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U.G. 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. U.G. 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, U.G. 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 U.G. 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, U.G. 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 J.K.'s philosophy, calling it a
"bogus chartered journey."
During this period, U.G. 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, U.G. 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 U.G.
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, U.G. gave his first public talk at the Indian
Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. 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
U.G., 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 U.G. 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 U.G. 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 U.G. and ourselves!
Who was this U.G.? 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 U.G.'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.
U.G. was truly enigmatic, subversive and revolutionary, and
totally fearless.
There was a unique energy with U.G.: 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 U.G. 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
realisation." 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 U.G.!
That mystery, that enigma, is no more. Once, a couple of
years back, when Mahesh Bhatt had asked him, "U.G., how
would you like to be remembered?" U.G. 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?"
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REMEMBERING
U.G. KRISHNAMURTI