Who is UG Krishnamurti (2024)

Indian Philosophy

(Note: This is an essay written 30 years ago by Dr. T.R. Raghunath that I have edited significantly and added more context in many instances. UG offers a fresh and unique perspective on both the theory and practice of philosophy or spirituality that challenges all the established wisdom of both the East and the West. This is a summary of all his key radical insights that can be of great help to many seekers and students alike).

UG Krishnamurti is well-known among spiritual circles as an anomalous, enigmatic and iconoclastic figure. Hurling 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. Unlike his more famous namesake Jiddu Krishnamurti, UG did not give any talks, keep any journals or write any commentaries on living. It was a very informal yet authentic atmosphere around UG. You didn’t have to beg the favor of some pompous devotee or trustee to meet and talk with him. UG’s doors, wherever he happened to be, were always open to visitors, with no discrimination on the grounds of wealth, class, race, religion, or nationality.

Books containing edited transcriptions of conversations numerous people have had with UG include “The Mystique of Enlightenment” and “Mind is a Myth.” Just as nature does not claim copyright over its creations, UG did not claim any copyright over these books either. Instead he went on to declare, “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.”

UG did not claim to have any “spiritual teachings.” Instead he 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 he maintained that there is no permanent entity or self to be transformed and therefore dismissed all teachings with their arsenal of meditations and practices. Although there may be no “teaching”, in the conventional sense, it seems quite undeniable that there is a “philosophy” in his corpus of utterances, which resists assimilation into established philosophical traditions, Eastern or Western, and one that is certainly worth examining.

He was not interested in offering solutions to problems. His concern was to point out that the solution is the problem! As he often observed, “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, UG maintained that 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.

He did not use logical arguments to deal with questions. He instead resolved the question into its constitutive psychological demands. And then showed that these psychological demands are without a foundation. Consider, for example, the question of God. UG was not interested in logical arguments for or against God. What he did is to resolve the question into its underlying constitutive demand for permanent pleasure or happiness and then pointed out that this demand for permanent happiness is absurd 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 UG put 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. UG brushed aside speculations about the “soul” and “after-life”. He maintained that there is nothing that will reincarnate after death, pointing out, “There is nothing inside of you but fear”. His concern was to point out that the demand for the continuity which underlies questions about death is due to the “experiencer” who has no basis:

Your experiencing structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like, it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs knowledge, a similar past experience it can call upon for reference. You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non-existence.

UG also repudiated Western philosophers such as Aristotle when he declared, “Whoever said that man was a rational being deluded himself and deluded us all.” He maintained that the driving force of human action is not rationality, but power which is interestingly similar to what 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserted. In fact UG held that rationality is itself an instrument of power. The rationalist approach is based on faith in the ability of thought to transform the human condition. UG contended that this faith in thought is misplaced. According to him, thought is a divisive and ultimately a destructive instrument. It is only interested in its own continuity and turns everything into a means of its own perpetuation. It can only function in terms of a division between the so-called self or ego and the world. And this division between an illusory self and an opposed world is ultimately destructive because it results in the aggrandizement of the “self” at the expense of everything else. That is why everything born of thought is harmful in one way or another. So thought is not the instrument which can transform our condition. But neither did UG point to some spiritual faculty such as intuition or faith as the saving instrument. He dismissed intuition as nothing more than a form of subtle and refined thought. As for faith, it is just a form of hope without any foundation.

What UG did emphasize is the natural intelligence of the living organism. The acquired “intelligence” of the intellect is no match to this natural intelligence. It is this intelligence which is operative in the extraordinarily complex systems of the body. One has only to examine the immune system to comprehend the nature of this innate intelligence of the living body. UG maintained that this native intelligence of the body is unrelated to the intellect. Therefore it cannot be used or directed to solve the problems created by thought. It is not interested in the machinations of thought.
Thought is the enemy of this innate intelligence of the body. Thought is inimical to the harmonious functioning of the body because it turns everything into a movement of pleasure. This is the way it ensures its own continuity. The pursuit of permanence is also another way in which thought becomes inimical to the harmonious functioning of the body. According to UG, the demand for pleasure and permanence destroys the sensitivity of the body in the long run. The body is not interested in permanence. Its nervous system cannot handle permanent states, pleasurable or painful. But thought has projected the existence of permanent states of peace, bliss, or ecstasy in order to maintain its continuity. There is thus a fundamental conflict between the demands of the “mind” or thought and the functioning of the body.

This conflict between thought and the body cannot be resolved by thought. Any attempt by thought to deal with this conflict only aggravates the problem. What must come to an end is the distorting interference of the self-perpetuating mechanism of thought. And this cannot, obviously, be achieved by that very mechanism. UG maintained that all techniques and practices to end or control thought are futile because they are themselves the products of thought and the means of its perpetuation.

