Narayana Moorty's Blog Page

Paradox of method:

2015-02-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

When I was going through my Notebooks I found the following entry. I thought it might be of interest to others. So I am positing it here.

11/10/00

Paradox of method:

I wouldn't even say paradox of practice: the practice is part of the paradox. Even if you

are in a null-state, the awareness is bound to turn it into a concept and a goal-to-be reached.

You can try to overcome it by snapping out of it. And then you are in a perpetual loop!

But you can constantly rise above everything. Nothing matters, even the paradox.

This paradox may be beyond any human will or intention. It just may have to go on, may

be because we are physiologically compelled to make concepts [and therefore goals] out

of everything we are aware of. The physiological doom! Be that as it may.

Every movement of thought is a movement of pleasure. In fact, pleasure-seeking itself is

a form of seeking security, to find a foundation for the self, just as power-seeking is.

2014-05-19T13:10:00.003-07:00

Essays on UG Krishnamurti and Related Topics

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2014-05-18T17:26:00.001-07:00

Friday, September 3, 2010

The Bugbear of Spiritual Progress

Those who consider themselves being in the spiritual path often tend to measure their progress or achievement. Sometimes they feel elated when they see themselves freed from some hang-ups or attachments and at other times they feel dejected at their failure to be so free. They can even set themselves a standard, say of total detachment, when the "soul can enter the dark night" and find themselves still stuck with some basic attachments like money, sex, achievement, food or what not.

But I think this is all bogus. As long as the measuring mechanism is operating, it is clear that it is active, looking forward to the future and measuring the past against the future. And all these are just ideas. If a person is truly detached, he wouldn't care about enlightenment or liberation. He would be "stuck" with whatever he is or has in the present. In some sense, he is psychologically dead. There is no other life. If it is pain, he is the pain. (Of course, he may not be able to help himself taking a pain pill.) Whatever he is doing, he is involved in it. If he is not, he may just be totally aware of everything. But there is no other life and there is no enlightenment either. He has no choice but to let everything else go. Even when he is occasionally involved in them, he doesn't have feel good or bad about them. That's what he is and there is no transcending them; because that presupposes there is some other life. If he is attached, he is aware that he is attached. On the other hand, when he is deeply involved in them, he may not be even aware of them. He may be stuck with them for the rest of his life. But that's life! As UG says, it's the goal that's the problem, even the goal of letting go of attachment.

The so-called "spiritual hunger" is part of the bogus affair. UG and others usually say that he has no "hunger", meaning that the person has no drive to break through. But trying to have enlightenment as a goal and strive for it, is just as much an involvement as any other. I realize that I don't have that kind of hunger. So I am stuck where I am. But so what?

P.S.: Is There a Thought that Results in no Thought? The question arises because when there is a moment of mere awareness, it is often preceded by a thought. (But then what other state is not preceded by a thought?) The thought may be one of understanding, disillusionment and some such thing. If the thought results in such awareness, the question is whether the thought is motivated, in other words fraught with duality, or it is not. If you say that it is motivated, the question arises as to how a dualistic thought can generate a non-dual state of mind? On the other hand, if you say, that it is not so motivated, that it is one of mere understanding and so forth, then the problem is how can there be a thought without a motive? I think this paradox can only resolved by accepting the idea that the thought may very well be motivated, but saying so what? It doesn't matter if it is. If this awareness we are talking about is also dualistic, because it is generated by a dualistic thought, so be it. I don't care if you call it a pure awareness or dualistic awareness -- I just don't care about pure awareness or enlightenment. If it happens fine, if it doesn't, fine, too. I think we generate unnecessary duality by worrying about a problem like this.

2014-05-18T17:19:00.001-07:00

May 18, 2014

If you are still visiting this blog, thank you. Unless something else distracts me, I will be visiting these pages from time to time.

Also please know that after waiting for some years to see if some publisher might be interested in publishing my book (I tried various), I have self-published my book and it is now available on as both a print-on-demand paperback and a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com.

The Title of the Book now is:

Being Yourself

Essays on UG Krishnamurti and Related Topics

It looks like this blog is a better way of communicating (expressing myself, at any rate) than through books. It all started when I noticed someone else put up UG's books (of excerpts) on Kindle; I thought why I couldn't I do the same with my book. Once I did that, I found there is an opportunity to self-publish the book as print-on-demand. And I did that.

There is something to be said about putting the book out as a paperback: it's something you have in your hand and a lot of people would prefer that than trying to read it on a tablet or computer. If you got the book printed at a local print shop I don't think it will cost less than that. So there is my pitch!

In the final proof I have eliminated a couple of chapters from the earlier version of the book: one on the Mind-Body problem and the other on Other Minds. I thought they would detract one from the main theme of the book and in the final reading they didn't seem philosophically sound enough.

Of course, if you happen to read it, feel free to pass on your comments.

You will find my e-mail address at the end of the book.

Also my homepage address has changed: it is now: www.narayanamoorty.net

Important Announcement:

2010-08-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://moortysblog.blogspot.com/.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://moortysblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

PS: Both the blogs seem to operating regardless.

I will try to post the same content in both the blogs until I decide which one of them is redundant.

Some Reflections on UG and the Scientific Approach

2010-03-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

[The following article was prepared with the aim of posting in the blog of a scientist friend of mine. For whatever reason, that did not happen. I am posting this just so readers here will have a look at it. Any comments, of course, will be welcome.]

UG operated from both the subjective and objective points of view in his approach to various issues:

A) He would take the objective, scientist's point of view at times and say: 1) Man as a product of evolution is born with a neurological defect, viz., of self-consciousness that creates the self and its concomitant self-protectiveness which go above and beyond the evolutionary needs of survival and reproduction. 2) The self and self-protectiveness operate through man's development outside his organism through his culture. 3) Man's internal and external conflicts are a consequence of this self-protectiveness which creates offensive and defensive mechanisms as well as a civilization which is ultimately destructive of the human kind.

Once I also heard him say that scientists will find out one day that consciousness is everywhere.

UG's teachings, however, cannot be judged or measured by any scientific (or for that matter any rational) means, because they are not, as he would say, "based on logically ascertained premises."

Man, according to UG, is unique in creation because of his self-consciousness. Self-consciousness has not only provided his superiority to better control nature to his advantage but also has generated all his typically human individual and collective problems. Thanks to the internalization of the cultural influences in him, he formulates his goals for perfection and strives to live according to them. It is indeed such goal-seeking that is the source of his problems. If it is just goal-seeking like food gathering or procreation, which we also find in the animal world, there would have been no problem. But the goals that man seeks are set by his culture on the model of other personages in his culture who have succeeded in molding society. The goals create a past and a future in his mind and become an endless source of conflict. These goals operate through his self-consciousness with the help of his thought process which splits up each thought into the self and the goal, something that he has to become or achieve. They also create his sense of time. Once the self is formed thus on the basis one's past experiences, it becomes the basis of assigning meaning to the world around us and finding a place for itself in it.

The self is formed through the operations of the thought process which includes goals inculcated by one's culture (such as becoming a perfect man), goals which not only are used to promote one's pleasure and avoid one's pain, but create an effort to ensure that pleasure or happiness over time (hence the quest for permanent happiness) and thereby achieve a permanent place in the scheme of things. This is essential for the "survival" of the self, as opposed to the survival of the organism of the individual, which is normally taken care of by the biological functions of self-preservation and procreation. Endless search for a non-existent permanent happiness, "without a moment of unhappiness," becomes the main concern of life and a source of conflict.

UG's views about modern medicine parallel his other views. He himself would never take medicines or see a doctor if he ran into any problem. But he doesn't recommend the same for others. He would say that the body knows how to take care of itself (and heal itself), that pain is a healer, that the (psychological) problem of pain is created by connecting one sensation with another in our minds, and that when the body finds itself unable to take care of itself, it will gracefully give up and die. At other times, he would say that you sometimes need "to give a helping hand" by taking medicine. When a person has cancer or suffers an injury, his advise to him, more often than not, is to seek medical help, especially by getting a diagnosis and go through surgery, if necessary. In case of mental illnesses, he always held that most of them are due to genetically determined chemical balances and have to be treated with drugs.

He would use scientific facts he collected from newspapers, magazines or people visiting him sometimes to bolster his own position, or sometimes to show that the scientists don't always know the depths of things.

B) UG also often takes the subjective (or rather, his own personal) non-dual point of view, i.e., point of view and says that 1) evolution and even cause-effect relationships are all thought-created, that unless in thought you concatenate one event with another, there is neither evolution nor cause and effect; and that 2) there is no such thing as a third or fourth dimension (if he saw Einstein [who talked about the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time], he would "shoot him on sight". As far as he was concerned there are only two dimensions, implying that the third (and the fourth) dimensions are interpolations of our thought process.

Thus UG discards the idea of evolution, especially when it came to the universe: according to him, the scientists' theories about the origins of the universe and big bang are all bunkum; scientists will never find the fundamental particle from which supposedly everything came. He says that the universe has no origin and has no end. It always has been, is and will be. There is no sense in asking the whys and wherefores of creation.

* * *

On the other hand, if someone complained about his personal problem such as deteriorating vision, he would counter with the objective point of view: "I don't see any blindness in you," or "I don't see any problem," or "You have no problem." Or, if someone speaks of how he experiences duality in response to UG's claim that he himself doesn't experience any duality, of how there is meaning in his experience and so forth, UG would counter him by saying that that the person's understanding of him and attributing meaning to his statements was only an "interpretation," that there is no meaning, that he (UG) was only making noise, "barking like a dog," that the other person was doing exactly the same thing, and that "they are only two dogs barking at each other."

In all this, UG's attempt is not so much to prove a certain point of view, position or claim, but to disarm the listener's intellect, so that he can stand without any ground whatsoever. UG is not so much interested in winning the other person to his side, either. His efforts were all directed toward dismantling the belief structures and mental edifices people have built in their minds. However, one can't say that UG has a set agenda of doing such things. It's more appropriate to say that that's how he operated.

Much like the dialecticians of the past like Nagarjuna, he didn't have a set position of his own. And whatever operated through UG, if it ever succeeded with anyone, would not only disarm the person's intellect as well as his mental edifice in general, unglue him from his attachments and conditioning, (it's not that the person wouldn't operate through them any more, but that he is not determined by them), but would prompt him to revert to what was his original state, i.e., the Natural State. Whether or not this individual will be able to function in the world as a natural individual largely depends on if and how much from moment to moment he has freed himself from his conditionings and attachments.

The natural state, if it could be called such, is not achieved through any conscious (or unconscious) effort on one's part. It is something we are already in and we revert to it only when all effort based on goal-seeking ceases. UG, however, cannot be understood to be supplying a set method or recipe to achieve such a state. He only states the necessary condition for it to occur. That doesn't mean that you can achieve that result by practicing a certain method. A method presupposes a calculated goal to which it is supposed to lead you. And, UG would say, as long as a duality exists in your mind between yourself as you are and a state such as the natural state, so long there is bound to be conflict.

Of course, in UG, this would be seen as a fundamental solution to the problem of conflict in man (within and without), although it's hard to visualize how such a person would live and function in this world. All the goals and ambitions that would mark the life of a modern man would have no meaning for this individual. (Note that this does not mean that he would not have goals as such making a living, having a family or other such finite goals; only he will be free of the goals which can in principle be never totally realized, goals such as becoming perfect or permanently happy, or totally fulfilled.) We can't see that there will be any civilization as we know it, if the world were populated by such men.

This doesn't mean that the situation is hopeless either. It just means that there is nothing we can consciously or deliberately do to achieve such a state. Does this mean that if a person realizes his true state, it's only by good luck or chance? UG often said that "'It' chooses you, you do not choose it," that is, if you are lucky.

Then what did he hope to achieve through all this? Was he aiming at some result or goal? He wasn't even interested as much in changing or transforming people. In his final years, he used to say that what he says would "unburden" you, meaning unburdening you from your past.

* * *

Comments and Reflections: My quarrels with scientific method, particularly as it is applied to human sciences, is that it almost totally neglects to take the subjective fully into consideration. While many scientific studies in medicine, neurophysiology, psychology or sociology have to take into account the subjective "input" to verify and validate its results, the subjective understanding of an issue is undervalued to the extent that results are either distorted or partial, or simply inapplicable. Scientific method in these areas is glaringly conspicuous for grossly ignoring or underestimating both commonsensical introspective reflection and inter-subjective verification, and philosophically esteemed phenomenological method, after it had abandoned introspective method in psychology in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Of course, the subjectivity of the human being can never be objectified. Yet, that ultimately is the basis for my dealings with myself and the world as well as for utilizing scientific findings. So, what does that mean for scientific investigation? As a scientist you may solve all my psychological or social problems, but they remain outside solutions to me, unless I see them as solutions and try to adopt them. In the ultimate analysis, scientific findings have to be seen by a person as valid and applicable to himself; he has to find a way translating them into his personal life and its problems. Also, contrary to appearances, science cannot solve existential problems; at best it gives the illusion of solving them, by creating a hope for final solutions sometime in an indefinite future.

It's not that the objective scientific discoveries and inventions about the human being, and the physiological or neurological equivalents of mental states are irrelevant or useless. They have their place in the realm of knowledge. But the problem with these researches is that it leaves any problems that the individual has to deal with largely in the hands of the experts in the respective field and the person involved is hopelessly dependent on the expert to solve any of them. And the expert, more often than not, is dependent in his turn for the funding of his research on commercial and governmental sources which tend to monopolize and control the discoveries. And only the rich can afford any help from these experts. Man thus becomes a commercial and political slave. In my opinion this is a misled enterprise. As UG would say, all those discoveries "do not percolate to the level of the common man." Not that every man on the street is interested in attaining spiritual liberation or gaining self-knowledge. But not all those who do are necessarily rich. And even if they could get some help from the experts, they would still lack the insight and understanding of how the duality with its consequent problems of conflict is generated in their own minds.

I am not saying that UG cared much about advocating understanding or self-knowledge. As I mentioned above, he rejected the idea of any effort directed to change anything in man's condition to arrive at what he called the "natural state". At the same time, he would also denounce scientific efforts to study the human being as an objective entity, say by establishing correlations between subjective, personal reports of mental states or experiences and the neurophysiologic states or centers of the brain. He is more interested in helping a person realize how all effort is ultimately futile (although it may take a lot of effort on one's part to realize that!).

As I said above, UG only offered the necessary condition to be in the natural state: (To repeat, "'It' chooses you and you do not choose it.") There is nothing you can do to achieve it, because it is not a state to be achieved, nor an experience to be had. When all your goals drop, then the mind is freed from the trammels of the past, automatically. But unfortunately, you cannot willfully drop your goals without the ulterior motive of becoming free. In other words, the process of becoming is still going on. When that ceases, what there is is the natural state.

Science may create through its scientific method a technology by which a human being may mimic such "effortlessness" or even "the absence of the domination of thought processes", but from what we have seen in other areas, the result may be a mock human being, but will not be a full-fledged flesh-and-blood person. Any scientific attempt to modify the brain may produce some result, but would it be the same as the natural state? Would it truly release one from the bonds of day-to-day existence? Of course, the scientist would say that it's always possible and offer us hope. Then we begin to live in hope and would never face the realities of our existence.

* * *

The most frustrating part about listening to UG is that there is really no "directive" you can derive from his teaching: you cannot say he is advising you to do this or not to do that. Yet, he kept talking to people, exposing to them their assumptions and belief structures and yet, telling them there is nothing the person can do ("no way out"). As far as he was concerned that's the mode of his operation. He wasn't trying to change anyone or provide a belief system for people to take home and adopt or apply to their lives. What effect his teaching had on others was not of concern to him. ("It cannot harm anyone;" "I sing my song and go.")

All right, if there is nothing one can do, why is this better than relying on the scientist (or the expert) to solve one's problems?

One common admonition of UG is that "you don't have the hunger, you are wasting away the precious time of your life in pursuing trivial pleasures... etc." Saying this and saying at the same time that no effort of yours is of any use is not very helpful. In fact, they seem contradictory, as the former implies that there is something better, more worthwhile that you should be doing.

Should I just sit tight without doing anything, then, without pursuing any specific goal? Suppose I am reverted to such a passive state. Then either I instantly fall asleep, or some thought, past habit or memory grabs me and takes me to another place (in my mind), pushes me to pursue something, or go after something. Should I just sit here consciously and avoid pleasure- or goal-seeking? But that too is done with a motive. How is that helpful?

The paradox here is resolved in my mind in the following fashion: Actually, the whole dilemma is created by the thought process which is driven by the motivation of trying to find liberation (and find some sneaky way of getting there) and being frustrated about it. Or else, why bother what you do or don't do? When the goals themselves aren't important, it doesn't matter. You could just as well "waste" your life and go when you have to. No meaning, no questions and no quest. If you are at peace with yourself, then where is the problem?

Then, surely, the duality between bondage and freedom would have to disappear, because there is nothing else that one has to become or achieve. There is no 'this' (bondage), because the 'that' (liberation), as a goal, does not have any significance.

The little restlessness that you confront in day-to-day life can easily be resolved by changing the lifestyle or reorganizing daily life slightly differently. There is no fundamental dissatisfaction (or satisfaction) in life. That may be all there is to life. It's neither good nor bad, it just is.

I have to resolve the problems of my life and existence now, while I am still alive, and cannot afford to wait for the scientist to come with some promised solution in some far off future.

When there is no duality in life, there are no problems. Then it doesn't matter if you are liberated or in bondage.

* * *

Introduction and Conclusion to my book "Being"

2009-09-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

I am positing in the following two posts the introduction and conclusion to my book "Being". If you have the electronic copy of the book you can append these pages to it. Anyway, you have the whole stuff. I am adding about 40 photos to the book as well as a cover page my wife has designed. Of course, I am looking for a publisher. If any of you know of someone who might be interested in publishing it, please drop a note.

Introduction

I have always thought a photograph reveals the photographer more than it does the subject. In that sense the following writing is rather autobiographical.

