U.G. KRISHNAMURTI
Question: A lot of things you have said sound like stuff I have read by U.G. Krishnamurti….
Answer: I’ve read a lot of things from U.G. – no relationship to J. Krishnamurti – that I like, too. There are other things I’ve read where he seems to contradict himself a lot, things I disagree with, or maybe things I don’t totally understand. But here’s a sample from this “anti-guru” of what I like….
“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.”
“The holy men are all phonies – they are telling me only what is there in the books. That I can read – ‘Do the same again and again’ – that I don’t want. Experiences I don’t want. They are trying to share an experience with me. I’m not interested in experience. As far as experience goes, for me there is no difference between the religious experience and the sex experience or any other experience; the religious experience is like any other experience. I am not interested in experiencing Brahman; I am not interested in experiencing reality; I am not interested in experiencing truth. They might help others; but they cannot help me. I’m not interested in doing more of the same; what I have done is enough.”
“I had arrived at a point where I said to myself ‘Buddha deluded himself and deluded others. All those teachers and saviors of mankind were damned fools – they fooled themselves – so I’m not interested in this kind of thing anymore,’ so it went out of my system completely.”
“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.”
* * *
“They are all liars, fops, fakes and cheaters in the world, who claim they have searched for and told the truth! Alright, you want to find out for yourself what this truth is. Can you find out? Can you capture the truth and hold it and say ‘This is truth?’ Whether you accept or reject, it’s the same: it depends on your personal prejudices and predilections. So if you want to discover the truth for yourself, whatever it is, you are not in a position to either accept or reject. You assume that there is such a thing as truth, you assume that there is such a thing as reality (ultimate or otherwise) – it is that assumption that is creating the problem, the suffering, for you. Look here, I want to experience God, truth, reality or what you will, so I must understand the nature of the experiencing structure inside of me before I deal with all that. I must look at the instrument I am using. You are trying to capture something that cannot be captured in terms of your experiencing structure, so this experiencing structure must not be there in order that the other thing may come in. What that is, you will never know. You will never know the truth, because it’s a movement. It’s a movement! You cannot capture it, you cannot contain it, you cannot express it. It’s not a logically ascertained premise that we are interested in. So, it has to be your discovery. What good is my experience? We have thousands and thousands of experiences recorded – they haven’t helped you. It’s the hope that keeps you going – ‘If I follow this for another ten years, fifteen years, maybe one of these days I will….’ because hope is the structure.”
“I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize – that’s the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize – and you say to yourself ‘What the hell have I been doing all my life?!’ That blasts you.”
“Nothing. That’s the discovery. So-called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing – ‘Why the hell have I wasted all my life?’ It’s a shocking thing because it’s going to destroy every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones. I tell you, it’s not going to be an easy thing, it’s not going to be handed over to you on a gold platter. You have to become completely disillusioned, then the truth begins to express itself in its own way. I have discovered that it is useless to try to discover the truth. The search for truth is, I have discovered, absurd, because it’s a thing which you cannot capture, contain, or give expression to.”
* * *
“You see, my difficulty with the people who come to see me is this: they don’t seem to be able to understand the way I am functioning, and I don’t seem to be able to understand the way they are functioning. How can we carry on a dialogue? Both of us have to stop. How can there be a dialogue between us both?”
“I am not trying to sell anything here. It is impossible for you to simulate this. This is a thing that has happened outside the field, the area, in which I expected, dreamed and wanted change, so I don’t call this a ‘change’. I really don’t know what has happened to me. What I am telling you is the way I am functioning. There seems to be some difference between the way you are functioning and the way I am functioning, but basically there can’t be any difference. How can there be any difference between you and me? There can’t be; but from the way we are trying to express ourselves, there seems to be. I have the feeling that there is some difference, and what that difference is is all that I am trying to understand. So, this is the way I am functioning.”
“Put it simply. I can’t follow a very complex structure – I have that difficulty, you see. Probably I’m a low-grade moron or something, I don’t know – I can’t follow conceptual thinking. You can put it in very simple words. What exactly is the question? Because the answer is there; I don’t have to give the answer. What I usually do is restructure the question, rephrase it in such a way that the question appears senseless to you.”
“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.”
“It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner. I am not trying to play with words. You know the answer, and you want a confirmation from me, or you want some kind of light to be thrown on your problem, or you’re curious – if for any of these reasons you want to carry on a dialogue with me, you are just wasting your time; you’ll have to go to a scholar, a pundit, a learned man – they can throw a lot of light on such questions. That’s all that I am interested in this kind of a dialogue: to help you to formulate your own question. Try and formulate a question which you can call your own.”
* * *
“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.”