The rationalist approach is also committed to the concept of causality. UG rejected causality as a shibboleth of a confused mind. He maintained that events are actually disconnected, and it is thought which connects them by means of the concept of causality. He maintained that all phenomena are acausal. This led him to reject not only the notion of a creator of the universe, but also the hypothesis of creation itself including scientific theories such as Big Bang. He maintained that the universe has no cause, no beginning, and no end. Interestingly, theoretical physics now also has come around to this view that the cycle of time is infinite.

While the Buddhists also reject the notion that the world had a beginning, they still subscribe to the view that all phenomena have causes. UG, by contrast, rejected this view. Of course, UG is not a Buddhist. He rejected the four noble truths, the eight-fold path, the goal of Nirvana, and all the methods of Buddhist meditation. He also denounced the Buddha for being the forefather of all the mischief of the missionaries by asking his followers to propagate the “dhamma” to the four corners of the earth.

UG’s total dismissal of causality and thereby all notions of creation, dissolution, seeking and gaining wisdom or attaining liberation through meditation etc. are most closely echoed by the ancient non-dual teacher Gaudapāda who famously declared in Māndukya Upanishad (2.32):

There is no dissolution, no creation, none in bondage, none aspiring for wisdom, no seeker of liberation and none liberated. This is the absolute truth.

UG maintained that there is no entity called “self” independent of the thought process. There is no thinker, but only thinking. We assume that there must be a “thinker”, an entity that is thinking, but we have no way of knowing this. There is only a movement of thought. UG did not acknowledge any distinction between thought and feeling or emotion. Even perception and sensation are permeated by thought. His use of the phrase “movement of thought” is thus quite extensive in its meaning. UG accorded a central role to memory which conditions the movement of thought.

In a masterly stroke of negative dialectic, UG pointed out that there is nothing like observation or understanding of thought because there is no subject or observer independent of it. The division between thought and an independent subject or observer is an illusion created by that very thought. What we have is just another process of thought about “thought”. UG therefore dismissed all talk of observation or awareness of one’s own thought process as absolute balderdash.

In UG’s ontology, there are no entities like mind, soul, psyche, and self. “The ‘I’ has no other status than the grammatical,” insisted UG. It is just a first-person singular pronoun, a convention and convenience of speech. “The question, `Who am I?’ is an idiotic question,” remarked UG apropos Ramana Maharshi’s method of self-inquiry. Interestingly, Ramana Maharshi himself wrote in his last composition that the question ‘who am I’ while effective to a point is ultimately pointless:

“Being ever the Self, to ask oneself ‘who am I’ is like the drunken man’s inquiring ‘who am I’ and ‘where am I’”

Of course UG questioned the very idea of the ever aiding Self as another creation of thought. Here it is worth pointing out that Ramana Maharshi also always emphasized that the Self is outside the structure of thought. And yet when expressed in words by Ramana Maharshi or by any scripture, the listener translates it only using the mechanism of thought. The one asking ‘who am I’ presupposes the existence of some unknown “I” other than the “I” which has picked up this question from some book. UG declared that this assumption is only a projection of thought. What is observed is only an unceasing and ever-changing process of thought. The so-called “I” is born anew each moment with the birth of each thought. UG therefore asserted that spiritual goals have really no basis or foundation. What is it that attains the so-called enlightenment? What is it that realizes or transforms itself? What is it that attains happiness? “Absolutely nothing!” is UG’s reply. These goals have been projected by thought to keep itself going. That’s all there is to it.

UG claimed that this self-perpetuating process of thought can come to an end. However, he pointed out that this does not imply a state totally bereft of thoughts. According to him, the ideal of a thoughtless state is one of the many hoaxes to which seekers have fallen victim. He claims that when the self-perpetuating mechanism of thought collapses, what is left is a harmonious mode of functioning of the living organism in which thoughts arise and disappear in accordance with a natural rhythm and in response to a challenge. Thus he demystified the whole notion of the ‘natural state’ or ‘enlightenment’ if one wants to use that term. He clarified that the problem is thought as a self-perpetuating process and not the occurrence of thoughts per se. In the natural state, it is not that there are no thoughts. But they do not constitute a problem. One is not concerned about whether the thoughts are “good” or “bad”, sensual or spiritual, or about whether they occur at all. UG says:

You may ask, ‘How can such a man have a sensual thought?’ There is nothing he can do to suppress that thought, or to give room for that thought to act. The thought cannot stay; there is no continuity, no build-up. One knows what it is and there it ends. Then something else comes up.

