Remembering U.G. Krishnamurti

- Remembering him
- His life
- Quotes from U.G,

 

U.G. Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends and admirers all
over the world, is no more. The end came on 22 March 2007 at 2.30 pm at the villa of his friend, in Vallecrosia, Italy.
As per UG's advice, with no rituals or funeral rites, the cremation was carried out by Mahesh Bhatt 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.'

 

                His life

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. 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

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.