“The end of illusion is the end of you.”
U.G. Krishnamurti
The words of U.G. Krishnamurti: Part I
There’s a lot I really like about U.G. Krishnamurti, and there are times when I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The excerpts provided below and in two later chapters represent the overlap between his views and mine. I may have taken some of it a little out of context, but the point here is to try to convey tricky and often paradoxical ideas, as well as to hold up the state of the realized being for observation, and I think these selections do that.
For the sincere seeker, to be challenged is to be entertained—they are two sides of the same coin—and whatever else he may be, U. G. Krishnamurti is challenging and entertaining.
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.
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.
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.
Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you’. There is nothing there inside you other than that.
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.
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.
Who am I to give it to you? You have what I have. We are all at 25 Sannidhi Street, and you are asking me “Where is 25 Sannidhi Street?” I say you are there. Not that I know I am there.
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.
The abstractions that you are throwing at me, I am not interested in. Is there anything behind the abstractions?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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