“You see, people usually imagine that so-called enlightenment, self-realization, God-realization or what you will (I don’t like to use these words) is something ecstatic, that you will be permanently happy, in a blissful state all the time – these are the images they have of those people…. There’s no relationship at all between the image you have of that, and what actually is the situation…. That’s why I very often tell people ‘If I could give you some glimpse of what this is all about, you wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole, a ten foot pole.’ You would run away from this because this is not what you want. What you want does not exist, you see.”
“We don’t want to be free from fear. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear.”
“You see, the search takes you away from yourself – it is in the opposite direction – it has absolutely no relation.”
“The search is always in the wrong direction, so all that you consider very profound, all that you consider sacred, is a contamination in that consciousness. You may not like the word ‘contamination’, but all that you consider sacred, holy and profound is a contamination.”
“Understanding is a state of being where the question isn’t there any more; there is nothing there that says ‘now I understand!’ – that’s the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.”
“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. 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.”
* * *
“We have very strange ideas in the religious field – torture this body, sleep on nails, control, deny things – all kinds of funny things. What for? Why deny certain things? I don’t know. What is the difference between a man going to a bar for a glass of beer, and a man going to a temple and repeating the name of Rama? I don’t see any basic difference…. I am not against escapes, but whether you escape through this avenue or that avenue, an escape is an escape. You are escaping from yourself…. What you do or do not do does not matter at all. Your practice of holiness, your practice of virtue – that is socially valuable for the society, but that has nothing to do with this.”
“By conserving sex energy, you are not going to improve yourself in any way. It is too silly and too absurd. Why have they laid so much stress on that? Abstinence, continence, celibacy, is not going to help to put you in this state, in this situation.”
“You don’t know what is good; you know only what is good for you. That’s all you are interested in, that’s a fact. Everything centers around that. All your art and reason centers around that. I am not being cynical. That’s a fact. Nothing wrong with it. I’m not saying anything against it. The situations change, but it is that which is guiding you through all situations. I’m not saying it is wrong you see. If it is not so, something must be wrong with you. As long as you are operating in the field of what they call the ‘pair of opposites’, good and bad, you will always be choosy, in every situation, that is all – you cannot help doing that.”
“A ‘moral man’ is a ‘chicken’. A ‘moral man’ is a frightened man, a chicken-hearted man – that is why he practices morality and sits in judgment over others. And his righteous indignation! A moral man (if there is one) will never, never talk of morality or sit in judgment on the morals of others. Never!”
“Questioning my actions before and after is over for me. The moral question – ‘I should have acted this way; I should not have acted that way. I should not have said this’ – none of that is there for me. I have no regrets, no apologies; whatever I am doing is automatic. In a given situation I am not capable of acting in any other way. I don’t have to rationalize, think logically – nothing – that is the one and only action in that particular situation.”
* * *
“You are asking me ‘Has anything any purpose?’ Look here, a lot of meanings and purposes have been given to you. Why are you still looking for the meaning of life, the purpose of life? Everybody has talked of the meaning of life and the purpose of life – everybody. Answers have been given by the saviours, saints and sages of mankind – you have thousands of them in India – and yet today you are still asking the same question, ‘Has life any purpose or meaning?’ Either you are not satisfied or you are not really interested in finding out for yourself. I submit that you are not really interested, because it’s a frightening thing. It’s a very frightening thing. Is there any such thing as truth? Have you ever asked that question for yourself? Has anybody told the truth?”
“In a way, the whole of life is like a great big dream. I am looking at you, but I really don’t know anything about you – this is a dream, a dream world – there is no reality to it at all. When the experiencing structure is not manipulating consciousness (or whatever you want to call it), then the whole of life is a great big dream, from the experiential point of view – not from this point of view here; but from your point of view. You see, you give reality to things – not only to objects, but also to feelings and experiences – and think that they are real. When you don’t translate them in terms of your accumulated knowledge, they are not things; you really don’t know what they are.”
“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. As long as you depend upon somebody, some authority, you are not an individual. Individual uniqueness cannot express itself as long as there is dependence.”
“My life story goes up to a point, and then it stops – there is no more biography after that. 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. I’m finished with the whole business.”
* * *
I said at the beginning of this chapter “there are other things I’ve read where he seems to contradict himself a lot, things I disagree with, or maybe things I don’t totally understand.” Apparently U.G. agrees….
“I am always negating what I am saying. I make a statement, but that statement is not expressing all that is being said, so I negate it. You say I am contradicting myself. I am not contradictory at all. I negate the first statement, the second statement, and all the other statements – that is why sometimes it sounds very contradictory. I am negating it all the time, not with the idea of arriving at any point; just negating. There is no purpose in my talking.”1