My association with UG, which started in 1981, has been long. He visited me practically once every year since then, till the beginning of 2006, after which time he stopped visiting the US. This book not only tells about my acquaintance and association with UG, but also how he affected me in person, and in my thought and my life in general. It’s hard to pinpoint these things and say definitely this is where UG’s influence stops and my own thinking and life start.

The other influences in my life have been Gora, Chalam and J. Krishnamurti. Yet, there has been a certain ongoing inquiry in my mind ever since I was conscious, namely, “Who am I?” You can say it is that which gave me a core identity and drove my thinking. It is what made me interested in all these people in the first place. After all is said and done, if there is anything called the "I" remaining, it is that which makes me question everything and everyone I have been exposed to, including UG. In my investigations in this book, I combine my skepticism with the critical and analytical skills I have acquired in my study of philosophy.

UG never minded my critical remarks in my essays on him. Once, he read my Introduction in the book No Way Out. When we were talking about it, he asked if I was rethinking my (critical) comments on him. I said, “No, I am not taking any of it back.” Then I remember him saying, “That’s the only way to write.” He did not want people to merely repeat what he said: “What hasn’t helped you can’t help others.” The essays in this book, although they tell of my acquaintance and relationship with UG, do not merely rehash what UG says, nor are they merely an interpretation of UG’s teachings. Even when I am open to someone’s ideas, I always question and test them and add my own investigations to them. It is in that spirit that I hope the reader will look at the following essays.

Almost all the chapters included here are essays I have posted on my blog site http://moortysblogpage.blogspot.com) for almost two years. For the sake of completion, I have added my paper “Science and Spirituality.” There is a little history behind this essay which was initially read at the Krishnamurti Centenary Conference in Oxford, Ohio. When the organizer of the conference, my friend Professor Rama Rao Pappu, asked me to write about J. Krishnamurti, I told him that I had already written an article about J. Krishnamurti , I would rather write about UG. After some hesitation, he agreed to my proposal.

When I was visiting UG in Corte Madera, California in the beginning of 1995, I mentioned to him that it was possible to put up one of his books on the Internet. Mario Viggiano and Julie Thayer were also present on the occasion. Mario immediately jumped on the idea and said, “Let’s do it!” Thus the UG website was set up in Julie’s www.well.com and UG’s Mind is a Myth with a picture of his taken by Julie in New Zealand were put up. UG, who had by then read my article “Science and Spirituality,” insisted that it also be put up. Later, I had seen him handing a copy of this article to a visitor or two.

Part 1 of this book consists of articles about how I met UG and an account of some of my meetings with him. I have deliberately avoided giving biographical details about UG as they have been frequently mentioned in books like The Mystique of Enlightenment, UG Krishnamurti, A Life, by Mahesh Bhatt, and The Other Side of Belief by Mukunda Rao. Part 2 of the book comprises a set of articles about UG’s teachings (Chapter 7) as well as his teaching process. Part 3 contains my ruminations about thinking, the self and mental states. Part 4 deals with a couple of academic issues, viz., the mind-body problem and the problem of other minds, as well as my views about meditation, morality and a few moral issues. I can’t say the articles in parts 3 and 4 are all inspired by UG’s teachings, but in some fashion or other, they all have some relationship to them. Only the essays on the mind-body relationship and other minds may be a little abstract to the reader. All others, though they might require careful reading, should be fairly accessible.

My philosophical essays may not impress the professional philosopher and may not seem to advance any current discussion of specific philosophical problems. They certainly are by no means scholarly. I didn’t even provide extensive documentation in my essays. My interest here is to tackle a couple of these problems from a rather commonsense point of view, mostly starting from my own experience. Of course, what I have learned from both Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as what I have learned from UG, does come into play in my explorations. I hope my suggestions to solve those problems are interesting to the professional philosopher as well as to the layman.

Needless to say, I have to use my thinking and logical skills to present my understanding of the issues presented here. I don’t know if it is possible to arrive at a totally consistent theory about them or fit them into a coherent and meaningful picture. Indeed, the reader may find that in several places my conclusions are hesitant and tentative. I may seem to be expressing doubts about my own previous conclusions or debating with myself. That’s why I would like to call this book a “work in progress.”

My aim in this book is to approach some issues without presupposing any religious or spiritual beliefs, taking a commonsense point of view and remaining always within the sphere of the known. The book should also demonstrate how I have translated, as best as I can, what I have understood or learned from UG into my own life. Standing on such a ground of experience I have tried to chip away, as it were, bit by bit, at some of the concepts in understanding oneself (contrary to UG’s rejection of the very idea of understanding oneself). Of course, you can never know the unknown. But what has been considered mystical or mysterious before could, at least to a minor degree, be unraveled. In my opinion, that was indeed what UG was trying to achieve as well, as the title of the book Mystique of Enlightenment indicates.

You may find it difficult to draw a clear line separating between what UG said from my own analysis and investigation. That’s in the nature of things. I never separated myself from UG. Just like in life, I consider my work as an extension of his teachings.

My central concern when I discuss moral issues is always to find out how I can relate to these subjects and what difference they would make in my life or my reader’s life.

Thanks to Wendy Moorty for her meticulous editorial help for both the text and the photographs. She has also designed the cover page.

Several photographs from the collections of Wendy Moorty, Lisa Toronto and Julie Thayer have been used in this book. My thanks to all three for letting me include them here.

Narayana Moorty

Seaside, California
September, 2009

Conclusion

2009-09-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

[The following is the concluding chapter to my book Being.]

UG’s Relationship with Me: What is my relationship to UG? Was he a friend, or was he a master or a teacher? I have been interested in the teachers I mentioned in my Introduction (Gora, Chalam, J. Krishnamurti and UG) primarily because they helped me in my own investigations. Their teachings spurred me to make advances in my thinking and ways of living and thus to various degrees have become an integral part of my intellectual life as well as my living. Gora, Chalam and UG all became my friends as well. Yet, I never hesitated to criticize them, especially Gora and UG. This applies to J. Krishnamurti as well. In other words, I never submitted myself totally to any of them; I didn’t implicitly obey them nor did I uncritically accept what they said. I have the greatest regard for UG as well as unbounded affection. So, my unqualified answer to my question is that regardless of an occasional skirmish or two between us, UG was my friend as well as my teacher.

Main Conclusion of this Book: The main conclusion that might emerge from the different essays in this book is that release (I am deliberately desisting from using the term “enlightenment”), while being total, sudden, final and acausal in someone like UG (and I can think of others), might also be piecemeal, relative and provisional in others.

UG’s Teachings: Once, during a conversation, UG vehemently denied that there is any such thing as relative freedom. In fact, he at times even denied (although I doubt if he had meant it) that there is any such thing as enlightenment. UG also often said that you cannot strive for “enlightenment” or total freedom: “You do not choose it; it chooses you.” Nevertheless, he laid down some necessary conditions: the mind must be stultified to the point that all desire must be burned away and all movement in any direction must stop. Yet, this, in his view, is not an effect you can aim at or try to achieve. This may be so. Yet the problem remains that the mind’s nature is to seek, if not to seek goals, at least to seek to avoid pain. As long as the mind is operating, it keeps seeking for this or that. The question is whether one can give up seeking ultimate goals such as what UG might call “permanent happiness,” “nirvana” and what not. That’s why UG always said you don’t really give up anything.

My Approach: I might want to opt for shutting life down, renouncing everything that I am and all that I have, say my house, relationships, property, food (when I am hungry I will find out where to get food), and so on. I could just walk away from everything. But would I be free from the goal of shutting life down? As UG says, it’s the goal you have to be free from. But could you? Giving up the goal still presupposes a reason for giving up the goal, which is the goal itself. Thus it becomes a game we play with ourselves. (As UG said, “the negative approach is a positive approach.”

My discussions in the book should have shown that while there are persistent goals (or attachments), there are also moments when we can just simply surrender to the inability to let the goals go. That effortlessness, to my mind, lets you become detached from the goal itself. So, the moral of the lesson here is not just to try to let things go, but to discover in oneself a place where there are no goals and surrender yourself to the prospect of living without any goal. Once we see the state of mind where there are no goals of whatever kind (including being free or enlightened), then I think stepping out of the process of striving for goals is not such a hard thing to do.

While a total and final change may be the "real" thing, I can’t just sit there and wait for it. For whatever it is worth, I have to live my life now, facing my problems and working things out, nevertheless not losing sight of what is fundamental in life. I see a gradual evolution (or development, if you will) in this process and it may or may not culminate in a total transformation. For example, it’s a lot easier for me now than before to let go of things and people.

I know such a release is at best relative and provisional and there is no finality about it. Final liberation can only come about when the will in some fashion or other withers away and that unfortunately is not in our hands.

Can I say that I attained some kind of breakthrough, or that I am enlightened? I have absolutely no claims to enlightenment. At times, I feel like that with certain limitations in my present makeup, physical or psychical, it may not possible for me to be anything other than what I am. That doesn’t render what I have been discussing in this book totally useless.

One of the facts of my life is that I too am conditioned like everyone else. UG used to say, “You can never be free from conditioning. Conditioning is intelligence.” I don’t know if these statements are indeed true. But I know that I do react and it may take me some time for those disturbances to run their course. I can see that as long as conditioning operates, one must live in the world of duality. In that sense, UG himself, as far as I know, to the extent he was operating under his own conditioning; he too was subject to duality (as he would say, “’UG’ comes into the picture”).

Method: The whole book may seem to advocate adopting a method, practicing it and thereby trying to progress toward a goal, and so on. It may seem as if I haven’t become free from goals after all. (You might ask, “Or why write this book?”) Also, when I write, what I write must perforce be taken as a method or a “directive”, to use UG’s term.

Take the other side of the picture: If having goals is a problem, and yet UG says that you cannot give up anything (including goals) except in order to gain something in return, then the main question is, why in the hell did he talk about anything at all? Why didn’t he just say what he had to say once and walk away? If UG kept hammering away at these issues, dinning the same thing over and over again into people’s ears, it may be that he was doing it so that it might have the effect eventually of people quitting their goal-seeking and their quests.

UG’s common response to this dilemma was to say that when someone asking him questions, the answers come out of him as if from a machine, automatically. When involved in some discussion or debate, UG often ended the debate by asserting, “It’s two dogs barking at each other.” He claimed that we “interpret” whatever he says or does according to our background, prejudices or predilections. There may be no problem with words, his or others', they being just noises made and everything being mainly an interpretation. This may be a consequences of his non-dual state, but it also has the consequence of his being wrapped up in a bubble of immunity to criticism, challenge or personal involvement. You can either admire him or throw up your hands in despair.

People who heard or read UG often couldn’t help taking what he said as directives either. He knew that. But he kept talking, knowing full well that people would interpret him the way they in fact do. His answer to the problem is to say, “Being exposed to what I say will unburden you.” For instance, UG said to someone who was bothered with a neurotic fear of silence that he should try to change nothing but should merely accept the fear. And the person eventually did find relief by letting his fear be. To my mind, such changes are possible only because people have learned to let things go, especially their goals. That is indeed how their lives become unburdened.

One of the common answers UG gave to people raising their problems in front of him was to say, “There are no problems. You have no problem.” If a person was saying he gets depressed, UG would say, “Be depressed!" or he would say, "Unless you are contrasting it with another state, where is the problem?” Or he would say “You have problems only because you want two things at the same time. If you want just one thing (and are willing to do everything to get it), there is not a thing you cannot get.” When he himself was in a rage, he never looked at it as a problem. He just rode it out. In that sense he never wanted to change the given. He never moved out of his nonduality.

Goals and Lettings Things Go: To come back to my own writing: what I have been trying to do is primarily to agree with what UG says about being disillusioned about goals (my writing should confirm this), yet, at the same time, I am trying to work out the nitty-gritties of it (the actual workings of it). My “letting things go” may sound like I am advocating a method. It’s rather a “non-doing” without any specific goal in mind, done only because one is confronted with a problem or set of problems. You might say that this, i.e., becoming free from a problem, is indeed a goal and is bound to set up a duality in your mind between yourself and the problem you are trying to deal with. I agree, and that’s where I point to the idea of “surrendering to a problem” (including to the inability to give up a goal). In other words, although your intention (or goal) is to solve a problem to begin with, you realize at some point that as long as you are attached to the goal, you cannot truly solve the problem.

Notice that in view of my analysis of mental states, it should be clear that I am not advocating advancing toward some goal. Rather, I am talking about repeatedly letting things go (and this may be telescoped into short moments, meaning that the time it takes will become much shorter). In that sense there is a progress or evolution, but not in any sense of gaining something. In fact, the whole thing will surely backfire if one does it with a view to achieve some result or gain something or attain a state (even if it is just to become free from a problem). If one has in view any solution outside of the problem, that surely would set up a duality and throw one headlong back into the problem.

I am writing more in a spirit of explaining the structure of problems and gaining an insight into them rather than trying to provide a solution or method which can be mechanically applied. Of course, just as with UG, this too can easily be misconstrued as advocating and teaching a certain method, a path, a practice and so on.

To me, what words you use don’t really matter. What matters are the facts: The fact of the matter is that one can be relieved from the burden of one’s past: This can happen by becoming free from specific problems as well as any and all problems, landing in the field of awareness (energy if you will). This "landing" is a function of our ability to relax totally to the point where nothing matters, including living, dying or enlightenment. The contrary side of the picture is that when problems mount up in myself or my mind, I can feel the tension going up. And when I stop caring for the problems or solutions by letting things go (and letting the problems be), I not only relax totally, but the problems disappear; I am then in the field of mere awareness or awareness of the body. The body is itself a surface phenomenon. When the relaxation is deep enough, even the awareness of the body as such merges in the general awareness. I can feel the tension in the head when I am in the middle of a problem and when I let things go, my attention goes back into the spine area in the back of my head, instead of being caught in the top of the head. That relaxes the system and helps the energies flow freely. I hope I have made this clear enough. I don’t need any approval for this from anyone, including UG (he never gave it to anyone, anyway). I am hoping this possibility -- or, ability -- to step out of things can be used by others as well. In that sense, the book is hopefully within the realm of understanding, communication and teachability.

I believe this book is still within the fold of the general teachings of effortlessness, because UG often said that any movement of the mind, in any direction, will make you stray from your natural state. My book explores all the problems involved in trying achieve the natural state while keeping that goal in mind and using various methods. It’s just a way of showing the ultimate futility of effort in this area. Of course, even this can be taken as some kind of positive teaching and offering a method, but unfortunately, nothing that is read or communicated can escape that fate. The human ‘hearing’ mechanism is such that the very hearing creates a goal and looks for a directive.

Thought and Knowledge: The final problem I have to deal with is thought, namely, that all this relaxing is an activity of thought, driven by the motivations of the self. For instance, how do I know when I am totally relaxing or giving up everything? How do I know whether I am in the state of being merely aware of the body? Isn’t the whole enterprise driven by thought? If it is, one cannot be said to be really free of the self as long as there is the self in the background, calculating and conniving. Indeed, I have myself raised such a question to UG: how does he know whether he is free from thought? What told him? Couldn’t one say that the self, and hence knowledge, has been there in the background? UG’s answer was always that he doesn't know and that Life knows itself.
Sometimes he said he knew it now (when he was talking), but didn't know it "then". My answer is somewhat similar to this last answer of UG: although one starts with the motivation of the self, one realizes that as long as there is any motivation to be free one cannot be free. But when one is free, there is an awareness of freedom; and when thought and (knowledge) operate, then one knows that he or she has been free. Of course, such knowledge can bring about further motivation and bondage; but that’s the nature of the case.

Differences: There lies the essential difference between UG and me, however. With UG, the freedom had become permanent and final. (You could say there was a change in his "hardware". The getting rid of motive had become automatic. (That’s the context in which he would say, "thought cannot enter, it will get burnt up every time it enters.") In UG there was a perpetual state of unknowing in which knowledge occasionally entered and created a temporary duality of UG and the other. In me, it’s the freedom that is occasional.

There is something else that is totally different about UG: I felt at times that UG was a mere appearance and that some force or power from another dimension was operating through UG. Thus to my mind UG represents the unknown. We get hints of this when we know that his words and deeds are not what they seem to be and have effects which are unfathomable to our ordinary knowledge and experience. I have no problems with that unknown. To that I totally surrender myself and pay homage. And I have no way to speak of or account for it. I just simply am awed when I sense its presence.

In spite of these differences, I feel that the attempt here is not a totally futile. Although the release that I experience may be only provisional and lacks the finality of the liberation of UG, it shows possibilities of freedom in everyday life.

Despite the differences, I have always felt there is a fundamental unity between UG and me. Underlying us is the unity of life, of existence or what you may call it, as was attested to so many times by my sense of being in the same "field of awareness" when I was around him, where there was (and is) neither UG nor me. I know that some others had similar experiences.

The Paradox of Being Yourself

2009-07-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

UG often used to say that you don't have to be anything and that being yourself is the simplest thing you can do. Unfortunately, being yourself may not be as simple as it sounds.

‘Being yourself’ is contrasted with trying to be (or become) someone other than yourself. If, for instance, you think you are inferior than someone else, or you feel inadequate or are afraid, in being yourself (trying to be yourself) you don’t change what you are into something which you are not, namely superior, adequate or not fearful.

Part of being someone or something other than what you are at the moment includes not being elsewhere at anytime.

You accept your lot, whatever it is. Shall we say you remain content.

Man’s condition is such that he or she cannot just be (or be anything) without being aware of that condition. But the problem with being yourself is that the mere awareness of what you are implies a judgement about yourself or your condition and in that very act of judging is imbedded an attempt to transcend it, to be something else or someone else -- at any rate, an attempt to be rid of the problem and thereby improve one’s condition.

