 U.G.
Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends and admirers all over the
world, is no more. The end came on March 22, 2007 at 2.30 pm in an apartment
built for him by his friends Lucia, Anita and Giovanni in
their villa in Vallecrosia, Italy. As per UG's advice, with no rituals or
funeral rites, the cremation was carried out the next day at 2.45 pm, in Vallecrosia, Italy He was eighty-nine years old. UG is
survived by his erstwhile family, comprising his two daughters, Usha and
Bharati, and their respective families and his son, Kumar and his family. But
his actual family is much larger than that, extending over the entire globe and
consisting of numerous 'friends' to whom he has been closer than their own
families and indeed their own selves.
Seven
weeks before, UG had a fall and injured himself. This was the second such
occurrence in two years. He did not want such an incident to occur once again which
would make him further dependent on his friends for his daily maintenance. So he
refused medical or other external intervention. He decided to let his body take
its own natural course. He was confined to bed and his consumption of food and
water became infrequent and then ceased altogether. 'It's time to go,' he declared,
joined his palms in namaste, thanked his friends and advised them to return
to their places. Only his longtime friends, the filmmaker, Mahesh Bhatt, Larry
and Susan Morris, and few other friends stayed back to guard his body and do
whatever was necessary when the end came. UG did not die of any disease,
although he suffered from 'cardio-spasm' for many years, which became quite
severe in the last days of his life.
UG
did not show the slightest signs of worry or fear about death or concern for
his body even at the end of his life. He did not leave any specific
instructions as to how to dispose of his dead body. You can throw it on the
garbage heap, as far as I am concerned, he often would say.
Responding
to questions on death, UG said, Life
and death cannot be separated. When
what you call clinical death takes place, the body breaks itself into its
constituent elements and that provides the basis for the continuity of life. In
that sense the body is immortal.
UG
was born on 9 July 1918, in a Telugu-speaking Brahmin family in Masulipatam, a coastal
town in the state of Andhra Pradesh. He lost his mother when he was seven days
old and was brought up by his maternal grandfather, who was a noted, wealthy
lawyer and a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. UG grew up in a
peculiar milieu of Theosophy and orthodox Hindu religious beliefs and
practices. Even as a boy he was a rebel yet brutally honest with whatever he
did.
He
did his schooling in the town of Gudivada and then his B.A. Honours Course in
Philosophy and Psychology at Madras University. But the study of the various
philosophical systems and Western psychology made very little impression on
him. Where is this mind these chaps have been talking about? he once asked
his Psychology teacher. It was something extraordinary coming from a student
who was hardly twenty years old, particularly when Freud's ideas were
considered to be the last word on human mind.
Between
14 and 21 years of age, UG spent seven years off and on with Swami Sivananda in
Rishikesh practicing yoga and meditation. He had various mystical visions and
experiences there, but he questioned their validity as he thought that he could
recognize them only on the basis of his prior knowledge he already had about
them.
In
1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and met Sri Ramana Maharshi and
asked him, This thing called moksha, can you give it to me? Ramana
reply, I can give it, but can you take it? struck him like a thunderbolt
and set him up on a relentless search for truth that ended at the age of 49
with a totally unforeseen result.
After
leaving the university, UG joined the Theosophical Society as a lecturer and
toured the country giving talks on Theosophy. Even after his marriage to Kusuma
Kumari in 1943, he continued to work with the Theosophical Society and gave
lectures in European countries, until, in 1953, he realized that what he was
doing was not something true to his real self and quit the post in disgust. After
that, he met J. Krishnamurti, who was by then famous as an unconventional spiritual
teacher. For two years, he met him now and again and got into fierce discussions
on spiritual matters, but later on, he was to reject JK's philosophy, calling
it a bogus chartered journey.
During
this period, UG also underwent a life-altering, mystical experience, what he
sometimes called a death experience. But he brushed it all aside as of no
importance and moved on, further probing and testing and questioning every
experience until he came into his own.
In 1955, UG went to America with his family to get medical treatment for his son's polio condition. When his
resources began to diminish, he took to lecturing for a fee. He gave talks on
the major religions and philosophies of the world and soon came to be
recognized as a fine teacher from India. But, as it happened before, at the end
of the second year, he lost interest in lecturing and then the inevitable
happened. His seventeen years of marriage came to an end. His wife returned to India with the children. And UG drifted from one thing to another. After his aimless
wanderings in London and Paris, like a dry leaf blown here, there and
everywhere, he landed in Geneva and at last found refuge in Valentine de
Kerven's chalet in Saanen. By then incredible experiences had started to happen
to him and his body was like rice chaff burning inside. It was a prelude to
his clinical death on his forty-ninth birthday (in 1967) 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. For seven days, seven bewildering physical changes
took place and he landed in what he calls the Natural State. It was a
cellular revolution, a full-scale biological mutation.
In 1972, UG gave his first public talk at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. He never again gave any public talk. But he did not/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. He usually stayed with friends or in small
rented apartments, but never stayed 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
naturally thousands of people the world-over felt otherwise and flocked to see
and listen to his anti-teaching.
