treatment for his son, Vasant. On hearing about it, JK offered
to try his hand at curing Vasant. On a few occasions, JK had had used his
healing hands and is believed to have cured people of what were then considered
to be almost incurable ailments. UG was sceptical, and he warned, ‘I did hear a
lot about your healing work. It doesn’t work in this case. The cells in the
boy’s legs are dead.’ Yet, in deference to his wife’s wishes, he relented. But
JK’s healing technique of massaging the boy’s legs did not improve the boy’s
condition. After the experiment failed, UG left for America with his wife and son in
1955, leaving behind their two daughters in the care of Kusuma Kumari’s elder
sister.
It
was indeed, both politically and culturally, an interesting period to be in America.
But to UG, America was like
a transit camp, a sort of preparatory ground before stripping himself of
everything and going adrift in Europe.
Meanwhile he tried to be a good father and make himself useful.
The
money he had taken with him to the USA was just enough to meet the
expenses of his son’s medical treatment. But it was worth it, thought UG, for
his son couldn’t have received better treatment anywhere else. The doctors
assured him that Vasant would be able to walk in a year’s time. It meant they
had to stay in the USA
for another year, perhaps longer; so, with his resources diminishing fast, UG
had to do something to earn some money. He took up what he was best at—
lecturing. Unlike in India
where his lectures had been for free, here he was paid one hundred dollars per
lecture. He now even had a manager to arrange his lectures.
Vasant’s
condition did improve considerably with the medical treatment, and he was able
to walk, dragging his diseased foot, without using crutches. UG continued to
lecture in different parts of America,
including four notable lectures on the major religions of the world, at the University of St Louis
in Washington
State.
On
UG’s home front at that time, however, there was no major change. His
relationship with his wife was as good as it could be between the likes of him
and Kusuma Kumari. With all his eccentricities and his spiritual quest, UG was
not a bad husband and father. Kusuma Kumari, of course, always remained a
devoted wife and mother. The only major problem that erupted now and then in
the family was regarding money. UG was
never good at managing his financial affairs or in handling money.
He
gave around sixty lectures a year and at the end of the second year, he not
only felt exhausted but also quite depressed with the whole lecturing business.
Two incidents stand out during this period. A couple of days after his lecture
on ‘The Meaning and Mystery of Pain’, he was laid up with mumps. The discomfort
was quite unbearable and the pain almost too excruciating, yet he refused to
see a doctor. As always he was overcome by a terrific curiosity to see into the
structure of pain, as it were; after all, just a couple of days ago, he had
given a lecture on the meaning and mystery of pain. This sort of curiosity
would again and again drive him to probe and experiment with himself to find
things out for himself, the same curiosity that had years ago made him eat
grass during his tapas in the caves of Rishikesh, if only to find out whether
he could survive on it. The pain, however, became unbearable and he lost
consciousness. The story goes that he was rushed to a nearby hospital, but the
doctors were not too sure as to the type of treatment he required. He lay there
on the hospital bed, his body turning cold, and it seemed he was on the verge
of death. Half an hour passed, and then suddenly he regained consciousness. He
felt no pain or discomfort now; the body had cured itself of the illness!
A
year after this, he began to lose interest in lecturing and began to wonder if
there could be some other way of earning his livelihood. His manager, Erma, was
shocked. He had become a celebrity of sorts and was in demand everywhere, and
there was of course good money to take home after every lecture. But UG
refused; suddenly, he no longer had the will to work.
Now
the onus of earning money for the family fell on Kusuma Kumari. Since she had
degrees both in English and Sanskrit, she found a job as a research assistant
with the World Book Encyclopaedia. At
the time Kusuma Kumari was pregnant with their fourth child, and she was not
exactly happy about going out to work for a living. But there was no choice.
Her initial fascination with the American lifestyle was gone. In fact, coming
from a traditional Indian background, despite her degree in English, she found
it difficult to relate to Americans, who to her seemed distant, queer and
somewhat intimidating. Now, working with them only added to her misery. Yet,
she carried on stoically, and sometimes she would bring her work home. She was
required to make notes and answer queries on several aspects of Indian cultural
and religious practices. UG, although not a ‘good husband’ in a traditional
way, did help her out in her research work, reading the necessary books and
answering these queries for her.
UG
now stayed home, attending to the household chores and the needs of their
handicapped son, Vasant. Friends would drop in at UG’s place and hold
discussions with him for hours on theosophy and Indian philosophy. After the
birth of their fourth child, Kumar (1958), when Kusuma Kumari resumed work, UG
did the babysitting.
After
working for about two years, Kusuma Kumari quit her job in frustration and
decided to leave America.
The thought of her two daughters, who had been left in the care of her elder
sister in India,
troubled her all the time. And now, with her fourth child growing up in an
‘alien country’, without the benefit of the love and care of the elders and
family members, and with no big change in the condition of Vasant, she worried
about the future of her two sons. And to make matters worse, her husband was no
longer the man she was married to seventeen years ago. He had changed and
changed drastically and now he lived like a stranger at home.
The
inevitable happened at the end of the year 1959. Kusuma Kumari decided to leave
America
with her two sons, even if it meant leaving without her husband. Her imploring
that he too must return with them to India had no impact on UG. He
bought her the tickets and handed over all of the money that was left with him.
Kusuma Kumari and her two sons flew to Madras,
and then, somewhere on the way to Pulla, in the train, she lost the box that
contained UG’s books, documents and almost all the letters he had received from
important people. It was as if all of UG’s past was being systematically
erased, and his return made impossible.
Now,
with his wife gone back to India,
if UG wanted to stay on in the country, he needed sponsorship. The problem was
solved when the World
University offered him a
job. He had been recognized not only as a brilliant speaker, but also as one
with a brilliant and well-informed mind. His talents were found to be useful by
the university which had planned to open hostels for its students in several
parts of the world. UG had no choice; he accepted the offer and made his first
trip to India.
When
UG first came to Madras
to ‘wind up’ his ‘show’ at Adyar, Kusuma Kumari met him and tried to persuade
him to join the family. It was to be
UG’s last meeting with his wife. She had brought all her children with the hope
that UG would, at least for the sake of his children, change his mind. But he
was hard as stone; there was no going back. He was finished with his past.
A
month later, UG went to Russia,
and from there flew to some of the Central European countries he had not
visited before. It seems he was getting fed up with his work, and visited
various cities in Central Europe, not to do ‘business’, but as a tourist, as
one eager to touch and know every important place on the world map. Actually,
he had begun to drift. And when finally he landed in London, he was almost finished!
In London, UG began to
aimlessly wander about like one who had lost his head. Some describe UG’s phase
in London as
‘the dark night of the soul’. UG disagrees, and most vehemently says that there
was ‘no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling with
urges, no poetic climaxes, but just a simple withering away of the will’.
His
‘will’ beginning to crack, when UG arrived in England, the winter had set in.
With whatever money he had been left with he managed to find a place in Kedagin
Square Apartments on Knight Bridge
Road. During the day, to escape from the shivering
cold and the boredom of staring at the four walls of his room, he would slip
into the British Museum and spend the whole day sitting
at the table next to the one where Marx had done his research for Das Kapital. UG was, of course, not
interested in doing any research or reading books. He had in fact stopped reading
books on philosophy and religion some years ago. Yet, to pretend that he was
there to read something, he would pick up a thesaurus of ‘Underground Slang’
and immerse himself in it for several hours. In the evenings, he would
aimlessly wander the streets of London, reading
signboards and the names and telephone numbers of the London call girls written or pasted on the
walls, on telephone booths and even on trees.
Winter
receded; the air grew warm and the day bright. The summer began and suddenly London had come alive. But
nothing helped UG. Nothing changed. To
make things worse he was running out of money.
Still,
if only to somehow keep himself going, he had to do something. So, whenever an opportunity came his way, he
started doing palm-reading for the immigrants (mostly from India and Pakistan), and at times, even
giving cooking lessons for a fee. He could have, of course, managed to live on
‘the unemployment dole’, but he didn’t. It was a desperate situation. And he
couldn’t help asking himself why he had become ‘a bum living on the charity of
people’. It was quite insane! But he
seemed to lack the will even to think of an alternative. He just let himself be
blown like a leaf ‘here, there and everywhere’.
It
was around this time that his wife died in India, the news of which reached UG
almost six months late. There was nothing he could do except write to his
children expressing his sympathy over the irreparable loss of their mother.
And
he drifted along, seeing and not seeing, hearing and not hearing, almost like
one who had lost his head. At times, he felt tired, but no hunger. And one day,
he realized he had only five pence left in his pocket. He was finished. There
was no place to go and there seemed nothing he could do. But, as his luck would
have it, help came to him in the form of Swami Ghanananda, the head of the
Ramakrishna Mission in London.
It was during this time certain changes began to appear in UG’s body. In 1953,
he had brushed aside the mystical experiences he had undergone in the caves of
Rishikesh and his ‘near-death experience’ at Adyar as of no great consequence.
But now, it seems that all these experiences were to converge and build up as
it were, and steadily begin to alter his being. From the traditional Hindu
perspective it may be interpreted as the awakening of Kundalini energy, the
‘serpent power’. One day, while sitting in the meditation room of the
Ramakrishna mission, he came upon the following experience. It was only the
beginning. In his own words:
I was sitting doing nothing, looking at all those people, pitying
them.These people are meditating.Why do they want to go in for samadhi? They
are not going to get anything—have been through all that—they are kidding
themselves.What can I do to save them from wasting all their lives, doing all
that kind of thing? It is not going to lead them anywhere. I was sitting there
and in my mind there was nothing—there was only blankness— when I felt
something very strange: there was some kind of movement inside of my body. Some
energy was coming up from the penis and out through the head, as if there was a
hole. It was moving in circles in a clockwise direction and then in a counter
clockwise direction. It was like the Wills cigarette advertisement at the
airport. It was such a funny thing for me. But I didn’t relate it to anything
at all. I was a finished man. Somebody was feeding me, somebody was taking care
of me, there was no thought of the morrow. Yet inside of me something was
happening….
Indeed,
the ‘new man’ was in the making, it was as if he was programmed for it from
birth, or some mysterious force was slowly but surely leading him to it. But it
was not going to be what he had imagined or thought it would be like. And that
is the most mind-boggling, most enigmatic, part of his story.
In
any case, his stay in London
was over. He quit Ramakrishna Mission, moved on and landed up in Paris. He turned in his
airline ticket to India
and made a handy 350 dollars. For another three months he let his hair down and
stayed at a hotel in Paris.
And as he had done before in London, he wandered
the streets of Paris
and lived on varieties of French cheese, a habit that continues to this day,
though it is in very small quantities now.
And
again, as it happened in London,
at the end of three months he ran out of money. There were no immigrants from India
here for him to give cooking lessons to and make some money on the side, and no
friends to approach for help either. However, with whatever little money he
could scrape up, UG took a chance and reached Geneva. Again, like an amnesaic, he took a
room in a hotel, and started wandering about.
Two
weeks passed and yet again he found himself without money even to buy his
meals, let alone pay the hotel bills. He had reached the end of his tether and
there seemed no way out except going to the Indian consulate and requesting the
authorities there to send him back to India.
Fortunately,
he still had his scrapbook with him which saved him from being thrown out of
the consulate. Reading through the praises heaped on UG by the American press,
which included the high opinions of the notable Norman Cousins, and Dr S.
Radhakrishnan, who was at the time the Indian ambassador to Russia, the vice-consul was quite
impressed. But he was helpless, since UG could not be flown back to India
at the expense of the government. The only alternative was for UG to write to
his people in India
and get some money. At that time, the head of Sri Ramakrishna Mission in Geneva, Swami
Nityabodhananda, happened to be there in the vice-consul’s chamber. The swamiji
straightaway offered UG 400 francs to clear all his bills, and then turning to
the vice-consul, he advised him not to treat UG as an ordinary person and to
see what best he could do to help him. It seems the ‘inscrutable power of Sri
Ramakrishna’ had yet again come to the rescue of UG.
Among
the staff of the consulate was a rather unusual woman, Valentine de Kerven. She
was sixty-three years old then and UG was seventeen years younger than she.
Something about UG touched a deep chord in her. Talking to him a little later,
her impulse or sudden resolve to help this strange man from India only grew stronger; she told UG that she
could arrange for his stay in Switzerland,
and if he really didn’t want to go back to India, he shouldn’t. For UG it was
like a new lease of life and he accepted the offer without a second thought. In
point of fact, there was no choice and UG let himself flow with the tide.
A
few months later, Valentine gave up her job and the two lived like friends who had
been separated for ages but were now reunited on the cusp of a new age. The
pension Valentine received was not large but was sufficient to take care of
their household expenses and travel. Upon UG’s suggestion, she sold almost all
her jewellery and antique art pieces she had collected over the years and put
the money in the bank. Later, Valentine also set up a separate fund for UG’s
travels.
Valentine
took care of UG, but had no idea of what was to come. The next four years were relatively calm. With
all the time in the world and no pressing tasks to attend to, UG and Valentine
went travelling outside Geneva.
For UG, the search had nearly come to an end. He ate, slept, read Time magazine, occasionally travelled,
and went for long walks either alone or with Valentine. It was what may be
called the period of ‘incubation’. The body was preparing itself for the
‘metamorphosis’ that would challenge the very foundation of human thought built
over centuries.
Though
all his search for truth, for moksha, was at an end and he was not seeking
anything spiritual or mystical, strange, ‘funny’ things had started happening
to him. If he rubbed his palms or any part of his body, there was a sparkle,
like a phosphorous glow. And when he rolled on his bed with unbearable pain in
his head, again there would be sparks. It was electricity. The body had become
an electromagnetic field. And he started suffering from constant headaches or
from what he calls ‘terrible pain in the brain’. But UG did not discuss what
was happening to him with Valentine. However, with all these physical changes
and bouts of severe headaches that went on for over three years, UG began to
appear much younger than his age. In photographs of him taken at that time, he
truly looks like a young man of eighteen or twenty. But this was to change and
he would start ageing after the completion of his forty-ninth birthday.
Every
summer JK came to Saanen to hold his talks and discussions. With the exception
of a few occasions when UG was dragged to these talks by his friends, UG kept a
respectful distance from JK and his admirers. But then it so happened that
almost every evening, inquisitive seekers would drop in at the chalet (where UG
was living) to chat with UG.The chat would invariably turn into a fierce conversation
on spiritual matters and UG would debunk the many spiritual concepts thrown at
him and generally tear apart JK’s teachings. And then gradually even
Krishnamurtiites started to drop in on UG; if some came out of sheer curiosity
to see who the ‘other Krishnamurti’ was, the others came either to clarify
their doubts or challenge UG with ideas gleaned from JK’s talks. This was to
become a pattern every summer. Even JK’s close associates would sometimes amble
into the chalet, if only to quench their curiosity, among them Madame
Scaravelli and David Bohm. Some, after
extended conversations with UG, were to turn their backs on JK and become UG’s
close friends.
With
all this, ironic and even mysterious as it may seem, on 13 August 1967, UG was
dragged to listen to JK’s last talk of the summer. UG sat there, under the huge
tent, listening and not listening. At some point JK started saying: ‘… in that
silence there is no mind; there is action…’
Stunned,
UG listened, and suddenly it all seemed funny. JK was actually describing his state of being! How could that be?
But it was true. So, ‘I am in that state!’ UG thought to himself. If that was
so, then what the hell had he been doing all these thirty-odd years, listening
to all these people, struggling, wanting to attain the state of Jesus, of
Buddha, when in fact he had already been there! ‘So I am in that state’; the
self-assertion, along with a sense of huge wonder, continued for a while. And then it suddenly seemed ridiculous to sit
there listening to JK’s description of his
state of being. He got up and walked out of the tent. But he was not finished. He was in that
state, certainly—state of the Buddha and all the enlightened masters. But what
exactly was that state? The next moment the question transformed itself into
yet another question: ‘How do I know that I am in that state?’ The question
burned through him like a maddening fury. ‘How do I know I am in that state of
the Buddha, the state I very much wanted and demanded from everybody? How do I
know?’
The
next day, still consumed by the question burning through his whole body as it
were, he sat on a little wooden bench under a wild chestnut tree overlooking
Saanenland with its seven hills and seven valleys bathed in blue light. The
question persisted; the whole of his being was possessed by that single
question: ‘How do I know?’ In other words, he had become the question. And it
went on thus: ‘How do I know that I am in that state? There is some kind of
peculiar division inside of me: there is somebody who knows that he is in that
state. The knowledge of that state—what I have read, what I have experienced,
what they have talked about—it is this knowledge that is looking at that state,
so it is only this knowledge that has projected that state. I said to myself:
“Look here, old chap, after forty years you have not moved one step; you are
there in square number one. It is the same knowledge that projected that state
there when you asked this question. You are in the same situation asking the
same question, how do I know? Because
it is this knowledge, the description of the state by those people, that has
created this state for you. You are kidding yourself. You are a damned fool.”
But still there was some kind of a peculiar feeling that this was the state.
And yet again the question “How do I know that this is the state?”—I didn’t
have any answer for that question—it was like a question in a whirlpool—it went
on and on and on…’
Then
suddenly the question disappeared. He was finished truly and wholly. It was not
emptiness, it was not blankness, it was not the void of Buddhism, and it was
not the state that all the enlightened persons were supposed to be in. The
question just disappeared.
The
disappearance of the question marked the extinction of thought—thought
crystallized and strengthened over centuries by cultures and religions. The ‘I’
linking up the thoughts, ‘the psychic coordinator collating, comparing and
matching all the sensory input so that it could use the body and its relation
for its own separative continuity’ was suddenly gone. Now, the link broken, the
continuity of thought snapped, exploded, releasing tremendous energy:
repairing, cleansing, invigorating, cathartic…
UG
deliberately calls it a Calamity for
he doesn’t want people, particularly the religious kind, to interpret it as
something blissful, full of beatitude, love, ecstasy, or even as
‘Enlightenment’. No. It is physical, physiological; a torture. It is a calamity
from that point of view.
For
the next seven days, seven bewildering changes took place and catapulted him
into what he calls the ‘Natural
State’. It took another
six months for the whole painful process to disappear altogether.
It
was a cellular revolution, a full-scale biological mutation. It was the birth
of the ‘individual’ in the natural state.
*
Towards the end of 1967, UG visited Sringeri in Karnataka and
happened to meet the Sankaracharya of Sringeri. Upon hearing of the bewildering
physical changes come upon UG, the Sankaracharya, Sri Abhinava Vidya Tirtha
Swami, had no doubt that UG was a jivanmukta
and he is believed to have said, ‘I don’t know of these things in my own
personal experience…. It is very rare that the body survives the shock of such
a thoughtless state. According to the scriptures, within three days or
seventy-two hours after such an event the body dies. If the body could sustain
its vital force and not die off, it must surely be for the sake of saving
humanity.’
UG
did not think he was a saviour. What had happened to him was not something he
had sought, and it had happened despite all his search and sadhana. Now he just
wished to stay put in some quiet place and let things be. The peaceful environs
of Sringeri, on the banks of the Tunga
River, seemed an
appropriate place for him to retire. He listened silently to the swamiji for
some time and then quietly broached the subject of his retirement. The
Sankaracharya is reported to have said, ‘I will be responsible for getting you
any place around here, if you so wish. But your idea of living alone will never
work. Whether you stay in a jungle or in a mountain cave, people won’t stop
coming to see you.’
It
was truly said. One could not hide a sun, nor could the sun choose to go
incognito. UG abandoned his resolve to stay away from people. But the question remained: ‘What is there to
say after a thing like this?’ Days passed, and then suddenly it occurred to
him:
‘I
will say it exactly the way it is.’
UG
gave his first public talk at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore, in the month of
May 1972. He never again gave any public talk, nor would he accept invitations
to speak at universities or institutions. But he could not stop people from
meeting and talking to him. He responded to their queries and answered their
questions in the way only he could. During his lifetime, UG travelled to
practically every country in the world. And this man with ‘no message’, ‘no
teaching’ probably met and talked to more people than can be counted.
UG
usually stayed with friends or in small rented apartments, but never in one
place for more than six months. He gave no lectures or discourses. He had no
organization, no office, no secretary, and no fixed address. Despite his
endless repetition that he had ‘no message for mankind’, ironically, yet also
naturally, thousands of people the world over felt otherwise and flocked to see
and listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. The
‘shop’ was kept open from early morning to late evening for people to feel free
to come without any prior appointment, and feel free to go whenever they
wanted. ‘This is how it should be. There should be no special duration, prior
appointment, and such,’ UG said, and his hosts everywhere maintained the rule
without fail.
Wherever
he went and stayed, people met him in increasing numbers. There was absolutely no restriction. People
could walk in and walk out as in a shopping mall. But there were no wares sold
in this shop. People were of course welcome to ask him questions, even
questions they dare not ask their parents, their spouses or their intimate friends,
let alone their gurus and intellectuals. ‘Why do you speak? Where do you get
money to travel so much? What do you mean you are neither man nor woman? What
is there in your pyjamas? What is love? Do you have sexual urges? Do you have
dreams? Why do you criticize and condemn the spiritual gurus? What is moksha?
Aren’t you an enlightened man? What is
your teaching? Do you have a message?’ And so on and on. And he answered them all in the way only he
could, and in his own inimitable style.
He
didn’t preach, for there was nothing to preach, nothing there to be changed.
The questions thrown at him were often shot down. It was like skeet shooting.