Unless you include these various attempts to be other than yourself (or be elsewhere) to be part of yourself, the notion of ‘being yourself’ is a contradictory notion; or at least it seems so; for to be yourself must necessarily bring an awareness of one’s self and that awareness is automatically also an attempt to become someone or something other than yourself, that is not being yourself. In that case ‘to be yourself’ paradoxically means ‘not to be yourself’. Or you could say, that ‘not being yourself’ is what constitutes ‘being yourself.’

When you are so aware, and also become aware of your attempt to transcend your condition, you can try to be what you are by telling yourself that there is no point in changing your condition, that there is nothing wrong with it, or that no solution to a problem has been shown to succeed, and so on. This telling yourself might help you succeed in returning to yourself momentarily. One could say then that one has learned to accept oneself or learned to be content with what one is.

But the mind is a comparative instrument. It not only is aware but it also compares -- the awareness and the judgment that comes with it are comparative. The comparative judgment has to bring in (no matter how much one tells oneself otherwise) a process of becoming something other than oneself or be in some other condition (that may only be as a fantasy or daydream).

Cutting the Gordian knot: This paradox, in my mind, can only be resolved by letting oneself be even in the state of becoming – you are aware of the process of becoming; and you just go through that without resistance to it. At some level or other you must come to terms with what you are – even if it be just to keep trying or keep becoming. When we are able to do so even at the most superficial level, then sooner or later, the acceptance or letting go will penetrate through layer after layer until you can accept your condition, fear, pain, guilt or whatever. Total acceptance has to involve surrendering, if you will, to the pain, fear or guilt. Then you are not yourself, because the self structure has been dissolved (at least relatively or momentarily) and you revert to mere consciousness or bodily awareness; you just are. So, in the final analysis, when we get through the structures of the self, ‘to be yourself’ means just ‘being,’ being without trying to become something else.

Announcements

2009-06-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Please note the following article I just posted to the blog.

1) If you want to know when a new posting is made to the blog, there is a good way to find out: consider subscribing to "Atom" feeds which can be found at the bottom of the right column. I think by doing so you will get an e-mail intimation about any new posts that are made to this blog.

2) Also, I have put together all the articles in this blog prior to the current one ("Looking Within") along with an additional article ("Science and Spirituality -- The Teachings of UG Krishnamurti -- A Case Study") in a book and edited it with a cover page and a back cover picture. If you are interested in an electronic copy of it please write to me at the following e-mail address and I will be glad to mail you one. (That way I would also know who is reading my blog page!)

moorty@pacbell.net

Looking Within

2009-06-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

Just the other day, I was watching how my mind was going through various solutions to the problem of the neck pain (or some other pain) I sometimes have. Normally, every time I experience some discomfort or pain, there is an immediate looking out for a solution, say a dietary supplement, a homeopathic remedy or the chiropractor, a surgeon or what not, even if I had already gone through several of them before to no avail. If it is a new symptom I experience, it immediately triggers a panic response in me, and the effort to look for a solution immediately goes into operation. That day, I became aware of the process (not that it was the first time that it ever happened); then my mind stopped looking for a solution. My attention was turned ‘inward’ to the discomfort itself and soon there was no discomfort (not that this happens every time). One can say that I ‘accepted’ the pain. (Please note that I am not suggesting here that merely 'accepting' pain will make it go away or that one should not get medical help when one is in pain or that medical help is useless.) It was in this context the meaning of ‘looking within’ became rather clear to me. When the problem had disappeared on this occasion, there was no ‘within’ or ‘without’, nor anything like looking within.

What came through in this experiment was that the awareness of the discomfort was enough to trigger the duality of the mind, with its accompanying panic, which implies a solution other than myself (and of course, making the effort of looking for it), as well as the time process, i.e. creating a future which implies a hope or dread or whatever.

The experiment reminds me of one of the angas of Patanjali’s ashtanga yoga, i.e, pratyahara, which is normally translated as withdrawal of the senses. I used to explain this step to my students as withdrawal of one’s attention from external objects. The next step is dharana, holding your attention on something and then you have dhyana, meditation. Maybe my experiment condensed all these processes into one and removed the duality of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as well as of myself and the world. My experiment also presupposes that within the duality of the mind, there are no ‘external’ or ‘internal’ objects as such; yet the very idea of an object as other than myself ipso facto presupposes that it is external to me.

‘Looking inward’, ‘looking within’ are phrases used in the spiritual world. In psychology, the more common term is ‘introspection’. In either case, the most common things one does with oneself are being aware of one’s memories (for instance, by honing into a past scene and reacting to it, often as if it were happening now), or being aware of parts of the body, thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions or intentions. What we are aware of and respond to is part of our mental world. All transactions take place within this field – the field of consciousness where objects are present in our mental world. And the response or reaction takes place from a certain point of view, which we generally acquired in our past, and which we are at the moment. (We may that the point of view is what constitutes the ‘I’ or the ego.) Hence the duality. Time and time-consciousness are inherent in this process. That is, divisions of past, present and future are created through the process of self-consciousness.

We know that such awareness is almost never neutral or impartial. We are partial to ourselves when we take a look a our own actions. More often than not, that point of view expresses itself through a thought which is more or less express, verbalized and conscious. In our attempt at introspection, we normally attempt to change what is given into what is we think is more desirable or pleasurable (or less painful), so that eventually we would appear to ourselves as more acceptable. When we do this consciously, we call the process self-consciousness. When we give directions to ourselves, we also do so with a view to better ourselves, be somewhere else or become someone better. Of course, the same processes could be done not so consciously; then we would not use the expression ‘looking within’, or self-consciousness.

When we withdraw our attention from the world of ‘objects’, the thought process mediated through verbalization is suspended, albeit for just a moment, until something else draws our attention and the thinking process is resumed.

Often, the process of self-consciousness is a battleground. There is a constant striving that occurs and it is driven by goals or objects we are attached to. We use the process not just to solve problems, but to plan, scheme and plot our path to achieve our desires or avoid painful things (such as fear, inadequacy and guilt), to maintain, enhance or protect our status, and to defend, justify or glorify ourselves, often at the expense of other people. This normally goes under the name of ‘thinking’.

When we stop looking for external solutions to our problems, we are giving up trying to solve the problem. Then presumably we accept the problem. At least for that moment, we cease to strive. (We ‘detach’ ourselves from the problem.) That’s when we can say that our attentions is turned within. But there is really no ‘within’ to look at. Just plain consciousness, if you will, or awareness of parts of the body, without any attempt to to change anything or become something other than what we are. There is neither a within nor a without. You just are.

Also, when we stop reacting to the problem, the personal point of view from which we look at the problem disappears. At least for the moment, the point of view, or rather the ego, the reactive mechanism disappears; at least it is held in suspension.

I know I am over-simplifying the process, making it look too easy. My interest here is to point out the elements of the process, not to claim it’s all that easy. I am not even claiming that the result is lasting.

Even when we become free from the thought process, i.e., when we give up a goal or an object we are attached to, this is done consciously. That means, an internal dialogue goes on in which we either explicitly or implicitly tell ourselves to let go of something, just about the same way as when we talk to ourselves when we plan, justify or defend ourselves, or try to calm ourselves when we are agitated. The directive that is given is through this talk, verbalization, although, when it happens, the result may be nonverbal.

This leads us to the question of whether there is anything like consciousness without the accompanying thought process. You can’t just say that thought goes on all the time. In fact, when, for instance, UG describes his state of mind when he looks at a clock, he says that his whole being is like a question mark -- “What is that thing?” This just means that he is just conscious of the clock, (even to say that he is conscious of the clock or “that thing” is misleading; it’s more appropriate to say that he is just conscious) without any knowledge that it is a clock or knowledge of what time it is. Of course, when he is asked later what he is looking at or what time it is, then, as he says, the answer comes like an arrow. That’s when he knows what he is looking at.

How long such a state of mere awareness or consciousness lasts is really not a relevant question. It is quite possible and indeed likely that when we get involved in a situation, or we are in the heat of the moment, we don’t get the chance to look at an object dispassionately or ask ourselves questions regarding our relationship to an object or a goal, thereby creating a ‘space’ between ourselves (i.e. our reactive mechanism) and the object. Here I am more interested in analyzing the process itself and pointing out the elements in it.

Notable Travels and Visits -- Times Spent with UG

2009-03-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

[The following is a chapter I have added to my book. At the end of the chapter, I have included an account of Mahesh and UG visiting me in Seaside, which I have added to the Chapter in my book on UG's Teaching Process under the head "Care and Compassion."]
For many people, knowing UG involved travel to places all over the world, for as UG would boast, he never stayed in one place more than six months. Even at an advanced age, he managed to keep moving. For many years, he rented the same Chalet Sunbeam in Gstaad Switzerland, and people would visit him there from all over. He would make brief trips to other countries in Europe from that base. While I knew him, he visited California almost every year, first staying in the Mill Valley area, then in Palm Springs. He also made regular brief visits to New York, passing through, as it were. He often went to India, staying for some time with Chandrasekhar and Suguna in Bangalore before and during the time they cared for Valentine, and after. He also made many trips to Australia, and even China, although his forays into China were always solo. He traveled simply and insisted on carrying his own small suit case or carry-on bag, his total sum of luggage, a point of pride. In his last years, he forwent travel to Australia and China, but made short trips by car to Germany and more extended ones to Italy, his last destination.

I visited UG in many of these places, at his invitation, and always was treated with great hospitality by UG. Here are some highlights.

First Trip, Gstaad and Bangalore, 1986

Late in 1985, UG suggested I should visit him in Gstaad. I told him that I wanted to bring my 12-year old daughter with me, and that I would also like to go to India, since it would be so much closer—less miles and less cost. But, I said I wouldn’t go to India unless he was there, because half the fun of going to India would be to visit him there! So he promised to be there at the time I would be there.

It was arranged that Shyamala and I would go for about two weeks, spending 6 days in Gstaad, and then also go to see friends in Marseille, Paris and Heidelberg, after which I would send Shyamala back to the US. I would then go on to India, spend some time visiting family members, and also time with UG in Bangalore. My wife, Wendy, and one year-old son, Kiran, would remain at home in Seaside.

Gstaad, 1986

UG stayed in touch with us constantly by sending transportation timetables, picture postcards, and whatnot. The initial travel was difficult, with Shyamala getting airsick on the plane and in the Frankfurt airport, and me having to clean up after her. In the airport I had difficulty finding a money exchange bureau, then getting us on the train to Berne. Making a call to UG involved some fumbling and help from a German man, as I didn’t understand about the extra “0” in the number (I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to dial that). Once the call was successfully made, I informed UG of our arrival time, and also of Shyamala’s sickness, but when I returned to my seat, Shyamala suddenly got better.

We both were starved. We had to change the trains in Basel carrying our stuff across the train tracks. That was another hassle. Finally, around 7:30 PM or so in the evening we arrived and were met in the train station by UG and Paul Sempé who drove us to Gstaad in an hour and a half. It was dark, so we couldn’t see much. Once arrived, we had some soup and bread, which revived us. Kim was cooking for UG and Valentine (and others too). We were given two small rooms upstairs to sleep, and we were ready to rest.

The next day, I had a better picture of the Chalet Sunbeam as well as the surroundings in Gstaad. It was two-storied Chalet, with the landlord, Herr Grossman and his wife, living upstairs. Also from a side staircase you could go to an upstairs apartment and a room for guests. There was a bath with a shower downstairs. The Chalet stood on a small hill and you could see the town main street, tennis courts and the surrounding magnificent mountains all around covered with green grass which was mown by the owners of places in the summer time. In winters, Gstaad was a ski resort place and in summers there were world-open tennis tournaments. The place was abuzz with tourists in summers. The weather was pleasant with occasional showers. Gstaad was a delight to tourists.

I met many people visiting UG that were new to me, but whom I would see many times again on future visits. These included Paul Sempé, Marissa, Salvatore, Henk Shoneville, Robert Geissman, and Herr Grossman, the rather peculiar owner/resident of the chalet. Paul was once a pacifist and used to listen to J. Krishnamurti regularly. Salvatore and Marissa were also once followers of Krishnamurti. Henk, who ran an Advaita ashram in Amsterdam, once took me out for a beer and complained about how badly UG would treat him in spite of the fact that he did all the arrangements for UG’s visits in Amsterdam. Paul Sempé would discuss Descartes with me. Being a Frenchman, Paul was quite enamored by Descartes. Once, UG was trying to listen in, but I was too self-conscious to speak freely. Of course, UG was critical of Descartes.

Shyamala was entertained by Marissa and Kim. Marissa’s teenage son, Lorenzo, being there was very helpful. They all took good care of Shyamala. Kim took Shyamala on a hike on the mountains and they all played Dungeons and Dragons. I remember Marissa even doing my laundry.

In the morning of the second day or so of our arrival, UG took us to Mount Egli and took our picture there with our camera. That was touching. He left us there, asking us to take the lift to go up on the mountain. We did, and Shyamala and I walked on the Alps. Shyamala said, “I am not going home. This is my home!” I was pleased with her response. When we got back down to the town, it was 2:30 or so in the afternoon, too late to expect lunch at UG’s. So we decided to have lunch in a restaurant downtown. We went into an Italian restaurant and ordered some minestrone soup. I had to make sure, in my broken French, that there was no meat in it. (I used the word “viande”.) Shyamala thought the soup was delicious.

Generally, the food we had with UG in “Sunbeam” was good—the usual UG menu of soups with cream, bread, cheese and yogurt.

We went on car trips to various places. Paul Sempé drove us to Zurich one day, where we ate lunch in an Indian restaurant. In Zurich we met this German doctor and his psychiatrist wife (they were young) whom I had occasion to meet again much later. Paul also drove us to see Berne and Lucerne. The night before that drive, the weather was predicted to be dismal. The television showed a picture of the whole of Switzerland overcast with a forecast of rain. But the next day, it was sunny. In Berne, UG walked around the shops with us, and bought us some freshly-squeezed orange juice and chocolate for Shyamala. Only when we had returned to Gstaad did it begin to get cloudy. Observing this, I asked UG, “Should we say it was UG’s miracle or simply that the weather man was mistaken?” UG replied quietly, “Let’s say that the weather man was mistaken.”

During our stay, Shyamala and I took pictures all over the place. Once Shyamala’s camera fell on the street. I later had to supplement my pictures with Chandrasekhar’s either because mine were lost or there was not enough film left.

I think it was on this trip I asked UG if he would be interested in reading the article I wrote about J. Krishnamurti (“Fragmentation, Meditation and Transformation”). It was published later (in 1988) in the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. UG said that he would always be interested in reading what I had to write. So, I gave it to him. He read it overnight and the next morning he nicely put it under a couple of other books or papers so that it would not be easily noticed. I asked him what he thought of the paper. He said I made clear some of the difficulties which the reader might have in understanding Krishnamurti, and the conversation ended there.

I commented to UG at one point how all the people who gathered around UG for his sessions (I had Robert Geismann and Bernard, the mailman from England, in mind when I made the remark) were so mature. And UG’s reply was astonishing: “The Old Man (meaning J. Krishnamurti) prepared them all.” That told me the regard with which he held J. Krishnamurti, contrary to all appearances.

Sometimes, UG would flare up on one person or another. I saw him flare up on Kim and another time on Paul Sempé. I remember Kim once saying, “You want me to leave now?” Then UG would say, “If you want to…” and soften. There was no apparent reason to flare up on Paul either. UG’s rationale was always, “This gun shoots wherever and whenever it sees the movement of thought.”

One of those days, may be on another trip, I saw UG yelling at Herr Grossman, calling him bastard or whatever, because Grossman had just raised his rent. And of course, UG didn’t like the idea. Grossman was quite money-conscious and, in spite of his riches, lived very modestly.

Grossman tackled me once when I was climbing down the stairs. He stopped me for at least 40 minutes or an hour and bored me with his talk about Rosicrucian teachings.

People would often gather informally in chairs outside on the small lawn area in front of the chalet, with the backdrop of the town below and mountains behind. One afternoon, I was standing there, and UG asked me to please sit down. I told him I didn’t mind standing. He replied that it hurt him if I stood. Without making a fuss, I sat down.

Our stay in Gstaad was filled with trips, conversations and new acquaintances. It was memorable.

Another car trip we had was by Salvatore, the architect. We went to Geneva to receive Chandrasekhar at the airport (he was returning from the US after a training course in Detroit). It rained and hailed heavily in Geneva and on return we found a dent on Salvatore’s car from the hail.

On the day of our departure, we were driven (I think by Paul Sempé) early in the morning around 3 AM to the border train station and dropped off there to go to France via Milan. Shyamala and I put the luggage in the cloak room and went out to a restaurant for breakfast. We got on the train, and it went through a very long tunnel on the borders between Switzerland and Italy. When we got out of the tunnel it just stopped raining, everything was wet and fresh. The mountain sides were green. The train stopped at a station. Everything was fresh and green: the wet pavement reflected the sun. It was one of the most beautiful sights you could see. We continued on the journey to Marseille where we were met by my old friend Paul Albert.

After a couple of days with Paul and his family, then five days in Paris and four days in Heidelberg, I returned with Shyamala to Frankfurt. I sent her back to the U.S. and took a plane to Bombay, India.

Bangalore, 1986

After visiting my relatives in Bombay, I went to Hyderabad to visit my brother. From there I tried to contact Chandrasekhar in Bangalore by phone to find out about UG’s arrival and stay. I couldn’t locate him, so I left a message. Chandrasekhar never answered my message.

I then went on a trip south, first to see Kumaraswami Raja in Annamalai. Raja was a professor of linguistics in Annamalai University. He used to be a close friend of mine in Visakhapatnam where we both worked in the University. He was very much into J. Krishnamurti, having read many of his books. Many years ago he had helped me go to the U.S. by encouraging me to send my papers and submitting them in the philosophy department in UC, Berkeley. I spent a couple of days with him in Annamalai, met his new wife Saraswati and his son Mohan. I played all my Amsterdam tapes of UG for him on his tape recorder. Hank had given me these tapes in Gstaad. He had made them himself; he was actually selling them to others, but he gave a set to me free of charge. The tapes must have made an impression on Raja. He said, “This must be another Krishnamurti looming on the horizon.” After a couple of days of visiting, Raja dropped me off at the Annamalai bus station about 10 in the night for me to travel to Bangalore. He promised he would come to Bangalore a day or two after I arrived there, and I asked him to put himself up in a hotel and come to 40 K.R. Road, Chandrasekar’s house, where UG was living.

