From ‘UG Krishnamurti a life’ by Mahesh Bhatt

‘A real guru, if there is one, frees you from himself.’



‘When you know nothing you say a lot, when you know something there is nothing to say.’



I had heard intriguing stories about U.G.’s walks with king cobras …..U.G. replied: The cobra would only strike if it sensed fear. A frightened being emits odours …..



In the year 1961, U.G. landed in London, alone and penniless. ‘There was no will to do anything. I was like a leaf blown here, there and everywhere.’ His friends saw him going headlong on a downhill course. But, according to U.G. all that he did at that time seemed perfectly natural to him. The mystic phrase, ‘the dark night of the soul’ has been used to describe those years of U.G.’s wanderings. U.G. disagrees. In his view, ‘There was no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling urges, no poetic climaxes but just a simple withering away of the will.’



Then one day, he had a very strange experience in the meditation room.

…..in my mind there was nothing – there was only blankness – when I felt something very strange: there was some kind of movement inside 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 counterclockwise direction…….I was a finished man. Somebody was feeding me, somebody was taking care of me, there was no thought of the morrow. ….



‘The search must come to an end before anything can happen’



The question disappeared. The whole thing was finished for me and that was all. From then on, never did I say to myself, ‘Now I have the answer to all those questions.’ …. The question disappeared, finished. It is not emptiness; it is not blankness; it is not the void; it is not any of those things; the question disappeared suddenly and that’s all.



Everything in the head had tightened …. These vasanas (past impressions) or whatever you call them, they do try to show their head sometimes, but then the brain cells are so ‘tight’ that the vasanas have no opportunity to fool around there any more.



…..following the ‘explosion’…. The changes began. For seven days, every day a change occurred. U.G. discovered that his skin had become extremely soft, the blinking of his eyes had stopped and his senses of taste, smell and hearing had undergone a change.



He says he no longer spends his time in reverie, worry, conceptualization and other kinds of thinking that most people do when they are alone. His mind is only engaged when it is needed…. When it is not needed, there is no mind there, there is no thought. There is only life.



‘The uniqueness of the individual cannot express itself because of the stranglehold of the experiences of others.’



U.G. explains that thought had controlled his body to such an extent that when that control loosened, the whole metabolism went agog….. Certain hormonal changes started occurring in his body. Now he didn’t know whether he was a man or a woman. Suddenly there was a breast growing on the left side of his chest. It took three years for this body to finally fall into a new rhythm of its own.



Since there is nobody here who uses thought as a self-protective mechanism, thought burns itself up. It undergoes combustion, ionization. Thought is, after all, a vibration. So, when this ionization of thought takes place, it throws out, and sometimes it covers the whole body with, an ash-like substance…. There is tremendous heat in the body as a result of this.



The incredible physiological changes continued to occur for years. U.G. was so bewildered by what had happened to him that he did not speak for a year after the ‘calamity.’ He had to practically learn to think and talk all over again, so complete was his mutation. After a year or so, he regained most of his communicative powers. …..This thing happened without my volition and despite my religious background. And that is a miracle. It cannot be used as a model and duplicated by others.



….the problem lies in our psyche. We function in our thought-sphere and not in our biology. The separative thought structure, which is the totality of man’s thoughts, feelings, experiences and so on ….is creating the disturbance. That is what is responsible for our misery; that’s what continues the battle that is going on there…..This interloper, the thought sphere, has created your entire value system. The body is not in the least interested in values, much less a value system. It is only concerned with intelligent moment-to-moment survival, and nothing else. Spiritual ‘values’ have no meaning to it. When through some miracle or chance you are freed from the hold of thought and culture, you are left with the body’s natural functions and nothing else. It then functions without the interference of thought.



The hungry dog chews on a lean, dry bone; and doing so hurts his gums and they bleed. The poor dog imagines that the blood that he’s savouring comes from the bone and not from himself … Whatever you experience is created by you; and these experiences, however intense and great they may be, do not last.



‘I go to the Master, not to hear him speak, but to watch him tie his shoelaces,’ said a Zen pupil.



‘You think when you don’t want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don’t think!’



The body handles all your despair, all your frustrations in its own way. It doesn’t need any help from your intellect. There is no pain or pleasure that can take permanent root in this body. Your pleasures and pains have a permanent existence only in that thing called the experiencing structure, which is your intellect.



I begin to discover that I am, and will always be, a stranger in the story of my life.