The Other Krishnamurti

The Other Krishnamurti

By Life Positive

October 2007

The late UG Krishnamurti has been a queer fish in the spiritual world about who no two people have the same opinion.

To some he is the ultimate – the only seer who sees right. To others he comes across as a cantankerous fussbudget, rejecting every received wisdom, shooting down all gurus, teachings, traditions, the concept of enlightenment, even God himself. Indeed he outdid the other Krishnamurti, Jiddu (to whom he has an eerie similitude, like a twin separated at birth – both Telugu Brahmins from Andhra Pradesh with a penchant for negating), in the ferocity of his negations.

So who was UG, really? This book, with an extremely well-written and comprehensive introduction by Mukunda Rao, his long-term friend and admirer, gives us a glimpse into his life and state of mind.

Restless and nonconformist, UG threw away his sacred thread at age 14. This was because he caught the Brahmin priests who were performing a rite for his dead mother, during which they were required to fast, sneaking into a restaurant. Nobody satisfied him. He rejected Swami Shivananda when he found that he had ‘hot pickles behind close doors’. Sweepingly, he dismissed all seers and sages including Buddha and Jesus as hypocrites, self-deluded into believing they were enlightened, and deluding others.

One may question the dismissal, but his reason for doing so is thought-provoking. ‘Everybody says, ‘Don’t get angry’ – I am angry all the time. I am full of brutal activities inside, so that is false. What these people are telling me I should be is something false, and because it is false it will falsify me.’

He even attended Krishnamurti’s talks only to scathingly dismiss his ideas and insights too. What an irony that Krishnamurti, who rejected everything and everyone himself, was in his turn, hoist by his own petard. Eventually, after giving up all search, Something did happen to UG. He calls it a ‘calamity’ and the experience was odd enough. It happened, ironically, at a lecture by J Krishnamurti where he described the enlightened state: ‘In that silence there is no mind; there is action’. It occurred to UG that JK was actually describing his state!

It took him about three years to stabilise into his state, about which he talks a great deal in the book, fascinating to the seeker. ‘When there is no coordinator, there is no linking of sensations, there is no translating of sensations….”

He also absolutely refuses to associate this state with known concepts like enlightenment. He says it is not shunya or the void or anything else described by earlier sages.

So is he talking about a new state, or is he simply testifying to the inability of language to convey the state? His own followers believe that the former is true. Says Mukunda Rao, ‘Truly, UG brought something utterly new and revolutionary into the world, into our consciousness, the implication and impact of which cannot be known today.’

But I wonder. Can the state really change from era to era, and seer to seer if it is the original, unconditional state? Unlikely, I would say. I would hazard a guess that the reason why the two Krishnamurtis so vehemently protected their experiences from being linked to what happened in the past, is because they would immediately become concepts and not what they are – newly minted and original truth experiences, not meant to be converted into thought.

Read the book. It might mess with your mind – and then again, it might free you of it.

- Suma Varughese