The next morning, after a sleepless night and with a back that felt broken, I arrived in Bangalore. I hired an auto rickshaw and went to 40 K.R. Road. Just as I was getting out of the vehicle I saw UG walking away on the street in an Indian dress (lalchi and pajamas). I hailed him; he turned around and recognized me, and took me into the house. He and Chandrasekhar showed me the room where I was going to sleep. It was next to the street, but quite decent. They arranged for a smoke device to keep the mosquitoes out. Usha, UG’s daughter, was there and also Valentine, living in the downstairs room at that time. There were a couple of servants and a constant traffic of people, Brahmachari, Kalyani, Radhakrishna, Nagaraj (the personal assistant to the Postmaster General), Shanta, her children Mittu and Prashant, Gopikrishna and others. I chastised Chandrasekhar for not answering my phone messages, but UG calmed me down, saying that since I was there anyway, it didn’t matter. There was also a mention of Sudha, my translation of Chalam’s Telugu poetry and Chandrasekhar was critical of it and seemed not to like it.

I stayed in Bangalore for six days. I was planning to stay there for less, but UG arranged my itinerary, insisting that I stay there for six days. (I had stayed for six days in Gstaad, I must stay here for six days, went the reasoning.)

There were all kinds of visitors there. Kalyani was one of them. She would sing and dance and beg for money. She was well to do, being the sister of a civil service officer. Later, she died of breast cancer or something. She was apparently pretty psychic and a bit crazy. All kinds of stories about her are told in Stopped in Our Tracks, Series I, by Chandrasekhar.

Shanta Kelker was a frequent visitor. I held her arm once while UG was watching. She was having an affair with one of the gurus in town on the sly, and UG would constantly chastise her for that, asking her what would happen to the children. The guru was apparently a no-good guy and eventually UG was able to wean her off of him.

There was the bicycle shop owner Niranjan, Radhakrishna, the tea merchant, Ramachandra and his partner, Rechal Das, financiers to the movies, Chandrasekhar, the architect and his wife, Gopi Krishna and his wife, Brahmachari, the would-have-been Sanakaracharya of the Kudali Math, Satyanarayana, the statistician/astrologer, etc. etc. We all sat on the floor or on a cot, while UG sat on a chair. There were few chairs. Lots of gossip and joking around made for a party-like atmosphere.

Mahesh Bhatt was also there, staying at the Woodlands hotel. A couple of days after I arrived, we went to see him there. And Mahesh ordered some beer. Brahmachari, the swamiji, was there. Then Raja was ushered in, as he had arrived at 40 K.R. Road and they brought him over. Apparently, he was given the room which Usha was occupying, UG asking her to sleep in the living room instead. He, myself, Mahesh and Nagaraj, all drank beer in UG’s presence—generally unheard of. Brahmachari who would not normally approve such things, nevertheless joined the merriment minus the drinking. Apparently Raja had been asked to take up a room there in K.R.Road house, the room which was being occupied by Usha, so he didn’t have to stay in a hotel.

Another night, UG asked me to join him to go to Mahesh’s room where a drinking session had been arranged. We took an elevator to go to Mahesh’s room. Mahesh wasn’t in his room. But UG had a key, and on entering the room we could hear a big band playing next door downstairs. It was so loud that I thought UG would do something to quell the noise. He went into the bathroom and closed the curtain there and came back into the main room. As he was sitting down in the armchair he swung his arm broadly. A minute later the band noise stopped and never came back again. Mahesh and I had did have a couple of drinks in the room, and then the three of us went downstairs for dinner. I can’t remember Raja or anyone else being there at that time.

Nagaraj was so addicted to smoking. He was taking “French leave” all the time from his work to be with UG. He wanted to quit smoking but couldn’t. UG would advise him that he shouldn’t quit; he should keep smoking. If he quit, UG warned, it would be a great shock. Some time later Nagaraj even called me at home in Seaside and asked me for tips to quit smoking. I told him to “just quit”. Anyway, apparently he did, and he died soon after. UG, I heard, went to visit his family to console them.

In the house there were two servants taking care of Valentine. Whenever UG walked in I noticed how the faces of these servant maids would expand with broad smiles. They were happy to see him. Of course, he always remunerated them lavishly for their work. Why wouldn’t they be happy? Besides, UG’s aura was such.

One night, Chandrasekhar and I brought vadais and hot chutney from a restaurant nearby. We all ate them to spare the women cooking in the house.

During my stay, I was offering to spend some money on this or that, but UG would always stop me, saying, “Wait, your turn will come.” When we were on a shopping spree, one time UG sent me and Mittu ostensibly to shop for comic books for Kiran, but the outing was apparently arranged to give a blasting to Shanta in our absence. I did buy a bunch of comic books, including a couple for Mittu as a gift. We went into a cloth shop looking for a sari for Wendy. UG let me pay for a piece of fabric for him and he helped me to pick a nice sari for Wendy, a blue one.

The time in Bangalore was the last time I saw my friend Raja. While there, he once participated in a conversation with UG. As usual, the topic was enlightenment. UG is usual downplayed the idea of “waiting for something to happen.” Although I never saw Raja again, I wrote to him a couple of times, but never heard from him. I learned a couple of years later from his son Mohan that one evening around 5 p.m. he went for a walk downtown and never returned. His family and friends advertised in the papers and other venues searching for him. No one knew what happened to him.

I mentioned this later to UG and mused aloud that someone might have murdered him. UG replied, “Murdered, no!” I didn’t know how to take it.

As my time in Bangalore was coming to a close, I remarked to UG that it seemed about 90% of the people who came to see him there were really there for the supernatural effect of his and not for his teaching. He replied, “Why 90%? All of them!”

After the six days had passed, I said goodbye. Suguna made some Upma for me (as it was too early for dinner) and I ate it. As a parting gift, UG gave me some incense sticks to give to my family.

Bangalore, 1990

On one of his visits to Seaside, UG invited Wendy to come to Switzerland, with our two children, 4-year old Kiran and by then a 17-year old Shyamala. I told him that if we went all the way to Switzerland, it would be only a bit longer to go to India, but it would cost too much to go to both places. UG said that it would be more interesting for Wendy to go to India. I pointed out that I wouldn’t care to go to India if he weren’t there, so as before, he said he would make a point of being there when we were there. So, the trip was arranged.

The four of us traveled from Seaside first to Madras, and then took another plane to Bangalore. Julie and Chandrasekhar received us at the airport.

At 40 K.R. Road, our family was given a special big room upstairs and was treated like royalty. The food was great. And I remember going for a walk with UG (Wendy following and taking a picture) in the Lalbagh gardens. And also, UG invited us all to the M.T.R Restaurant where everything was made with ghee.

We stayed in Bangalore for 10 days. On the third day, it was June 25, my birthday. For that day, I arranged that Julie would take the family in a taxi to Mysore and show them around while I spent time with UG in Bangalore. But at 6 in the morning, just as I went downstairs in my pajamas to get some coffee, I learned that Julie had backed out of going—she couldn’t tear herself away from UG! UG suggested that I should take them to Mysore, after all, they were my family. I agreed, and got ready in 15 minutes. I did have a great birthday celebration, with a lovely beer-and-cashew-nut repast in the luxury hotel located in the Brindavan Gardens near Mysore.

One morning, UG arranged for me to go have a Nadi reading (I think it was called the Agasthya Nadi). I had anticipated this possibility even while I was back in the US, as there was talk about it then. So I had my horoscope that had been done by my late father sent to me from Hyderabad and I took it with me to the reading, along with information about Wendy’s birthplace and date and time. We had both our readings done. Brahmachari and Chandrasekhar were with us, as well as Wendy, and I think Shyamala and Kiran. The session took place I think for no more than an hour. At the end I gave the Nadi reader a hundred rupees. The Nadi reader had long matted hair and read the palm leaves inscribed with archaic Tamil (I think) text which he translated into contemporary Kannada. Chandrasekhar recorded it and typed it up that night. There were some predictions about my being famous and rich in some sort of international business, about my living till I was 93, that Wendy was my second wife, and that my mother was going to die in the next year or two, due to her past karma. The reading was right about Wendy, and perhaps my mother, but not about the “international business.” Neither I nor UG ever believed that I would be good in any kind of business. At the end of the session, I was prompted to ask three questions. I asked, as one of them, whether I would get enlightened (or, when I would get enlightened.) The answer came that I would be enlightened when I was 93. When this was reported to UG, he chastised me for my question. I said I just asked out of curiosity, although, I told him, I believed that in some sense I was already enlightened. That put an end to the conversation.

One afternoon, there was big gathering at 40 K.R. Road. The upstairs room was packed with people. A little girl from a Telugu family was asked to perform classical dance for UG. Her teacher was accompanying her with her singing. It was painful to watch. The dance was so long and the girl was literally in pain. Julie shot a video of this and other events. At some point in the late afternoon everyone moved up onto the rooftop terrace. Evan Valentine was carried up the stairs in her wicker chair. There Shyamala charmed everyone with a dance, and also her dramatization of a Dr. Seuss’s poem “What Was I Scared Of?” It was quite nice. While everyone was chatting, Shyamala and the other girls, Mittu, Aruna and Archana, were teaching each other some dance movements. Mittu and Prashant were Shanta’s children. Shanta is the author of The Sage and the Housewife. Aruna and Archana were Chandrasekhar’s daughters. Bharati, UG’s elder daughter, was also present. The women had a grand time decking Shyamala with saris.

Another day, I invited everyone for lunch at the Woodlands Hotel. We all ate pizza and other foods. Indian food was served, but in another part of the restaurant where you ate in the Indian style.

The night before we left, we saw UG off at the airport. He left to go somewhere. The same night, after 10 o’clock, Chandrasekhar took me to see his friend Satyanarayana, the statistician, who was also an astrologer, for a reading. Satyanarayana was kind enough to give a detailed reading. I did take some notes. The reading didn’t seem all that striking to me, when I looked over the notes later.

Apparently, Satyanarayana was pretty psychic too. He could cite phrases from a page of a book, along with the page number, of UG’s (I think Mind is a Myth) before it ever came to be published. Apparently, his father was a monk; I noticed his picture in one of the rooms.

On our final day, we were all invited for lunch by Ramachandra and Rechal Das. They were partners and billionaires. There were snacks and beer and all that. But we didn’t see their families. There was some philosophical talk, part of it turning around who would succeed UG. I felt that they got interested in me because somehow they suspected that I might be the one to succeed UG. Not a chance! (In fact, I commented once on UG in everyone’s presence: “UG is an odd ball. I don’t want to be like an odd ball!) After the lunch, Ramachandra dropped us off at the airport.

From there we flew to Hyderabad, where we visited my brother and his family for several more days. In Hyderabad, my family was treated for dinners and parties by UG’s daughters Bharati and Usha. UG’s grandson Kamesh drove us around showing his place of work, the Defense Research Laboratories.

We then briefly visited several other places, Bombay, Guntur, Delhi, Agra, Banaras and Madras, partly on a lecture tour, before returning to Seaside.

Carmel, 1991

Although this period of four weeks did not involve traveling for me, it was the only time that UG stayed for more than two or three days in the area where I live. The occasion was to provide Mahesh Bhatt a place and some assistance from me and UG to write his biography of UG (UG Krishnamurti, A Life, published later in 1992 by Penguin Books, India).

UG sent some money from Europe, asking me to find a place for him and Mahesh to stay while they visited the US with the plan of Mahesh writing UG’s biography. Wendy and I found a vacation rental house in Carmel for them and rented it for a month. They arrived and set up house there. I brought in my 286 PC computer and a dot-matrix printer. The idea was for me to help Mahesh write the biography in the afternoons when I wasn’t teaching in the college. For a whole week I came, but there was no movement, as Mahesh didn’t make even the first stab at writing. I was beginning to doubt if the biography would ever happen. But soon after, he picked up speed and would dictate material to me and I would type it into the computer while simultaneously editing where it was needed.

There were few visitors – UG made sure of that. There was this odd and odoriferous couple whose story I recounted in the chapter on “UG’s Teaching Process.” Larry Morris came for a couple of weeks to help with the writing. UG himself had newspaper and magazine clippings as well as some old letters with him, and he would dictate some of those to me. At times, he and Larry (and I too) would work together on a paragraph or two. Also, Douglas Rosestone visited, giving an account of the night of the calamity, which was duly recorded in the biography. [A few others mostly from the San Francisco Bay area and Santa Cruz managed to drop in for short visits. ]

Mahesh was intense in his work. When he was not working, he was talking to his daughter on his birthday or to some others in Bombay about his films. He never cared much about what he ate or drank and lived practically on what UG provided him. At nights, when he was alone, he would write his stuff and dictate the material when I was on the computer.

The last night of the writing of the biography, at about 10 p.m., the computer keyboard promptly broke down. Not knowing what else to do, I called the person who had sold me the computer. Fortunately not only did he answer, but he said he could replace the one I had with another one right then! I told Mahesh I would go down to this man’s shop to fetch the replacement keyboard and Mahesh said he would go with me. After returning at about 10:30 PM, I told Mahesh that it was my job now to put all the material of the book together and he could retire for the night. But Mahesh insisted that he would sit with me: in his movie-making work he was used to things breaking down in the middle of the night and to sitting with people working with him late into the night. I started working.

Around 2 AM, UG suddenly walked in from his bedroom and declared, “I still sense a block here. These two chapters (whatever they were) should not be separate. They should be merged together.” I told him that then the resulting chapter would be too long; some material would have to be cut. I think the material that could be cut was mostly about Mahesh’s relationship with Parveen Babi. Mahesh said that he couldn’t do it because the material was too close to him. So, I said I would do it and in about 10 minutes time the chapters were merged and cut down to size. This was another of the many instances where being with UG meant things could change instantly, at any time; one could not hesitate or ponder, but had to move quickly.

The book was ready to be printed by 6 AM. I sat down with UG to design the cover page and was wondering if UG had a picture of himself to put on the cover page. He went into his bedroom and returned with a very nice picture (not the one on the published book). It seemed to fit the cover perfectly. As the book had to be finished immediately, I called my work and excused myself for the day, and set about printing the biography using double-strike printing on a dot-matrix printer. The two hundred pages took about five and-a-half hours. By 11:30 AM the manuscript was ready to be taken to the printers to be copied and bound. I was exhausted; so I rested for a couple of hours in the middle of the day.

The next morning, Mahesh and UG left the house in Carmel, dropping by our house for breakfast on their way to Corte Madera. I told UG that the work had been hard, but I loved every minute of it. I also said that my work was my “guru dakshina” (gift to the guru). UG replied that if there was anybody like a guru, he wouldn’t call himself that, or something to that effect. Anyway, the writing of the biography was a memorable experience.

Yercaud, Mysore, Bangalore and Madras, 1994

While I was visiting UG in San Rafael some months earlier, UG invited me to go to India that winter of 1994 and he even provided me with a ticket. I was to spend a month in India, about three weeks with him and a week with all my extended family in Hyderabad.

My brother had died the year before (in November 1993) from a heart attack in Hyderabad. I hadn’t gone to his funeral, so I thought it would be a great idea to visit my sister-in-law, his widow, after a year of his death to offer my condolences.

After one night in Madras, I first spent about two weeks in Yercaud with UG, a night at Bramachari’s ashram in Mysore, a few days in Bangalore at Chandrasekar’s, then a week with family in Hyderabad, and then went back to Madras to spend another week with UG before I left the country.

I flew from L.A., I think, on Malaysian, directly to Madras. UG not only had sent me the ticket, but also arranged for Chandrasekhar to meet me at the airport and for us to go to Mr. Malladi Krishnamurti’s house. I was quite impressed by the cordiality with which the Malladi’s received me. They had supper ready for me. I slept, took a bath in the morning and had some coffee. I learned that Mr. Krishnamurti was the roommate of my childhood friend Parthasaradhi when they both studied at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. (I later told Parthasaradhi, who, like me, has lived in the U.S. for many years, about him and I was able to connect the two.)

Well rested, the next morning, Chandrasekhar and I took a train to go to Salem. We traveled in an air-conditioned compartment where seats were already reserved for us. We ate some idli sold by vendors on the train for breakfast and talked to our hearts’ content.

When we arrived in Salem after about 4-6 hours of travel, UG and the Major (Dakshinamurti) were waiting at the station to receive us. We went into a nearby restaurant for lunch. UG chided the major for the measly tip he gave to the waiter.

Later we arrived at the Radha Estate, in Yercaud. Yercaud is a resort town located on a hill near Salem. Driving there involved quite an uphill curving road with sharp hairpin turns which the Major negotiated well. The house had a West Wing and an East Wing; UG, I and the Major were in the East Wing. In my room, as I opened my suitcase to pull out some small gifts (like almond rocca), I heard UG talking about them as “junk”. Of course, I was hurt a little. Yet he appropriated the whole box of the almond rocca, only part of which I had intended to give to Chandrasekhar and Suguna (and the rest to my family), and never even mentioned a thing about it. UG gave me some rupees in exchange for dollars (with his usual “commission” – as this was his usual practice and how he made some money, the exchange rates varying, depending on the customer!).

Nartaki, an old friend from my days with Chalam and Souris, who also knew UG and Chandrasekar, and who was partly responsible for my meeting UG, also came to see me (I had written to her before), and, of course, UG. She was also put up in the West Wing.

I think it was during that trip that Brahmachari showed a sudden interest in me which he never had before, perhaps because he had read my paper on non-duality by that time. He showed some respect for what I had to say. One afternoon we went out for a walk and he told me stories from his past about UG.

