The whole chemistry of the body changes, so it begins to function in its own natural way. That means everything that is poisoned (I deliberately use that word) and contaminated by the culture is thrown out of the system. It is thrown out of your system and then that consciousness of life (or whatever you want to call it) expresses itself and functions in a very natural way. The whole thing has to be thrown out of your system; otherwise, if you don’t believe in God, you become an atheist and you teach, preach and proselytize atheism. But this individual is neither a theist, nor an atheist, nor an agnostic; he is what he is.
The question has disappeared. The whole thing is finished for me……. This non-event caused a sudden explosion inside, blasting, as it were, every cell, every nerve and every gland in my body. And with that ‘explosion’, the illusion that there is continuity of thought, that there is a centre, an ‘I’ linking up the thoughts, was not there any more.
Until the sales pitch of enlightenment is thrown out of your system by the simple confrontation with its futility, it will continually mislead you, and once it is kicked out, you will see that there is no need for it. What was baffling and convincing about the case of UG was that it appeared to have fallen away without his volition. He didn’t know how it happened that he gave up.
…..I …. wandered over to the Juhu beach area, supposed to be an upscale neighbourhood …..wasnt the same as a walk in an upscale New York neighbourhood. Here poverty seeped between all cracks.
It astonished me that whole days could go by in this way as I sat in that room of strangers, all of us suspended in the air like dust motes, floating carelessly in a shaft of light called U. G. Krishnamurti.
‘Red bag, table, chair, hard, soft! That is you, nothing else. You are a collection of memories, definitions. You never once look without telling yourself what it is you are looking at!’
‘You are all looking for happiness without one minute of unhappiness. That is the ultimate search, whether or not you seek it in a bar or in a temple makes no difference.’
‘Don’t quote the source, you are original!’
You are conditioning your mind through all this lingo – that is all it is necessary for you to see.
Why do you bother about those fellows? They are dead. You should pitch them in the river. And yet you don’t; you keep listening to someone (it makes no difference whom), and you keep hoping that somehow, tomorrow or the next day, by listening more and more, you will get off the merry-go-around.
We met for dinner and I pressed for clarification about what was happening with the Californian. She assured me there was absolutely nothing happening, then suggested I spend the night since it was already late. I accepted her offer and restarted the engines of misery.
To put it in the boxing ring phrase, you have to ‘throw in the towel,’ be totally helpless. No one can help you, and you cannot help yourself.
Yogini was living next door …..we escaped to her room and went for walks. We spent hours wandering over the fields of the Bernese Oberland, which really is a most beautiful place. On one walk she told me about her favourite movie, where the heroine married men and then murdered them for their money. Nice. I lived with similar fantasies.
The group dissolved into the night like tattered bits of wet tissue paper.
Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the ‘you’ does not want to let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this ‘you’ is the thinking.
The consciousness which is functioning in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same.
The structure which is always thinking of every possible situation, envisaging every situation, how to be prepared, to deal with each and every kind of situation that might arise during the course of your life, is a thing that has no meaning, because every situation is quite different.
‘If you are not thinking in terms of right and wrong, you will never do wrong. As long as you are thinking of right and wrong, you will always do wrong.’
Sri Ramakrishna was an uneducated villager who used the extremely vulgar expressions of his village Bengali. UG once told Guha, a Bengali, to read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna cover to cover in the original language, so that he could see for himself how the man spoke. UG used to point out that the translators had cleaned up the text.
…..One could sense that UG actually held Ramakrishna in high regard
…..I was told he used to be full of praise for Ramana Maharshi and Sri Ramakrishna. Now he expressed nothing but contempt for them. In fact, he was doing everything in his power to destroy the images people were building in their heads about such people.
‘UG, we all saw you were asleep during the conversation. How do you explain your memory of it?’
‘Sir, this body is totally relaxed. The recording goes on all the time no matter what. There is no UG there to focus on anything so it all comes in and is recorded. Even in you the recording is going on all the time, but you are all the time practicing selectively and censorship. Since there is no UG here, there is no editing and I have much more energy than you do. …..Also this body can hear even while it is what you call sleeping.’
Listening to other people is what you have been doing all your life. It is the cause of your unhappiness.
‘If there is only one thing you want, just one, you will surely get it.’
Man cannot become man as long as he follows somebody.
It may seem even stranger to make a note of it but his penis really was like that of a child, which he said was a side-effect of his calamity.
A few times he said to me: ‘Look, sir, its useless! You mean to say I could have sex with that? I never, never would have expected this to happen, you cant imagine; it’s the end of you as you know yourself!’
It was chilling to see the physical evidence of that. Not exactly the image of enlightenment bandied about in the marketplace. The purely physical process he described was a rare and painful mutation that finished him, not to mention these side-effects.
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 ….
……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 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 and 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 am sitting or standing. There is no body.
‘The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.’ It was one of his favourite lines to quote from the Bible.
‘Burn it to the ground, sir! See what comes up in the ashes.’
UG used to say he learned more from his newborn son in the first two years of his life than from any spiritual or secular teacher.
There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labeling brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation.
‘I can sit here in this chair forever. I am never bored. You people are bored because you think there is something more interesting happening somewhere else.’
‘If I could give you just a glimpse of this, I’m telling you, you wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole!’
He condensed his teaching into two words: ‘Your job in life is to shut up!’
The culture has made it impossible for the personality to express itself in its own way, because the culture has different ideas.
‘I don’t know what to do, I am helpless, totally helpless’ – as long as you think you are totally helpless, you will depend on some outside agency.
‘The ego is nothing but the conflict between right and wrong, good and bad. It is an abstraction, it does not exist.’
You separate yourself from that awareness and create an entity which is not there actually.
…..that quote I later found out was attributed to the renunciate Shiva:
On whomsoever my grace falls, he will be robbed and stripped naked and left standing in the streets.
Geissman also pointed out that UG was a product of a tradition that specifies that when you come into something of your own it is your duty to destroy what has gone before you.
I am all the time trying to knock off the reference point.
Nisargadatta had a brilliant way of putting it: ‘Spirituality is nothing more than understanding this play of consciousness – try and find out what this fraud is by seeking its source.’
An English lady asked him boldly: ‘But UG, don’t you have any powers? Couldn’t you give someone a push in some way?’
Her question reminded me of UG’s question to Ramana Maharshi, ‘What you have, can you give it to me?’ His answer was actually not so different:
‘Yes I have, but this is a very violent thing. I’m telling you, you wouldn’t want this thing!’ Then a pause: ‘It is not like a dove descending on your head!’
‘The desire for permanence in every area is the cause of human misery.’
When once it throws out everything that has been put in there by your filthy culture, this body will function in an extraordinarily intelligent way. It can take care of everything.
The native intelligence of the human body is amazing. That is all it needs to survive in any dangerous situation in life.
An enlightened man can never have sex because he cannot reproduce another one like him. Once an interviewer on television asked m, ‘Cant we take your sperm and make a woman pregnant?’ I answered, ‘There is no sperm any more.’ Anandamayi stopped having her periods when she was twenty-one, after whatever had happened to her. She was a nice lady. She was a genuine article.
‘This body is a solidified imagination.’
A couple of times I went down and sat in his apartment around dusk. There were disembodied presences floating through the place, as if looking for him. I’m not prone to sensing that sort of thing, but it was undeniable. They were just there and then after a couple of days it stopped. ‘Just because you don’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t there.’
‘The only thing that will happen around me is that people’s burden will be lightened a little, that is all.’
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