The death of thought as a self-perpetuating mechanism involved, in UG’s case, also the ‘death’ of the body, an experience that he described as a ‘calamity’. Spiritual history in India furnishes us with examples of mystics who underwent such experiences of the body. Ramana Maharshi underwent a “death experience” when he was seventeen years old, an experience that culminated, on his account, in the realization of the Atman. Ramalinga Vallalār, a nineteenth century mystic, also appears to have gone through this death and the subsequent renewal of the body, thus making an astonishing claim that he had overcome bodily death. The saint Tukārām in one of his songs also claims that he witnessed his own death through the grace of his deity. Thus there are some precedents to UG’s ‘calamity’ in the annals of India’s spiritual history.

UG claimed that in his case the body underwent “actual clinical death”. He said, “It was physical death. What brought me back to life, I don’t know. I can’t say anything about that because the experiencer was finished”. This happened in 1967 in Switzerland soon after his realization that his search for enlightenment was the very thing that was keeping him from his natural state. This hit him like a bolt of lightning and led to the collapse of thought as a self-perpetuating process. He then underwent a series of changes in the functioning of his body for six days. On the seventh day he died. When he came back, he was like a child and had to relearn all the words necessary for functioning in the world.

UG stripped the phenomenon of all religious or mystical content, being emphatic that it was simply a physiological phenomenon. He also insisted that it is acausal, no spiritual or physical technique can bring it about. UG was fond of reiterating that it happened to him despite all the sadhana or spiritual practices he had done. UG discovered that the state he had “stumbled into” had nothing to do with the projected goals of spiritual practices such as bliss, beatitude, thoughtless silence, omniscience, omnipotence etc. Rather, it was a bewildering physical state with all the senses functioning independently of each other at the peak of their capacity, since they were free of the distorting interference of the separative thought process. He did not attain omniscience. It was a state of unknowing, a state in which the demand to know had come to an end. There was no bliss or ecstasy. It was a state which involved tremendous physical tension and pain whenever there were “outbursts of energy” in the body as a consequence of the collapse of the self-perpetuating mechanism of thought. And it was not some dead, inert state of “silence of mind”, but the silence of a volcanic eruption, pregnant with the essence of all energy.

UG also discovered that it could not be shared with others, which presupposes that there is a division between the self and others. But for UG there was no division between the “self” and the “other” in that condition. It never occurred to him that he was an enlightened man and that others were not or that he had something that others did not have.

UG, therefore, questioned the legitimacy of the idea of the Guru, or spiritual authority. He declared that if a person gets into this condition, he cannot set himself up as an authority because he has no way of comparing his condition with the condition of others. Since it implies the absence of an independent experiencer, it is not something that can be transmitted by someone to others. Therefore, UG maintained that there is really no basis for the idea that enlightenment or moksha can be attained by contact with an enlightened Guru or teacher. There is also another interesting reason for his repudiation of spiritual authority. He maintained that each individual is unique. Therefore, even if there is something like enlightenment, it will be unique for each individual. There is no universal pattern or model of enlightenment that all individuals must fit into. Every time it happens it is unique. Thus the attempt to imitate someone else’s “spiritual realization”, which is the foundation of all spiritual practices, is fundamentally mistaken. This is also true of any attempt to make one’s own “spiritual realization” into a model for others. This is the reason why UG was critical of most of the spiritual teachers in history. They attempted to make what happened to them a model for others. It simply cannot be done.

UG’s critique of spiritual authority is very relevant to an age full of gurus who have turned out to be manipulative and mercenary slave masters. His uncompromising criticism of exploitation and commercialism in the garb of spirituality is very relevant in light of so many spiritual teachers proven guilty of the worst form of authoritarianism, sexual abuse, financial fraud and chicanery. UG never succumbed to the temptation or pressure of building an organization or institution to preserve and propagate his “teachings”, unlike even J. Krishnamurti, who was also critical of spiritual authority and yet concerned with the preservation and propagation of his teachings in their “pristine purity”.

One of the most radical and startling claims that UG made is that the search for enlightenment, transformation or moksha, is the very cause of the greatest misery or suffering. In the pursuit of this non-existent culture-imposed goal, people have subjected themselves to all sorts of physical and psychological torture. UG regarded all forms of asceticism or self-denial in the hope of having spiritual experiences as perverse. The torture radically disturbs the metabolism of the body and gives rise to visions and hallucinations which are considered as great spiritual experiences. What about the ideal of the renunciation of desire? UG views desire as a function of hormones in the body. There is no such thing as a total absence of desire for the living body, declaring it another giant hoax. If anything, it is the desire for enlightenment that has to be renounced!