As Jeffrey Masson (the author of Final
Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst and several other
popular works) rightly puts it, ‘…everything he says or does is the
mirror-image of what a traditional guru does, in reverse. He discourages you
from touching his feet, he questions, subverts and laughs at your so-called
spiritual sadhanas, your great ideals, if you have any, and uses every trick
possible to stop you speaking further and never go back to him again. If you
find him rude, insulting and blasphemous and feel hurt, then you are lost, you
have entirely missed the “point”, and missed the man. You go to him not to
“receive” but to lose, to drop your heavy baggage of ideas, to free yourself
from, if you can, non-existing gods and goals. He is a blaze that burns and
explodes everything that falsifies the unitary movement of life.’
In
the last few years UG had wanted to do something other than answer tiresome
questions, for he found all questions (except in the technical area, which is
something else) were variations of basically the same question revolving around
the ideas of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. He
would curtly yet simply say, ‘Becoming something other than what you are is the
cause of your misery….You will remain a man of violence as long as you follow
some idea of becoming….You can’t divide these things into two. The process you
adopt to reach what you call being is also a becoming process. You are always
in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself
and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do
about this. Anything you do to put
yourself in that state of being is a becoming process. That is all that I am
pointing out,’ and that left people with nothing to say.
The
conversation comes to an end. He has spoken enough! He has said what he wanted
to say a million times. There is utter silence. It is embarrassing; it is also
a tremendous relief from the burden of knowing. And UG would start playing his
enigmatic little ‘games’, or invite friends (all are friends, no disciples, no
followers) to sing, to dance, and to share jokes. Now, either one drops ones
questions and abandons one’s ‘becoming’, or one gets up and leaves. The room
explodes with laughter: funny, silly, dark, and apocalyptic! We all mock and
laugh at everything, mock heroes and lovers, thinkers and politicians, scientists
and thieves, kings and sages, including ourselves, at our own silly yet
agonizing struggle for non-existent things. We convulse with laughter. And
suddenly, it seems, at last we are delivered from the tyranny of knowledge,
beauty, goodness, truth, and God.
*
Truly, there was no teaching. 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 our way of life. What UG was saying, he insisted, was
outside the field of teachability. In point of fact, there was no teacher, no
taught and thereby no teaching. There was no symbolism, no metaphysics, no
mysticism involved in his words. He meant what he said, literally. There was
nothing new in the language of UG. He did not coin any new words like
philosophers and scientists do; he used simple, commonplace words, free of
metaphysical overtones and spiritual content, to describe life in pure and
simple physical and physiological terms so that it was de-psychologized and
demystified, and the implication of what came through is quite revolutionary,
to say the least.
Generally, in his freewheeling
chats he did two things:
First,
in physical and physiological terms he described the way he, the body, was
functioning. He called it the natural state. It is the state of ‘primordial
awareness without primitivism’, or 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. He insisted that it is not the state of a
God-realized man or ‘enlightenment’. It is not a state of bliss or supreme
happiness either. There is only the throb, the pulse, the beat of life. There
thoughts emerge in response to stimuli or a question, and then burn themselves
up, releasing energy. There is no soul, no atman, only the body, and the body
is immortal. It is an acausal state of ‘not-knowing’, of wonder. And this is
the way you, UG stated, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also
functioning.
Second,
he described the way we function, caught in a world of opposites, constantly
struggling to become something other than what we are, and in search of
non-existent gods and goals. How we all think and function in a ‘thought
sphere’ just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. How and why we
have no freedom of action, unless and until thought comes to an end—but then,
it is not in the interest of thought to end itself. Thought is self-protective
and fascist in nature, and it’ll use every trick under the sun to give momentum
to its own continuity. Thought controls, moulds, and shapes our ideas and
actions.
Idea
and action—they are one and the same. All our actions are born out of ideas.
Our ideas are thoughts passed on to us from generation to generation. And this
thought is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life
around us. That is why we create all these ecological problems, problems of
pollution, and the problem of possibly destroying ourselves with the most
destructive weapons that we have invented. There is no way out. The planet is
not in danger. We are in danger…
*
Who is this UG? What is he? Is it possible to say anything and
describe him without making any comparisons, without locating him or his
utterances, in the realm of the ‘known’?
It
is true that when UG rejects the notion of soul or atman and declares that our
search for permanence is the cause of our suffering, he sounds like the Buddha;
when he negates all concepts and knowledge systems including his own
statements, we may recall the great Buddhist, Nagarjuna, who negated everything
including his own act of negation; when he blasts all spiritual discourses as
‘poppycock’ and thrashes the spiritual masters as ‘misguided fools’, we may
think of the fiery and abusive words of the great ninth-century mystic of
China, Rinzai Gigen, who declared, ‘I have no dharma to give…. There is no
Buddha, no dharma, no training and no realization…. If you meet the Buddha on
the road, kill him!’ When he speaks of ‘affection’ as ‘thuds’ felt in the spot
where the thymus gland is located, we may relate it to Sri Ramana’s declaration
that the ‘true heart’ is located on the right side of the chest; and when he
speaks of ‘wonder’ and the state of ‘not knowing’ we may wonder if this is what
the Mother (of Pondicherry) tried to describe in her report of the bodily
changes she had experienced between 1962 and 1973. Likewise we may connect some
of his radical statements to certain expressions or declarations in the Avadhuta Gita, Ashtavakra Gita, the Upanishads and Zen koans, or compare them with
the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj and even the
postmodern‘deconstructionists’. Or, persons grounded in nuclear physics may
find similarities or parallels between UG’s statements and the observations
made in quantum physics. We could go on making such connections and comparisons
but still it doesn’t help us to get a handle on the mystery that is UG.
Of
course, UG warns us against relating, for instance, his statements about time
and space, order and chaos, birth and death to the observations made by
scientists since, according to him, they are mere concepts to them and ‘they
are observing certain things only through the mirror of their own thinking. The
scientist is influencing what he is looking at. Whatever theories he comes up
with are only theories; they are not facts to him.’ And as regards the past
spiritual masters he said most emphatically, ‘I don’t give a hoot for a
sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst.
Do not compare what I am saying with what he, or other religious authorities,
has said. If you give what I am saying
any spiritual overtones, any religious flavour at all, you are missing the
point.’
Does
it mean that UG is utterly unique, without a parallel in the history of
humankind, or that we should just listen to the utterly new and cathartic voice
of the ‘natural state’ and not put whatever he says in any particular frame
whether traditional or modern? How then can one understand his admonitions, his
mind-boggling statements? Indeed, how is the problem and the beginning of
mischief, since it throws us back into the old ‘frames’ of traditional
discourses. Yet, we cannot help but ask questions. We cannot but respond to the
challenge, albeit cautiously and without putting this ‘wild bird in constant
flight’ into a cage, or on a pedestal.
Now,
what does it mean to have a body that is in tune with the cosmos and be
affected by whatever is happening in nature? What does it mean to be in a
‘declutched state’ or ‘state of not knowing’, or to feel all sounds emerging
from within and have no sense of division at all? Was UG in the state of ‘primordial
awareness’; was he the end result of the evolutionary process? Is this what the
spiritual masters of the past hinted at but could not clearly articulate in the
limited vocabulary of their times? Is this what the mystics and the religious
gurus speculated about, but erred in institutionalizing the ‘teachings’, in
building knowledge systems and inventing methods to reach it? Is then
‘liberation’ all about reactivation of the thymus, pituitary and pineal glands?
Is it a biological mutation? In short, is ‘enlightenment’ physical after all?
Truly, UG brought something utterly new and revolutionary into the world, into
our consciousness, the implication and impact of which cannot be known today.
His is the voice that is at once explosive, subversive and cathartic. In ‘bits
and pieces’ we may yet find echoes of his voice in the teachings of the past
masters. Perhaps we can say there was a need for the masters and they came in
answer to the anguish and cries of their times, and marked a leap in human
consciousness and the emergence of new ways of being and doing things. They
have served their purpose and are gone. Period. Newton has to give way to Einstein and of
course Einstein is not the last word in physics. That is not to say we must
forget Newton
or the past masters. Our learning can never stop. But there’s no need to
continue to build temples and set up organizations for them, and look upon them
as perfect models. As UG would say, ‘There is no point in reviving all those
things and starting revivalistic movements. That is dead, finished…. All of
them have totally failed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today. If there
is anything to their claims, we would have created a better and happier
world…. We are partly responsible for
this situation because we want to be victimized by them. What is the point in
blaming those people?
There
is no point in blaming ourselves either because it is a two-way game: we play
the game and they play the game. But… you can’t come into your own being until
you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of self. To be really
on your own, the whole basis of spiritual life, which is erroneous, has to be
destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down
temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books like a bunch of
drunks. It is not that at all…’
Of
course that is not the way. We cannot destroy the past, for, we are the past.
But we can refuse to be victims and stop playing games with ourselves.
Religions have failed to solve our problems, and politics, that ‘warty
outgrowth of religious thinking’, hasn’t done better. Our problem lies in our
solutions. No wonder UG challenged the very foundation of our cultures, and in
particular, our so-called spiritual practices of ‘awakening’. Now, in the light
of what UG says, can we really critically re-examine our past, de-psychologize
and demystify our religious discourses and political culture, and possibly put
ourselves on a different track wherein the search and struggle for non-existent
gods and goals have come to an end?
(Extracted from The
Penguin U.G.Krishnamurti Reader, by Mukunda Rao, Penguin Books India,
2007)
*
Body, Mind, And
Soul — Do they exist?
Whenever Sri Ramana was asked any questions
relating to God, Atman and the meaning of
life, his usual response used to be: ‘Who is asking the question? Who or what
is this ‘I’? What is mind? Enquire into it; find out…’
How does one find out? There is no asking
‘how’, JK would say, yet, do inquire, be aware, and see ‘what is’. On the other
hand, UG would assert that the whole business of self-inquiry
is a joke. But in the first place, why do we ask these questions? Who am I?
What is man? Is there a God? Is soul different from the body? What is the
meaning of all this?
But are these really our questions? Or, are we
repeating the questions already asked by others in the past, sometimes
rephrasing them this way or that? Or, are we asking these questions because our
traditions and Gurus have told us that they are very important and that it is
possible to find answers? Or, is it, to use UG’s language, because the old
answers are really no answers, that the questions have remained and continue to
be asked. Could it be that there are actually no questions but only
unsatisfying and unconvincing answers, and these answers are our problem. Is
the problem that we hope that one day we should be able to find satisfactory
and final answers to all our questions?
Obviously, of all the creatures living on this
planet, only the self-conscious human being asks questions. The questioning is backed by a sort of a priori belief that it is possible
to know, to understand and share or communicate that understanding to others.
Otherwise, all our inquiries, all our searching, all our sciences should come
to a grinding halt.
However, there has arisen, time and again, a
strong suspicion about this whole business of the search. For, to ask what
something is, or to
ask, say, what
the body, or the mind or a human being is, is to seek out its
essence. Does such a thing as essence exist? This is indeed a metaphysical question and
metaphysical answers are no real answers at all. ‘Man
does not exist’, declared Foucault.
Actually, what he meant was that the body-mind composite, the
empirico-transcendental duo is nothing more than a metaphysical construct.
Nietzsche too questioned the very basis of this search, for, according to him,
it is rooted in the value not only of absolutes but also of opposites, by
playing off one against the other.1
There is nothing outside the text, announced
Derrida, meaning that there is only the text and the language in which it is
expressed. The implication is that we have first to examine the text, how it
works, examine the language and see if it offers any meaning, stable or
otherwise, and whether the texts achieves
anything at all!
So then, for many postmodernists it is not the
question, but language itself that is problematic. The self, or even the body, is not something
given, but the significant effect of language. The self is not outside of
language, and is always in relation to the ‘other’. In fact, it is in and through language
and in comparison with others that man constructs himself as a subject, and
establishes the concept of self or ego. 2
It seems to be a terribly futile
epistemological exercise. As G B Madison would say: ‘So long as we remain bound
to epistemology, which is to say, to metaphysics, searching for ultimate basis
or “models”, sources, grounds, or origins, ultimate causal, essentialist,
fundamentalist explanations, we are perhaps condemned to go round in endless
circles, like a dog chasing its tail in vain.’ 3
But the chase is on. The dog seems to be
getting nearer its own tail, particularly in the non-philosophical,
non-metaphysical domains. A considerable number of the psychologists,
neuro-physiologists or neuroscientists, geneticists, and socio-biologists do
not bother too much about whether ‘mind’ exists at all. They simply grant it a
vague epiphenomenal status and get down to talking about behavioural patterns
and neural activity. And we see is a certain interpenetration of disciplines: The
psychologists reduce their science to biology, the biologists to chemistry and
physics, and physicists to the enigmatic man who happens to be the observer who
seems to create or construct a phenomenon rather than discover it. This
epistemological circle, avers Madison,
has not led us anywhere closer to a unified
theory or non-reductionist understanding of the human person.
However, there are tough molecular biologists
and geneticists who believe that they have nearly solved the body-mind problem
within their discipline. It is interesting to take a quick look at two of their
important theories.
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkin’s celebrated yet controversial
book, The Selfish Gene narrates a
fascinating story of the evolution of man on
earth from the genetic point of view. It is the story of the journey of the
ruthless gene, starting its passage from the ‘primordial soup’ through
Darwinian ‘natural selection’, through ‘mutation’ and ‘adaptation’ to the ‘Homo sapiens’, the human body, which is but a
fantastic machine used by the gene for its perpetuation.
According to Dawkins, it is erroneous to assume
some grand design or purpose to evolution, or that it is for ‘the good of the
species’. No—it is for the good of the individual or the gene. The argument
that culture is more important than genes to the understanding of human nature
is at best only wishful thinking. ‘Much as we wish to believe otherwise,’
writes Dawkins, ‘universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are
concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.’
Anything that has evolved through natural selection is selfish, Homo
sapiens included. ‘Selfish,’ in the sense that genes act only for themselves,
their only interest being their own replication. Come what may, they copy
themselves and ‘want’ to be passed on to the next generation. ‘Selfish’, or
‘want’ ought not to be understood as some grand purpose, aim or intention
(which are all only mental constructions) but only as ‘chemical instructions’
that can be copied. In this relentless journey of the gene, altruism too is but
another technique of the gene, another facet that is played out to ensure its
continuity. ‘To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a
species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared
to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go
extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish
interests first.’ Altruism is selfishness in disguise and ‘often altruism
within a group goes with selfishness between groups.’ 4
These genes or replicators are basically the
same kind of molecules in all living organisms—from bacteria to elephants. The human body, which has evolved over millions of years,
is the handiwork of the very same gene, created for its safe perpetuation. ‘We
are all survival machines,’ declares Dawkins, ‘for the same kind of
replicators—molecules called DNA—but there are many different ways of making a
living in the world, the replicators have built a vast range of machines to
exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a
machine that preserves genes in water…DNA works in mysterious ways.’
It is genes that are immortal, not some dreamed-up
spirit or soul which we imagine and identify ourselves with. There is no such
thing as God or spirit either! There are only genes that leap ‘from body to
body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for
its own ends…’ We are merely their survival machines and ‘when we have served
our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes
are forever.’
What then is ‘mind’ in this scheme of things?
Is it just another technique, another ‘machine’ used by the gene for its own
survival? Towards the end of his book, Dawkins proposes a theory of what he
calls meme,
apparently to solve the niggling body-mind problem. If the ‘body’ is the
survival machine of the gene, the ‘mind’—that is, memory—is the survival
machine of the meme, proclaims Dawkins. Unlike genes, memes are not
physically located, yet, he asserts: ‘Memes should be regarded as living
structures, not just metaphorically but technically.’
If the gene emerged out of the ‘primordial
soup’, human culture is a product of the ‘new soup’—memes. But how and when did
memes emerge? Dawkins says: ‘The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains,
provided the “soup” in which the first memes arose. Once the self-copying
memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. And they
seem to have taken over the genes and start a new, independent kind of
evolution of their own.’ 5
There are different kinds of memes—what Dawkins
calls ‘meme complexes’—such as fashions in dress and diet, ceremonies and
customs, art and architecture, engineering and technology, tunes, ideas and concepts—all
of which ‘evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up
genetic evolution, but has really nothing to do with genetic evolution.’ In
other words, these new replicators, like selfish genes, perpetuate themselves
simply because it is advantageous to them.
They plant themselves on or parasitize the brain, ‘turning it into a vehicle
for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the
genetic mechanism of a host cell.’ According to Dawkins, God exists ‘if only in
the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the
environment provided by human cultures.’
The Meme Machine
Surprisingly, it is not Dawkins idea or theory of selfish gene (which many people find
reductionist and reactionary), but his novel concept of the meme that has caught the
imagination of a considerable number of psychologists, biologists and even
cultural theorists, although they may not all use the term to mean the same
thing. For instance, Ken Wilber finds the theory quite problematic6
though he too uses the term ‘green meme’ to mean pluralistic relativism
embedded in egalitarian, anti-hierarchical values.
Susan Blackmore, a psychologist who is
interested in ‘near-death experiences’, the effects of meditation, the paranormal
and evolutionary psychology, has applied the idea of meme to develop a theory
of memetics in her book, The Meme Machine. Since her theory has some
bearing on what UG has been saying about the nature of thought, it is
worthwhile to consider some of her central ideas.
Blackmore believes that memetic theory not only solves
what is called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and the body-mind dualism
more effectively than other theories, but can also open up a whole new way of
seeing and being in the world.
We copy each other all the time and with great
ease. We imitate and learn through imitation, and that imitation is what
distinguishes us from animals and makes us special. When we imitate an idea, an
instruction, a behaviour, even a gesture, something is passed on again and
again and from generation to generation, which takes on a life of its own. It
becomes independent and autonomous, for instance, like Karl Popper’s idea of
World 3 (the world of ideas, language and stories, works of art and technology,
mathematics and science). This is the meme: the second replicator (after the gene).
Memes are stored in human brains or in books and computers and passed on
endlessly. Memes spread for their own benefit, without regard to whether they
are useful, neutral or harmful. As examples, the idea of God, or revolution, or
a particular invention, spread irrespective of whether they are useful or not. Some
memes are useful and creative, some harmful and even dangerous. But memes don’t
care, they just ‘want’ to spread and perpetuate themselves. ‘There is no master
plan, no end point, and no designer.’ What we call new creative or original
ideas are only ‘variation and combination of old ideas.’ Memes have uncanny
ways of perpetuating themselves. But not all thoughts are memes; not our
immediate perceptions and emotions, which are ours alone and which we may not pass
on. However, once we express them or speak about them to others, be it our feelings or our ideas,
they are passed on.
Memes have nothing to do with genes. If ‘genes
are instructions encoded in molecules of DNA—memes are instructions embedded in
human brains, or artefacts such as books, pictures, bridges or steam engines.’ 7
Acknowledging Dennett’s idea of ‘competition
between memes to get into our brain’ to make us the kinds of creatures we are, Blackmore believes that our minds and selves are
created by the interplay of the memes. For that matter, human consciousness
itself is a product of memes.
There are only memes, only thoughts. Thinking
involves energy. Much of our thinking is sheer frustration, self-pity, which we
could do without, to the huge advantage of the body. Yet thinking goes on,
draining the energies of the body. It happens because the memes, replicators or thoughts are
trying to get themselves copied, and in this process, language plays a crucial
role in helping memes copy themselves and ensure their
perpetuation.
Blackmore says that for at least 2.5 million years,
memes have coevolved with genes. Now, for the last century or so, they are ‘off
the leash’ and have become independent of genes. For instance, sex is no longer
indulged in for reproduction alone, for sex has been taken over by memes. Similarly,
the self or the I is the doing of the meme
called the ‘selfplex, which, strangely, does not exist. It is an illusion, says
Blackmore, in the sense that there is no self separate from the brain, no
continuous, persistent and autonomous self. It does not exist, though ‘we
construct many of our miseries out of the idea of a persistent self.’ Blackmore quotes the Buddha: ‘…actions do exist, and
also their consequences, but the person that acts does not.’
The self is a vast ‘memeplex’, the most
insidious and pervasive of all memes. Susan calls it ‘selfplex’, put together
by self-protecting memeplexes, by the process of memetic evolution. It is this
selfplex that ‘gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false
idea that there is someone inside who is in charge...’ but actually it is an
illusion, ‘a memetic construct: a fluid and ever changing group of memes
installed in a complicated meme machine.’
Therefore, Blackmore
suggests that
to live honestly one must be free of this illusion, this false sense of self,
and allow decisions to be made by themselves.
‘From the memetic point of view the selfplex is not there to make decisions, or
for the sake of your happiness, or to make your life easier, it is there for
the propagation of the memes that make it up.’ In other words, ‘by its very
nature the selfplex brings about self-recrimination, self-doubt, greed, anger,
and all sorts of destructive emotions.’
Blackmore ends her thesis on a brilliant,
rather ‘spiritual’ note, going beyond her guru Richrad Dawkins’ idea of
rebellion ‘against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. She writes, ‘Compassion
and empathy come naturally. It is easy to see what another person needs, or how
to act in a given situation, if there is no concern about a mythical self to
get in the way. Perhaps the greater part of true morality is simply stopping
all the harm that we normally do, rather than taking on any great and noble
deeds; that is, the harm that comes from having a false sense of self…. We can
live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex
interplay of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that that is all
there is. Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense
we can be truly free—not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the
selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel.’ 8
Alternative Theories Or Towards A Unified
Theory Of Life
Alternative theories based on the ideas of
transpersonal and integral psychology, hyperspace, ‘deep structure’, quantum mechanics, psychokinesis, the implicate order and so
on basically work on the idea of the interconnectedness of life and the
universe. Their thesis is that we cannot hope to understand the mystery of the
body, the enigma of the mind, and our belief in God or Spirit, in isolation,
but only within this intriguing ebb and flow of reality, of the inextricable,
interconnectedness of all things.