My room was comfortable enough, and there was a bathroom where I could get hot water and wash my underwear and hang them up to dry. I remember one morning I came out after my bath, not quite fully dressed, and UG was sitting in the living room on a sofa or a bench, clad in white clothes. I was standing in front of him watching him in reverence. Earlier, when I was taking my bath, I had been having plenty of negative thoughts going in my head, but now when I stood there, my mind was swept clean of all those negative thoughts, and I could feel a nice clean energy running through me. UG looked like a freshly blossomed flower.

One evening, after dinner, UG was asking all the foreigners (it must have included me) to go to the West Wing, I teasingly said something to the effect, “We all belong over there!” UG took it as if I was feeling hurt. The next afternoon, he himself made some coffee with cream and brought over to me. I knew he was making up for his remark the previous night. The coffee was absolutely delicious.

I saw him also catering to a drunkard over his drinking habit by giving him money each time he came by or UG passed him on the street.

One evening, UG again started his tirade against Chandrasekhar for gathering of so many personal letters of people to UG, along with photographs of UG, and videos and audios of UG talking with people. UG’s claim was that others might access those letters, gleaning personal information the authors or involved parties wouldn’t want seen. Also, he maintained that the photographs and videos were the general property of people (of everyone) and Chandrasekhar had no business keeping them for himself. Another claim I heard was that people who keep these videos etc., might eventually use them to make money. That night things came to a head with a movement to destroy the photographs. UG started throwing pictures (if I remember right, he only did that to a few) into the fire. I said I would help him and threw one of them into the fire myself. Everyone was aghast at what I did. Later, on several occasions, I would brag about how I had committed UG’s picture to flames.

Early in my visit there was a talk about taking me to a Nadi astrologer somewhere in Salem. Godfried and Bodil had already consulted that Nadi. The Nadi reader had told them about their previous lives, including their past names, and everyone had been duly impressed. Arrangements were made for us all to go in a hired van. I was mildly interested. On the morning of the reading, I was taking a bath, getting ready to go, and UG shouted from the living room addressing me, “You‘re not really interested in going, are you?” I said, “No, not really.” Then he cancelled the trip, on that pretext! That’s UG’s style. He can throw surprises at you at any turn!

One cold night, the fireplace was lit. UG’s room was right next door. There was a lot of smoke coming out of the fireplace, and quite a bit of it was being drawn through a small window into UG’s room. UG, however, continued to sleep in his room with his door closed and did not come out for hours. Later, he bragged about this and would say, “’Fresh air is only a psychological necessity!” “Right” I would say to myself sarcastically. In fact, I remember in Palm Springs and in the Crow’s Nest in Mill Valley, people practically choking and rushing out of the room gasping for a breath of fresh air. Suffocation is not a psychological problem!

One evening Brahmachari went for a walk with me into the village and we sat on top of some rocks. The views from there were magnificent. We exchanged notes about our experiences with UG. I did go for several other walks. I remember walking around a church, and I saw a huge resort development under construction.

It was while I was there that one afternoon, Chandrasekhar asked me if I would look into the translation he had made of Mahesh Bhatt’s biography of UG into Telugu. I said I would and asked him whose idea it was, his or UG’s. It was UG’s, he said. UG remembered that I had some experience in translating when I worked for the Telugu Encyclopedia many years ago, and probably thought that it would do some good to the translation if I looked into it.

There was this lawyer of the Supreme Court of India, Sushil Kumar visiting from Delhi. He wore a Rajnishi’s style sannyasi ochre robe. Obviously he was a sannyasin before. One morning there was a big meeting in the living room with several people around. Sushil Kumar was quite brilliant. A big repartee session went on between him, Brahmachari and UG. Mahesh was also present. I think someone even filmed it. It was simply hilarious. People roared with laughter.

That same day or the next day, Sushil Kumar and UG were standing in the porch involved in some discussion. I was present. At some point UG for some reason turned the discussion over to me. I answered to the best of my ability, I think, to the point.

On the New Year’s Eve, Dakshinamurti, Chandrasekhar, Suguna and I watched the TV while UG was resting in his room. The celebration was quite interesting. Among other entertainment items, there was a woman from Malaysia singing in Tamil who was quite good. It was quite amazing to me how many channels (including Western channels like CNN and BBC) you could get on the TV in India.

After the New Year’s, it was time for us to leave Yercaud. Brahmachari had left before us. We were going to visit him in Mysore at his Ashram (which is really a house where he taught Vedanta or what not to a few Brahmacharis (bachelors). They cooked food and ate there. There were several rooms there; the house was his family house and probably his share of the family property. His brothers, according to UG, were king makers. They were noted for corruption and taking bribes for getting favors done. Bramachari had connections with liquor dealers and could get you illicit liquor!

I rewarded the servants well for their work before we left the house in Yercaud for Mysore. The Major drove UG, Nartaki and me. We dropped Nartaki off at the bus stop to take a bus to Tiruvannamalai where she worked in the Ramanashram. It was in the morning around 8 a.m. We then drove for quite some time through a National Forest, up in the hills. The forest was like a jungle, but had wide enough dirt roads to go on and lots of trees, but it wasn’t a dense forest. We might have driven through the forest for about an hour. We played several tapes of Balamuralikrishna in the car.

We arrived at Brahmachari’s Ashram at about lunch time. Brahmachari made me wear a dhoti, and we sat on the floor for lunch. The food was cooked by Brahmachari. It was quite tasty. There were cots with mosquito nets in the neighboring rooms. After lunch, some astrologer came by and a hilarious conversation followed. UG and Brahmachari were talking to each other through that astrologer, joking, of course. I interrupted saying, “Why are guys talking to each other through him, instead of directly?” That added more to the hilarity. I think we slept there that night and the next morning we left for Bangalore, which, if I remember right, was about a six-hour drive. Brahmachari came by to send us off after blessing me and receiving UG’s blessings.

I stayed in Bangalore at Chandrasekhar’s place, in Purnakutee. There I saw Gottfried and Bodil again as well as Frank Naronha. That was the first time I met Naronha. He was trying to touch UG’s feet and UG was preventing him by trying to touch Narona’s feet in turn. So you could see both of them ended up pushing each other’s arms away from themselves. It was funny. When he was making some appeals to UG (about his job or something), I said to Naronha: “You don’t have to ask him, whatever is good for you, UG will do it.” UG looked at me and echoed questioningly, repeating, “Without asking?”

Chandrasekhar brought out his translation of Mahesh’s book, and I started making corrections with my limited abilities. UG and I discussed the correct translation for “Calamity” and we finally settled on “vipattu”. I spent several days making the corrections. In the process, Chandrasekhar also brought out his notebooks of handwritten journals of his encounters with UG. I looked at them and told him that they deserve to be published in English, as many Westerners wouldn’t know about most of the things that had happened around UG in India in the early years.

One evening, Brahmachari brought a poem of his (dandakam, it was called, I think) which he wrote in Kannada and wanted us to translate it into English. He, Chandrasekhar and I sat together for about two hours and did the translation and got it typed up (Julie might have been there and typed it up, I can’t remember.) It is now included (“Who is this UG?”) in Chandrasekhar’s book, Stopped in Our Tracks, Series I.

My next stop was Hyderabad, where I visited my sister-in-law and other family relatives and friends for a week, out of UG’s sphere, and then went on to Madras where UG was waiting in the airport, along with Chandrasekhar and Major. We again were put up at the Malladi’s, where I had a grand time.

Chandrasekhar played a tape of Jnanachakravarti’s astrology readings and some music. We were invited for breakfast at Madurai Mani’s place. The idlis were great and on top of it Mr. Mani sang. The Manis are a domiciled Telugu family. Obviously, the man is well known. His music was good, except it wasn’t my favorite.

After three nights, Chandrasekhar, Suguna, the Major, UG and I went out scouting for a place to spend the next three nights. After looking at a resort place one day and not being satisfied with it, we returned to Madras. The next day, we decided to go to Pondicherry; we went to the Ashram Hotel there and found there were no vacancies. So we headed out of Pondicherry. About 15 kilometers away, UG spotted a hotel from a distance and declared that that was it. We went there, and found it was the Government-run Ashoka hotel. It was pretty clean and was standing on an immaculate beach with a fantastic view from the back where you could sit on chairs and watch the ocean, the beach and the lone boat parked on the beach. Major and I occupied one room, Chandrasekhar and Suguna another and UG a third. The food wasn’t great, but we tipped well anyway. Once, UG asked how much I tipped and I mentioned 10% or something and he made no comment. Chandrasekhar was going to pay for the hotel, but I insisted on paying for it.

On the second day, I arranged for a ride back to Pondicherry to meet with my French friend, Paul Albert, at the hotel where he was staying. Albert was living in Pondicherry at that time trying to do some field work in linguistics with a local tribe. The Major drove and Chandrasekhar and Suguna went with us. UG opted to stay back at the hotel. I caught Albert in the restaurant of the hotel. Looking at the picture on one of the books, Paul remarked that UG looked like a movie star. I introduced Chandrasekhar and the Major to him. They were to come back in the late afternoon and pick me up after I had spent the day with Albert. I drank some beer with him and then we went into the local native tavern with food stalls lined up and local wine served. There were hordes of flies on the foodstuff. Paul said that if it weren’t for the flies, he would have loved to eat the food. We walked a little. We went up to his room which was clean. He made a tape copy of a couple of 45 rpm albums of Sita and Anusuya’s folk songs and gave it to me as a gift. Alas, I lost the tape and I don’t know how. Then we went for a short walk along the street.

Late afternoon, my three friends came to pick me up. Paul said namaskaram to Suguna and we all left.

One night, while we were there was a beautiful full-moon night and all four of us went to the beach. Suguna was complaining about the personal things in her life, particularly about how she didn’t want see or hear about Kaka whom Chandrasekhar once married and divorced on UG’s prompting.

We returned to Madras. I called Satchidananda Murty, my former philosophy professor at Andhra University, on the phone. I had called him once earlier from Yercaud. He had already met UG once in Albuquerque, so he asked if UG would come to his village and receive his hospitality. Of course, UG politely declined. Instead, I made an appointment to see Murty there in Madras at the hotel where he was staying. He was in Madras on some official business.

I asked Mr. Krishanmurti (Malladi) if he could spare a couple of copies of the organizers he had gotten made for his company, which he graciously gave me. I took one of those and a copy of one of UG’s books as gifts for Murty. UG was getting his hair cut at the Taj Mahal Hotel. UG, Major, Chandrasekhar, Suguna and I had some coffee there after the haircut and then drove by Murty’s hotel, where they dropped me off. I went and knocked at Murty’s door. He opened but looked pretty annoyed as I was there a bit earlier than the appointed time (I was supposed to see him at 12 Noon, and it was about 11:50 AM). He let me in anyway. Other teachers came, and I spent the afternoon in their company, taking an auto rickshaw back to the Malladi’s after also attending a lunch and a meeting.

At the Malladi’s, the food was delicious. UG, the Major and I were all put upstairs. Mahesh was visiting UG at that time. And also a lady from Sri Lanka, called Sylvia, I think.

Parvati Kumar, a wealthy retired chartered accountant, once came with his wife and probably about fifty foreigners he was taking on a tour going somewhere in the South to one of the Masters’ places. Malladi’s house had a collection of the pictures of the Masters. I once heard the whole family doing some chanting in Sanskrit at the shrine downstairs. The sound of it sent shivers up my spine. Parvati Kumar prostrated before UG, and, of course, UG, withdrew his feet, saying they were dirty. Kumar is into some occult Vedic thinking and has published in poor English plenty of literature concerning it. UG is considered a Master in the lineage of Masters by Kumar’s group to which the Mallad’s also belong.

That night, the whole group Kumar had brought was asked for dinner. UG and the rest of us were invited too. UG was made to sit on an elevated seat. He introduced Mahesh Bhatt as “Public Enemy No. 1,” and Chandrasekhar as “Public Enemy number 2,” and I added that I was the Public Enemy Number 3. Anyway, we ate dinner. UG gave a small speech, and not saying very much, got up and mingled nicely with the people around and pretty soon we all left to go upstairs, leaving the group to their own devices.

The last night I was there, I was leaving in the middle of the night to fly back to the U.S. from Madras. UG was supposed to leave the next night. I asked him where he was going. He said he had four plane tickets in his pocket—one to go to Australia, a second to go to the U.S., a third to go to China and Japan and the last one to go to Europe. He said he would first go to Singapore, and then decide where he would go from there. I am sure he made his decision tossing a coin. That’s some traveler!

UG was debating whether he should go with me to the airport to see me off. I told him, why he should put himself to driving in the car at such a late hour in the night. Around 10 PM, he decided to go. At the airport I got everything taken care of and was about to go to board the plane. As usual, I shook UG’s hand and saluted him. He tapped me on my shoulder and made some kind of blessing sign with his arm as he was leaving. It had to be a blessing!

That was the end of my trip to India in 1994.

Hemet, California, and Gstaad Switzerland -- 1995

At the end of 1994, UG and gang visited us in Seaside for a couple of days, staying through the New Year. As usual, he stayed in the modest Magic Carpet Lodge (a Best Western motel) down the street that UG liked to stay in when he visited us. During that time, UG insisted that I go travel with them in Southern California right after the New Year. There was no specific destination. Rather, he wanted to make good on his threats to find a new “base” in California: he was “finished” with the Bay area.

So, soon after, I flew to LA and was received by UG at the airport. My daughter Shyamala was also there to meet me at the airport and spend a little time with me. We all got into a van driven by Julie. While Julie was driving out of the parking lot she ran into competition with another lady for space on the driveway and neither of them would budge. UG kept yelling at Julie, “Don’t let her in, the bitch!” and so on and Julie was egged on further. Finally, after both women took considerable risks, Julie prevailed. This scene certainly fazed out Shyamala.

We drove to a nearby hotel where the Malladi’s were waiting for us with idlis and other goodies. We had our lunch with them. Shyamala was introduced to Krishnmurti and his wife Prasanna. I believe Larry was with us on the trip too. But I can’t distinctly remember. Shyamala left us to return home.

We spent the night in a hotel, UG, Larry and I, I think, occupying the same suite. In the morning we set out on our trip with nothing but a cup of coffee or tea and some peanuts from the plane. And, looking for places to stay, we drove toward San Diego, via a valley where we didn’t find anything suitable. We had lunch in an Indian restaurant in San Diego. Then we were driving again when UG asked us to stop and picked up one of those papers where hotels, apartments and other accommodations were advertised. He found a Best Western motel posting a price of $19 a night in a place called Hemet. He couldn’t have been happier!

We immediately drove and found ourselves in a small non-descript town some distance southeast of Los Angeles. The rent at the motel was actually somewhat higher, probably around $29 and the apartment suites were even higher. Julie rented an apartment, Mario and Lisa one and the Guhas another. And Larry too I suppose. I was to crash in UG’s suite, sleeping on the living room sofa bed which would be folded back into a sofa in the daytime for people to sit on. The arrangement was that I would pay the suite rent for one month (that was the scheduled duration of our stay) and in his turn UG would cook for me.

Sometime while there I coined a nickname for Hemet: “Hemet Damn it!” which UG liked.

In India, Mahesh was going to write a press release on pornography and censorship and he sought UG’s help. To help in the matter, although I didn’t have a computer with me, UG dictated his pronouncement on the subject to me, and I wrote it down by hand. It was entitled, “The Role of Godmen in the Next Millennium.” I edited it and then fair-copied it in all capitals, and Julie faxed it to Mahesh in Bombay. It was an indictment of censorship, showing how it never works. A key sentence in the piece reads: “If we admit that our interest in spirituality is not essentially different from our interest in varieties of food, varieties of girls, and every other form of pleasure, then everything falls into its natural rhythm of life.”

While we were in Hemet we made several trips to various places. One time we went to a billionaire’s place (I can’t recall his name.) The man had once been a professor of mathematics or economics at the University of Chicago. Once, Julie took UG to visit him in Chicago. He had quit his job there, saying that the income provided by his job kept him poor. Instead he became a high-level investment broker and made 4 billion and was on the way to making his fifth billion. His place in one of the valleys in the Los Angeles area was hidden away. We had to drive down a long driveway which had several signs warning, “Armed Response!” He had two ferocious dogs and lived alone with a whole lot of booze and vitamins and huge TV screen with almost 1000 channels. He looked like a lonely man.

We later went to another place of his where he was having a huge house built with big lawns and bronze sculptures on the lawns worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. There was a separate annex being built which he was offering to UG to live in. But UG wasn’t too enthusiastic about it as the place was located in a remote area and it would be difficult for people who want to visit him to have access to.

While I was in Hemet, Wendy mailed a copy of Vemana, the book of Vemana’s verses translated by me into English which had just been published in India. UG immediately got a hold of it in the car and started reading from it as we set out to go on one of our “malling” trips.

At one point, UG was making arrangements to go with Mario to the airport in Los Angeles for Mario’s departure back to Europe. Mario was to drive there, I was to go with them and then drive UG back to Hemet. UG suggested that we visit my daughter Shyamala after dropping off Mario, as she lived nearby. We called her, offering to take her out to lunch. She asked if she could invite a few of her friends to meet UG. That was fine with UG, so it was arranged.

When we arrived the next morning at the airport, I had to get help from Mario even to start the car – needless to say I was nervous to drive in that busy city. But I did anyway, and drove UG and myself carefully to Shyamala’s apartment. Kash, her boyfriend then (now her husband) was there. As Shyamala didn’t have any coffee or cream with her, so she had to send Kash to get some, and then we had some coffee. Meanwhile, about ten to fifteen of their friends, mostly interns from medical fields, ophthalmologists, psychiatrists, and others gathered there (Kash was in medical school at the time). One of them offered to go to a nearby South Indian restaurant and bring us all lunch. By about noon, the table was filled with a feast with all kinds of goodies and we had a great communal lunch, instead of merely taking Shyamala out! And UG, in his usual fashion, charmed all of them with his answers to their questions and with his one-liners, anecdotes and jokes. UG’s magic at work again! After a couple of hours, UG and I drove back to Hemet.

