U. G. Krishnamurti
No Way Out
e-artnow, 2021
Contact: [email protected]
EAN: 4064066383039
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. The unrational philosophy of U.G.Krishnamurti
Chapter 2. Nothing to be transformed
Chapter 3. What is the meaning of life?
Chapter 4. You Invent Your Reality
Chapter 5. Religious thinking is responsible for Man's tragedy
Chapter 6. Seeking Strengthens Separation
Chapter 7. What Kind of a Human Being Do You Want?
Chapter 8. The Build-Up of Sex and Love
Chapter 9. Leave the Body Alone
Chapter 10. It's Terror, Not Love That Keeps Us Together
Chapter 1.
The unrational philosophy of U.G.Krishnamurti
Dr.T.R.Raghunath
Department of Philosophy
McMaster University
Canada
I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine. —U.G.
Swami Without a Robe The Universe is your Ashram the planet your Stupa Humanity your adherents Truth your God Love your being Dissolving your teaching Nothing your self as you melt into all.
U.G.Krishnamurti is well-known in spiritual circles as an anomalous, enigmatic, and iconoclastic figure. He has been variously and aptly described as the "Un-Guru", as the "Raging Sage", and also as the "Don Rickles of the Guru Set". The man is a walking Rudra who hurls verbal missiles into the very heart of the guarded citadels of human culture. He spares no tradition however ancient, no institution however established, and no practice however sanctimonious. Never have the foundations of human civilization been subjected to such devastating criticism as by this seventy-three year old man called U.G.
Unlike J. Krishnamurti, U.G. does not give "talks" to the general public, or "interviews" to VIP'S. He keeps no journals or notebooks and makes no "commentaries" on living. There is an unusual but authentic atmosphere of informality around U.G. You don't have to beg the favor of some pompous "devotee" or "worker" to meet him and talk with him. U.G.'s doors, wherever he happens to be, are always open to visitors. In striking contrast to most contemporary gurus, U.G. does not appear to discriminate between his visitors on grounds of wealth, position, caste, race, religion, or nationality.
Although he is 73, he continues to travel around the world in response to invitations from his friends. His "migratory" movements over the globe have earned him a rather devoted circle of friends in many parts of the world including China (one of the very few countries he has not visited), where translations of his best-seller, The Mystique of Enlightenment, first published in 1982, are in circulation. A second book, Mind is a Myth, published in 1988, is also very popular with an audience disenchanted with the Guru set. A third book, Thought is Your Enemy, has been published recently. These books contain edited transcriptions of conversations numerous people have had with U.G. all over the world. It is striking that U.G. does not claim copyright over these books. He goes so far as to declare that "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." I doubt if this has any precedent in history. U.G.'s ways are like nature's ways. Nature does not claim copyright over its creations. Neither does U.G.
U.G. does not claim to have any "spiritual teachings." He has pointed out that a spiritual teaching presupposes the possibility of a change or transformation in individuals, and offers techniques or methods for bringing it about. "But I do not have any such teaching because I question the very idea of transformation. I maintain that there is nothing to be transformed or changed in you. So, naturally, I do not have any arsenal of meditative techniques or practices," he asserts. Although there may be no "spiritual teaching", in the conventional sense, it seems quite undeniable that there is a "philosophy" in his ever-growing corpus of utterances, a "philosophy" which resists assimilation into established philosophical traditions, Eastern or Western, and one which is certainly worth examining. U.G. is important enough not to be left to J. Krishnamurti's "widows" and Bhagwan Rajneesh's former "divorcés" (to use U.G.'s terms)! He deserves critical attention from the philosophical community, particularly in India, where the traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
The term "unrational" best describes the temper of U.G.'s philosophical approach. He is not interested in offering solutions to problems. His concern is to point out that the solution is the problem! As he often observes, "The questions are born out of the answers that we already have." The source of the questions is the answers we have picked up from our tradition. And those answers are not genuine answers. If the answers were genuine, the questions would not persist in an unmodified or modified form. But the questions persist. Despite all the answers in our tradition we are still asking questions about God, the meaning of life, and so on. Therefore, U.G. maintains, the answers are the problem. The real answer, if there is one, consists in the dissolution of both the answers and the questions inherited from tradition.
U.G.'s approach is also "unrational" in another sense. He does not use logical arguments to deal with questions. He employs what I call the method of resolution of the question into its constitutive psychological demands. He then shows that this psychological demand is without a foundation. Consider, for example, the question of God. U.G. is not interested in logical arguments for or against God. What he does is to resolve the question into its underlying constitutive demand for permanent pleasure or happiness. U.G. now points out that this demand for permanent happiness is without foundation because there is no permanence. Further, the psychological demand for permanent happiness has no physiological foundation in the sense that the body cannot handle permanence. As U.G. puts it:
God or Enlightenment is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, and all that stuff are just variations of the same theme: permanent happiness. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long; it would be destroyed. Wanting a fictitious permanent state of happiness is actually a serious neurological problem.
The problem of death would be another example. U.G. brushes aside speculations about the "soul" and "after-life". He maintains that there is nothing inside of us that will reincarnate after death. "There is nothing inside of you but fear," he says. His concern