These theorists, striving to develop a unified
or integral theory of life, reject what they consider to be materialist,
linear, reductionist theories of body-mind put forward by biologists such as
Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins. The dogma that genes determine behaviour,
which has become the conceptual basis of genetic engineering and which is
vigorously supported by the biotechnology industry, is viewed with suspicion by
persons like Fritjof Capra, the well-known author of The Tao of Physics. Capra thinks that the claim made by
geneticists that they have found the ‘blueprint’, the ‘language of life’, is
premature and misleading. But then, within the family of molecular biologists
too, there are a few who are critical of the view of genes as causal agents of
human behaviour and of all biological phenomena. For instance, the molecular
biologist, Richard Strohman, who is quoted with approval by Capra in support of
his criticism, thinks that the basic fallacy of genetic determinism lies in a
confusion of levels: ‘the illegitimate extension of a genetic paradigm from a
relatively simple level of genetic coding and decoding to a complex level of
cellular behaviour represents an epistemological error of the first order.’9
The human body is not a mere survival machine
for genes, nor is it just a collection of genes. Genes by themselves do not
simply act. They have to be activated. For that matter, William Gelbart and
Evelyn Fox Keller, both geneticists, find the term ‘gene’ to be of limited value, that it cannot be ‘the core
explanatory concept of biological structure and function’, and might be a
hindrance to the understanding of the genome.
So then, ‘many of the leading researchers in
molecular genetics,’ says Capra, ‘now realize the need to go beyond genes and
adopt a wider epigenetic perspective’ to explain the biological structure and
function. There is ‘the growing realization that the biological processes
involving genes—the fidelity of DNA replication, the rate of mutations, the
transcription of coding sequences, the selection of protein functions and
pattern of gene expression—are all regulated by the cellular network in which
the genome is embedded.’10
In some ways the ‘epigenetic network’ seems
analogous to the ‘morphic field’, the term Rupert Sheldrake, a cell biologist
and plant physiologist, employs for an understanding of human consciousness and
the process of evolution. Explaining his hypothesis of morphic resonance and
morphic fields, Rupert Sheldrake thinks that ‘genes are grossly overrated and
that a lot of inheritance depends on the memory which is carried within these
organising fields of organisms. This memory is a kind of cumulative memory, a
kind of habit memory, which is built up through a pool of species experience,
depending on a process I call morphic resonance.’ 61 In effect,
Sheldrake proposes ‘a field theory of the mind’ in order to arrive at a more
integral understanding of the nature of the mind, which in many ways ties up
with other attempts and theories to overcome the traditional frameworks of
biology, psychology and epistemology that have largely been shaped by the seventeenth-century
Cartesian division between mind and matter that has ‘haunted Western science
and philosophy for more than 300 years.’
These alternative theorists also question the
recent research by neuroscientists on the function of different areas of the
brain to explain religious and mystical experiences in terms of neural network,
neurotransmitters and brain chemistry. For instance, neuroscientists have put
forward the idea that normal functioning of the right frontal lobe,
specifically the parietal lobe, helps orient a person in three-dimensional
space, and controls much of our sense of self, and the decreased activity of
the parietal lobe could cause the blurring between the self and the rest of the
world and give rise to a transcendental feeling
of being one with God or with the world.
Vilayanur S Ramachandran, an eminent researcher
and author of the widely acclaimed book, Phantoms
in the Brain, believes that questions on the Self, free will and consciousness
can now be approached and explained empirically. He says, ‘Even
though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the
richness of our mental life—all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our
ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us
regards as his own intimate private self —is simply the activity of these
little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else... Lofty
questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking
them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in
the West—but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the
answers.’ 12
The alternative
theorists, of course, are suspicious of this over enthusiasm of neuroscientists like
Ramachandran and reject their ‘findings’ on the ground that the neuroscientists
haven’t been able to repeat their experiments to produce identical results as
incontrovertible proof, simply because you cannot really reduce human
experiences or human consciousness to purely neural mechanisms. These
scientists succeed only in explaining away the complex relationship between the
nature of the human
brain and consciousness.
So, Fritjof Capra
suggests: ‘Mind is not a thing but a process of cognition, which is identified
with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this
process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one
between process and structure. Moreover, the brain is not the only structure
through which the process of cognition operates. The entire structure of the
organism participates in the process of cognition, whether or not the organism
has a brain and a higher nervous system.’ For that matter, ‘At all levels of
life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure
are inseparably connected.’ 13
Rupert Sheldrake
comes close to UG’s opinion when he suggests that ‘the brain is like a tuning
system, and that we tune into our own memories by a process of morphic
resonance, which I believe is a general process that happens throughout the
whole nature.’
Extending this idea
as it were, Saul-Paul Sirag, a theoretical physicist, suggests that ‘in some
cosmic sense there really is only one consciousness, and that is really the
whole thing—in other words, that hyperspace itself is consciousness acting on
itself, and space-time is just a kind of studio space for it to act out various
things in.’ Karl Pribram, a professor of neuropsychology, who explores the
similarities between current findings in neuropsychology and in quantum
physics, thinks that our ideas of mind-brain, for that matter our whole understanding
of life, are still caught up in terms of classical mechanics, with cause and
effect relationships. In actuality, he says, we can never find out what and
where the cause of a particular act or event is. ‘The whole system does it.
There isn’t a start and a midst and so on, because time and space are enfolded,
and therefore there is no causality.’ Every act is
‘very much a quantum type, holographic, implicate order kind of idea.’ In view
of this, there is no such thing as self, or mind as such; rather, there are only ‘mental processes, mental activities. But
there isn’t a thing called the mind.’ 14
UG’s
Response: Mind is a Myth
Although the various
theories discussed above, on the one hand, seem to contradict and cancel each
other out, on the other hand they appear to support, extend and explicate each
other in quite complex ways. Some of these theories come close to what UG has
been saying for more than three decades now. However, our purpose is not so
much to note the parallels, but see where and how UG deepens our understanding
of the body-mind
relationship and the interconnectedness of life and the universe. This is not
just an idea or an insight with him, but the way he moves and lives in the
world, he asserts. It is amazing how very spontaneously, without batting an
eyelid, and with absolute clarity he answers questions that have troubled
philosophers and religious thinkers over the centuries. In this context, one may
be tempted to compare and contrast UG’s utterances with the Enlightenment traditions
and teachings of the sages of the world, although
this would not necessarily enhance our understanding of things. In fact,
it could even mislead us into thinking that what UG has been saying is as old
as hills, so we should tread carefully here. For, in actual fact, there is
something new, utterly new in what UG is saying, the implication of which is
tremendous and critical for a world that seems to have more or less decided
what is right for humanity. Unless we break out of our old, and established mode of thinking, our situation will
continue to be like that of a dog chasing its own tail in vain.
Outwardly, there is
nothing new in the language UG uses. He does
not coin any new words like philosophers and scientists do, he uses simple,
commonplace terms, free of metaphysical overtones and spiritual content, but
what comes through is revolutionary, to
say the least.
What is there is only the body, asserts UG.
There is no mind. But for centuries we have been made to believe that there is
an entity — the ‘I’, the self, the psyche, the mind. There is no such thing. It’s only an illusion.
In the light of what UG says, we need to
understand the term ‘mind’ at two levels.
Mind in
the sense of intelligence
is life itself and is everywhere. It is present in the seed of a plant as
much as in a mosquito. It is there in matter, in every particle of the
universe, in every cell of the body. This mind or consciousness as
intelligence, as awareness, says UG, ‘functioning in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the
same. In me it has no frontiers; in you there are frontiers – you are enclosed
in that.’
When Arthur M. Young, says that photons can
think, or that so-called matter has properties of mind, or when Saul-Paul Sirag
suggests that ‘hyperspace itself is consciousness acting on itself’, they are,
in point of fact, saying that Mind is immanent in matter at all levels of life.
The Mundaka
Upanishad too seems to suggest the
same thing poetically: ‘As the web comes out of the spider and is withdrawn…so
springs the universe from the eternal Brahman…Brahman …brought forth out of himself the material
cause of the universe; from this came the primal energy, and from the primal
energy mind, from mind the subtle elements, from the subtle elements the many
worlds…’
But this mind as intelligence, as primal
energy, is not our problem, although it would be if we make that into a
philosophy or build a religion around it. It simply points to the
inseparability of life and the interconnectedness of everything, which by
implication means our sense of separation is an error and an illusion.
Our actual problem is the mind in the sense of
self. Buddha did not find this self
inside or outside, above or below, and UG says it is non-existent. But it is
this non-existent self that has created religions, cultures, politics,
technology, and the market forces that have begun
to dominate the world today. It is the same self that not only produces great
architecture, wonderful artefacts, enchanting music but also invents nuclear
bombs, wages wars, abuses natural resources and endangers the existence of life
on earth.
How does this sense of self arise in the first
place? And why? Tradition says we do not know, cannot know, it is ignorance.
The evolutionary biologists say that self-consciousness probably arose to
enable the survival of the hominid. In other
words, self-consciousness was the emergent property of the brain, or the result
of some strange mutation engineered by the body itself in its fight against the
forces threatening its survival. A strange adaptation!
The myth of creation found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad offers layered
meanings and implications: In the beginning there was nothing but It, the Self
(in the sense of Awareness), in the form of a person (the Body). It looked
around and saw that there was nothing but itself, whereupon its first utterance
was ‘It is I’; hence the birth of ‘I’. Then it was afraid, and desired a
second. It split itself into two: female and male. The male and female now
desired each other and embraced and from them arose all living creatures,
including the human race.
Hence, it is said, the sense of aloneness, the sense
of lack, fear and desire (libido, kama).
To put it differently, in the words of Joseph Campbell: ‘Life and death became
two, which had been one, and the sexes became two, which also had been one.’ One
could say that God divided itself into two and thus began the terrific play,
the maya; what tradition calls the lila of Brahman.
In other words, this primordial creature(s) was
thrown out of the Garden of Eden (not in the orthodox Christian sense but in
Joseph Campbell’s image), breaking the unitary
consciousness. It was a grand illusion, forever accompanied by a sense of
separation, alienation, lack, and suffering. As long as this illusion of
separation, this ego, remains, in the words of Joseph Campbell again, ‘the
commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa,
as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego,
related to it in love, fear, worship, exile, or atonement, will be there. But
precisely that illusion of duality is the trick of maya.’ 15
UG, however, refuses to use this kind of
religious or mythical metaphor, or even words that may carry philosophical or
metaphysical connotations. The terms such as soul, universal mind, Oversoul, Atman or Higher Self are all only persuasive words
that seduce people and put them on the wrong track—a bogus chartered flight! UG
believes life has to be described in simple, physical and physiological terms: ‘It
must be demystified and depsychologized’.
According to UG, somewhere along the line of
evolution, the human species experienced self-consciousness, which does not
exist in other species on this planet. (UG refuses to say why this happened,
probably because it cannot be known; it is not within the realm of knowing, for
thought cannot know its own origin.) With the help of this sense of self-consciousness,
man accorded himself a superior position over and above the other species on
this planet. It is this separation and sense of superiority that has been the
source of man’s problems and tragedy.
Since the whole of Nature is a single unit,
human beings cannot ever really separate themselves from the totality of what
we call Nature. Our sense of separation from Nature is an illusion and it is in
this illusion that the ‘I’ is born (the ‘I’ itself being the illusion) and
tries to perpetuate itself, forever seeking permanence. In actuality, there is
no permanence, no security, no permanent happiness, and no ‘I’, no separate,
psychological entity. The search for permanence and the ‘I’ are the same thing.
The institutionalisation of this search is what all religions are about. There
is only the ‘I’, as a first person singular pronoun which, UG says, he uses
only to make the conversation simpler. There is no other ‘I’.
Sometimes, for purposes of convenience, and for
want of a better or adequate word, UG uses the term ‘world mind’ to explain the
nature of ‘I’ or the ‘self’. The world mind constitutes the totality of
thoughts, feelings, experiences, and hopes of humankind.
‘The world mind is that which has created you
and me, for the main purpose of maintaining its status quo, its continuity.
That world mind is self-perpetuating, and its only interest is to maintain its
continuity, which it can do only through the creation of what we call
individual minds — your mind and my mind. So without the help of that
knowledge, you have no way of experiencing yourself as an entity. This
so-called entity — the I, the self, the soul, the psyche — is created by that.
And so we are caught up in this vicious circle, namely, of knowledge giving you
the experience, and the experience in turn strengthening and fortifying that knowledge…
This knowledge is put into us during the course of our life. When you play with
a child, you tell him, “Show me your hand, show me your nose, show me your
teeth, your face… what is your name?” this is how we build up the identity of
the individual’s relationship with his body and with the world around.’
So, knowledge is all that there is, says UG. The
‘me’, the ‘self’ is nothing but the totality of this inherited knowledge that
is passed from generation to generation. Susan Blackmore would be delighted to
know that what UG says about knowledge and thoughts reflects her ideas: Memes and memeplex are
passed on through imitation, education, and knowledge systems, for ensuring their own continuity. But she would note that according
to UG, thoughts are passed on not only through education and books; thoughts
are everywhere, and we have no way of finding out the seat of thought or human
consciousness. Sometimes, he uses the phrase ‘thought sphere’ or ‘world mind’
to explain the all-pervasive nature of thought. But how this knowledge, these thoughts,
this memory is passed on is a mystery. The genetic code is only a part of it;
It is much more than the genetic code. He says:
There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. Mind is everywhere,
sort of like the air we breathe. There is a thought sphere. It is not ours and not mine.
It is always there. Your brain acts like an antenna, picking and choosing what
signals it wants to use. That is all. You use the signals for purposes of
communication. First of all, we have to communicate with ourselves. We begin as
children naming everything over and over again. Communicating with others is a
little more complex and comes next. The problem, or the pathology if you will,
arises when you constantly communicate with yourself, irrespective of any
outside demand for thought. You are all the time communicating with yourself:
“I am happy.... I am not happy.... What is the meaning of life?...” and so on.
If that incessant communication within yourself is not there, you are
not there as you now know and experience yourself. When that inner monologue is
no longer there, the need to communicate with others is absent. So you
communicate with others only to maintain that communication you are having with
yourself, your inner monologue. This kind of communication is possible only
when you rely and draw upon the vast totality of thoughts passed on by man from
generation to generation. Man has through the process of evolution learned to
draw from this storehouse quicker, subtler, and more refined thoughts than the
rest of the animals. They have powerful instincts. Through thinking man has
enabled himself to survive more efficiently than the other species. This
ability of thought to adapt is the curse of man.
And it
seems to be the curse of man never to know the origin of thought. It is too
vast, It has the tremendous momentum gathered over thousands of years of
evolutionary history, and within it also survive what UG calls the ‘plant
consciousness’ and the ‘animal consciousness’. Whatever insights we might claim
to have are arbitrary, the invention of thought itself, for they are a result of thought observing thought, thought thinking
about itself. It is not in the nature of thought to know either its own origin
or the origin of things. In fact, there is no such thing as the origin of
things, origin of consciousness, or the origin of the universe, asserts UG—a
position that some scientists seem to have come round to accept today, though
reluctantly. In the study of matter, molecules, atoms, particles, and quarks, the scientists finally say that there is
really nothing there. Indeed it is an exercise in futility, avers UG; we shall
never be able to discover the fundamental particle or the building blocks of
the universe, because, ‘the fundamental particle does not exist’.
In a conversation
with Jeffrey Mishlove, Capra admits that ‘quantum physics has brought a
dissolution of the notion of hard and solid objects, and also of the notion
that there are fundamental building blocks of matter.’ The search, however,
goes on, although scientists
have more or less come to a tacit
understanding that in effect, all our laws of physics, all our observations and
findings are generated by our minds. The physicist Evan Harris Walker expresses
this position most tellingly when he says that essentially what makes a quantum
reaction finally get to some determinate end point is a human consciousness
observing it.16
Thus, we see that in effect, thought
manufactures all our ideas and worldviews, for in this lies its illusory
existence and its own continuity. But this thought, the ‘I’, separated from
nature, from the totality of life, also knows that it cannot exist forever,
that it has to come to an end. Hence, the ‘I’ also entails the fear of
extinction. And this fear, which is ‘me’, the ‘I’, creates an artificial
immortality by way of
a)
linking up thoughts and giving them an illusion of continuity,
b)
projecting an entity, a soul, heaven, etc.,
c)
depending upon and using the body for its own
continuity.
Strange and contradictory as it may sound,
thought by itself and in itself can do no damage or harm. But when the ‘I’, the
‘self’, uses thought to achieve what it cannot achieve the problems begin. In
UG’s words: ‘The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when you attempt
to use, censor, and control those thoughts to get something that your
problems begin. You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in
this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist — God, bliss, love,
etc., through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another,
creating misery for yourself and the world.’
The nature of thought or the self is to think
always in pairs, in terms of opposites— love and hate, birth and death, good
and evil, God and Satan, spirituality and materialism—and always to privilege
one over the other. But such a separation cannot be made, for love and hate,
good and evil are born of each other, or rather from the same source; in short,
the pairs are made of basically the same self-protective movement of thought.
There is no such thing as spirituality,
asserts UG. It is yet another movement of thought or the ‘self’, that creates
this artificial division, hoping to overcome the problem that thought has
created for itself in the first place. We could perhaps see through this
terrible dualism in yet another way. ‘Thought is matter,’ says UG. So when the
‘I’ uses thought to achieve either material or spiritual goals, it is basically
the same movement of thought, (that is, matter) to free itself from what may be
called self-created anxiety, sorrow, conflict, hate, envy, and the fear of
coming to an end. The society may have placed the spiritual goals on a higher
level than the material goals, but actually all values, even the so-called
spiritual values, are all materialistic.
The Brain
is Only a Reactor
The brain has nothing
to do with thought. Thoughts are not manufactured by the brain. Concepts such as synapses, micro-circuits, Broca’s
area, and so on do not explain the origin and nature and function of thought.
As UG says, thought is everywhere. It is there as traces of the past, as memory
in every cell of the body, including the brain. And it is there in the ‘thought
sphere’ or ‘world mind’. It is the ‘I’ that uses thought, and the body, strictly speaking, is not involved in its
play. Yet, the body carries, in every cell, the traces of not only human
memory, but also of plant and animal consciousness.
To emphasize the point again, the brain is
not the ‘creator’ of the ‘self’ or of thought, it is only a ‘reactor’. ‘It is, rather,
that the brain is like an antenna,’ insists UG, ‘picking up thoughts on a
common wavelength, a common thought sphere.’
What UG is saying is that the brain has a minimal function in the protection and survival
of the body. Rather, it is only the coordinator of bodily functions. It is not
the creator of the coordinator, the ‘I’, which in fact uses the brain. Left to
itself, the brain
is only concerned with the safety and survival of the body. It is only a
reactor, or as Sheldrake would say, it is ‘like a tuning system’. The brain
does not generate thoughts, it only picks up thoughts. Now, in UG’s words
again:
Thoughts are not really spontaneous. They are not self-generated.
They always come from outside. Another important thing for us to realize and understand
is that the brain is not a creator. It is singularly incapable of creating
anything. But we have taken for granted that it is something extraordinary,
creating all kinds of things that we are so proud of. It is just a reactor and
a container. It plays a very minor role in this living organism.
The
brain is only a computer. Through trial and error you create something. But there are no thoughts there. There is no thinker there. Where
are the thoughts? Have you ever tried to find out? What there is is only about
thought but not thought. You cannot separate yourself from a thought and look
at it. What you have there is only a thought about that thought, but you do not
see the thought itself. You are using those thoughts to achieve certain
results, to attain certain things, to become something, to be somebody other
than what you actually are. I always give the example of a word-finder. You
want to know the meaning of a word and press a button. The word-finder says,
“Searching.” It is thinking about it. If there is any information put in there,
it comes out with it. That is exactly the way you are thinking. You ask
questions and if there are any answers there, they come out. If the answers are
not there, the brain says “Sorry.” The brain is no different from a computer.
Is There A Soul?
Etymologically speaking,
it is said that atman in Sanskrit, psyche in Greek, anima and
spiritus in Latin mean ‘breath’, as
do pneuma in Greek and ruah in Hebrew. If spirit or soul means
‘breath’, perhaps there isn’t much to say about it except that prana or
‘breath’ is the defining characteristic of all life forms. Linked to it, one
might suggest, is the ancient idea of ‘spirit’ believed in by the ‘primitive’
or tribal people the world over for thousands of years. They believed that a
mysterious spirit (or spirits) animates the whole world, not only life forms
but also the whole of Nature.
However, the notions of spirit or soul as found in the
belief systems of the major religions and even mystical reports are complex,
complicated and different from each other. The Hindu notion of atman or Self is not the same as the Christian or Islamic soul. The
one common defining characteristic of these different narratives of the soul is
that it is conceived of as an independent or separate entity, and that in its
complex relationship with God, mind and body, the
soul is always privileged over the body. The soul is pure and transcendental; the
body is impure, mundane, subject to decay and death. The body is something to
be rejected, abandoned, and transcended in order to realize and experience the
soul. Despite the hermeneutical attempts to overcome the dualism of body-soul,
soul-God, it has to be conceded that this dualism between the body and the soul
is the bedrock on which all religions are built and continues to be the core of
all their discourses. It is the same with what goes under the name of
spirituality, too. After all, what is spirituality? Isn’t it understood as
something concerned not with the material or the mundane, but with the sacred,
the holy, with Soul, God or things divine? Isn’t spirituality seen as an
engagement with the soul or spirit as opposed to matter, body, and
external reality? This dichotomy or dualism between spirit and matter, body and
soul, spirituality and materialism is the warp and woof of all religions and
all spiritual traditions.