The first book, "The Mystique of Enlightenment" The unrational ideas of a man
called UG, put together by Rodney Arms, appeared
in 1982. In 1986, he went public and gave his first TV interview, which was
soon to be followed by several TV and radio interviews the world over. And UG
made publishing history by not allowing copyright on any of his books saying, My teaching, if that is the word you
want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute,
interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim
authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
In the last seven years during his stay in
Bangalore, he rarely engaged in serious conversations; rather he started to do
something else 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. There used to be long stretches of utter silence. It used to be
embarrassing; also a tremendous relief from the burden of knowing. And then UG
would start playing his enigmatic little games, or invite friends to sing,
dance, or share jokes. And the room would explode with laughter: funny, silly,
dark, and apocalyptic! At last freed from the tyranny of knowledge, beauty,
goodness, truth, and God, we would all mock and laugh at everything, mock
heroes and lovers, thinkers and politicians, scientists and thieves, kings and
sages, including UG and ourselves!
Who
was this UG? What kind of person was he? He was the most enigmatic person you
could ever meet at once kind and cruel, most loving yet stern, constantly
talking about money, seeming to 'extract' it from friends, yet most
generous in giving; seemingly abusive and punishing, yet showering affection on
the same person the next moment; utterly carefree, yet worrying about what
might happen to the person in front of him; directing people to act in specific
ways, yet instantly accepting of any outcome; demonstrating the most incisive
logic, yet making utterly contradictory statements. For a man who complained
that we are constantly preoccupied with something other than what is happening
at the moment, he endlessly talked about himself and his past. One could never
fathom UG's true intentions behind his statements or actions.
His
answers to our questions came straight like arrows, unsettling our minds. He
was well-known for striking down not only the edifices we have so carefully
built in our own minds but the foundations of human thought as a whole. UG was
truly enigmatic, subversive and revolutionary, and totally fearless.
There
was a unique energy with UG: in speech or in stillness it was constant and
vibrant, and had a profound effect on those who were around him.
And
let this be told: when UG rejected the notion of
soul or atman and declared that our search for permanence was the cause of our
suffering, he sounded like the Buddha; when he blasted all spiritual discourses
as 'poppycock' and thrashed the spiritual masters as 'misguided fools', we
thought of the fiery and abusive words of the great 9th 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...' When he spoke of 'affection'
as 'thuds' felt in the spot where the thymus gland is located, we related it to
Sri Ramana's declaration that the 'true heart' is located on the right side of
the chest. Likewise we sometimes connected his radical statements to certain
expressions or declarations in the Avadhuta Gita, Ashtavakra Gita,
the Upanishads and Zen Koans, or compared them with the teachings of J. Krishnamurti,
Nisargadatta Maharaj and even the post-modern 'deconstructionists'. We could go
on thus, making such connections and comparisons, but that did not help us to
get a handle on the mystery that was UG!
That mystery, that enigma, is no more. Once,
a couple of years back, when Mahesh Bhatt had asked him, 'UG, how would you
like to be remembered?' UG had said, 'After I am dead and gone, nothing of me
must remain inside of you or outside of you. I can certainly do a lot to see
that no establishment or institution of any kind mushrooms around me whilst I
am alive. But how do I stop all you guys from enshrining me in your brains?'
__________________________________________
UG Says
Quotable Quotes
I have no teaching. There is nothing to
preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change.
Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What
is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is
not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying.
I have no claims.
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.
My teaching, if that
is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce,
distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even
claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
My interest is to point out to you that
you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really
handicapped, I wouldn't advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to
feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those
crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That's all that I can say. 'If I
fall....' - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to
fall.
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. I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC
Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a
bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no
power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear
and not God.
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.
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.
All your experiences,
all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is
strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking
you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is
a self-centred activity.
There is nothing
there, only your relative, experiential data, your truth. There is no such
thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or
independent of our minds.
Mind or thought is not
yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your
mind and my mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind, the
totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down
from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that
thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing.
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.
Human nature is
basically violent, because thought is violent. Anything that is born out of
thought is destructive. You may cover it up with all wonderful and romantic
phrases: 'Love thy neighbour as thyself.' Don't forget that in the name of
'Love thy neighbour as thyself' millions and millions of people have died, more
than in all the recent wars put together. But we now have come to a point where
we can realize that violence is not the answer, that it is not the way to solve
human problems. So, terror seems to be the only way. I am not talking of
terrorists blowing up churches, temples, and all that kind of thing, but the
terror that if you try to destroy your neighbour you will possibly destroy
yourself. That realization has to come down to the level of the common man.
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.
I can never sit on a platform and talk. It is too artificial. It is a waste of
time to sit and discuss things in hypothetical or abstract terms. An angry man
does not sit and talk and converse pleasantly about anger; he is too angry. So
don't tell me that you are in crisis, that you are angry. Why talk of anger?
You live and die in the hope that someday, somehow, you will no longer be
angry. You are burdened with hope, and if this life seems hopeless, you invent
the next life. There are no lives to come.
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.
TELLING IT LIKE IT IS:
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.
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.
All experiences however extraordinary
they may be are in the area of sensuality.
Man cannot be anything other than what he
is. Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him.
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.
Gurus
play a social role, so do prostitutes.
By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals.
It would be more interesting to learn
from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to
function.
All I can guarantee you is that as long
as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
You eat not food but ideas. What you wear
are not clothes, but labels and names.
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.
That messy thing called 'mind'
has created many destructive things. By far the most destructive of them all is
God.
Atmospheric pollution is most
harmless when compared to the spiritual and religious pollution that have
plagued the world.
Nature is busy creating
absolutely unique individuals, where as culture has invented a single mold to
which all must conform. It is grotesque. |