On his next visit to the US, UG did change his base to Palm Springs.

In 1995 I and my family all visited UG in Gstaad. On this trip our family also went to Heidelberg on our friend Rima Holland’s invitation to spend a few days there. One event I remember particularly is the following:

UG asked Julie and Mario to take our whole family on a trip to Italy. They did. We stopped in a border village after passing through the big tunnel going to Italy and had a six-course elaborate lunch, (and we weren’t allowed to pay – Julie paid for everything) including aperitifs, digestives, wine, portabella mushrooms and what not. It was so fancy. I realized that the Italians (exemplified by Mario) were just as picky as the French (and the Brahmins) about eating.

We took the freeways (which are toll ways in Italy) and went to Milan. We went into some stores and shops, had coffee in a shop that also sold ice cream, and went into a big cathedral where there was a dress code (you had to wear shoes and a shirt and whatnot). There was a big water fountain in the huge plaza in front with lots of pigeons and people. We took some pictures there and headed back to Switzerland.

We came to Stressa, a resort town on the Italian-Swiss border, where UG had spent a couple of months with Valentine many years ago. Obviously, UG had asked Julie and Mario to show us that place. It was on the Lago Majore, a big and beautiful lake. The place was very touristy. We walked around on the cobbled lanes and went into shops, stopped in place for a delicious pizza and an ice cream place across the street for a fancy ice cream.

It was after dark when we left to head back to Gstaad. We drove through another long tunnel. When we stopped to pee, we got out of the tunnel and saw the full moon. And it was beautiful. It was so fantastic driving through the magnificent high mountains on a moonlit night with Mario driving effortlessly and perfectly all the way. It was around 2 AM when we got home.

Palm Springs: December 1998 -- January 1999

The final event I would like to write about here is my ill-fated visit to UG in Palm Springs at the end of 1998 and beginning of 1999. That December-January, I had a falling out with UG in Palm Springs. That was the same winter when he gave $10,050 to Kiran for both his grand piano and drum set.

I traveled to Palm Springs first and then about a couple of weeks later Wendy and Kiran joined me.

At first, UG fixed a place for me in a condominium (in a fancy gated compound called Whitewater) with Mahesh. I was doing the cooking there for Mahesh and myself. Once UG asked me to feed Bob and Paul as well, and then when they came along with him into the condo, UG started his talk about how he didn’t like the stink and stench of an ashram. I just about pounced on him for his contradictory messages.

A week or so later after we had moved to another apartment, UG asked me if I could feed Mahesh for the next ten days. I said fine. But I wasn’t just cooking for him; occasionally the whole gang would come in for lunch. And I had to make something special for UG. I was making mashed canned garbanzo beans or something for him. I would take about an hour or so to prepare the lunch. UG was watching over all this. He didn’t like my getting so involved with cooking. I should have seen it coming.

Ten days later, Mahesh left, and Wendy and Kiran came and we were all put up in one room in the main house next to the cottage where UG lived. Chandrasekhar and his wife Suguna were also there, as were Lisa, who lived there, the Guha’s, who were also visiting, and Julie.

I was supposedly to share the kitchen with Chandrasekhar and Suguna. I quickly made some garbanzo beans with a few spices and lemon for Kiran. I didn’t take more than about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, UG was sitting there outside the kitchen watching and at one point he said, “Get out of there, they have to do their cooking.” By that time I finished and said I was just getting out. Then a minute or so later, he said again to get out of there. I got furious. I was already out of the kitchen. I said, “UG, I am out of there! I’m done.” He realized that I was really done and he couldn’t say anything more.

I continued on, “I won’t get into the kitchen! The three of us will eat outside from now on.” UG replied, “You’re guests here. I don’t like your eating outside.” I said, “Why are you sentimental about it? This is a decision I came to after thinking about the practicalities. After all, I am earning my own living. It’s not a problem for me.” His speech faltered and became weak. It was clear that he was disturbed.

Here is a quote from Chandrasekhar’s notebooks (Stopped in Our Tracks – Series III, published on UG’s website) about UG’s reaction:

"UG faltered in his speech and his voice was weakened, reflecting the disturbance in him. “You haven’t eaten anything? Why is your voice like that?” asked Moorty. UG had already cooked his oats and eaten them.

"I then went to UG’s room. “Why should Guha and their family eat here? Why should Julie eat here?” he said. But it was he who wanted them to stay.

"I can’t wait to see how far this saga of eating will go on today. “I am not going to have any more meetings or talks from now on. I never invited the Germans. They can do what they please,” UG said. He turned to Larry and said, “America is finished. This is also the end of the Palm Springs chapter. I am not even going to India.” Then he turned to Lisa and said, “Why do we have this big chair here? It’s a waste. Return it to the owner. I must vacate this place by the end of January. I’ll tell Lynn. There won’t be any more meetings. There won’t be any talking.”

"He talked like that, rather incoherently, for a while. This incident is proof that he too reacts to situations by being sorry for what happened and being hurt. Although he says “I never question my actions,” it’s clear that he is affected by what happens in such contexts. The principal actor of the drama, Moorty, however, sat quietly like a cool cucumber. The three of them ate after we finished."

Then I stopped using the kitchen. I told Wendy to take care of the cooking. I got my food and ate in the living room for a couple of times, and then I figured it would be better if I ate in the Lucky store at the end of the street. This went on for about three days (just before New Year’s Eve. On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Lynn, Lisa, Wendy and I had a celebration with expensive champagne).

In one of the gatherings in the house, I said to UG, “I know when I am not wanted.” He replied, “You are very much wanted. If it comes to that, all these people, Chandrasekhar and all, can go.” Although surprised by the reply, I wasn’t too convinced by it. The fourth day morning, I was telling myself in the bed that I had to leave the place. I was finishing up putting Chandrasekhar’s Stopped in Our Tracks in a book form in Word Perfect. I was still struggling with the headers and footers. As UG entered the main house, I declared that I was leaving that afternoon (Wendy and Kiran were leaving that day to go to San Diego). UG looked very surprised, turned to me and said, “Why?” I said, “I don’t feel very happy here.” And that was it; there was no further conversation.

I went to his cottage to wind up the computer business and put all the files Chandrasekhar needed on a disk to give to him. Meanwhile, UG walked in, and I said that he didn’t owe me anything for whatever I did for him, I did all the web business because I didn’t make any distinction between his work and mine, and finally that I would look after his web page until he found someone else. UG replied that he wasn’t concerned about that.

I told Wendy I would get a ride with her to the bus station that afternoon; she could drop me off there and move on to San Diego with Kiran. I would take a bus to Los Angeles, then to Salinas and Monterey. I said at the bus station to Wendy, “It’s my life. You have to let me do it this way.” The operator didn’t have change for a hundred dollars. But he let me in and I bought the ticket at the next stop. I paid $70 without knowing there was a cheaper fare; the sales clerk didn’t tell me about it. In the L.A. bus station I had a sandwich for dinner and sat there watching people while I waited for the bus. I was quite impressed by how a black woman treated another homeless person. That was quite moving. She was so compassionate. There were two buses, and I think I took one of them knowing full well that it would arrive in Salinas around four in the morning.

When I landed in the Salinas bus station there was no immediate connecting bus to go to Monterey. I walked with my bag (and pillow) on the streets for at least a mile in that cold weather (It was 30 degrees or 40 I can’t remember—but it was cold) until I found a breakfast place. I ordered some serial with milk and went and washed in the bathroom. I asked the waitress for directions to the Monterey bus station. One of the fellows there advised me where the stop was, but said I should go back to the Greyhound station instead of to the bus stop nearby, as it was dark and not safe to wait there. I walked back to the bus station and waited for another hour or so. Then I took the bus; I was dropped off in Seaside at Fremont and Ord Grove streets.

After eight days of internal turmoil, I did finally break down and call UG in Palm Springs and apologized, saying, “I’m sorry, I made such a mess out of things.” UG said, “No need to apologize,” and quickly started making arrangements for Chandrasekhar and Suguna to spend a couple days in Seaside.

Later, UG and I met many times, but the air between us was never so clear again. I did visit UG again in Gstaad in the summer of 2000. (That’s when I edited Bob Carr’s autobiography). The question did come up in my mind, more than once, what in the world was I doing sitting there, day in and day out.

The next summer, UG extended the same invitation, even offering to send me a ticket for my travel, saying that I didn’t have to spend a penny. But I turned down the invitation. He said that he was terribly disappointed. I said, “For a long time I thought that no one understood me better than you.” He enthusiastically replied, “Yes, that’s true.” I continued, “But I don’t feel that way any more.” He then said, “Come over here, we will thrash out the matter.” When I declined, he said, “Give it some deep, serious thought.” He called me twice in this context.

I didn’t go to Gstaad again until the summer of 2004, although I had been seeing him off and on in the US in various places, including my own. In 2004, I heard that he fell in the bathroom and was hurt. Being concerned, I called him a couple of times. I told him I planned to go to India for one last time to say goodbye to everyone. UG said that if I was going, he will be there too. The second time I called him in Gstaad, he said, “Why don’t you come and spend some time here.” I accepted the invitation and went to Gstaad to spend six weeks with him. That was when I also made arrangements to spend four weeks with him in Bangalore along with Wendy and Kiran at the end of the same year.

He did come to see us in Seaside in the beginning of 2006. But after that, he never visited the US again. My last visit to see him was before his death. The story of that visit of mine is recounted in the following chapter. You will notice that in spite of the air between us not being cleared, there was still that friendship, affection and mutual respect between us, as there always had been.

A Few Other Travel Memories

Sleeping Arrangements

It was probably on my first visit to UG in Palm Springs. I was to sleep in his living room as usual and UG was saying to me that he would prefer that he slept on the couch and I in his bedroom. Of course, I would have none of that. I told him I would arrange the sofa pillows on the floor and sleep there (as the couch was not even enough or was too soft). He took it upon himself to bring sheets and pillows and arrange my bed himself. I remarked to him smiling, “UG, you are doing everything short of taking me to bed and singing lullabies!” Once Guha told me that UG said only two people could sleep on the couch in his living room (referring to Chalet Sunbeam in Gstaad): Mahesh Bhatt and Narayana Moorty.

One night in Palm Springs, UG slept in his room with his door locked and the heater turned way high (probably around 95 degrees). I couldn’t sleep -- it was so hot plus I had to pee. But I couldn’t get into the bathroom as it was in UG’s room. So, I went outside and peed in the plants. The next morning I told UG, and he said that he hardly ever slept at night and that I could easily have gotten him up.

Later, I started getting picky about where I slept.

On a visit to Lake Havasu, I was to stay in the same hotel suite as UG. There was so much party noise from downstairs that I suggested to UG that maybe we should look for another room for me. And with Larry’s help we did go around looking but didn’t find anything satisfactory. So I ended up in UG’s living room again, with ear plugs this time, loaned by Larry.

I think from then on UG changed his policy. On my further visits to Palm Springs he never asked me to sleep in his studio apartment. I slept in other places.

Once in Gstaad, in 1996, I remember UG noticing that we needed an extra mattress for me to sleep on upstairs. Without my knowing it, UG went downstairs to the storeroom and singlehandedly carried a twin mattress upstairs. I only found out as I saw him coming up the last few stairs. I was so embarrassed to see him doing that. But it was too late!

Children, Movies, and Censorship

It was in Chalet Sunbeam in Gstaad, I believe. We were watching a movie every night to spend time. The movies were either brought in by Julie from the US or rented by her in the nearby town. Sometimes the movies had foul language (the four-letter word said hundreds of times), violence and explicit sex. But UG never disallowed children to watch the movies (the children present at this time were Shilpa and Sumedha, Guha’s daughters, and perhaps also Claire, Susan’s daughter). “They will be exposed to them later in their lives anyway,” was his justification.

A most moving time was when we were watching a movie on Larry Flynt, the “Hustler” maven. The movie was quite painful to watch at moments, as Flynt’s girlfriend was suffering from drug addiction and whatnot. It was dark in the room, except for the light from the movie. Everyone was absorbed in watching the movie. But I looked at UG’s face, and I could see distinctly tears rolling down his cheeks. Who could say that UG never cried?

Memorable Car Rides

I had the most memorable car rides while I was visiting UG. UG always made sure that I sat in the back (he always occupied the front seat by the side of the driver).

In California, the ride to Idyll Wilde was very interesting: The road up the hill was windy and the climb steep. Larry, Susan, Mario, UG and I and some others all went there looking for a house to stay while we were still in Hemet. It had snowed there earlier and was rather cold. We parked the car at the main intersection of the town and got out. Everyone else was shivering, but UG got out with not even his hands in the pockets of his thin jacket. There was sludge on one of the streets. UG was more sure-footed than I was, so he gave me a hand when I stumbled crossing the street. When they looked at a house on the corner of a street, I went with him inside and remarked while he was toying with the idea of renting it, that he and others could stay there, but I would stay outside under the tree, and if I died in the cold, they could drag me out and throw me away! That probably poured cold water on any enthusiasm he might have had.

While in Switzerland, I remember going on such fantastic trips with UG and others that I doubt if I will ever have such experiences again. One was driving through Villars, the place where Krishnamurti lived a long time ago with his brother. I remember stopping there and have coffee with Larry and Susan and whomever.

A second trip was to Lugano and the Italian borders where we saw Lago Majore and (I am not so sure now that they are near each other). The views were phenomenal.

A third trip was when we all went to the Lichtenstein Principality. The small town was bordering on three countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. We stopped to have lunch in the local MacDonald’s. I treated everyone to veggie burgers and what not. We circled around the where the ruler of the country lived. On our return trip, I was with UG in a car driven by Vibodha. We drove back on the Upper Alps and the views of the mountains and valleys were so fantastic that I will never forget them. Vibodha was such a perfect driver. Mario, I think, was driving the other car. He too was a great driver, and also (contrary to UG’s denunciations) a great cook.

Even as recently as August 2004, we went in a two-car caravan to Chamonix, France, to see the glacier coming down Mont Blanc. Not only the views there phenomenal, but I never saw water flowing so fast in a river.

Care and Compassion:I had just had a cancer operation. (I consulted with UG before and he advised me to go through with the operation.) After the surgery, I had called him from the hospital room in Stanford to tell him how the operation went. When I returned home a couple of days later, UG and Mahesh took a plane and came and visited me in Seaside. UG made sure that no others visited us (which would normally be the case) at that time. When they came, I went into the living room and sat on a high stool talking to them. After a while, I felt exhausted, still suffering from the after-effects of surgery, and said, “You guys keep talking. I am a little tired. I will go and lie down in the bedroom.” And after I lay in the bed, UG came into the bedroom and sat next to me at the bed for a length of time and chatted with me. I was so touched!

Later, after he returned to Palm Springs, UG wanted me to go to Switzerland to his place and get a good rest there. He cashed his frequent flyer miles and a first-class ticket and got me a business class ticket and Wendy and Kiran tourist class tickets and told Wendy, “You drop this guy off in Gstaad, and then you can return to Seaside.” Of course, Wendy stayed with me the whole time and we spent two months in Gstaad as UG’s guests. I was kept busy translating Chandrasekhar’s notebooks at that time – that’s some kind of rest! But UG’s care and compassion were boundless!

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2009-02-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

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I took me a while to write this article on love. And I don't know when I will write another article again, but if you have any suggestions on what you might like to read, that will provide some motivation.

An Upanishad of Love

2009-02-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

My inquiry here is into relationships with special reference to “love”: what are the myths and realities in the so-called love? Is there a genuine relationship that could be called love? What are the factors that go into making such a relationship? What are the dependency and liberating factors? And so on. I am interested in the morphology of love.

When I was teaching Upanishads in an Eastern Philosophy class, I used to say to the students that they could write their own Upanishad, as for example on the subject of love. Any such Upanishad would start with what is the most obvious aspect of love, viz., physical attraction and eventually culminate in a non-dual state where there is neither the lover nor the loved, and no need exists for the lover either. The following essay explores those various aspects of love, partly from personal experience and partly from observations of human behavior. This Upanishad perforce is somewhat autobiographical, but it will illustrate the stages one could go through to arrive at what might be construed as the non-dual aspect of love.

An Upanishad of Love:

Stage 1: The process starts with sexual arousal. When you see a person of the opposite sex (sometimes same) you begin to have an arousal; maybe the person is naked or you have touched him or her. Either by accident, because there is no channel for expression of sex, (and no experience of being held physically or holding another), or because of company one might get into sexual fantasies and even masturbation. One yearns for the contact of a sex partner.

Stage 2: If, by chance, one does get into a relationship, (especially as a teenager), one feels that his or her life has found a new meaning. One is full of life and joy. One feels as one lives for the sake of the other. You buy gifts, say sweet things, do various favors and so on and so forth. If there is no sexual intercourse, one keeps fantasizing and hoping for that moment of touch and union. If it comes, it will last for a while and can end up in marriage or at least an affair.

Stage 3: When there is a frustration or some obstacle in the course of love, and one’s emotional needs are not yet satisfied (for instance, for lack of an adequate response from the partner), there is a likelihood of becoming dependent on the other. This can also be coupled with one’s ego being hurt, one’s sense of conquering or power or self-importance not being satisfied. Then it’s bound to express itself either with excessive or unreasonable demands or expectations, or as a show of power withdrawal of affection or favors from the other. Or if forcing oneself or one’s will on the other doesn’t work, one can end up hating the other. And it can, in the same vein, lead to force and violence. One can also get into a state of loss of meaning or interest in life or total boredom.

Stage 4: One can get desperate and seek escape from one’s condition by entering into more dependency-generating relationships, activity, achievement, alcohol, attempts at suicide and such. Ultimately, if none of them succeed, one can run into a total life crisis.