If one were to consign the notion of the soul to the
dustbin, religions would collapse like a pack of cards, and gurus would have to
find some other job to earn their living. In UG’s words, ‘We have been fed on
this kind of bunk for centuries, and if this diet were to be changed, we would
all die of starvation.’
In many ways, this is analogous to our belief in ‘love’,
without which most of our artists, novelists and poets would not survive, and
the gargantuan structures of the film and music industry would soon be a heap
of ash.
Just as hate is seen as the enemy of love, the body is seen as the enemy of the soul. The major
religions might differ in their interpretations of the soul, but they all pit
the soul against the poor body! However, some people may argue that of all
religions, Hinduism—or rather, India’s
different religious groups and spiritual traditions—have developed a more
rigorous and sophisticated discourse on atman
which is radically different from the other notions of the soul. It isn’t. The notion of atman, however sophisticated and complex, is not free of this
awful dichotomy.
‘While our bodily organization undergoes changes, while
our thoughts gather like clouds in the sky and disperse again,’ writes S Radhakrishnan, ‘the self is never lost. It is present
in all, yet distinct from all.’ The nature of atman or soul is ‘not affected by ordinary
happenings. It is the source of the sense of identity through numerous transformations.
It remains itself though it sees all things. It is the one thing that
remains constant and unchanged in the incessant and multiform activity of the
universe, in the slow changes of the organism, in the flux of sensations, in
the dissipation of ideas, the fading of memories.’ 17 These words
more or less summarize the position of Vedanta, which is considered to be the
highest philosophy of atman
or Self.
In short, the body, the mind, and the world are
arbitrary restrictions imposed on atman, which in itself is pure, unaffected, unchanged, immutable and
eternal, a trinity of transcendental reality (sat), awareness (cit),
and bliss (ananda).
Radhakrishnan himself being a Vedantin, a non-dualist, his interpretation does come close to the
various discussions on the nature of atman
to Sankara’s notion of body as impure, limiting, and imperfect, to his
distinction between what he called, the empirical, individual self and the
Supreme Self: unconditioned, transcendent, absolute, pure and immutable, essentially
the same as Brahman, the source
and ground of all creation and existence. This again is the notion of atman as found in the Bhagavad Gita,
which declares atman, not the body,
as immutable, immortal, which ‘weapons cut not, fire burns not, water wets not,
wind dries not’; which casts off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones in its
cycles of births and deaths, until it finds release and becomes one with the
Supreme.
Say what you will, in these texts,
the opposition between the atman and
the body is unmistakably evident. Modern gurus
and alternative theorists, who are trying to develop an integral and unified
theory of spirituality, might argue that atman or Spirit or the Universal Self is not necessarily opposed
to the body; that it is a problem of semantics, and the limitation of the
vocabulary of the period when these texts were composed. This is sheer word-play that does not really help the situation. The
modern theorists succeed only in dodging the real issue, which is the
irreconcilable dualism between body and soul, spirit and matter, that runs
through all spiritual discourses. The usage of terms such as pure,
transcendental, unchanging, unconditioned, and eternal, simultaneously betrays
the fear of the self coming to an end and the search for some symbolic
security, permanence or immortality. The more important question for us here
is: Why talk of soul or atman
as immortal, when, in the first place, there is no death for the body?
The Buddha, of course, did not find the atman. As regards JK, he found
the whole thing problematic. He asked why, instead of saying the atman is immortal, ‘Thou art That’, ‘You are That
Brahman,’ you cannot say ‘I am the river,’ ‘I am the poor man,’ ‘I am that
tree,’ ‘I am all that.’ How can a narrow, conditioned mind observe or even
speculate on the unconditioned? How can one start with a conclusion that one is
Brahman? Isn’t that the end of the search?
UG is categorical and direct in his response and asserts
that there is nothing to our search there. He demolishes the questions and the
many answers given by declaring: There is no self, no I, no atman, no God.
What is there inside you is nothing but fear,
states UG. ‘Death’ is fear, the fear of something coming to an end. The ‘I’
knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do, it is a frightening
situation and it does not want to come to an end. So it creates the belief that
there must be something beyond, it projects an afterlife, immortality of soul,
God and so on. The problem, therefore, is not whether there is a soul, whether there
is a center, whether there is a God or not; it is fear, operating as
belief, that is passed on from
generation to generation. It is this knowledge, says UG, that makes us think
that there must be something beyond and even experience it. But there is
nothing to it. In other words, ideas of the soul and life after death are born out of
the demand for permanence. That is the foundation of man’s religious thinking.
All religious thinking is born out of that demand for permanence.
But thought is a tricky customer. It cannot exist without grounding
itself in some belief. It will appear to abandon a belief only to create a new one in
its place. It will even employ the so-called negative approach to arrive
at some positive idea. Atheism, agnosticism, pragmatism, nihilism, and what
have you, are only the various tricks of thought to anchor itself to some
belief in order to seek its perpetuation. And so, UG warns: ‘You will replace
one belief with another. You are nothing but belief, and when it dies, you are
dead. What I am trying to tell you is this: don’t try to be free from
selfishness, greed, anger, envy, desire, and fear. You will only create its
opposites, which are, unfortunately, fictitious. If desire dies, you die. The
black van comes and carts you away, that’s it! Even if you should somehow
miraculously survive such a shock, it will be of no use to you, or to
others.’
And then according to UG, all our beliefs in ‘thoughtless state’, ‘state
of awareness’, ‘choiceless awareness’ and so on are nothing but bogus chartered
flights. There is no such thing as self-awareness, for the self and awareness
cannot co-exist. If one has to give a simple example or analogy, awareness is
something like a mirror, images are reflected upon it, but the image is not the
mirror. Awareness is only a medium through which images pass in and pass out.
There is nothing more that can be said about it, we cannot call it a
soul or build a philosophy or religion around it. Any such attempt will be an
attempt to anchor ourselves in something which it is not. In other words, it is
only our search for power and security, useful only to the spiritual gurus. In
UG’s words:
You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot
co-exist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock,
once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the
experiencing structure, the ‘you’, would collapse, and everything would fall
into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at
— that is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there,
again experiencing the old, what you know. It is not something that can be
captured, contained and given expression to through your experiencing
structure. It is outside the field of experience. So it cannot be shared with
anyone.
Putting
it differently, he says:
I am not particularly fond of the word ‘awareness’. It is misused. It is a
rubbed coin, and everybody uses it to justify some of his actions, instead of
admitting that he did something wrong. Sometimes you say, ‘I was not aware of
what was going on there.’ But awareness is an integral part of the activity of
this human organism. This activity is not only specifically in the human
organism but in all forms of life – the pig and the dog. The cat just looks at
you, and is in a state of choiceless awareness. To turn that awareness into an
instrument which you can use to bring about a change is to falsify that.
Awareness is an integral part of the activity of the living organism.
(Excerpts from The Other Side of Belief: Interpreting
U.G.Krishnamurti, by Mukunda Rao, Penguin Books India, 2005)
*
The Enigma of the Natural State
India boasts of a strong, 300-year old enlightenment
tradition. Yogavashista
speaks of seven steps to enlightenment, the seventh and final stage being moksha — the
extinction of the individual, which sounds similar to the concept of Nirvana,
meaning the final ‘extinction of the self’. Moksha
also means release from the cycles of births and
deaths, or complete and ultimate liberation from all ignorance and
duality through realization of the Supreme or Universal Self and its identity
with Brahman. There are, of course, various other descriptions of what constitutes moksha, depending upon
the spiritual tradition one belongs to. Are they all speaking of the same state,
in different words? Is there an ‘essence’ to moksha or liberation? How can realization of
the Supreme Self be same as ‘the extinction of self’ or Nirvana?
Are there different kinds of enlightenments? Are there
levels to it? Does such a thing exist at all?
In 1939, when UG asked more or less the same question of
Sri Ramana, the sage of Arunachalam is believed to have answered in the affirmative.
UG: ‘Can one be free sometimes and not free sometimes?’
Ramana: ‘Either you are free, or you are not free at
all.’
UG: ‘Are there any levels to it?’
Ramana: ‘No, no levels are possible, it is all one
thing. Either you are there or not there at all.’
After his ‘Calamity’ in 1967, in 70s and 80s
to be specific, UG used to offer ‘soft’ and not entirely negative answers to
questions on enlightenment and questions concerning ‘spiritual’ matters. Today
he straightaway rejects the idea of enlightenment. He says: ‘There is no such thing as enlightenment. You may
say that every teacher and all the saints and saviours of mankind have been
asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that
they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river!’
And yet, paradoxically, he also
states: ‘But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not
interested in freeing or enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of
knowing that he is a free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not
something that can be shared with somebody, because it is not in the area of
experience at all.’
Enlightenment
Demystified
I
believe there is such a thing as enlightenment but not in the sense in which it
is talked about by most of our gurus and spiritual teachers in the world today.
It is of course, as UG says, a state of being that cannot be shared with or communicated to others, as it is not in the realm
of experience as we understand it. Still, if we have to approach the
subject intellectually and suggest a functional definition of it in plain,
non-religious terms, we could perhaps say that it is the cessation of all
psychological conflicts, the dissolution of the self, and the birth of the
individual into the Natural
State.
One prefers the term ‘Natural State’ to ‘enlightenment’
for two reasons: one, it is a better and more creative term than the
much-abused word ‘enlightenment’, which should help us understand at least
intellectually this state of being, cleansed of the anti-intellectual,
sanctimonious dross indulged in by religious gurus and apologists of religion.
Two, the word ‘enlightenment’ is being (ab)used widely in a way that has
nothing whatsoever to do with the state of enlightenment. This is not to say
that one knows what enlightenment is all about or that there can only be one fixed
meaning to it. Far from it. It is only to point out what enlightenment is not,
just as, in the context of the current knowledge of life, we realize that it is
a gross error to think that God created the earth and man in seven days (although
there is no consensus even among experts as to how many billion years it took and
how exactly life forms and Homo sapiens emerged on earth).
Enlightenment has nothing to do with world peace
or with the kind of political and social changes we want to bring about to prevent
our mutual destruction. It has nothing to do with our values of justice,
equality, love, and even compassion. Gurus who claim to be enlightened not only deceive themselves but also
mislead people by attributing non-existent ontological status and spiritual
values to enlightenment.
In other words, enlightenment has nothing to do
with being good or pious. The enlightenment state is
not a blueprint for a world order, much less for world peace. There is no
religious or social content there, yet, in its own way it could make a great
social and cultural impact by quickening our insights into ourselves and the
world. Genuinely enlightened persons, sages (not saints, gurus or even
mystics), do not directly recommend any change in the world, or teach a better
way of living. They only point out the errors in our perception of things,
question our self-righteous ways of being and doing things, our precious ideas
and ideologies, in short, our fragmented existence. They simply go on living as
if nothing has happened, as if they are not concerned which the way the world
goes, for deep in the marrow of their bones, as it were, they know that life
goes on and it has its own ways.
An enlightened person is not an avatar or saviour
come down on earth to save humanity or lead humanity to some promised land, or
create the kingdom
of God on earth. His or
her utterances cannot be converted into a body of teaching and institutionalized.
His social or political comments (which are made in responses to people’s
queries and demands) do not carry timeless meaning or values. He lives and moves in a state that is outside the framework
of our traditional modes of understanding. Enlightenment is what it is. It
cannot be willed, or brought about by an act of volition. Perhaps it comes with
the cessation of ‘will’, the stuff the self is made of. It is the natural state
nature throws up now and then for reasons not accessible to our reason. Perhaps
it is the last stage of evolution and yet, an utterly new expression of life.
Salvation is Physical
The Mind of the Cells — or Willed Mutation of our Species is a record of reports of
physical changes and experiences of the Mother of Pondicherry, which occurred over eleven years between
1962 and 1973.
It is a remarkable book that makes other books on
mysticism sound like the mere prattling of a child. It is unique not because it
is far superior to other texts on mysticism, but because it marks the end of
mystical experience. It is an incredible journey on
an uncharted sea. One could well call it a journey of billions-of-years old
cells, a cellular journey into utterly new waters of life and intelligence,
something the molecular biologists should want to discover and understand. But
it is not something that could be seen or studied under a microscope in
a laboratory, inside the fish bowl of one’s mind.
But strangely, it is an incomplete journey,
perhaps only to be carried forward by UG, to reach its final and full fruition
and expression in his life.
Aurobindo said, ‘Man is a transitional being,’ and that he has to be surpassed. We do not know if
Aurobindo experienced this ‘transition’. We know his ideas of ‘overmind’,
‘supermind’, ‘superman’, and ‘supramental manifestation’. But did it happen
to him? Or, was it only his prediction? Or, merely philosophical speculation?
Going by the Mother’s reports, it seems it
happened to her. She presided over this transition, this strange transmutation
of the body, this bewildering mutation of the cells. It was something that was
certainly not entirely in line with Aurobindo’s ideas or predictions.
In 1953, the Mother made a statement to the effect
that something new was beginning to take shape in her life. She said: ‘…a new
world is born. It is not the old world changing, it is a New
World which is born…’ although, ‘the old is still all-powerful and
entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness.’ 18
But it seems that only in 1962, when she fell
‘ill’, did she
begin to notice strange changes taking place in her body. It actually was not
an illness nor symptoms of illness. Something strange was going on within the
cells of her body, ‘…a sort of decentralization…as if the cells were being
scattered by centrifugal force…’ She would feel terribly weak at times, faint
now and then, yet, something untouched, was fully conscious of what was
happening. ‘…Witnessing everything…’ something like ‘matter looking at itself
in a whole new way.’ This process went on for
almost eleven years, until the day she passed away in 1973, at the age of
ninety-five.
At first it seemed her consciousness was breaking
out of its limits; it felt like waves, ‘not individual waves, rather a movement
of waves.’ It was almost infinite and strangely ‘undulatory’: vast, at times,
very quiet, and there was a harmonious rhythm to it. ‘And this movement,’ she
felt, ‘is life itself…’ and it moves by expansion: ‘it contracts and
concentrates, then expands and spreads out.’
Something was trying to get established, an
utterly new way or movement of life! It was the preparation of the body, of the
cells, to mutate. It was not an act of volition. ‘You can’t try to make it
happen,’ said the Mother. ‘One can’t make an effort, one can’t try to know,
because that immediately triggers an intellectual activity (habit) which has
nothing to do with “that”.’
Then there came a sort of memory block. She did
not know how to climb stairs, how to read and things of that sort. It seemed
necessary to let go everything, all knowledge, all intelligence, all capacity —everything.
The sense of separation was dissolving. Old habits were dying.
Taste, smell, vision, touch, sound —the sensory
perceptions began to undergo complete change. Perhaps, ‘they belong to another
rhythm,’ she suggested. It seemed curious and funny. ‘There is no longer
“something seeing” but I am numerous things. I Live numerous things… I See
clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open, and yet it is the same
vision. It’s physical vision, purely physical…fuller.’
Now and then she experienced a tremendous burst of
energy that caused pain. At times she would feel that she was dying, that she
was going to explode. It was not what the religious people assume to be joy or
bliss, but a sense of alarm, fear, anxiety, pain. ‘…It’s really and truly
terrifying…it’s a hideous labour…it’s truly a journey into nothing, with
nothing, in a desert strewn with every conceivable trap and obstacle. You are
blindfolded, you know nothing.’
The body had become a battleground. A battle
within the cells between the old habit and something new that was trying to
emerge. In the Mother’s words: ‘The battle begins to be fought deep down in the
cells, in the material consciousness, between what we call “the will to
haemorrhage” and the reaction of the cells of the body. And it is absolutely
like a regular battle, a real fight. But suddenly, the body is seized with a
very strong determination and proclaims an order, and immediately the effect
begins to be felt and everything returns gradually to normal.’
It is the struggle of the body to cleanse itself
of the habit developed over thousands of years of ‘separate existence on
account of ego.’ Now it has to learn to continue, without the ego, ‘according
to another, unknown law, a law still incomprehensible for the body. It is not a
will, it’s… I don’t know…something; a way of being.’
The way human beings have lived with a separative
consciousness has been nothing but a habit. A bad habit! All that must be
undone, the so-called laws of Nature, all the collective suggestions, all the
earthly habits. ‘It is nothing but mechanical habits. But it clings, it’s
really sticky, oh!… what appear to us as “the laws of Nature” or “inescapable
principles”, are so absurd, so ridiculous!’
And then the body falls into a rhythm all its own.
It becomes transparent. ‘All vibrations pass through it freely. It no longer
feels limited: it feels spread out in everything it does, in everything around,
in all circumstances, in people, movements, feelings…just spread out.’ The
Mother felt that the body was everywhere. ‘I am talking here about the cells of
the body, but the same applies to external events, even world events. It’s even
remarkable in the case of earth quakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. it would seem
that the entire earth is like the body.’
Everything is interconnected. Everything is one.
The sense of separation is a complete falsehood. Cause and effect only a
figment of human imagination. ‘It isn’t something you see or understand or
know, it’s…something you are.’ Consciousness or mind, divides everything up.
But here, in the body, everything is one. Literally everything: ‘The speck of
dust you wipe off the table, or ecstatic contemplation, it’s all the same.’
The Mother felt it was something beyond what all earlier
spiritual leaders had said till then, which is what UG reiterates today with
absolute conviction and clarity. It was beyond moksha, beyond Nirvana; it was something
very physical. ‘Salvation is physical,’ declared the Mother. And she demanded
to know: why did they the spiritual teachers of the past all seek liberation by
abandoning their body? Why did they talk of Nirvana as something outside the
body? ‘The body is a very, very simple thing, very childlike,’ said the Mother.
‘It does not need to “seek” anything: it’s THERE. And it wonders why men never
knew of this from the start: why, but why did they go after all sorts of
things—religions, gods, and all those… sorts of things? While it is so simple!
So simple! It’s so obvious for the body!’
When the Mother says ‘the body is very simple’ and
that it does not need to ‘seek’ anything at all, she sounds very like UG. She
confirms what UG has been saying for the last thirty years, when she asserts:
‘All the mental constructions that men have tried to live by and realize on
earth come to me from all sides: all the great
schools of thought, the great ideas, the great realizations… and then, lower on
the scale, the religions; oh, how infantile all that seems! …Oh, what noise,
how vainly you have tried!’
It is fairly clear that the ‘process’ took the
Mother beyond even Aurobindo’s philosophy of the supramental manifestation, as
well as her own previous ideas about spiritual evolution before the actual
physical changes began to take place. Still, her past kept popping up now and
then, and she did refer, though reluctantly and hesitantly, to the idea of
‘supermind’ and ‘supramental’. It is surprising to note that even serious
followers of Aurobindo have either completely ignored the Mother’s report of
these great physical and physiological changes, or interpreted them purely in
terms of Aurobindo’s philosophy.
One might quote from Aurobindo’s writings and
argue that he was the first to speak about the need, or rather the
inevitability, of a physical transformation.
Indeed, he was the first to say that if any radical change has to take place,
it has to take place in the body, and he did prepare the ground for the
Mother’s transformation. Even otherwise, his interpretation of the Upanishads
and his criticism of Sankara’s Vedanta makes him one of our most radical
mystic-philosophers. But all this should in no
way distract us from the cleansing fact that the Mother, quite unwittingly as
it were, went beyond Aurobindo’s philosophy, and beyond all the known frames of
spiritual reference. This would have certainly brought a smile on Aurobindo’s
face, for he would have intuitively known that something like this would
happen; after all, didn’t he repeatedly warn that what is to come in future
will be something hitherto unknown and unexplored!
What happened to the Mother was something she
had least expected, just as UG had not expected his ‘Calamity’ even in his
wildest dreams! A careful consideration of the Mother’s report reveals that all
through these changes, she felt a sort of total helplessness, ‘choicelessness’,
and had absolutely no precedence or frame of reference to which she could
relate. ‘I don’t know…can’t say…have no idea…no words to express…blindfolded…
you see, I feel I am right in the middle of a world I know nothing about,
struggling with laws I know nothing about… it is something like a condition:
the unreality of the goal—not its unreality, its uselessness. Not even
uselessness: the non-existence of the goal… it happened in my bathroom
upstairs, surely to show that it is in the most trivial things, in everything,
continuously… You see, it’s even fairly easy to pose as a superman! But it
remains ethereal, it isn’t the real thing, not the next stage of terrestrial
evolution… So simple! It’s so obvious for the body!’ Her admissions more than
reveal her incredible journey into unknown waters of life and intelligence, and
she did go beyond Aurobindo and her own ideas and beliefs before the process
began.
We do not know. Perhaps the Mother did not live
long enough for everything to change, for the process, the mutation, to complete itself. However, to use her own words:
‘…but some things changed and have never reverted.’
The Mother died in 1973. For UG the ‘Calamity’
occurred in 1967. It was a full-blown mutation of the body, enabling the human
being to become fully human. It was not a mystical experience, nor a Kundalini
experience (though the Kundalini
experience could just be the beginning, almost elementary). And it has nothing
to do with the spiritual goal (as opposed to the material, the body) that the
spiritual traditions of the world with their band of teachers have been
proclaiming for centuries.