According to UG, there is no qualitative contrast between the pursuit of material values and the pursuit of the so-called spiritual values. The pursuit of spiritual values is not in any way superior to the pursuit of material values. It may seem radical, but UG argued that the use of thought to attain the goal is common to both the pursuits. Since the spiritual seeker is also using thought to attain his projected goals or values, his pursuit also falls within the bounds of something material and measurable. There is nothing “transcendental” about it. Moreover, the spiritual pursuit is as self-centered as the material one. It makes no difference whether you are concerned with your peace or salvation, or your financial status. It is still a selfish pursuit. As UG put it:

There are no spiritual goals at all; they are simply an extension of material goals into what you imagine to be a higher, loftier plane. You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable. This is in actuality not possible. You may think that only inferior persons pursue material goals, that material achievements are boring, but in fact the so-called spiritual goals you have put before yourself are exactly the same.

Coming to social structures, since UG rejected the search for permanence, he questioned the validity of grand programs for the sake of “humanity”. He maintains that the concept of “humanity” is an abstraction born out of a craving for permanence. We simply assume that there is some collective and permanent entity called “humanity” over and above particular and perishable individuals. What has importance is the predicament of individuals in the world here and now, not the “Future of Humanity”. The revolutionary is frightened of his own impermanence. He realizes that he will not be around to experience the benefits of living in his utopian society. He therefore invents an abstraction, “humanity”, and endows it with permanence. “Humanity, in the sense in which you use it, and its future, has no significance to me,” remarked UG. He maintained that all political ideologies are only ‘warty outgrowths’ of the old religious thinking that seeks permanence and thereby creates a lot of mess and misery. He always emphasized that he has no conflict with society just the way it is and any attempt to transform it would only lead to violence. The underlying message is that as long as the self-perpetuating mechanism of thought predominates among humans, it cannot be any different from what it is.

On the ecological front, UG pointed out clearly that the roots of the present crisis lie in the Judeo-Christian belief that the human species is superior to other species, created for a grand purpose, and therefore had the right to exploit the rest of nature. Indian religious systems also share a variant of this belief, the idea that birth as a human being is the most precious and highest form of birth. UG completely rejected this belief in the special status and superiority of the human species, observing that the human species is not created for any grander purpose than the mosquito or the garden slug. Our erroneous belief in our own superiority has been used to justify our extermination of other species, and has led to the environmental problem. What is in question is not just the kind of technology and the economic system we have, but the structure of belief and values which drive the technology and the economic system. But the problem endangers us, not the planet. Nature can take care of itself. So it is absurd to talk of saving the earth or saving the planet. “We are in danger, not the planet,” observed UG. And he pointed out that those who claim to be saviors of the environment are not ready to make any personal sacrifices and only interested in protecting their lifestyles. UG accurately warned that the environmental cause, just like other religious and political causes, will be used to justify the persecution of individuals.

In UG’s account, all forms of destruction, disorder, and suffering flow from the division between the self and the world or nature. This divisive movement of thought came into operation with the birth of self-consciousness somewhere in the process of evolution and marks the beginning of the end of this species. “The instrument that we think places us at the pinnacle of creation is the very thing that will lead to the destruction of not only the human species but all forms of life on this planet,” declared UG. He is thus no starry-eyed utopian. There is no “kingdom of heaven” around any of the corners of time. On the contrary, it is apocalypse that awaits us. This is not because of any supernatural factor but the very nature of the instrument of thought on which human civilization is based.

We can thus see that, in all realms, UG had a subjective explanation of the human condition. Ultimately it is not any external, social or socioeconomic factors that are responsible, such as class divisions, the military-industrial complex etc., but internal factors, the separative movement of the thought mechanism, the ego structure and the separative self-consciousness and the value system which it has created that we call as ‘culture’. All cultures are variations on a common theme, the perpetuation of a social order by fitting individuals into a common value system. This is the reason why UG did not discriminate between Eastern and Western cultures. Nor did he advocate a return to our primitive past as a solution as the they share the same root as pointed out by UG, “The hydrogen bomb had its origin in the jawbone of an ass which the cave man used to kill his neighbor.”

Thus the overall significance of UG lies in his radical and original critique of all traditions, be it spiritual, religious or social. His overarching message was that the collective value system is the root causes of all goals — spiritual or material. When freed of the value system and self-perpetuating mechanism of thought, one comes into one’s own unique natural state. But the ultimate paradox is that wanting to be free of the value system is itself a product of the value system and therefore keeps it going ever more strongly. Whatever may be said about the merits and demerits of UG’s insights, it is undeniable that it has the power of an uncontaminated simplicity which because of its very nature is also deeply enigmatic.