Stage 5: Questioning Assumptions or Premises in one’s thinking process: I recall a time of crisis in my own life: That day when it happened, I had called this girlfriend 21 times, each time being hung up on the other end. Finally, I ended that effort. But the pain and agony did not go away. That night I was groaning and moaning with my head in the pillow. In one of those moments, whether thanks to my being acquainted with the teachings of J. Krishnamurti or because something else, I can’t say, but I became aware of a mistake I had been making in all my youth, namely, assuming that life without love is not worth living. The youthful urge for sex and contact with the opposite sex (which I was deprived of in India, thanks to the sexual segregation in the culture there), the previous frustration of an affair with a married woman (6 years older than me) not getting anywhere, the eagerness to fall in love with someone available around and that love not finding a response -- all precipitated in this crisis. The idea in my assumption was that someone, somewhere, must love me. Of course, if it is just any love, I could have found that in umpteen numbers of ways and places – among friends, parents and so forth – but that wasn’t good enough. It had to be romantic love and that too from this woman, or whomever I chose to be with at that moment.

Once I became painfully aware of that assumption, I was out of my crisis instantly. I merely questioned the assumption, I did not accept it or reject. The problem, as a consequence, dropped out of me as if a handkerchief dropped itself out of my pocket. I never had to become dependent on another person again in my life.

I stopped calling my girl friend. Yet, I heard from her about three months later. Her foot was hurt in a skiing accident. There were a few meetings and sex, and even an attempt on her part to get me to meet her grandparents (perhaps for possibly of marrying her). But eventually the relationship fizzled out. She married a lawyer and divorced him in six months! I heard from her again about 17 years or so later. She said she later discovered her true sexuality and had a relationship with a lesbian who walked out on her after 10 years. She had a habit of calling me when she was in doldrums! Anyway, I was so glad I did not get entangled any more with her.

It’s not that somehow I could never again relate to another person, nor was it that I was never involved in sexual or other love relationships with women any more. Far from it. It’s just that the relationships never deteriorated into dependency any more.

One more consequence of this event was that I was sort of rooted out of both my native Indian culture as well as the Western/American culture I was engrossed in for the previous three and-a-half years of my life. I remember going on a bus to San Francisco from Berkeley on some errand and while I was travelling on the bus, I had this vision of my travelling in some sort of a ship when the round window of the room suddenly opened up and I saw the vast expanse of the ocean and sky outside for the first time. That sight was too frightening for me and I quickly shut off the window. It was clear to me that a part of my self was dropped the previous night and this freedom which resulted from the event was too new and too scary to bear. It took me years to understand the implications of that freedom.

Stage 6: Relationships after: I would still go after women, have affairs and eventually I got married twice and had two children, one from each wife. I have an excellent relationship with my present wife and family. And my ex-wife is still on friendly terms with me and my family and visits us at least once or twice in a week. Yet, there is no involvement in relationships, and certainly no dependencies. People who have observed, an elderly person in India, for instance, described my relationship as no involvement yet fulfilling my family duties and obligations. By the way, I and my wife never used the word ‘love’ when we talk to each other. (UG says ‘love’ is just a “four-letter word!”)

But I think more needs to be said in this context, because it relates to the matter of love. I enjoy relationships, yet I am also content to be alone. I do think about myself and my health and other matters, but when there is another person in front of me, such as my wife or a friend visiting or a someone who needs my attention or help, I think also (perhaps even first) of the other person. I do things for them which I don’t necessarily do for myself. When there is a conversation, most of the time it’s not to win a point or show myself off, but rather it’s geared toward listening, understanding and helping, if necessary. It’s not as much that the other takes precedence over my needs and tastes, but that there is not much thinking about my own needs – they, not being many, would be met easily anyway. Relationships are no longer based on need. They just happen. I do not mean that I sacrifice myself and my needs. I am just not in the picture.

And when I am by myself, when I have not immediate concerns about my health or other needs, and I am not occupying myself with various activities (such as playing games on the computer!), there are moments when nothing and no one in the world matters, and there just in no one in the picture. When someone does enter into the picture, then that person is the primary focus of attention and nothing else matters. I am not sure you could call that ‘love’. Anyway, it’s not based on mutual exploitation, push and pull, expectations or demands.

Comments:

While many relationships are rather clear-cut, we notice that some of these create bondage for both (or several) parties involved. In almost all these relationships there is a mutual dependency of one on the other. The same can be said about even the relationship of love. More often than not, the dependency is generated by a set of desires or expectations and/or fear of these not being fulfilled. Perhaps friendship is the one relationship in which the partners are free to be related or separated as they wish.

In some sense or other we are related to the environment around us, including the people in it, whether we will it not. To exist is to be related, not in the sense of self and other, but in a very existential sense – I am related to the things in the environment, for instance. May be they are my tools, my property, things I cherish or detest, and so forth. But I am already jumping ahead – by calling these such, I am already involved in a self-thing relationship: For example, I have an identification with the newly bought TV set in the sense that if a part of it is broken, I feel as if a part of me is broken.

But once the self is formed through the thought process, i.e., my being connected through memory to my past experiences which in reflection are regarded as pleasant or unpleasant, I am related as a self to my environment, whether it be objects, situations, persons or ideas and beliefs. We can generalize here and say that ultimately all our relationships are based on the pleasure principle, i.e., pursuing what has proven to be pleasurable in the past and avoiding what has been experienced in the past as painful. As UG, would say, our relationships, particularly love, are based on “what can I get out of it?” When things fail in our relationships, when we don’t get what we expected, and we can’t seem to press the partner into yielding what we desire, we play the last trump card call “love”.

Role of Instinct: Although thought is invariably mixed and drives most of our responses, some forms of behavior are closer to the instinctive behavior we observe in the animal world: Take, for instance, a mother’s willingness even to die to protect her child, or a person’s starving himself or herself to death upon the bereavement of the partner in love or matrimony. The attachment is too great to even care for one’s own survival. Even such behavior in other cases, however, is vastly modified, of course, by one’s upbringing and various other factors generated by the ego-centered thinking mechanism.

Physical Contact: There is no question that touch and any sort of physical contact play a vital role in sex, romantic relations and other human relations. We know that children deprived of physical contact have a stunted growth and grow up as warped human beings. When someone is in distress, nothing consoles like a hug, or getting the other person physically close to you or at least a touch on the shoulder. Lovers sitting in embrace or even hands-in-hands can experience a state of euphoria or ease and blissfulness. These are the moments which we normally remember and cherish about love, along with friendly conversations in which we sense no conflict.

Touch in Sex: No doubt touch plays a central role in sex. In India when I grew up I knew how starved I was for touch and physical contact with the opposite sex. If only I had such a contact, I would have not grown up to be so warped in my sexual growth. In sex, of course, chemistry and electricity are major components. We can actually feel how charged we are before the contact, and how the charge gets ‘neutralized’ after a period of contact. This phenomenon is even more poignant in sexual intercourse, part of the reason we feel so laid back and relaxed (and even wasted) after the orgasm. The glands have done their job. There is no ‘built up’ tension any more.

In a sense Freud was right: most of sex is touch. But unfortunately he reversed the equation and somehow thought that most of touch is sex. His interpretation of the tactual relations that exist between a parent and a child of the opposite sex as sexual, in my opinion, is a perversion which led to his weird theories of Oedipus Complex and penis jealousy.

When sexual relationships (or so called ‘love’) are limited to sex, it is quite likely not only a sense of bonding does not develop between the partners, but one tends to treat the partner as a mere object to be utilized for one’s pleasure, and change partners like one ‘changes jackets.’ One gets into the mode of conquest: I knew of a ‘friend’ in India who boasted one day that he had slept so far with 267 women and was still counting! I also know women who did similar things with men.

Sharing: Doing things together and sharing things with each other are some other components. Doing things for one another, dedication, loyalty, sharing a family and children and so on, are other ingredients of what we normally call a love relationship.

Communion: In our minds we sometimes have a sense of communion where the other person’s as well as our own minds are so completely relaxed and at ease and nothing else seems to matter, and the mind doesn’t seem to go anywhere else.

Bonding: Just as one develops a bonding with one’s child or a friend or a spouse (in India many times after marrying), you could develop a bonding with your partner: her (or his) interests become your interests. One would do things for the other which one wouldn’t do for oneself. Bonding generally goes beyond dependency. There is a certain empathy you feel for the other which is beyond normal relationships.

An Expanded Self: When two people are entwined with each other, soon one’s self-interest begins to encompass the other too, and the two begin to form an exclusive relationship. As a consequence, people who were friends before no longer receive the same treatment. A transition has been made from the ‘I-club’ to ‘We-two Club’.

This is somewhat akin to the in-groups one becomes part of as one grows. More often than not, one’s family becomes such an in-group. Collectively, the family and its interests alone are what count. And one is willing to exploit others (or rob them) to feed the family. The standards that we apply to the others we don’t apply to our family members. We say, “It’s the family.” Property relations are only part of the story.

So, although it start out to be an expanded self, love relationship can eventually lead to become more aware of others and shed more of oneself in favor of other.

Power in Relationships: It’s not just pleasure-seeking or gratification one seeks in relationships, but a sense of power or importance which often expresses itself in the form of competition. A win or victory in competition as well as pleasure gives a sense of one’s own existence and continuity. The continuity of the self is ubiquitous in human relationship.

Women as well as men use sex to gain power or domination over the other by dangling it, withdrawing it when they find it necessary and so forth.

The Role of Will: More often than not, one tends to exert one’s to assert one’s will and insist on having one’s way. A tug-of-war of wills is the usual consequence. When both the sides assert themselves in this fashion, not only conflict, but ultimately a breakdown of relationship can occur.

Possessiveness: Once a relationship has been established, each side can become possessive of the other, and that is bound to choke the relationship and lead to ultimate failure. Jealousy, violence and domination and submission (as well as masochism and sadism) are bound to enter into such a relationship.

Faithfulness: In marital or other love-based relationships, each partner feels that he or she owns the other, and that the other owes allegiance to oneself and one’s relationship. When she or he has a side affair, anger, jealousy and hatred flare up in the other and we all know the consequences of these.

All this seems somehow bypassed in what we imagine as love relationship. When there is romantic love, one is intoxicated, to be sure. The mere presence or even thought of the loved one is enough to trigger a sense of exhilaration, well-being and feeling good about oneself. Each thought about the other fuels the feeling one has towards him or her. But like all other feelings, this feeling of love also is transitory and subject to changes of time – it lasts only until a sense of doubt, questioning or some other obstacle presents itself and begins gnaw at it. The rest of the self naturally asserts itself and introduces expectations and demands into the picture. The self and its interests, for instance, jealousy, will eventually have to play a role and bring down the edifice of love one has built so assiduously. Also, competition is bound to create division: you keep looking for the difference in the other person and that creates the division. The division is the source of conflict. We develop contempt or fear of the partner. Where these exist, there is no scope for love.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these divisions have to be permanent. It’s entirely possible that a couple, even after they are married, may work these differences out to the degree of not only being able to live with them, but also being able to allow the partner to be different. But in this process something is lost. The initial fervor no longer exists. We may arrive at a point at which we may let each other be, but we are lone individuals living under the same roof, meeting occasionally for dinner or lunch or some social occasion when friends visit us.

Economics: After one forms a family with the partner, economic relationships not only a play central part, but also become one of the major sources of conflict within the family, as they do in the rest of one’s life, and become a source of pulls and pushes and ultimately of even divorces. That’s one reason why I think in spousal relationships, it is highly advisable to get economics out of the way, by, for instance, leaving complete access to money and property to the partner. Of course, this takes tremendous mutual trust. Economics, we know is a key to feeling power in life. Such a relationship is bound to create a more relaxed married life.

The same goes for enabling the partner to have a total sense of power by including him or her in any major decision making within the married life. In fact, in my family I even included my children in the decision-making. I used to say, “Don’t think of just what you want and how you would want to get it. But think of how, given the whole picture, including every one’s interests and wishes, what sort of decision you would make not just for yourself, but for everyone. Whatever decision we come to must be agreeable to all of us.” Of course, I also let the children have their say in the choice of schools or subjects they studied. That too gives them a sense of power. I was there to merely advise them of the consequences of their choices – as for instance, when I told my daughter how difficult it is in the highly competitive contemporary world to make a living as a dancer. If my daughter still wanted to go into dancing, it would be her choice. And when she grew up, neither she nor the rest of the family were unhappy with her decision.

Is there a need for a relationship? In this process, one has perhaps lost one’s zest for life. You may become slowly lifeless and merely carry on the business of living. Also notice that one’s self and interests have diminished somewhat and the self is carrying on a minimal load. Of course, you may turn out to be a lonely person: whereas earlier the same loneliness drove one to a relationship (even if it is an unpleasant or unfulfilling one), having turned somewhat bitter, now you get reconciled to this sort of existence. You only do what comes in your way. You only respond to people and situations when there is a demand from outside. You have no initiative.

Also, as one ages, one sees that one’s possibilities are limited and he or she is stuck with the partner one is left with, which may be better in one’s mind than not having a partner at all. Or, the other hand, the couple could develop a genuine friendship with each other and enjoy each other’s companionship.

Of course, these are all just abstractions and purely hasty generalizations. A lot of people choose many other and different paths of life. They can repeat affair after affair; or if life presents frustrations, one could escape or compensate through activity, achievement, drinking, or even suicide. The possibilities again are endless.

The impressive features I have noticed in various instances of love: 1) The bereavement in birds and cats and even in people can lead to suicide and death. I remember that one of the pair of little kittens once disappearing and then the other kitten stopped eating and eventually disappearing too. 2) You notice that some persons never recovered from the grief of the death or even separation of their partner. I don’t think, my friend Bob, for instance, ever recovered from his wife leaving him to be with a family friend. 3) I notice that people go to extraordinary lengths to care for their partners, even to their own detriment: I remember Vito being so patient and serving his wife Shalom when she was having serious problems. Same with my wife’s friend, Ann, when her husband had an accident and was seriously injured. You see how forgiving fathers and mothers are when dealing with problems caused by their children. These instances are not people just bound by custom and tradition. There is an intimate bond that has been formed that accounts for such behavior. You could say it is identification based on habit and so forth. But it may be more than that. The self simply has diminished or has little place in determining one’s actions. What’s happens to the other is the only factor that operates. 4) Also I see with some such gentleness and affection emanating from every move of theirs (I remember the elderly lady, part of the renter’s family in our house, when I was little). She would just wish ill for no one. Nothing around her trained her to be so. It was her nature. She was just born with very little self, I would say, and never let it get the upper hand over her. 5) Or someone like UG, who would show such utter compassion for even total strangers – we don’t even know what triggers it. But he can go extreme lengths to care for that person. Again, there is a total lack of self.

In all these behaviors, one thing that seems to be common is that not just there is some bond between people, but the self or ego and interests don’t come in the way. We can say that it’s the self or the ego that has its own interests which are sooner or later bound to conflict with the interests of the loved one that is detrimental to anything that could be called genuine love.

Then the question arises as to why one needs a relationship such as love at all if there is no self-centered need? Why bother?

Is it possible to live without a relationship then?

A few things I want to say about relationships, especially about what you might call ‘love’: I strongly feel that where there is fear (of authority, for instance), dependence, contempt for the other, and feelings of inferiority or superiority, there can’t be love. Also, when relationships are based on mutual need or exploitation, they might work for a while (even for a long time), but I would say they are not based on love.

After all this, how do we go about describing or defining love? I don’t know. But you know what I mean. As long as there is the self and the needs based on the self, you don’t have any love. I know this goes quite contrary to the current beliefs, especially on the part of psychologists and psychoanalysts, about love. But check it out yourself.

Need for a Relationship: There surely are biological and psychological constitutional factors that initially prompt one to seek a relationship. For one thing, sex glands being active is a primary reason: the sight of opposite sex, even one is a child, is bound to invoke feelings of sex in oneself. Add to that the fact as one becomes conscious of oneself and a sense of the self has formed, one feels a gap or emptiness sometime or other. Combine these two, you have the ingredients for a romantic love: as I said before, plain consciousness is an unstable state, if only for the fact that the psychological elements of memory, acting through the brain, are bound to impinge themselves on one’s consciousness. Once they are present in the consciousness, one can see oneself as lacking or needing such things. This one could easily perceive as a need to fill the gap generated by these memories. Aloneness or loneliness thus arising constantly prompts to seek fulfillment through seeking company, achievement, proving oneself and what not.

I am not saying there is no such thing as friendship or affection beyond these things. But if there is such a thing, it masks the initial emptiness, and soon uncovers it when there is a frustration or other obstruction in its way. It is the same with what we call ‘love’. There are moments when we are in company with someone, with whom we are not necessarily romantically involved, when we are gloating in each other’s company and our minds do not go to some other place. We are not even conscious of ourselves. Those idyllic moments, unfortunately, are short-lived. Soon there is an awareness of it, and the desire process butts in by either wanting to continue or perpetuate or repeat those moments. Then we are back again in the process of seeking and desiring and the accompanying aloneness or loneliness which we constantly make up for.

Of course, it is also quite likely that without such warm relationships such as friendship and love, our life may seem not only dry, but may in fact feel meaningless. We may drift and drag in life and merely carry on. However, I feel that such an attitude may be the result of some initial frustrations and once they are cleared from our way, we just live our live without any negative feelings.

What I am saying here is that if there is any such thing as love or friendship, it is quickly contaminated by the process of the self which introduces various elements into the picture, such as calculation (how much each is giving or taking), competition, power relations, finding differences or other kinds of division. It takes quite a bit of maturity on both sides to eventually overcome and transcend these divisions and come to a place where one lets each other be without the common pushes and pulls and enjoy each other’s company.

Such a state also enables one eventually to become aware of the whole process of the self and enables us to be free from it, however short-lived that freedom may be.