Evidently, this biological mutation, or
‘Natural state’ as UG would call it, or ‘cellular revolution’ as the Mother
would put it, is not entirely unprecedented. But now we have someone, in the
shape of UG, to tell us, in clear physical, physiological and material terms,
what it is all about.
The Body Is Immortal
The Bhagavad Gita, the
approximately 2000-year old religious text of the Hindus, is certainly
not considered to be a text on the subject of the immortality of the body.
Rather, it is celebrated as a quintessential text on the immortality of the
Universal or Supreme Self. Nevertheless, Chapter XI, on what is called the
Universal Form or Self tells a different story. That is the paradox, the irony
of ironies the text conceals. After a longish discourse on the different forms
of Yoga, the nature of Brahman and atman, Lord Krishna bestows on Arjuna a vision of
his Universal Form. Arjuna beholds this terrific kaleidoscope of life with
borrowed ‘divine eye’. And what does he see?
He beholds the whole cosmos reflected in the body of Krishna
with multitudinous arms, stomachs, mouths and eyes. It is boundless, with
neither end nor the middle nor beginning. Everything, all the innumerable forms
of life are there, and in the centre is Lord Brahma resting on a lotus,
surrounded by all the sages and the heavenly serpents.
The Sun, the Moon, and the heavenly planets
blaze along, worlds radiate within worlds in a never-ending kaleidoscope,
torrents of rivers flow relentlessly into thunderous seas, and behold, the
flaming mouth licking up, devouring all worlds, all creatures; it is the body,
with no beginning, middle or end, swallowing, burning itself up in an endless maya of creation and destruction.
There couldn’t have been a better metaphor for
the body. Many scholars and commentators on the Bhagavad Gita might find it
difficult to accept this interpretation. However, the text reveals that truly,
within the body is the cosmic dance of life. Rather, the cosmos itself is the
body, and the different, immeasurable life forms, like bacteria in the
bloodstream, like fish in the ocean, are rising and dissolving continually,
floating, moving back and forth, up and down, with no beginning and no end.
Scientists, however, posit a point of time for
the beginning of the universe and the evolution of the human body. We do not
know. It is a matter of perspective. We always think in frames, in terms of
time and space, cause and effect. It is an incorrigible human habit. But in
actuality, says UG, what is there is a space-time-energy continuum, which has
no end.
There are, of course, scientists today, who
have come round, however reluctantly, to more or less ‘accepting’ this hard
reality, yet, if only to keep their profession and search alive, they like to
imagine that the universe has had a beginning and consequently should have an
end, too. They say that the universe could be about thirteen billion years old,
the Sun and the planets about four-and-a-half billion years old. And they like
to suggest that it probably took a few more billion years for the first life
form to emerge on earth, and a few more million years for Homo sapiens to
arrive on this planet. We cannot be sure, of course. Still, if we were to
believe, however arbitrarily, in this theory, then it logically follows that Homo
sapiens, the human body, which has evolved over millions of years from the
‘primordial soup’, must have everything of the world and the cosmos in it.
According to Paul McLean’s work at the National
Institute of Mental Health’s Brain Research Centre, we have three brains in our
skulls.19 All three separate structures are supposed to have
developed over millions of years of evolutionary history on earth. First, there
is the reptilian brain (identical to the brain found in all reptiles), which
includes our spinal cord and the brain stem. Superimposed on this is the great
limbic structure, inherited from the mammals; it is believed that this is our
emotional-cognitive brain which handles emotional energies. Superimposed on
this structure is the neocortex, which is five times bigger than the two animal
brain structures and occupies almost eighty percent of our skull. It is this
neocortex, containing some ten billion neurons, which is supposed to be our
thinking brain which has made possible the so-called human progress from the stone
axe to the airplanes to the atom bombs to quantum physics.
‘Speaking allegorically of these three brains
within a brain,’ says McLean with a hilarious
effect yet with great philosophical implication, ‘we might imagine that when
the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to
stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile.’ Further: ‘In the popular
language today, these three brains might be thought of as biological computers,
each with its own peculiar form of subjectivity and its own intelligence, its
own sense of time and space and its own memory, motor and other functions.’ 20
When JK talked of the necessity of mutation in
the brain to bring about a radical change in human consciousness, did he mean
the transformation of the three brains, in particular the animal brains?
Interestingly, that is more or less what some of the neurologists are saying—that
religion is the ‘property’ of the brain, that unless there is a fundamental
change in the brain, the search for God, the related religious or spiritual
beliefs, and the battles over religious identities will be with us for a long
time. Even UG seems to suggest the same thing
when he says that religion is a serious neurological problem. But a careful
reading of his utterances tells us that he does not simply mean the brain, but
the whole body. The brain is only a ‘reactor’. The reptilian brain, the limbic
structure and the neocortex perform certain jobs or tasks, but by themselves
they are passive. They have to be activated and it is the ‘I’, the activator,
which uses them.
The traces of evolutionary history, the traces
of animal traits or animal consciousness exist not merely in the brain but all
over the body, in the trillions of cells of the body. To theorise further on
what UG has been saying, the ‘I’ (the coordinator of thoughts), is a squatter;
it uses the body for its own continuity, and it has superimposed itself on
every cell of the body. In other words, the ‘I’ with its age-old memories,
experiences, along with the animal consciousness, is deeply embedded in every
cell of the body. That is what the Mother’s report of her experience of the
cellular changes seems more or less to be saying as well. So then, the ‘I’, with
all its fears and anxieties, its sense of lack and insecurity, the animal trait
of aggression and even the survival instinct, has to go, has to be cleansed, if the human being has to begin truly
to function as a human. The cleansing has to take place not just in the brain but
in every cell of the body, on which the tremendous gravity of the psychological
fear and lack in the form of the ‘I’ or the ‘self’ is superimposed.
To put it in the language of molecular biology,
if mutation of cells is what caused the emergence of self-consciousness, (the
‘I’, the neocortex), then it will be another mutation in the cells that will
dissolve the ‘I’, which has outrun its original purpose and turned
self-destructive.
That seems to be the only way out, failing
which the humanity seems to be doomed to destroy itself, along with the
millions of other creatures living on this planet. If such a catastrophe were
to occur, perhaps only the tough cockroaches will survive, mutate, and let Nature
start the evolutionary cycle again, for purposes only Nature knows.
It is the stranglehold of thought, or culture,
over the body—culture in the form of religious ideals, goals, political
ideologies and so on—that has prevented the body from cleansing itself of these
‘bad habits’ to begin its natural, harmonious, non-destructive movement of
existence. Just as disease-causing viruses enter the body and cause havoc,
these thoughts have become parasites on the body, throwing the body out of its
natural order. The body can sometimes battle the viruses and regain its
balance, but it cannot do so with thoughts, for they have a stranglehold on the
cells of the body. There has to be a mutation if these thoughts and their
coordinator, the ‘I’, has to be destroyed before the body finds its freedom.
Unfortunately, this kind of mutation cannot be
willed. Nor can it be genetically engineered, for the ‘I’ is everywhere, and in
every cell. It seems that we could perhaps open up the possibilities of that
happening if only we stop and achieve a state of ‘do-nothing’ to further
strengthen the already tremendous momentum of the destructive structure of
thought.
There are already enough religions, enough
political ideologies, and more than enough atomic bombs to blow up the earth.
It is really ridiculous to talk of peace, love and compassion and then wage
wars, absurd to believe in an all-loving God and then slit each other’s throat
in the cause of religious identity and in the name of the very same loving God.
And it is plain fraud to talk of ‘development’ when evidently all that
‘development’ or ‘progress’ has done is to create a few billionaires and a
powerful, predatory class, while hundreds of millions are forced to live a
sub-human existence.
The rot has really gone deep into the very
cells of our body. It is frightening.
Actually our problems are, as UG has been
saying for over more than three decades now, rooted in our so-called solutions:
in our gods, our religious ideals, our political goals, our very notions of
justice and health. It is the macabre dance of death played out by the
self-protective, fascist thought. There seems to be no way out unless there is
a benign, biological mutation of the human body.
The ‘Calamity’
UG says that it happened to him despite his
long search and sadhana,
despite everything he did in all of his forty-nine years before the ‘Calamity’.
He calls it a ‘Calamity’ deliberately in order to discourage us from
attributing any religious or spiritual meaning and value to what happened to
him.
For truly and absolutely
there is no religious or spiritual content there. It is a physical process, a
physiological phenomenon, brought to fruition in the
way Nature works on a tiny seed to give rise to a gigantic tree. It is life
finding its fulfilment. It is the completion of the journey of the ‘cells’
started some millions of years ago from the ‘primordial soup’. It is there.
Over seven days, seven different changes took
place UG body. It was literally an explosion of energy, and UG cannot say
whether it erupted from within the body or descended from outside; actually
there was no outside and inside, it came from all sides, everywhere, in waves,
in spirals, like a river in spate, like a tidal wave, penetrating into and
breaking through every wall, every resistance; it was
energy, atomic, repairing, cleansing the body, cleansing every cell of its age-old ‘habits’, the ‘accumulated
knowledge’ the traces embedded in it over thousands of years of evolutionary
history; it was the flushing out of the virus of thought, memes. The
accompanying pain and terror and other sensations of extreme discomfort were
the death pangs of the ‘I’, the ‘self’.
It is of crucial importance to note here that
the physical process or mutation was triggered off by the dissolution of the
question: ‘How do I know that this is the state?’ There was no answer. It was
the end of all answers, all knowledge born out of the separative existence,
cessation of all opposites; it was a tremendous crisis within the thought
structure. It was a calamitous situation for thought, for
the ‘self’, the build up of a tremendous molecular pressure within the
structure of the mind-body,
and it could have release only in an explosion. In other words, with no answer
coming, which is absolutely essential for the continuity of thought, it was as
if the question itself, akin to matter, cracked and set off a series of
explosions in the nuclear plant of the body, blasting every cell, every nerve
and every gland. The anxieties and fears, the fantasies and wishes, the images
and symbols, the ideas and concepts and worldviews, all created and maintained
and played out by the ‘self’ for its own continuity, all the sensory
perceptions hitherto enslaved by the self for its own separative existence, the
whole history of the body
inscribed by the self on every cell, began to explode, burn and dissolve into
nothingness. And thus, on the seventh day, the coordinator, the self,
disappeared, and with it the body, constructed by thought, disappeared too.
It was an extremely painful process, almost like
physical torture, and it took about three years for the process to complete
itself and let the body fall into a new rhythm all its own, into what UG calls
the ‘Natural State’.
The Natural
State is also the state
of ‘undivided consciousness’, says UG. With the sense of separation gone, and
even the instinct of survival dissolved, the body is extremely vulnerable to
everything around it; the body is ‘affected’ by the natural phenomena, be it an
earthquake or the eclipses of the moon and the sun; or even when someone gets physically
hurt. UG calls it the true ‘affection’. (It is not spiritual oneness with the
world, nor what is called the ‘Atman becoming one with the Brahman’. There is
no religious or spiritual content there. It is a purely a physiological
phenomenon.) With the sense of separative existence dissolved, the stranglehold
of culture, the ‘I’, gone, the body is in tune with the cosmos.
The
ductless glands, located exactly in the same spots where, according to Kundalini Yoga, the chakras
or energy centres are, have taken over the function of his body, says UG. He
doesn’t, of course, refer to Kundalini
or use any spiritual terms to explain this phenomenon. The thymus gland, which
is supposed to be active through childhood until puberty and then goes dormant,
is reactivated, and it is there that the physical (not emotional) oneness is
felt or experienced. It is not, UG emphasizes, what the Hindus call the atman
becoming one with Brahman and all that stuff. There is no spiritual content
there. It is not unity of consciousness in the sense we want to understand itj .
It is just the absence of thought, the past, that enables UG to be in that
state of oneness, which also means that he is (physically) affected by
everything that happens around him. It is the natural, physical condition of
his being. In UG’s words:
Sensations
are felt there; you don't translate them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; they are just a thud. If there is a
movement outside of you – a clock pendulum swinging, or a bird flying across
your field of vision – that movement is also felt in the thymus. The whole of
your being is that movement or vibrates with that sound; there is no
separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with that bird or
whatever… There is no ‘you’ there, nor is there any object. What causes that
sensation, you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation.
‘Affection’ means that you are
affected by everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something.
The natural state is a state of great sensitivity – but this is a physical
sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness
for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no “others”
for me, and so there is no separation.
He also says that with the co-ordinator, the
‘I’, which uses the body for its own separative continuity, gone, the pituitary
gland—called the ‘third eye’, ajna chakra (ajna meaning ‘command’) — is now in command over the
body. With the coordinator gone, it is this ajna chakra or pituitary gland that gives the instructions to
the body and enables the body to function in perfect tune with the world. Since
there is nobody (no ‘I’) there to control or
interfere with the functioning of the body, thoughts arise in response to a
demand or challenge, and once the task is fulfilled, they undergo ‘combustion’
or burn themselves up and ionize, releasing energy. Hence, UG says, he is able
to talk for hours on end and yet not feel tired or drained of energy.
But when there is no demand or challenge, no
stimuli (stimulus and response being a unitary
action), he is in a state of ‘not knowing’, a sort of ‘declutched state’. There
is no self-talking, thinking, or daydreaming, there is nothing there. But when
a question is thrown at him, the response comes quickly and effectively, from
what he calls his data or memory bank; it is immediate and it is mechanical. It
is like a computer switching on and it responds to queries by scanning its data
bank and coming up with an answer. There is nothing mysterious about it. It’s the
past, the memory—mechanical. There is nothing else there. If there is something
else, there is no way of knowing it.
In other words, when there is no demand, he is
in a state of ‘not knowing’. There is only the sensory activity, pure and
simple. Each of the senses work, independently (with no coordinator or
coordination) at the peak of its capacity. Sensations are not interpreted as
hard or soft, sweet or bitter, good or evil, spiritual or material. There is no
difference between music and the barking of a dog, or the sound coming from the
toilet. It is just sound, notes spaced out in a certain order, that is all.
There is no interpretation, for there is no interpreter there.
Further, UG says that his vision is two dimensional, flat, in
frames, like a camera clicking away picture after
picture, but with no linkage between these pictures. The third, fifth and tenth
dimensions are figments of imagination, invented by thought, by the self
for its own sake and for its own continuity.
Truly a marvellous machine, an amazing body. It
is, put simply, the Natural
State! This Natural
State is not a
spiritual state, not a state of enlightenment, asserts UG. It is not a state of
bliss or perfect order. For order and chaos, cause and effect, birth and death
are a simultaneous process. There is silence there, but it is like the silence
of a volcano. It burns everything, leaving behind no trace. It is the movement
of life, the ebb and flow of life that can never be captured by thought.
And his body is supposed to be
hermaphroditic or androgynous: qualities of man and woman coexist in it. A
perfect union of animus-anima, man-woman in union, pictorially represented by
the Indian tradition in the form of ardhanarishwara: one half (the right
side) of the body as Shiva and the other half
as Parvathi, his consort—an artistic illustration of the androgynous state! But
UG rejects the comparison and simply states: ‘Here (in UG) the body
goes back into that stage where it is neither male nor female. It is not the
androgynous thing that they talk about.’ However, when he says that his left
side is female and responds to women and the right side is male and responds to
men, he seems to imply that there is something in the traditional image of ardhanarishwara. As physical
evidence of this male-female convergence and difference in the body, there is
even a dark line over his stomach upward, as if to demarcate the male and the female in him.
If UG’s
body is truly both male and female, or neither purely male nor female, then it
challenges our knowledge of the human body. It also certainly goes beyond the
understanding of the left and right brain as having different faculties and
functions, according to the present-day neurosciences. In view of UG’s
experience and what he has said, it seems that it is not merely the right and
left hemispheres of the brain but the entire
left and right sides of the body (the two brains being only vital parts of
them) that respond in different ways with their different faculties
(‘intelligence’ would be more appropriate) and functions.
To UG,
death is a continuous phenomenon. His body is supposed
to go through death almost every day, and come back to life. It is the body’s
way of renewing itself. He says:
This is necessary because the senses in the natural
state are functioning at the peak of their sensitivity all the time. So, when
the senses become tired, the body goes through death. This is real physical
death, not some mental state. It can happen one or more times a day. You do not
decide to go through this death; it descends upon you. It feels at first as if
you have been given an anaesthetic: the senses become increasingly dull, the
heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold, and the whole body becomes
stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It
happens differently every time. The whole process takes forty-eight or
forty-nine minutes. During this time the stream of thoughts continues, but
there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you ‘conk out’:
the stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut
lasts — it is not an experience. There is nothing you can say about that time
of being ‘conked out’ — that can never become part of your conscious existence
or conscious thinking.
You
don’t know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment,
you could decide not to come back. When the ‘conking out’ is over, the stream
of thought picks up exactly where it left off. Dullness is over; clarity is
back. The body feels very stiff — slowly it begins to move of its own accord,
limbering itself up. The movements are more like the Chinese T’ai Chi than like
Hatha Yoga. The disciples observed the things that were happening to the
teachers, probably, and embodied them and taught hundreds of postures — but
they are all worthless; it is an extraordinary movement. Those who have
observed my body moving say it looks like the motions of a newly born baby.
This ‘conking out’ gives a total renewal of the senses, glands and nervous system:
after it they function at the peak of their sensitivity.
In the Natural State
there is no conflict, no fear, no desire, and all search of whatever kind comes
to end. There is only the simple yet vibrant movement of life. It is the
fulfilment of life. It is life. There is nothing supernatural about this state.
UG is no superman, no God or avatar come down to save humankind. UG cannot be a
model for others, and one cannot convert his utterances into a body of teaching
to be followed by others. Perhaps UG’s state is the end product of evolution,
life at last finding itself! In UG ‘s words: ‘Nature, in its own way, throws
out, from time to time, some flower, the end-product of human evolution. This
cannot be used by the evolutionary process as a model for creating another.’
Now, one may ask here, how does UG know?
‘I don’t know,’ says UG, ‘life is aware of
itself, if we can put it that way — it is conscious of itself.’
The Mundaka
Upanishad speaks of this state using the metaphor of two birds. The two birds
of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the individual self and the immortal
self, are perched on the same tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter
fruits of the tree, the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.
The notion
of ‘immortal self’, a much-abused term, is misleading. Perhaps we
can simply
call it ‘awareness’, an integral part of the activity not only of
all organisms but of all forms of life. It is there, functioning in a tree and the birds that perch on it, as much as in a human
being. And there is nothing more one can say about it, for it cannot be
conceptualized
or converted into a philosophy, for it would be like trying to catch the wind in one’s palm and giving it a name and
form. And so, UG says:
‘This consciousness (or Awareness) which is functioning
in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same. In me it
has no frontiers; in you there are frontiers — you are enclosed in
that. Probably this
unlimited consciousness pushes you, I don’t know. Not me; I have nothing to do
with it. It is like the water finding its own level, that’s all — that is its
nature. That is what is happening in you: life is trying to destroy the
enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience, which is not of
its nature. It’s trying to come out, to break open. You don’t want that. As
soon as you see some cracks there, you bring some plaster and fill them in and
block it again. It doesn’t have to be a so-called self-realized man or
spiritual man or God-realized man that pushes you; anything, that leaf there,
teaches you just the same if only you let it do what it can. You must let that
do. I have to put it that way. Although “let that do” may imply that there is
some kind of volition on your part, that’s not what I mean.
But we don’t let things be, or ‘let
that do’. We theorise and build traditions around that ‘awareness’ and hope to
achieve what cannot be achieved. For it is not something to be achieved, or
willed into existence. In other words, there is no need to achieve or realize
what is always already there. And so UG warns: ‘Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural
state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such
thing. This is your natural state, this is the way you,
stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning. But what prevents what is there
from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something,
trying to be something other than what you are.’
(Extracted
from The Other Side of Belief:
Interpreting U.G.Krishnamurti, by Mukunda Rao, Penguin Books India, 2005)
Notes
1. The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity—
Figures & Themes,
G.B.Madison, Midland Book Edition, 1990.
2. Ibid.
- Ibid.
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, Oxford University
press, New York,
1999.
- Ibid.
- See the notes part in his A Theory of Everything—An Integral
Vision for Business, Politics, Science & Spirituality, Gateway,
2001.
7. The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University
Press, 1999.
- Quoted in The Hidden Connection, Fritjof Capra,
Flamingo, 2003.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
11. For interesting insights into
body-mind problem and related issues, read Jeffrey Mishlove’s discussions with
Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, Saul-Paul Sirag, Julian Isaacs, Karl Pribram,
U. G. Krishnamurti and others, in Thinking Allowed, Council Oak Books,
1992.
12. See Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s
Reith Lectures on ‘The Emerging Mind’ available online at
http:/www.bbc.couk/radio4/reith2003.
13. The Hidden Connection, Fritjof Capra.
14. Thinking Allowed, Jeffrey Mishlove.
15. Oriental Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
16. Read
Julian Isaac in conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove in Thinking Allowed.
17. Eastern Religions and Western
Thought, S.
Radhakrishnan, Oxford
University Press, 1977,
pp. 26-27.
18. This quotation and all the other
quotations from the Mother in this chapter are from The Mind of the Cells — or
Willed Mutation of our Species, edited by Satprem, Institute For Evolutionary
Research, New York,
1982.
19. Thinking Allowed, p.270.
20. Quoted by Arthur Koestler in Janus
— A Summing Up, Picador, 1979.
Anti-teaching: Calling
It like It Is
How do I know? I don’t know.
Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way — it is conscious of itself.
