The Mystique of
Enlightenment
The Radical Ideas of
U. G. Krishnamurti
Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti
(Sentient Publications)

All gurus are welfare organizations providing petty experiences to their followers. The guru game is a profitable industry.

---

The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man...

--- U. G. Krishnamurti

No, no --- not that Krishnamurti, "World Teacher," "The Light of the East," all that nonsense. No, this is another one, a different one, a far different one, a guy who "hates" enlightenment, one who says, "You see one holy man, you've seen them all."

He has met the other Krishnamurti, J. Krishnamurti ... spent seven years with him and says, finally: "His teaching did not interest me at all." At the end, he said to "J,"

"What the hell are we doing? I've wasted seven years. Goodbye. I don't want to see you again." Then I walked out.

This Krishnamurti married, was prosperous, had children --- and one day he left his family so he could let his soul "wither." He ultimately found the Truth. Where? In what he calls "a strip tease joint," where he realized, at age forty, that he

didn't know whether I was the dancer or whether there was some other dancer dancing on the stage ... There was no division; there was nobody who was looking at the dancer. The question of whether I was the dancer or whether there was a dancer out there on the stage puzzled me. This kind of peculiar experience of the absence of division between me and the dancer puzzled me and bothered me for some time.

Can you imagine getting enlightened in the Casino de Paris?

He refers to finding this Truth as "a calamity." With his "declutched mind," he went through shaking, wringing, pain, helplessness, thinking there were bugs in his bed, months of agony, every cell changing, clanging. He found himself a man/woman, with a fully formed breast on the left side, all his chakras swollen, painful.

"It took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own," he says. This change --- this excruciatingly painful change --- cannot be prepared for, cannot be sought, comes unasked and unwanted.

We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.

--- U. G. Krishnamurti

Most of all, he tells us, enlightenment should not be of interest to anyone. Why? This spiritual Indian Yoga/mysticism business is "poppycock." What happens in a state of real change, "is a primordial consciousness, untouched by thought."

You have a feeling that there is a "cameraman" who is directing the eyes ... Movement attracts them, or brightness or a color that stands out from whatever is around it. There is no "I" looking. Mountains, flowers, trees, cows all look at me.

There is nothing inside us, Krishnamurti claims--- heroism, wisdom, virtue, insight, vision. No, there is nothing inside all of us but fear; and meditation leads nowhere but to the looney bin.

Books are meaningless, he tells us. Reading his words is futile. Get it? We are reading a book of a man who says reading a book about him and what he says is futile, a waste of time, useless. And when he is asked pregnant questions like "What will happen after death?" he responds,

All questions about death are meaningless, especially for a young person like you. You have not even lived your life. Why do you ask that silly question? ... Only a person who is not living asks "What will happen after my death?" You are not living. First live your life, and when the time comes ... Let us leave it at that. I am not interested in that kind of philosophy.

This one is great. He can't stand the guru stuff. He is the anarcho-syndicalist of the mystical world, the Kropotkin of the New Age, the Bakunin of all that touchy-feely nonsense.

A breath of fresh air? No, more: he's a hurricane of no-nonsense, a firestorm of indifference to this bliss crap.

If you think you are on The Way, read him. You have everything to gain, nothing to lose but your arrogance. The only thing you can win is the chance to forget your pretence of Being on the Path.

--- Deb Das

The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.

--- U. G. Krishnamurti