I
have no answers for any metaphysical questions because I am not thinking
metaphysically. I am not thinking in concepts. You may very well ask whether it
is possible to use words without concepts. I say it is possible. There is no
content to these words. These are not born out of any concept. They are just
words. To imagine that there is a state of nonverbal conceptualization is just
a myth. The purpose of this conversation is to enable you to break free from
the methods of thought as a means to understand anything.
Is there a Teaching?
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.
The natural state is not the state of a
self-realized, God-realized 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.
Your
natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of
bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those
who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have
perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are
thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna
Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you,
are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time.
The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much
less given
expression
to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis
situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage.
I’ve no message to give to the world. Whatever
happens to me is such that you can’t share it with the world. That’s the reason
why I don’t get up on a platform or give any lectures – it’s not that I can’t
give lectures; I’ve lectured everywhere in the world – I’ve nothing to say. And
I don’t like to sit in one place, surrounded by people asking set questions. I
never initiate any discussions; people come and sit round me – they can do what
they like. If somebody asks me a question suddenly, I try to answer,
emphasizing and pointing out that there is no answer to that question. So, I
merely rephrase, restructure and throw the same question back at you. It’s not
game playing, because I’m not interested in winning you over to my point of
view. It’s not a question of offering opinions – of course I do have my
opinions on everything from disease to divinity, but they’re as worthless as
anybody else’s.
What I say you must not take literally. So much
trouble has been created by people taking it all literally. You must test every
word, every phrase, and see if it bears any relation to the way you are
functioning. You must test it, but you are not in a position to accept it –
unfortunately this is a fact, take it or leave it. By writing it down, you will
do more harm than good. You see, I am in a very difficult position: I cannot
help you, whatever I say is misleading.
What I am saying has no logic. If it has a logic,
it has a logic of its own – I don’t know anything about it. But you have
necessarily to fit me into the logical structure of your thought; otherwise the
logical structure there, the rational thing, comes to an end. You see, you have
to rationalize – that is what you are. But this has nothing to do with
rationality, it has nothing to do with your logic – that doesn’t mean that it
is illogical or irrational.
On Himself
or the Natural State
I am
not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable
to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in
describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in
which those people in the ‘holy business’ have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe
I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state
which does not exist except in your imagination.
There is nobody here talking, giving advice,
feeling pain, or experiencing anything at all. Like a ball thrown against the
wall, it bounces back, that is all. My talking is the direct result of your
question, I have nothing here of my own, no obvious or hidden agenda, no
product to sell, no axe to grind, nothing to prove.
That silence burns everything here. All
experiences are burnt. That is why talking to people doesn’t exhaust me. It is
energy to me. That is why I can talk for the whole day without showing any
fatigue. Talking with so many people over the years has had no impact upon me.
All that they or I have said is burnt here, leaving no trace. This is not,
unfortunately, the case with you.
The personality does not change when you come into
this state. You are, after all, a computer machine, which reacts as it has been
programmed. It is in fact your present effort to change yourself that is taking
you away from yourself and keeping you from functioning in the natural way. The
personality will remain the same. Don’t expect such a man to become free from
anger or idiosyncrasies. Don’t expect some kind of spiritual humility. Such a
man may be the most arrogant person you have ever met, because he is touching
life at a unique place where no man has touched before. It is for this reason
that each person who comes into this state expresses it in a unique way, in
terms relevant to his time. It is also for this reason that if two or more
people are living in this state at the same time, they will never get together.
They won’t dance in the streets hand in hand: ‘We are all self-realized men! We
belong!’
Man becomes man for the first time – and that is
possible only when he frees himself from the burden of the heritage we
are talking about, the heritage of man as a whole (not East and West;
there is no East and West). Then only does he become an individual. For the
first time he becomes an individual – that is the individual I am talking
about. That individual will certainly have an impact on human consciousness,
because when something happens in this consciousness of man it affects (the
whole), to a very microscopic extent maybe. So, this is a simile: when you
throw a stone in a pool, it sets in motion circular waves. In exactly the same
way, it is very slow, very slow – it is something which cannot be
measured with anything.
So, maybe that’s the only hope that man has –
that’s the first time such an individual becomes a man – otherwise he’s an
animal. And he has remained an animal because of the heritage, because the
heritage has made it possible, from the point of view of Nature, for the unfit
to remain; otherwise Nature would have rejected them a long time ago. It has
become possible for the unfit to survive – not the survival of the fittest, but
of those unfit to survive – and religion is responsible for that. That’s my
argument. You may not agree. It doesn’t matter.
Is there such
a thing as Enlightenment?
There
is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the
saints and saviours of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries
that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in
one bunch into the river! I don’t care. To realize that there is no enlightenment
at all is enlightenment.
But actually an
enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in freeing or
enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of knowing that he is a
free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not something that can be shared
with somebody, because it is not in the area of experience at all.
To me what does exist is a purely physical
process; there is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes,
some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids, there is
still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead,
which doesn’t show, but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden; in Europe
it is blue. There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the
neck. It’s as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front
and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover
those points, there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn’t do anything
or help the body to function in any way; it’s just there.
This state is a state of not knowing; you really
don’t know what you are looking at. I may look at the clock on the wall for
half an hour – still I do not read the time. I don’t know it is a clock. All
there is inside is wonderment: ‘What is this that I am looking at?’ Not that
the question actually phrases itself like that in words: the whole of my being
is like a single, big question mark. It is a state of wonder, of wondering,
because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it – all
that I have learned – is held in the background unless there is a demand. It is
in the ‘declutched state’. If you ask the time, I will say ‘It’s a quarter past
three’ or whatever – it comes quickly like an arrow – then I am back in the
state of not knowing, of wonder.
When I talk of ‘feeling’, I do not mean the same
thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the
thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breastbone.
The doctors tell us that it is active through childhood until puberty and then
becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is
re-activated. Sensations are felt there; you don’t translate them as ‘good’ or
‘bad’; they are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you – a clock
pendulum swinging, or a bird flying across your field of vision – that movement
is also felt in the thymus. The whole of your being is that movement or
vibrates with that sound; there is no separation. This does not mean that you
identify yourself with that bird or whatever – ‘I am that flying bird.’ There
is no ‘you’ there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation, you
don’t know. You do not even know that it is a sensation.
‘Affection’ means that you are affected by
everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something. The natural
state is a state of great sensitivity – but this is a physical sensitivity of
the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others.
There is compassion only in the sense that there are no ‘others’ for me, and so
there is no separation.
The Body
My body
exists for other people; it does not exist for me; there are only isolated
points of contact, impulses of touch which are not tied together by thought. So
the body is not different from the objects around it; it is a set of sensations
like any others. Your body does not belong to you.
Perhaps I can give you the ‘feel’ of this. I sleep
four hours at night, no matter what time I go to bed. Then I lie in bed until
morning fully awake. I don’t know what is lying there in the bed; I don’t know
whether I’m lying on my left side or my right side – for hours and hours I lie like this. If there
is any noise outside – a bird or something – it just echoes in me. I listen to
the ‘flub-dub-flub-dub’ of my heart and don’t know what it is. There is no body
between the two sheets – the form of the body is not there. If the question is
asked, ‘What is in there?’ there is only an awareness of the points of contact,
where the body is in contact with the bed and the sheets, and where it is in
contact with itself, at the crossing of the legs, for example. There are only
the sensations of touch from these points of contact, and the rest of the body
is not there. There is some kind of heaviness, probably the gravitational pull,
something very vague. There is nothing inside which links up these things. Even
if the eyes are open and looking at the whole body, there are still only the
points of contact, and they have no connection with what I am looking at. If I
want to try to link up these points of contact into the shape of my own body,
probably I will succeed, but by the time it is completed the body is back in
the same situation of different points of contact. The linkage cannot stay. It
is the same sort of thing when I’m sitting or standing. There is no body.
In the natural state there is no entity who is
co-ordinating the messages from the different senses. Each sense is functioning
independently in its own way. When there is a demand from outside which makes
it necessary to co-ordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a
response, still there is no co-ordinator, but there is a temporary state of co-
ordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there
is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses.
This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart – not that it was
ever there; but the illusory continuity – it’s finished once and for all.
God is Irrelevant
Is
there a beyond? Because you are not interested in the everyday things and the
happenings around you, you have invented a thing called the ‘beyond’, or
‘timelessness’, or ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’, ‘Brahman’, ‘enlightenment’, or
whatever, and you search for that. There may not be any beyond. You don’t know
a thing about that beyond; whatever you know is what you have been told, the
knowledge you have about that. So you are projecting that knowledge. What you
call ‘beyond’ is created by the knowledge you have about that beyond; and
whatever knowledge you have about a beyond is exactly what you will experience.
The knowledge creates the experience, and the experience then strengthens the
knowledge. What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is
not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of ‘you’ is absent. The
absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be
experienced by you; it is when the ‘you’ is not there. Why are you trying to
experience a thing that cannot be experienced?
Man has to be saved from God – that is very
essential because ... I don’t mean God in the sense in which you use the word
‘God’; I mean all that ‘God’ stands for, not only God, but all that is associated
with that concept of God – even karma, reincarnation, rebirth, life
after death, the whole thing, the whole business of what you call the
‘great heritage of India’ – all that, you see. Man has to be saved from the
heritage of India.
Not only the people; the country has to be saved from that heritage. (Not by
revolution, not the way they have done it in the communist countries – that’s
not the way. I don’t know why; you see, this is a very tricky subject.)
Otherwise there is no hope for the individual and no hope for the country.
That messy thing called the mind has created many
destructive things, and by far the most destructive of them all is God. To me
the question of God is irrelevant and immaterial. We have no use for God. More
people have been killed in the name of God than in the two world wars put
together. In Japan,
millions of people died in the name of the sacred Buddha. Christians and
Muslims have done the same. Even in India, five thousand Jains were
massacred in a single day. Yours is not a peaceful nation. Read your own
history — it’s full of violence from the beginning to the end. Man is merely a
biological being. There is no spiritual side to his nature. There is no such
thing… All the virtues, principles, beliefs, ideas and spiritual values are
mere affectations. They haven’t succeeded in changing anything in you. You’re
still the brute that you have always been. When will you begin to see the truth
that the philosophy of ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is not what stops you
from killing indiscriminately but it’s the terror of the fact that if you kill
your neighbour you too will also be destroyed along with him that stops you
from killing.
God is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted
happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is
the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, liberation, and all
that stuff are just variations on the same theme: permanent happiness.
Religion is
a Neurological Problem
Religion
is not a contractual arrangement, either public or private. It has nothing to
do with the social structure or its management. Religious authority wants to
continue its hold on the people, but religion is entirely an individual affair.
The saints and saviours have only succeeded in setting you adrift in life with
pain and misery and the restless feeling that there must be something more
meaningful or interesting to do with one’s life.
‘Religion’, ‘God’, ‘Soul’, ‘Beatitudes’, ‘moksha’,
are all just words, ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact.
When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple, harmonious
physical functioning of the organism.
Love, compassion, ahimsa, understanding,
bliss, all these things which religion and psychology have placed before man,
are only adding to the strain of the body. All cultures, whether of the
Orient or of the Occident, have created this lopsided situation for mankind and
turned man into a neurotic individual.
Man has already messed up his life, and religion
has made it worse. It is religion that really made a mess of man’s life.
You cannot exonerate the founders and leaders of
religions. The teachings of all those teachers and saviours of mankind have
resulted in only violence. Everybody talked of peace and love, while their
followers practiced violence.
Holy Men and
Holy Business
We have
been brainwashed for centuries by holy men that we must control our thoughts.
Without thinking you would become a corpse. Without thinking the holy men
wouldn’t have any means of telling us to control our thoughts. They would go
broke. They have become rich telling others to control their thoughts.
The whole religious business is nothing but moral
codes of conduct: you must be generous, compassionate, loving, while all the
time you remain greedy and callous. Codes of conduct are set by society in its
own interests, sacred or profane. There is nothing religious about it. The
religious man puts the priest, the censor, inside you. Now the policeman has
been institutionalized and placed outside you. Religious codes and strictures
are no longer necessary; it is all in the civil and criminal codes. You needn’t
bother with these religious people anymore; they are obsolete. But they don’t
want to lose their hold over people. It is their business; their livelihood is at
stake. There is no difference between the policeman and the religious man. It
is a little more difficult with the policeman, for, unlike the inner authority
sponsored by the holy men, he lies outside you and must be bribed. The secular
leaders tell you one way, the holy men another way. It makes no difference: as
long as you are searching for peace of mind, you will have a tormented mind. If
you try not to search, or if you continue to search, you will remain the same.
You have to stop.
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest
jokes, perpetrated on the gullible and credulous people everywhere, not only by
the purveyors of ancient wisdom– the holy men– but also by the modern
scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualization,
living from moment to moment, and such rot. These absurd ideas are thrown at us
as if they are something new.
You have been brainwashed by all those holy men,
gurus, teachers and the so-called enlightened people that the past should die,
should come to an end. ‘If you attain this, life would be hunky-dory – full of
sweetness.’ You have fallen for all that romantic stuff. If you try to suppress
the past and try to be in the present, it will drive you crazy. You are trying
to control something which is beyond your control.
It is not only your past. It’s the entire past,
entire existence of every human being and every form of life. It is not such an
easy thing. It is like trying to stop this flow of the river through all those
artificial means. It will inundate the whole thing.
They talk very lightly of money as if it has no
importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in
their lives. These holy men are greedy, jealous, and vindictive bastards, just
like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your
children. These people want to live through their religious institutions.
What these gurus in
the market place do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some
comforters.
Meditation
is Warfare
Meditation
is a self-centreed activity. It is strengthening the very self you want to be
free from. What are you meditating for? You want to be free from something.
What are you to meditate on? All right, thought is a noise, sound. What is
sound? You look at this and you say ‘This is a tape-recorder,’ so thought is
sound. There is a continuous flow of thoughts, and you are linking up all these
thoughts all the time, and this is the noise you can’t stand. Why can’t you
stand that noise? So, by repeating mantras, you create a louder noise,
and you submerge the noise of thought, and then you are at peace with yourself.
You think that something marvellous is happening to you. But all meditation is
a self-centreed activity.
You have also been told that through meditation
you can bring selfishness to an end. Actually, you are not meditating at all,
just thinking about selflessness, and doing nothing to be selfless. I have
taken that as an example, but all other examples are variations of the same
thing. All activity along these lines is exactly the same. You must accept the
simple fact that you do not want to be free from selfishness.
Meditation is warfare. You sit for meditation
while there is a battle raging within you. The result is violent, evil thoughts
welling up inside you. Next, you try to control or direct these brutal
thoughts, making more effort and violence for yourself in the process.
Consciousness
Krishna
Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you,
are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time.
The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much
less given expression to, by any man.
This consciousness which is functioning in me, in
you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same. In me it has no
frontiers; in you there are frontiers – you are enclosed in that. Where is the
seat of human consciousness?
You have no way at all of finding out for yourself
the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over, and you are not
separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain
physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting millions and millions of
dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness, they will never be
able to find it out at all.
Culture is part of this human consciousness, so
everything that man has experienced and felt before you is part of that
consciousness.
It is really a mystery. All the experiences – not
necessarily just your experiences during your span of thirty, forty or fifty
years, but the animal consciousness, the plant consciousness, the bird
consciousness – all that is part of this consciousness.
Consciousness is a very powerful factor in
experiencing things, but it is not possible for anybody to find out the content
of the whole thing – it is too vast. The genetic is only part of it. It is much
more than the genetic.
Whatever you experience, however profound that
experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your
consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced
the bliss, beatitude – call it ‘ecstasy’, call it by whatever name you
like, but somebody somewhere along the line – not necessarily you – must
have experienced that, and that experience is part of your consciousness. you
have to come to a point where there is no such thing as a new experience
at all: somebody has experienced it before, so it is not yours.
The consciousness of
the body does not exist. There is no such thing as consciousness at all. The
one thing that helps us to become conscious of the non-existing body, for all
practical purposes, is the knowledge that is given to us. Without that
knowledge you have no way of creating your own body and experiencing it. I am
questioning the very idea of consciousness, let alone the subconscious, the
unconscious, the different levels of consciousness, and higher states of
consciousness. I don’t see that there is any such thing as consciousness. I
become conscious of this (touching the arm of the chair) only through the
knowledge that I have of it. The touch does not tell me anything except when I
translate it within the framework of knowledge. Otherwise I have no way of
experiencing that touch at all. The way these senses are operating here is
quite different from the way we are made to believe. The eye is looking at the
movement of your hand, and is not saying anything about that activity, except
observing what is going on there.
Awareness
I am not particularly fond of the word ‘awareness’. It is
misused. It is a rubbed coin, and everybody uses it to justify some of his
actions, instead of admitting that he did something wrong. Sometimes you say,
‘I was not aware of what was going on there.’ But awareness is an integral part
of the activity of this human organism. This activity is not only specifically
in the human organism but in all forms of life – the pig and the dog. The cat
just looks at you, and is in a state of choiceless awareness. To turn that
awareness into an instrument which you can use to bring about a change is to
falsify that. Awareness is an integral part of the activity of the living
organism.
There is no
Self, no Soul
The belief that there is a centre here, that there is a
spirit here, that there is a soul here, is what is responsible for that belief
that there must be something beyond.
Is there any such
thing as soul? Is there any such thing as the ‘I’? Is there any such thing as
the psyche? Whatever you see there, whatever you experience there, is created
only by the knowledge you have of that self.
There is no self,
there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind. That
knocks off the whole list, and you have no way of finding out what you are left
with.
Ideas of soul and
life after death are born out of the demand for permanence. That’s the basis of
man’s religious thinking. All religious thinking is born out of the demand for
permanence.
Mind is a Myth
There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind
is conditioned. It is absurd, you see, to.... If there is a mind, it is
bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind.
To me there is no
such thing as mind; mind is a myth. Since there is no such thing as mind, the
‘mutation of mind’ that J. Krishnamurti is talking about has no meaning. There
is nothing there to be transformed, radically or otherwise. There is no self to
be realized. The whole religious structure that has been built on this
foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realize.
The whole Buddhist
philosophy is built on the foundation of that ‘no mind’. Yet they have created
tremendous techniques of freeing themselves from the mind. All the Zen
techniques of meditation try to free you from the mind. But the very instrument
that we are using to free ourselves from the thing called ‘mind’ is the
mind. Mind is nothing other than what you are doing to free yourself from the
mind. But when it once dawns on you, by some strange chance or miracle, that
the instrument that you are using to understand everything is not the
instrument, and that there is no other instrument, it hits you like a jolt of
lightning.
Thought is Bourgeois
Thought in its birth, in its origin, in its content, in
its expression, and in its action is very fascist. When I use the word
‘fascist’ I use it not in the political sense but to mean that thought controls
and shapes our thinking and our actions. So it is a very protective mechanism.
It has no doubt helped us to be what we are today. It has helped us to create
our high-tech and technology. It has made our life very comfortable. It has
also made it possible for us to discover the laws of nature. But thought is a
very protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same
time, thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living
organism.
It is thought that
has invented the ideas of cause and effect. There may not be any such thing as
a cause at all. Every event is an individual and independent event. We link up
all these events and try to create a story of our lives. But actually every
event is an independent event. If we accept the fact that every event is an
independent event in our lives, it creates a tremendous problem of maintaining
what we call identity. And identity is the most important factor in our lives.
We are able to maintain this identity through the constant use of memory, which
is also thought. This constant use of memory or identity, or whatever you call
it, is consuming a tremendous amount of energy, and it leaves us with no energy
to deal with the problems of our living. Is there any way that we can free
ourselves from the identity? As I said, thought can only create problems; it
cannot help us to solve them. Through dialectical thinking about thinking
itself we are only sharpening that instrument. All philosophies help us only to
sharpen this instrument.
Thought is very
essential for us to survive in this world. But it cannot help us in achieving
the goals that we have placed before ourselves. The goals are unachievable
through the help of thought. The quest for happiness, as you mentioned, is
impossible because there is no such thing as permanent happiness. There are
moments of happiness, and there are moments of unhappiness. But the demand to
be in a permanent state of happiness is the enemy of this body. This body is
interested in maintaining its sensitivity of the sensory perceptions and also
the sensitivity of the nervous system. That is very essential for the survival
of this body. If we use that instrument of thought for trying to achieve the
impossible goal of permanent happiness, the sensitivity of this body is
destroyed. Therefore, the body is rejecting all that we are interested in –
permanent happiness and permanent pleasure. So, we are not going to succeed in
that attempt to be in a permanent state of happiness.
Thought to me is
matter. Therefore, all our spiritual goals are materialistic in their value.
And this is the conflict that is going on there. In this process, the totality
of man’s experiences created what we call a separate identity and a separate
mind. But actually if you want to experience anything, be it your own body, or
your own experiences, you have no way of experiencing them without the use of
the knowledge that is passed on to us.
All the problems are
artificially created by the various structures created by human thinking. There
is some sort of (I can’t make a definitive statement) neurological problem in
the human body. Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the
human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive.
Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers
around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that
we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can. Do you
think these frontiers are going to disappear? They are not. Those who have
entrenched themselves, those who have
had the monopoly of all the world’s resources so far and for so long, if they
are threatened to be dislodged, what they would do is anybody’s guess. All the
destructive weapons that we have today are here only to protect that monopoly.
But actually ‘Is
there a thought?’ the question is born out of the assumption that there is a
thought there. But what you will find there is all about thought and not
thought. All about thought is what is put in there by the culture.
That is put in by the people who are telling us that it is very essential for
you to free yourself from whatever you are trying to free yourself from through
that instrument. My interest is to emphasize that that is not the instrument,
and there is no other instrument. And when once this hits you, dawns upon you
that thought is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, then
there is no need for you to find out if any other instrument is necessary. No
need for any other instrument. This very same structure that we are using, the
instrument which we are using, has in a very ingenious way invented all kinds
of things like intuition, right insight, right this, that, and the other. And
to say that through this very insight we have come to understand something is
the stumbling block. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are
worthless, because it is thought that has created what we call insight, and through
that it is maintaining its continuity and status quo.
Where does thought
come from? Is it from inside, or outside? Where is the seat of human
consciousness? So, for purposes of communication, or just to give a feel about
it, I say there is a ‘thought sphere’. In that ‘thought sphere’ we are all
functioning, and each of us probably has an ‘antenna’, or what you call an
‘aerial’ or something, which is the creation of the culture into which we are
born. It is that that is picking up these particular thoughts. You have no way
at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness, because it
is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all
the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting
millions and millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human
consciousness, they will never be able to find it out at all. I am not making a
dogmatic statement or any such thing.
Thought can never
capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and
thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light,
reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events. It is only the
natural physiological sensations and perceptions that can move with the flow of
life.
There is no such
thing as looking at something without the interference of knowledge. To look
you need space, and thought creates that space. So space itself, as a
dimension, exists only as a creation of thought. Thought has also tried to
theorize about the space it has created, inventing the ‘time-space-continuum’.
Time is an independent reference or frame. There is no necessary continuity
between it and space. Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the
‘now’, the ‘eternal now’. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you
attempt to look at the present, it has already been brought into the framework
of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentum to its
own continuity. Its essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and
over again; this gives it an illusion of permanency. This permanency is
shattered the moment the falseness of the past-present-future continuum is
seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.
Feeling too is Thought
Feeling is also thought. We want to feel that feelings
are more important than thoughts, but there is no way you can experience a
feeling without translating that within the framework of the knowledge that you
have. Take for example that you tell yourself that you are happy. You don’t
even know that the sensation that is there is happiness. But you capture that
sensation within the framework of the knowledge you have of what you call a
state of happiness, and the other state, that of unhappiness. What I am trying
to say is that it is the knowledge that you have about yourself which has
created the self there and helps you to experience yourself as an entity there.
Knowledge and
Experience
Whatever you experience – peace, bliss, silence, beatitude,
ecstasy, joy, God knows what – will be old, second-hand. You already have
knowledge about all of these things. The fact that you are in a blissful state
or in a state of tremendous silence means that you know about it. You must know
a thing in order to experience it. That knowledge is nothing marvellous or
metaphysical; ‘bench’, ‘bag’, ‘red bag’, is the knowledge. Knowledge is
something which is put into you by somebody else, and he got that from somebody
else; it is not yours. Can you experience a simple thing like that bench that
is sitting across from you? No, you only experience the knowledge you have
about it. And the knowledge has come from some outside agency, always. You
think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience
the experiences of your society; there is no new experience.
Knowledge is not
something mysterious or mystical. You know that you are happy, and you have
theories about the working of the fan, the light – this is the knowledge we are
talking about. You introduce another knowledge, ‘spiritual knowledge’, but –
spiritual knowledge, sensual knowledge – what is the difference? We give the
names to them. Fantasies about God are acceptable, but fantasies about sex are
called ‘sensual’, ‘physical’. There is no difference between the two; one is
socially acceptable, the other is not. You are limiting knowledge to a
particular area of experience, so then it becomes ‘sensual’, and the other
becomes ‘spiritual’? Everything is sensual.
You cannot
communicate what you cannot experience. I don’t want to use those words,
because ‘inexpressible’ and ‘incommunicable’ imply that there is something
which cannot be communicated, which cannot be expressed. I don’t know. There is
an assumption that there is something there which cannot be expressed, which
cannot be communicated. There is nothing there. I don’t want to say there is
nothing there, because you will catch me – you will call it ‘emptiness’, ‘void’
and all that sort of thing.
Whatever is
experienced is thought-induced. Without knowledge you can’t experience. And
experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle: the dog chasing
its own tail.
Where, you ask, is
this knowledge, the past? Is it in your brain? Where is it? It is all over your
body. It is in every cell of your body.
Is There any
Meaning and Purpose to Life?
‘What is the meaning of life?’ It is not life that we are
really interested in but living. The problem of living has become a very tiring
business – to live with somebody else, to live with our feelings, to live with
our ideas. In other words, it is the value system that we have been thrown
into. You see, the value system is false.
The heart does not
for a moment know that it is pumping blood. It is not asking the question, ‘Am
I doing it right?’ It is just functioning. It does not ask the question, ‘Is
there any purpose?’ To me, that question has no meaning. The questions, ‘Is
there any meaning?’ ‘Is there any purpose?’ take away the living quality of
life. You are living in a world of ideas.
Suppose I say that
this meaninglessness is all there is for you, all there can ever be for you.
What will you do? The false and absurd goal you have before you is responsible
for that dissatisfaction and meaninglessness in you. Do you think life has any
meaning? Obviously you don’t. You have been told that there is meaning,
that there must be a meaning to life. Your notion of the ‘meaningful’
keeps you from facing this issue, and makes you feel that life has no meaning.
If the idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever
you are doing in daily life.
Why should life have
any meaning? Why should there be any purpose to living? Living itself is all
that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of
living. You have been fed all this rubbish about the ideal, perfect, peaceful,
purposeful way of life, and you devote your energies to thinking about that
rather than living fully. In any case you are living, no matter what you are
thinking about. Life has to go on.
Once a very old
gentleman, ninety-five years old, who was considered to be a great spiritual
man and who taught the great scriptures all the time to his followers, came to
see me. He heard that I was there in that town. He came to me and asked me two
questions. He asked me, ‘What is the meaning of life? I have written hundreds
of books telling people all about the meaning and purpose of life, quoting all
the scriptures and interpreting them. I haven’t understood the meaning of life.
You are the one who can give an answer to me.’ I told him, ‘Look, you are
ninety-five years old and you haven’t understood the meaning of life. When are
you going to understand the meaning of life? There may not be any meaning to
life at all.’ The next question he asked me was, ‘I have lived ninety-five
years and I am going to die one of these days. I want to know what will happen
after my death.’ I said, ‘You may not live long to know anything about death.
You have to die now. Are you ready to die?’ As long as you are asking the
question, ‘What is death?’ or ‘What is there after death?’ you are already
dead. These are all dead questions. A living man would never ask those
questions.
Is There
Such a Thing as TRUTH?
Truth is a movement. You can’t capture it, contain it,
give expression to it, or use it to advance your interests. The moment you
capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something
that cannot, under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty
here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business
is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your
self-denial is to enrich the priests. You deny yourself your basic needs while
that man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated
like a potentate. He, and the others in the holy business, thrive on the
stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians, similarly, thrive on the
gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.
Is there Freedom?
I
maintain that man has no freedom of action. I don’t mean the fatalism that the
Indians have practiced and still are practicing: when I say that man has no
freedom of action it is in relation to changing himself, to freeing himself
from the burden of the past. It means that you have no way of acting except
through the help of the knowledge that is passed on to you. It is in that
sense, I said, no action is possible without thought.
So what is necessary is that the individual should
free himself from the burden of the past, the great heritage you are talking
about. Unless the individual frees himself from the burden of the past, he
cannot come up with new solutions for the problems; he repeats the same old....
So it is up to the individual. He has to free himself from the entire past,
the heritage which you are talking about – that is to say he has to break away
from the cumulative wisdom of the ages – only then is it possible for him to
come out with the solutions for the problems with which man is confronted
today.
But that is not in his hands; there is nothing
that he can do to free himself from the burden of the past. It is in that sense
that I say he has no freedom of action. You have freedom to come here or not to
come here, to study or teach economics or philosophy or something else – there
you have a limited freedom. But you have no freedom to control the events
of the world or shape the events of the world – nobody has that power,
no nation has that power.
Man is
Memory
The
mind is (not that I am giving a new definition) the totality of man’s
experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There is no such thing as your mind or my
mind. I have no objection if you want to call that totality of man’s thoughts,
feelings, and experiences by the name `mind’. But how they are transmitted to
us from generation to generation is the question. Is it through the medium of
knowledge or is there any other way by which they are transmitted from
generation to generation, say for example, through the genes? We don’t have the
answers yet. Then we come to the idea of memory. What is man? Man is memory.
What is that memory? Is it something more than just to remember, to recall a
specific thing at a specific time? To all this we have to have some more
answers. How do the neurons operate in the brain? Is it all in one area? The
other day I was talking to a neurosurgeon, a very young and bright fellow. He
said that memory, or rather the neurons containing memory, are not in one area.
The eye, the ear, the nose, all the five sensory organs in your body have a
different sort of memory. But they don’t yet know for sure. So we have to get
more answers.
There is always a space between perception and
memory. Memory is like sound. Sound is very slow, whereas light travels faster.
All these sensory activities or perceptions are like light. They are very fast.
But for some reason we have lost the capacity to kick that (memory) into the
background and allow these things to move as fast as they occur in nature.
Thought comes, captures it (the sensory perception), and says that it is this
or that. That is what you call recognition, or naming, or whatever you want to
call it. The moment you recognize this as the tape recorder, the name `tape
recorder’ also is there. So recognition and naming are not two different things.
We maintain the separation and keep up a
non-existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your
memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity.
‘Who am I?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Does
God exist?’ or ‘Is there an afterlife?’ all these questions spring only from
memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own.
What you call the ‘act of knowing’ is nothing
other than this accumulated memory.
Can you become conscious of anything except through
the medium of memory and thought? Memory is knowledge. Even your feelings are
memory.
To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal,
and withdrawal is death.
You Are
Not There
YOU don’t exist. There is no individual there at all.
Culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, has created ‘you’ and ‘me’
for the sole purpose of maintaining its own continuity. But, at the same time,
we are made to believe that you have to become an individual. These two things
have created this neurotic situation for us. There is no such thing as an
individual, and there is no such thing as freedom of action. I am not talking
of a fatalistic philosophy or any such thing. It is this fact that is
frustrating us. The demand to fit ourselves into that value system is using a
tremendous amount of energy, and there is nothing we can do to deal with the
living problems here. All the energy is being consumed by the demands of the
culture or society, or whatever you want to call it, to fit you into the
framework of that value system. In the process, we are not left with any energy
to deal with the other problems. But these problems, that is, the living
problems, are very simple.
Relationship is Division
The problem is a problem of relationship. It is just not
possible to establish any relationship with anything around you, including your
near and dear ones, except on the level of what you can get out of the
relationship. You see, the whole thing springs from this separation or
isolation that human beings live in today. We are isolated from the rest of
creation, the rest of life around us. We all live in individual frames. We try
to establish a relationship at the level of ‘What do I get out of that
relationship?’ We use others to try and fill this void that is created as a result
of our isolation.
We always want to
fill this emptiness, this void, with all kids of relationships with people
around us. That is really the problem. We have to use everything – an idea, a
person, anything we can get hold of, to establish relationships with others.
Without relationships we are lost, and we don’t see any meaning; we don’t see
any purpose.
But that relationship
is already there. So, what separates you from me and me from you is the
knowledge we have
Love is Fascist
What an amount of energy we are putting into making our
relationship into a loving thing! It is a battle, it is a war. It is like
preparing yourself all the time for war hoping that there will be peace,
eternal peace, or this or that. You are tired of this battle, and you even
settle for that horrible, non-loving relationship. And you hope and dream one
day it will be nothing but love. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself– ‘ in the name
of that how many millions of people have been killed? More than all the recent
wars put together. How can you love thy neighbour as thyself? It is just not
possible.
Love implies
division, separation. As long as there is division, as long as there is a
separation within you, so long do you maintain that separation around you. When
everything fails, you use the last card, the trump in the pack of cards, and
call it love… We say: I love my country, I love my dog, I love my wife, and
what else. What happens? You love your country, I love my country, and there is
war.
It is not going to
help us, and it has not helped us at all. Even religion has failed to free man
from violence and from ten other different things that it is trying to free us
from. You see, it is not a question of trying to find new concepts, new ideas,
new thoughts, and new beliefs.
What, after all, is
the world? The world is the relationship between two individuals. But that
relationship is based on the foundation of ‘What do I get out of a
relationship?’ Mutual gratification is the basis of all relationships. If you
don’t get what you want out of a relationship, it goes sour. What there is in
the place of what you call a `loving relationship’ is hate.
The whole music of
our age is all around that song, ‘Love, Love, Love....’ But love is fascist in
its nature, in its birth, in its expression and in its action. It cannot do us
any good. We may talk of love but it doesn’t mean anything.
Sex is Thought
Sexuality, if it is left to itself, as it is in the case
of other species, other forms of life, is merely a biological need, because the
living organism has this object to survive and produce one like itself.
Anything you superimpose on that is totally unrelated to the living organism.
But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in
its nature, into a pleasure movement.
It is a very simple
functioning of the living organism. The religious man has turned that into
something big, and concentrated on the control of sex. After that the
psychologists have turned that into something extraordinary. All commercialism
is related to sex. How do you think it will fall into its proper place?
You may ask: Is not
sex a basic human requirement? Sex is dependent upon thought; the body itself
has no sex. Only the genitals and perhaps the hormone balances differ between
male and female. It is thought that says ‘I am a man, and that is a woman, an
attractive woman.’ It is thought that translates sex feelings in the body and
says ‘These are sexual feelings.’ And it is thought that provides the build-up
without which no sex is possible: ‘It would be more pleasurable to hold that
woman’s hand than just to look at her. It would be more pleasurable to kiss her
than just to embrace her,’ and so on. In the natural state there is no build-up
of thought. Without that build-up, sex is impossible. And sex is tremendously
violent to the body. The body normally is a very peaceful organism, and then
you subject it to this tremendous tension and release, which feels pleasurable
to you. Actually it is painful to the body.
But through
suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into this
state. As long as you think of God, you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any
religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy, whether he doesn’t dream
of women at night.
The peak of the sex
experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a
first-hand experience; all of the rest of your experiences are second-hand,
somebody else’s. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this? Why do
you destroy the joy of sex? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity;
but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.
Marriage is Possessiveness
The institution of marriage is not going to disappear. As
long as we demand relationships, it will continue in some form or other.
Basically, it is a question of possessiveness.
The marriage
institution will somehow continue because it is not just the relationship
between the two, but children and property are involved. And we use property
and children as a pretext to give continuity to the institution of marriage.
The problem is so complex and so complicated. It is not so easy for anybody to
come up with answers to the age-old institution of marriage.
Desire and Selfishness
Man is always selfish, and he will remain selfish
as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. I have nothing against
selfish people. I don’t want to talk about selflessness – it has no basis at
all. You say ‘I will be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a
marvellous man’ – but until tomorrow arrives (or the day after tomorrow, or the
next life) you will remain selfish. What do you mean by ‘selflessness’? You
tell everybody to be selfless. What is the point? I have never said to anybody
‘Don’t be selfish.’ Be selfish, stay selfish! – that is my message. Wanting
enlightenment is selfishness. The rich man’s distributing charity is also
selfishness: he will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue
of him there.
You have been told
that you should practice desirelessness. You have practiced desirelessness for
thirty or forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be wrong
somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must be wrong with the
one who has told you to practice desirelessness. This (desire) is a reality;
that (desirelessness) is false – it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire
as such can’t be wrong, can’t be false, because it is there.
Don’t you see that it
is the very thinking that has turned this into a problem? Anger is energy, desire
is energy – all the energy you want is already in operation there.
You hope that you
will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking, because of that
model of a saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that man
has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don’t believe that man at all!
Such a man builds some organization, and lives in luxury, which you pay for.
You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a
fool in the world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to prostrate
before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock
of your life if you see him there. That is why they are all aloof – because
they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is
always afraid that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man - he
never, never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than
seeing the President of your country – that is a lot easier than seeing a holy
man. He is not what he says he is, not what he claims he is.
As long as there is a
living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and
tried to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of
mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is
thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe
that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope
against hope that thought will pull you through, but you will die in hope just
as you have lived in hope. That is the refrain of my doom song.
Politics
All the political ideologies, even your legal structures,
are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of man. It is not so easy to
flush out the whole series of experiences which have been accumulated through
centuries, and which are based upon the religious thinking of man. There is a
tendency to replace one belief with another belief, one illusion with another
illusion. That is all we can do.
Revolution is only Revaluation of the Old
The human being modelled after the perfect being has
totally failed. The model has not touched anything there. Your value system is
the one that is responsible for the human malady, the human tragedy, forcing
everybody to fit into that model. So, what do we do? You cannot do anything by
destroying the value system, because you replace one value system with another.
Even those who rebelled against religion, like those in the Communist
countries, have themselves created another kind of value system. So, revolution
does not mean the end of anything. It is only a revaluation of our value
system. So, that needs another revolution, and so on and so on. There is no
way.
Every human being is
different. That is all I am saying. There is nobody like you anywhere in this
world. I tell you, nobody! I am talking physiologically, you know. But we
ignore that, and try to put everybody in a common mould and create what we call
the greatest common factor. All the time you are trying to educate them and fit
them into the value system. If that value system does not work, naturally
revolutions take place. The whole idea of restructuring is nothing but a
revaluation of the old value system. Revolution only means revaluation of our
value system. It is the same thing. After a while things settle down, and then
they go at it again. There is no improvement again. Or there is a slight
improvement. But it is basically a modified continuity of the same. In that
process what horrors we have committed, you know! Is it really worth all that?
But you seem to think that it is. After killing so many people you go back to
the same system, the same technique. What is the point?
Fear and Death
The balance of energy in nature has to be maintained for
some reason. I don’t know why. So death occurs only when there is a need for
the atoms to maintain the balance of energy in the universe. It is nothing but
a reshuffling of atoms. This organism has no way of finding out that it was
born at a particular point of time and is going to die at another point of
time, and also that it is living at this moment and not dead.
You shall not taste
of death, for there is no death for you: you cannot experience your own death.
Are you born? Life and death cannot be separated; you have no chance whatever
of knowing for yourself where one begins and the other ends. You can experience
the death of another, but not your own. The only death is physical death; there
is no psychological death.
Why are you so afraid
of death?
Your experiencing
structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even
expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will
feel like – it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to
feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs
knowledge, a similar past experience it can call upon for reference. You cannot
remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot
remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non-
existence. As long as you have known life, you have known yourself, you have
been there, so, to you, you have a feeling of eternity. To justify this feeling
of eternity, your structure begins to convince itself that there will be a life
after death for you – heaven, reincarnation, transmigration of souls, or
whatever. What is it that you think reincarnates? Where is that soul of yours?
Can you taste it, touch it, show it to me? What is there inside of you that goes
to heaven? What is there? There is nothing inside of you but fear.
Is there anything to Vegetarianism?
Vegetarianism for what? For some spiritual
goals? One form of life lives off another. That’s a fact, whether you like it
or not. He (the questioner) says his cat is a vegetarian cat, it doesn’t kill a
fly. Because of its association with vegetarians it has become vegetarian. For
health reasons maybe one should. I don’t know, I don’t see any adequate reason
why one should be a vegetarian. Your body is not going to be any more pure than
the meat eating body. You go to India,
those that have been vegetarians, they are not kind, they are not peaceful. You
will be surprised. Vegetarians can be more aggressive than the meat eaters.
Read the history of India
– it is full of bloodshed, massacres, and assassinations – all in the name of
religion. So it has nothing to do with spirituality, – what you put in there
(stomach) is not really the problem.
What is Life?
You will never know what life is. Nobody can
say anything about life. You can give definitions, but those definitions have
no meaning. You can theorize about life, but that is a thing which is not of
any value to you – it cannot help you to understand anything. So you don’t ask
questions like ‘What is life?’ you know. ‘What is life?’ – there is no answer
to that question, so the question cannot stay there any longer. You really
don’t know, so the question disappears. You don’t let that happen there,
because you think there must be an answer. If you don’t know the answer, you
think there may be somebody in this world who can give an answer to that
question. ‘What is life?’– nobody can give an answer to that question –
we really don’t know. So the question cannot stay there; the question burns
itself out, you see. The question is born out of thought, so when it burns
itself out, what is there is energy. There’s a combustion: thought burns itself
out and gives physical energy. In the same way, when the question is burnt,
along with it goes the questioner also. The question and the questioner are not
two different things. When the question burns itself out, what is there is
energy. You can’t say anything about that energy – it is already manifesting
itself, expressing itself in a boundless way; it has no limitations, no
boundaries. It is not yours, not mine; it belongs to everybody. You are part of
that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of
life, you are another expression of life.
Life is one unitary
movement, not two different movements. It’s moving, it’s a continuous flux, but
you cannot look at that flux and say ‘That is a flux.’ … This is just a pure
and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life,
there is a response. The response and the stimulus are not two different
movements: you cannot separate the response from the stimulus. (The moment you
separate the response from the stimulus, there is a division, it is a divisive
consciousness that is in operation.) So, it is one movement.
There are only Answers, no Questions
Try and formulate a question which you can call your own.
This you will discover: they are not your questions at all.
Questions are there
because you have a vague answer for the question.
Your problems
continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are
not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your
problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to
end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by
all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really
solutions at all. That is obvious. If there were legitimate answers, there
would be no problems. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more
meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the
same. That is all they can do. The teacher, guru, or leader who offers
solutions is also false, along with his so-called answers. He is not doing any
honest work, only selling a cheap, shoddy commodity in the marketplace. If you
brushed aside your hope, fear, and naiveté‚ and treated these fellows like
businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will.
But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offeredup by the experts.
Real Problem is the Solution
The real problem is the solution. Your problems continue
because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there,
the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions
go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems,
those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy
people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all.
That is obvious. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more
meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the
same. That is all they can do. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and
naiveté‚ and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do
not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus
wares offered up by the experts.
Actually there are no
problems, there are only solutions. But we don’t even have the guts to say that
they don’t work. Even if you have discovered that they don’t work,
sentimentality comes into the picture. The feeling, ‘That man in whom I have
placed my confidence and belief cannot con himself and con everyone else,’
comes in the way of throwing the whole thing out of the window, down the drain.
The solutions are still a problem. Actually there is no problem there. The only
problem is to find out the inadequacy or uselessness of all the solutions that
have been offered to us. The questions naturally are born out of the assumptions
and answers that we have taken for granted as real answers. But we really don’t
want any answers to the questions, because an answer to the questions is the
end of the answers. If one answer ends, all the other answers also go.
What is Maya?
Not that the world is an illusion. All the
Vedanta philosophers in India,
particularly the students of Sankara, indulge in such frivolous, absolute
nonsense. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in
relationship to this point, which itself is illusory, is bound to be an
illusion, that’s all. The Sanskrit word ‘maya’ does not mean illusion in the
same sense in which the English word is used. ‘Maya’ means to measure. You
cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the centre is absent,
there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic.
Silence
The peace there is not this inane dead
silence you experience. It’s like a volcano erupting all the time. That is the
silence; that is peace. The blood is flowing through your veins like a river.
If you tried to magnify the sound of the flow of your blood you will be
surprised – it’s like the roar of the ocean. If you put yourself in a sound
proof room you will not survive even for five minutes. You will go crazy, because
you can’t bear the noises that are there in you. The sound of the beat of your
heart is something which you cannot take. You love to surround yourself with
all these sounds and then you create some funny experience called the
‘experience of the silent mind,’ which is ridiculous. Absurd. That is the
silence that is there – the roar – the roar of an ocean. Like the roaring of
the flow of blood.
The Body is
Immortal
It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical
death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not
concerned with ‘the afterlife’ or any kind of permanency. It struggles to
survive and multiply NOW. The fictitious ‘beyond’, created by thought out of
fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand
for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for
permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought’s demand for
permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as
not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body’s
continuity. Both are utterly false.
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.
This body has not
fundamentally changed for hundreds of thousands of years. Its propensity to
follow leaders, to avoid solitude, to wage war, to join groups– all such traits
are in the genetic make-up of mankind, part of his biological inheritance.
The human body, when
broken into its constituent elements, is no different from the tree out there
or the mosquito that is sucking your blood. Basically, it is exactly the same.
The proportions of the elements may be higher in one case and lesser in the
case of the others. You have eighty percent of water in the body, and there is
eighty percent of water in the trees and eighty percent on this planet. So that
is the reason why I maintain that we are nothing but a fortuitous concourse of
atoms. If and when death takes place, the body is reshuffled, and then these
atoms are used to maintain the energy levels in the universe. Other than that,
there is no such thing as death to this body.
Thought is only a
response to stimuli. The brain is not really a creator; it is just a container.
The function of the brain in this body is only to take care of the needs of the
physical organism and to maintain its sensitivity, whereas thought, through its
constant interference with sensory activity, is destroying the sensitivity of
the body. That is where the conflict is. The conflict is between the need of
the body to maintain its sensitivity and the demand of thought to translate
every sensation within the framework of the sensual activity. I am not
condemning sensual activity. Mind, or whatever you want to call it, is born out
of this sensuality. So, all activities of the mind are sensual in their nature,
whereas the activity of the body is to respond to the stimuli around it. That
is really the basic conflict between what you call the mind and the body.
You are a
Cheat
You are
a cheat. Your religious ambitions are just like the businessman’s there. If you
can’t cheat there is something wrong. How do you think the rich man there got
his great wealth? Through lectures about non-greed and selflessness? Not at
all. He got it by cheating somebody. Society, which is immoral to begin with,
says that cheating is immoral, and that non-cheating is moral. I don’t see the
difference. If you get caught they put you in jail. So your food and shelter
are provided for. Why worry? It is the guilt you have that compels you to talk
of non-greed while you continue on with your greedy life. Your non-greed is
invented by thought to keep you from facing the fact that greed is all that is
there. But you are not satisfied with what is so. If there were nothing more
than that, what would you do? That is all that is there. You just have to live
with it. You can’t escape. All thought can do is repeat itself over and over
again. That is all it can do. And anything repetitive is senile.
There is no
such thing as Spirituality
Separating things, dividing things
into material life, and spiritual life. There is only one life. This is a
material life, and that other has no relevance. Wanting to change your material
life into that so-called religious pattern given to you, placed before you by
these religious people, is destroying the possibility of your living in harmony
and accepting the reality of this material world exactly the way it is. That is
responsible for your pain, for your suffering, for your sorrow.
Stop it
You can stop it in you. Free yourself from
that social structure that is operating in you without becoming anti-social,
without becoming a reformer, without becoming anti-this, anti-that. You can
throw the whole thing out of your system and free yourself from the burden of
this culture, for yourself and by yourself. Whether it has any usefulness for
society or not is not your concern. If there is one individual who walks free,
you don’t have any more the choking feeling of what this horrible culture has
done to you. It’s neither East nor West, it’s all the same. Human nature is
exactly the same – there’s no difference.
You are
Unique
By
using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna
we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.
Those who recommend that you forget your own natural uniqueness and be like
someone else, no matter how saintly that person may be, is putting you on the
wrong track. It is like the blind leading the blind.
When dealing with these yogins and holy men the
first wrong turn you take is in trying to relate the way they are functioning
with the way you are functioning. What they are describing may not be related
to the way you are functioning at all. Uniqueness is not something which can be
turned out in a factory. Society is interested only in the status quo and has
provided all these so-called special individuals so that you’ll have models to
follow. You want to be like that fellow– the saint, the saviour, or the
revolutionary– but it is an impossibility. Your society, which is only
interested in turning out copies of acceptable models, is threatened by real
individuality because it (individuality) threatens its continuity. A truly
unique person, having no cultural reference point, would never know that he is
unique.
What nature has
created in the form of human species is something extraordinary. It is an
unparalleled creation. But culture is interested in fitting the actions of all
human beings into a common mould. That is because it is interested in maintaining
the status quo, its value system. That is where the real conflict is.
Man cannot become man so long as he follows
somebody. What is responsible for man remaining an animal is that culture – the
top dog, following somebody – that has not helped you at all. You want to be a
cheap imitation of Sankara or Buddha; you don’t want to be yourself. What for?
I tell you, you are far more unique and extraordinary than all those saints and
saviours of mankind put together. Why do you want to be a cheap imitation of
that fellow? That is one of the myths. Forget it.
Sages
You cannot become a sage through any sadhana (spiritual practice);
it is not in you hands. A sage cannot have a disciple, a sage cannot have a
follower, because it is not an experience that can be shared. The sages and
seers are original and unique because they have freed themselves from the
entire past. (Even the mystic experience is part of the past.) Not that the
past goes for such a man; but for him the past has no emotional content – it is
not continually operative, coloring the actions.
No Power Outside of You
Psychic powers, clairvoyance, clairaudience – they are
all human instincts. And they are necessary because there are two things that
the human organism is interested in. One: its survival at any cost. Why should
it survive? I don’t know; it is a foolish question to ask. That is one of the
most important things: it has a survival mechanism of its own, which is quite
different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second
thing is: to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two
fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism.
I can tell you that
there is no power outside of you – no power. This does not mean that you have
all the attributes that you read about of the super-duper gods; but there is no
power outside of you. If there is any power in this universe, it is in you.
Courage to Stand Alone
Man has to be saved from the saviours of mankind! The
religious people – they kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind.
Throw them out! That is courage itself, because of the courage there; not the
courage you practice.
Fearlessness is not
freedom from all the phobias. The phobias are essential for the survival of the
organism. You must have the fear of heights and the fear of depths – if that is
not there, there is a danger of your falling. But you want to teach courage to
man to fight on the battlefield. Why do you want to teach him courage? To kill
others and get killed himself – that is your culture. Crossing the Atlantic in a balloon or the Pacific on a raft – anybody
can do that – that is not courage. Fearlessness is not a silly thing like that.
Courage is to brush
aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you. You are the only
one, greater than all those things. Everything is finished, the whole tradition
is finished, however sacred and holy it may be – then only can you be yourself
– that is individuality. For the first time you become an individual.
What Is
We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants
that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that
are sucking our blood.
*
We are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other
thing on this planet.
*
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.
*
When you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of
right and wrong or good and bad,
you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are
caught up in this duality, the danger is that you will always do wrong.
*
In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What
occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain
the balance of ‘energy’ in this universe, death occurs.
*
An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsmen. He
uses that tool to express himself. All art is a pleasure movement.
*
There is
more life in the chorus of the barking dogs than in the music or singing of
your famous musicians and singers.
*
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.
*
It is terror, not love, not brotherhood that will help us
to live together.
*
Meditation itself is evil. That is why you get evil
thoughts when you start meditating.
*
Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is
the very thing that can free you.
*
Atmospheric pollution is most harmless when compared to
the spiritual and religious pollution that have plagued the world.
*
Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same; it is
quick fix.
*
The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter
there.
*
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.
*
You have to touch life at a point where nobody has
touched it before. Nobody can teach you that.
*
Until you have the courage to blast me, all that I am
saying, and all gurus, you will remain a cultist with photographs, rituals,
birthday celebrations and the like.
*
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are
searching for happiness, you will remain
unhappy.
*
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes
perpetrated not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom– the holy men– but also
the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge,
self-actualization, living from moment to moment, and such rot.
*
The more you know about yourself the more impossible it
becomes to be humble and sensitive. How can there be humility as long as you
know something?
*
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.
*
You actually have no way of looking at the sunset because
you are not separated from the
sunset. The moment you separate your self from the
sunset, the poet in you comes out. Out of that separation poets and painters
have tried to express themselves, to share their experiences with others. All
that is culture.
*
The feminist movement will not succeed as long as the
woman depends on the man for her sexual needs.
*
All experiences however extraordinary they may be are in
the area of sensuality.
*
Humility is an art that one practices. There is no such
thing as humility. As long as you know, there is no humility. The known and
humility cannot coexist
*
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.
*
It is a terrible thing to use somebody
to get pleasure. Whatever you use, an idea, a concept, a drug, or a person, or
anything else, you cannot have pleasure without using something.
*
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.
*
The subject does not exist there. It is the object that
creates the subject. This runs counter to the whole philosophical thinking of India.
*
When thought is not there all the time, what is there is
living from moment to moment. It’s all in frames, millions and millions and
millions of frames, to put it in the language of film.
*
The man who spoke of ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is
responsible for this horror in the world today. Don’t exonerate those teachers.
*
Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and
physiological terms. It must be
demystified
and depsychologized.
*
Society is built on a foundation of conflict, and you are
society. Therefore you must always be in conflict with society.
*
You know the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The red queen has to
run faster and faster to keep still where she is. That is exactly what you are
all doing. Running faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere.
*
The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally
determined and is the product of thought. It is acquired taste that tells you
that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats
screaming; both produce equally valid sensations.
*
The peak of sex experience is the one thing in life you
have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all the rest of your
experiences are second-hand, somebody else’s.
*
The problem with language is, no matter how we try to
express ourselves, we are caught up in the structure of words. There is no
point in creating new language, a new lingo, to express anything. There is
nothing there to be expressed except to free yourself from the stranglehold of
thought.
*
What you call ‘yourself’ is fear. The ‘you’ is born out
of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.
*
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.
Knock
Off
My interest is not to knock off what others have said
(that is too easy), but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I
am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. This is why my talking
sounds contradictory to others. I am forced by the nature of your listening to
always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second
statement is negated by a third, and so on. My aim is not some comfy
dialectical thesis, but the total negation of everything that can be expressed.
Anything you try to make out of my statements is not it.
* * *
Laughing with UG
If not liberation at least a transistor
Once
a harikatha dasa, a traditional
teller of stories of Gods, famously called Bhagavatar
throughout South India, visited UG. He came
dressed in a white dhoti, a white shirt, a Kashmir
shawl on his shoulders, and a rosary around his neck. He wore marks of vibhuti
(ashes) on his forehead. In the middle of those marks, he wore a round red
vermillion mark. He was over seventy five years old, yet looked healthy and
strong. He believed UG was an enlightened man and addressed him as ‘Appa’
although UG was twenty years younger than him. UG never condemned the
Bhagavatar’s faith or beliefs. But, when at times UG started his tirade on
human culture and civilization, immediately Bhagavatar would get up and run out
saying, “Father, it’s time for me to go. But I’ll come again.”
One day,
apparently overcome with emotion, the Bhagavatar held UG’s feet begging, “Appa,
no one else cares for me. Only you can show me the way to moksha.”
UG
instantly held him up trying to prevent him from holding his feet. And then he
asked, “You spent so many years with Ramana Maharshi. Why didn’t you ask him?”
“At that
time, I didn’t have either that interest or yearning. Now, I feel I don’t want
anything else,” he answered.
UG said,
“That’s the only thing I cannot give. It’s not something that someone can give
and someone else can receive. You ask for anything else. I will give that.”
As soon
as he said that, the Bhagavatar, a shy smile creasing his lips, asked UG to get
him a small ‘foreign’ transistor. Bhagavatar’s interest slipped fast from liberation to a transistor.
But UG did not laugh.
No prior appointments....
There is no need to wait for a fixed
appointment or time to see UG, people come at different times. On Sundays, from
morning until night various people continuously come and go. One day (in 1986)
he was talking incessantly without a respite. The visitors came and left one
after another. Even after it was past the time for lunch, the hall did not
become vacant. When there was hardly any space for people to come and many
stood out waiting to get in, U G stood up, and smiling, said, “This has turned
into a barber shop. One after another, people come and get their hair cut. They
have been coming since morning without a break.” Peals of laughter broke upon
the crowd, but still no body showed any sign of leaving. And UG sat back,
saying, ‘Anyway, This is how it should be. There should be no special duration,
prior appointment, and such.”
I
like Madhvacharya the most because…
In 1972, along with Valentine, UG
visited Udupi, a place famous for temples and monastries. A senior swamiji of a
famous Math who had heard about UG, invited him to accept his hospitality.
“If I
come to your Math, would I have to wear clothing appropriate to your ritual
rules? I wouldn’t be allowed with my pajama and lalchi. Besides,
Valentine also will have to come with me. She is a foreigner,” said UG, trying
to discourage the swami from inviting him.
The swami
reassured UG that he could come dressed just the way he was and of course bring
Valentine as well. “But, please don’t force me to sit with you to eat. That’s
all I ask,” he said, repeating his invitation.
UG,
Valentine and friends were treated to a tasty meal with twenty five delicious
items. The swamiji sat in front of them while they ate their lunch. Later there
was a discussion on many things. At one point, after listening to UG for a
while, the swami said to his disciples, “That Krishna and this Krishna say the same thing.”
Then UG
remarked, “Among the three Acharyas, I like Madhvacharya the most.”
The
Adamara Math Swami was flattered with this remark, believing that UG was
admiring his Guru and their tradition. “Why, UG, why?” he asked with
excitement.
“It is because of Madhvacharya that Udupi restaurants
sprung up all over the world. Whether we go to New York
or London or
some other place, thanks to those restaurants, I can find the idlis I
need.”
A Parliament of dacoits
Once, a noted journalist brought
along a VIP who was responsible for the surrender of six hundred dacoits. The
VIP spoke about his good work and how with great struggle he could get the
dacoits surrender to the government. When he was finished there was profound
silence and then quiet murmurs of appreciation from the little crowd. But UG
looked at the man and asked simply, “Yes, but what about the six hundred
dacoits you have put there in the Parliament?”
The man
rose in a hurry, saying, “I will return when you are in a better mood.”
No need to touch anybody’s
feet, not even your own
Once, a pious old man, after
listening to UG, with tears in his eyes, went down on his knees to touch UG’s
feet. Quickly UG withdrew his legs preventing the man from touching his feet.
But the old man, not willing to give up, kept persisting. It was quite a funny
tussle: one old man trying to touch the feet and the other doing his best to
stop him. At last, UG said, “No, don’t do that, sir. Not only to me but to
anyone else either. No one is worth that, believe me. How can I convince you
that there is no power outside of you? I never touched anybody’s feet, not even
my own.”
Therapy is the disease
One morning, Dr. Modi, a renowned
eye surgeon who had performed many eye operations free by setting up camps all
over India,
came to see UG. After a long chat over spiritual matters, the good doctor said,
“Sir, I am fully blind. Please help me see.”
UG humbly
replied, “I am not competent enough to do the operation. I can only tell you
that there is nothing wrong with your eye and no operation is necessary.”
But when
the doctor persisted that UG should suggest some therapy for his spiritual
malady, UG said, “Sir, the therapy is the disease.”
*
One day, a long-time admirer and
friend of UG declared grandly that he thought UG was the only reliable and
dependable friend he had in the whole world, and that he trusted UG so much
that if at that minute UG asked him to jump from the window he would obey him
blindly. UG immediately said, “Really? Let’s go on the terrace. That’s high
enough for you to jump from.”
*
One day, while having meal, UG
poured some ghee in his rasam, looked at Shanta and said, “See how the
ghee floats on this rasam! This reminds me of how your Shirdi Baba
performed the miracle of lighting lamps on water. Obviously this is how the
layer of oil must have floated in the tin pot.”
*
Once, an old friend and schoolmate
of UG, recalling his days with UG, recounted the night they both went to see
the film Harishchandra, and how he was quite surprised to see tears
rolling down UG’s cheeks at the plight of the honest King Harishchandra. This
did surprise many in the crowd and they stared at UG as if to ask if it was
true that he shed tears. UG smiled and replied, “I was crying because of the
poor Indians who have to live up to Harishchandra’s lofty ideal.”
*
A childless couple once came to UG
asking for his blessings for a child, and UG as usual replied, “You don’t need my
blessings. All you need is to go to the doctor, to find which of you needs
medical help.”
*
One evening, surprising everyone sitting around him in the room, UG
got into a playful mood. Louis, an American was sitting by his side. He was a
tall, broad-shouldered, muscular guy, who looked more a WWF wrestler than a
spiritual seeker. That day, he became the target of UG’s mischief. One had
never seen UG getting so childishly mischievous. Without his dentures, he
looked a grandma playing pranks with her overgrown grandchild. He kept nudging,
poking and hitting Louis all over his bulky frame. At one point, suddenly he
stretched out his hand and ordered Louis to read his palm. Sometimes UG plays
this game with palmists, asking, ‘Tell me, where will I get my money from and
how much?’ We were all familiar with this game of UG and so was Louis. Promptly
now, Louis held UG’s palm and then screwing up his mischievous eyes, said,
‘Look here, the lines here are in the shape of MW. Ah, M for
money and W for wealth. You are lucky!’ ‘No,’ bellowed UG, ‘M
means murder, and W means whacking.’ And he started whacking Louis hard
on his tonsured head and bulky frame.
*
Once, a religious man, who believed in
miracles as the sign of the existence of God, asked seriously, ‘UG, what do you
think of Jesus Christ walking on water?’
Smiling, UG replied, ‘Jesus
walked on water probably because he did not know how to swim. Fortunately for
him and unfortunately for others the water was only knee-deep. And in the story
of the multiplication of the loaves of bread and fishes, he probably cut the
bread into many smaller pieces.’
*
“Are there any boots to walk on
thorns.”
UG’s reply came back crisp and
direct, “There are no thorns.”
Unsatisfied, the woman pursued, “The
thorns are very much there for me!”
With quiet patience he answered,
“Stop looking for roses and there will be no thorns.”
*
Once a very famous man in the USA was very curious to meet with
UG to find out why some of his friends were going gaga about him. And one
evening he did meet him in a friend’s house. He asked UG straight, ‘I have
heard quite a lot about you. I’m really curious. What do you do?’
UG replied simply, ‘I’m retired, sir.’
‘Retired?’
‘Yes, I was born retired.’
*
A sweater for the spider
Once, an American friend had to leave to India with UG and was caught in a
dilemma over the safety of her spider friend who was keeping her company over
the past few weeks. She didn’t want the spider hanging in her bath room, with
one of his legs missing, to be killed by the cleaning woman the next day. So,
carefully, delicately she picked the spider and put him outside near the steps.
It was quiet cold and suddenly the spider seemed frozen out there. Worried she
asked UG his opinion. UG scoffed at her insensitivity about American boys (soldiers)
dying in the Middle East deserts and fussing
over the safety of one spider in the bathroom.
The American friend said, ‘But I don’t condone sending
soldiers anywhere, don’t condone anything my government does. It’s just that I
have grown attached to my spider.’
UG said, ‘Why don’t you knit a sweater for the spider?’
*
Once, hoping to be commended for his brave act, the friend told UG
that he had taken down all the guru pictures in his room, all his ex-teachers,
Zen masters, including a photo of UG.
UG laughed and said there would therefore be fewer
lizards on the walls.
*
(Extracted from The Penguin U.G.Krishnamurti Reader, edited by Mukunda Rao, Penguin
Books India, 2007)