Announcement

2009-01-29T11:32:00.000-08:00

One of my readers posted a comment yesterday asking why I have not been posting any new articles on this blog site. I apologize for the long silence. Here is a rather lengthy explanation and a resolution:

For the past few months I have been wrestling with some medical problems which resulted in my arms and wrists practically dysfunctional. Thanks to a drug I have been taking, now they have regained a reasonable amount of strength. I should start writing soon.

Also, last Christmas, as a gift to my friends and a few relatives I thought I would put together all the articles in the blog in the form of a book and present it to them. I did. My wife is currently editing the book. There is a possible offer to publish it from India. (My wife got only 5 copies printed as a hard copy and the rest I sent electronically by e-mail.)

Once that job was done, I didn't have either the energy or the motivation (especially since I didn't have an overwhelming response to the articles I had already posted) to continue writing. Now that someone has made a noise about it, I am prompted to write again.

I am wondering about what I should write about next: Here is a thought: I will see if any of you is interested in it: when I was teaching my Eastern Philosophy I used to make up a "Love Upanishad". Would it be interesting to writing about the "Myths and Realities of Love"? Of course, it might take a few weeks (I would say two to three) to write an article on it. Let me know your interest.

Ending the Downward Spiral

2008-09-05T16:33:00.000-07:00

The build-up of thought: whether it is a positive or negative thought, memory, impression or sensation, our mind builds on them, making the positive ones more glorious and rosy. These are forward-looking. We do the same with the negative thoughts. We build up on them, turn them into nightmares and try to avoid them at all costs. These two are forward- looking. In fact, many memories we have, just because they have an emotional charge, they look toward future for fulfillment, and repetition, annulment and annihilation, revenge and what not, if they are negative ones. In other words, as we get older, it may seem like we are only repeating and reliving our past, but we are really trying to resolve them in the future.

As we get older, we tend to emphasize the worries and the negative thoughts more, although we do too reminisce the positive ones a lot. Of course, it all depends on the occasions when we see the threat of negative thoughts; that’s when we tend to dwell on them so much. Indeed, we build up on them so much that we panic and terrorize ourselves with them, turn them into nightmares and start trembling at their occurrence. And we become paralyzed. The downward spiral never seems to end. Every symptom or sign we read we turn into something huge and start dreading it. An itch or a rash somewhere on our skin is turned quickly in our mind into the threat of a cancer, for instance. We become mentally and therefore physically sicker and sicker. If this is not hell, what else is?

We don’t question our positive thoughts, because they give us pleasure. We tend to avoid the negative ones, because they are painful. But there is no rut which we cannot extricate ourselves from. To do so it may not be enough to become aware of our conditioning or attachments and let them go, as they keep recurring. At times, we may have to consciously and deliberately say to ourselves, “I will accept the worst, and I am not going to go into this any more.” We have to make a conscious decision. Like a young fellow saying to himself, “I am not going to be intimidated by this kid any more; what’s the worst he can do to me?” or “I will work this out.” It’s not that you are using your will, which is generally based on identification with something. But rather it is that after seeing getting into the same rut repeatedly, you decide consciously not to slide into it. Buddhist meditation Vipassana meditation recognized the role of such a decision. (Also, in the eightfold path, part of Buddhist meditation consists in encouraging our minds to think wholesome thoughts and discouraging it to think unwholesome thoughts. The Buddhist realized that our minds do have a tendency to build.)

When you once again confront a symptom and start reading its meaning, you catch yourself before or right at the time when you fall headlong into the thought-habit pattern and stay or step out of it. It doesn’t matter if you have to do it repeatedly and it doesn’t even matter if you have already been caught in the spiral. The moment you are aware of the rut, you step out! And you can.

The trouble with stepping out of things is that when you are involved in some thought process or state, you are within it and as such you don’t even think that it’s possible to get out of it, let alone make any effort to get out. But when the pain is great, and you see no way out, it might just occur to you to “surrender” to you or to drop the whole process. Or you might just say to yourself that you have had enough of the rigmarole, it’s time to get out of it. Anything is possible. Unfortunately, there are no rules.

The stepping out of things is a very unstable state. Consciousness, as Sartre would say, constantly seeks a foundation. In other words, it seeks content. If there isn’t any, it will try to find some. Being without foundation is indeed a heroic task. But if you could be there from moment to moment (unfortunately there is no continuity here, because it’s not a mental state), then you stand alone. In some sense, you are always there catching the beginning of sliding into a mental state. I don’t know if this is called freedom, but it surely can end the downward spiral and the descent into hell.

In and Out of Mental States

2008-08-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

I talked elsewhere about how the continuity of mental states not only creates mental problems, but also creates in us our sense of identity, a notion of myself as a separate entity from others, the world and even from myself. It is indeed fascinating to see how this identity actually occurs.

Without our interference mental states have their own natural duration and then they fade out on their own. We pour life into them by either participating in them or resisting them and thus give continuity and permanence to them.

Take grief, for example. Like anger, fear, depression, loneliness or boredom it is a state of mind. Left to its own devices, it is a limited life and duration. Then it fizzles away, sometimes through distraction and sometimes naturally without any effort on our part. But our past experience works on it through our thought process and interprets it as something undesirable. In that very interpretation is the process of resistance. Since I, what I think about and my thought about it are not in reality separate entities, although I might presume they are, my very thought of it and resistance to it pours life into the mental stat e, gives it a continuity and a life. In fact, we have no way of looking at it the state of mind except through our thought of it. If we could, then we wouldn’t even know we are in that state.

Thus, in my mind a duality is set up between me and my mental state (of course, through my thought process). I keep battling the state and can’t understand why it continues despite of my resistance or trying to suppress it.

The mental state does not have any strength if I don’t participate in it or resist it. Just suppose I come to some terms with it by understanding that perhaps grieving is a natural process or that death is inevitable and so on. The state will have its natural life and die its natural death. The duration of the state depends mostly on the intensity of it. Of course, as long as the perceived cause of the state remains, the state has to remain, unless one turns his or her attention away from it.

Fear is another example of a mental state: Our initial attitude to fear is that it shouldn’t be there, i.e., we should not be afraid. And then whatever we do to address it will inevitably strengthen the fear, even if the attempt is merely to accept it. You cannot will to let it be. You just let it be. This is so, because the will presupposes a duality set between yourself and your fear and as long as you operate within the duality, the fear not only persists, but is multiplied and strengthened. But suppose you surrender to it. Cease and desist from any effort to change it. On many such occasions, which generally happened in my bed, in just a few moments, the fear not only fizzled away, but my organism relaxed and I fell asleep to wake up to notice I had no problem any more.

The discussion about mental states gives the hope that we can do something to change a given mental state. But unfortunately this essay can give no such direction or instruction. Even the instruction “Do nothing about mental states” can easily be taken as a direction. Then we tend to look upon a given state with a view not to change it. That too has the motivation of wanting to change it.

The reader can always ask: “Then what to do?” “Nothing,” would be my answer.

2) But this talk may sound all too easy. Actually, it’s more difficult than it seems, because we are so used to living by the pleasure principle of enhancing what has been pleasant and avoiding what is painful. As long as we fall headlong into pleasurable experiences and want to repeat them, improve upon them and seek further pleasurable experiences, we guarantee the continuity of ourselves. It is the same attempt to preserve the self that also automatically produces the negative reaction to some other experiences calling them painful. So, the learning about inaction regarding mental states has eventually to apply to the so-called pleasant or positive or pleasurable states of mind as well as the negative painful states.

It’s of course not to say that we shouldn’t enjoy what happens in our life. This is a far cry from preserving mental states as a way of perpetuating ourselves. But this does involve a fundamental overhaul of our systems.

What is the difference between letting a state be and being in a state? We are sometime in a state struggling in it (like in a depression) and there may seem to be no end to it. This is an inevitable question to arise. The answer is that when you are struggling within a state, either you are aware of your struggling in it or you are not. If you are aware, the fact that you are aware is itself in indication that you are other than that. And that awareness also implies that there is an attempt to become free from the struggle. Thus you are back to square one. If, on the other hand, you are not aware that you are struggling, then as such there is no problem. The state will wither away, unless, of course, it is generated by body chemistry or drug-induced. The solutions for such problems (which are observed by others) are not from within. You have to get help!

If by some means you can get out of mental states, say by just letting them be and surrendering to them, there is a “neutral” zone, a zone of mere consciousness. Here you are merely aware of the innards of the body such as the throat, the stomach or the mouth, and you are not within the mental world. Thoughts may arise and pass, but you are not them or in them and there is no reaction to them. It is indeed a skill -- not a skill which you can consciously and deliberately develop, as that requires a goal of changing the given and a will to change it – to just let the state be. Once you have a clear taste of the zone, then you can move back into the “neutral” zone whenever you find yourself caught in a mental state – you just have to let be whatever the state you find yourself – if it is fear, let it be; and if it is a hurt, let it also be. It is a skill of instantly freeing yourself from any mental state by letting it be and letting it last as long as it wants to.

I can only talk about when I am out of mental states; I cannot really talk about pure consciousness as such. Hence this may not constitute enlightenment at all. (As I said, I don't care what it is called anyway.) While I have sensations such as awareness of the throat, it is followed by some self-consciousness and verbal activity. The awareness of my sensation as well as the recognition of it through my verbal activity does involve duality and yet it is subsequent to the initial awareness where there may be no subject-object division. There is also no response to the sensation. Divisions and reactions enter into the picture only within mental states. The conceptual picture of this is not terribly clear to me, but this is the best I could come up with as yet.

You can say this zone of consciousness is self-luminescent, to use a Vedanta phrase. You know it exists because there is a built in self-awareness. I think UG himself talks about consciousness knowing itself (he says, for instance, in the Mystique that life knows itself.). You could call this a temporary state of enlightenment. On the other hand, you can say it is a shift in the brain. I am not so much interested in what you call it as the fact itself. When the ‘front’ of your brain is active, you are in mental states and you struggle within them. When you shift to the ‘back’ of your brain (or ‘head’ if you prefer that word), then you are in the zone of the body and awareness of the innards. There are no values here, nothing bothers you, and you don’t have to do or strive for anything. There are no relationships, including with yourself, no emotions, no love, and no fear of death. You can’t say it is anything. It’s not a nothing either. It’s just awareness.

Reflections on Meditation

2008-05-10T12:20:00.001-07:00

Preface: I used to define meditation to my students as having the main function of disrupting one’s thought process. This definition is consistent with the Yoga definition of meditation as cessation of the activities of the mind. But unfortunately, like many other activities carried out by means of our mind, meditation is a mental activity, although its aim is to disrupt the thought process. In other words, its aim is psychological suicide!

Unless we intend to change ourselves to become someone different or better, or be in a more peaceful or ‘enlightened’ state, we wouldn’t take up meditation. Such an activity is the product of the mind, as it is our thought process which always attempts to change the given situation and help us be somewhere else. Meditation presupposes an awareness of our condition and dissatisfaction with it, as well as an attempt to change the condition into something better. The following demonstrates the paradoxical nature of meditation and how and why it is fundamentally frustrating. I will also show some of its virtues as well as its limitations.

Then I will mention some possibilities and discuss them.

What is Meditation? In the West, meditation is used, more often than not, to relax, to gain a sense of calm and freedom from anxiety. In the form of biofeedback it has been used to control blood pressure, promote alpha rhythm in the brain or whatever. For purposes of relaxation, it is also coupled with deep breathing, differential relaxation, visual imaging and so forth. Those who use meditation for such purposes don’t have any pretense to enlightenment, liberation or whatever.

Traditionally, however, meditation has been viewed, at least in the East, not merely as a method of relaxation but as a means to attain Nirvana or Release or enlightenment.

Forms and Methods of Meditation: There are many different forms of meditation: a) the most common form is to focus totally on whatever you are doing, not minding anything else. The traditional story of a woman going around three times with a pot on her head with nothing else in her mind, not even knowing that she was walking around, comes to mind. This is considered one of the means of transformation (mukti) traditionally recognized. That is what one might call the path of karma. You just are focused so much on what you are doing, you are not even minding what it will get you or won’t. Of course, in any skilled action, you have to constantly adjust your means to the ends, or else your actions misfire. That doesn’t mean you care about the outcome; you do care, but not about what you will or won’t get for yourself.

b) Repetition of a mantra or some sort of formula or a holy name is what comes to mind next as the most common method of meditation: Whether it is the syllable ‘Om’ or the names of gods, or a prayer, it doesn’t matter. You could help it with the counting of beads and what not. (Then you have to split your attention between the reciting and the counting – which I think becomes a chore.)

c) Or you could engage in contemplating God or having a dialogue with Him. This could also take the form of singing the praise of God, as in bhajans.

d) One frequently adopted form of meditation is self-inquiry, looking into the true nature of the self. In a contemporary version, it took the form of the well-known ‘Who am I?’ question one asks oneself constantly, as advocated by Sri Ramana Maharshi.

e) Just sitting and being aware (passively) of the mental contents is yet another form. Soto Zen and other forms advocate this meditation. Non-interference with what you observe is essential. There is and should be no goal for mediation. If there is a goal, meditation becomes contrived and you begin to interfere with the contents and generate conflict within yourself since you constantly calculate, measure and compare.

f) Many times this method is aided by focusing visually on a point on the wall, or the space between one’s eyebrows or just the breathing (watch the way breath enters the nostrils and leaves them. In some forms of meditation, being aware of your breath and counting the number of breaths constitute meditation. It has been long known in yoga practice that making exhalations slower than inhalations can indeed help one to relax.

g) Some other methods employ the instrument of thinking to create a space between oneself and one’s problem element such as a fear or depression by thinking about the whole picture, contemplate the consequences of actions, or the opposite side of an issue, or take another’s point of view and so forth. These too can result in freeing one, relatively speaking, from the problem one is currently facing and perhaps even develop detachment (Shankara’s Bhajagovindam and Buddhist descriptions of the body and prospect of the cremation ground come to mind). Some special types of meditation like Vipassana take an objective approach to one’s action and look at it as an impersonal process than done through one’s agency. The aim here, once again, is to fee one from an ego-centered point of view, thereby developing detachment. These types of meditation employ the instrument of thinking to counter or dissolve the problems created by the thinking process.

h) Also in Vipassana meditation, like in some other forms, awareness (or self-awareness, if you will) is interspersed between the perception of any part of the body or emotion of the mind, without interfering with the mind. Sweeping the floor being aware, watching how your foot step falls on the ground when you walk, being aware of how an emotion of anger rises, has its life and passes away, are some examples. This sort of awareness has not only the virtue of objectifying what one perceives, but also breaking up identification with it.

i) One frequently used form of meditation in contemporary practice is differential relaxation – focusing on each part of the body and relaxing it. In contemporary practice, one finds similar techniques to reduce pain. Focusing on one’s pain with awareness and breathing and relaxing deeply helps one being relieved from the pain.

j) Awareness in movement (much like meditation) as in Feldenkrais can be and has been used successfully in solving skeletal-muscular physical (perhaps psychological as well) problems. In some ways this is similar to practicing yoga asanas with breathing and awareness.

I can go on listing these methods.

Outcomes of Meditaton: The outcomes of meditation vary with the belief system one participates in or the method of meditation one uses: you may gain a vision of Christ or Krishna, you may experience God, you may feel oneness with the universe, you may have out-of-the-body experiences, you may lose all awareness of your body, you may feel that your head is missing, you may feel that your consciousness is expanding to encompass the whole universe, you may experience states of bliss or beatitude, or have a total sense of peace and harmony, or you may become part of the universal energy, and so on and so forth. The list is endless. Some may claim super sensual powers, peep into their past lives, have precognition, have psychic powers as well as powers to heal, not counting ability to know the internal structure of matter. Or your aim may be to simply relax and move into day-to-day chores with ease and a lightness of being.

Relaxation and Release: We need to examine the mechanisms or operation of meditation to see how it works and how it can help, if it does. In meditation you are either focusing or you are simply relaxing. In either case, you don’t interfere with the contents that show up either in the foreground or background of your consciousness. This is primarily reason why people who have been suppressing contents in their minds, or have problems facing their own undesirable thoughts, emotions or past experiences have no business meditating unless they can face up to everything that shows up in their minds when they meditate. But if you can let things go and not react as and when things show up, there is a genuine possibility of being released from the contents, particularly if you have gotten to the bottom rung of the ladder of the layers of a problem. One could term this process self-knowing or self-knowledge.

For example, fears. Normally we resist fear. But below the fear there is the threat we feel from the object of fear. And we dread the consequences of the threat. If we listen to the process of fear and all the consequences of the threat that we are afraid of, figure out what could be the worst consequence that could happen and let it be, then the object of fear will no longer pose a threat.

Or it could be frustration or conflict with another person or depression. Coming to terms with the happening which we dread or the not obtaining what we so cherish and desire, then we could obtain a release from either the fear or the frustration that is generated by the attachments, negative or positive to the objects. The same goes with attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

In the process of meditation in terms of self-knowledge as described above, one could come to some very basic attachments, particularly to positive attachments to good health and life itself, and negative attachments to pain and to death. When we learnt to let these too go, we could arrive at a stage where nothing is important to live any more, not living or dying, and you are just plain consciousness. In that moment of consciousness or awareness, thought might appear just like sounds and experiences as mere images. You now have the ability to let them come and go. They have no longer the hold on you they had before or the charge. The emotional charge is dissipated, as it were. (Of course, this can also happen in confession or confiding with a friend.)

Self-knowledge in the sense described above implies the awareness of the contents of the self, and since the awareness is non-interfering, it could be described as an automatic process of detachment. In other words, in some way, we are shedding the contents of the self from ourselves.

Limitations: This freedom may be just momentary. You may fall headlong into a thought or an experience and react to objects of these as though they are currently happening. In other words, the attachments reassert themselves. You may have to go through the process again and again and release may only be momentary.

So the relief and release you obtain in meditation is relative and temporary. Don’t expect any permanent changes. The conditioning that generates the attachments may be too deep and perhaps even beyond the reach of your consciousness. And meditation may not be able to uproot these conditionings. You may have to accept meditation at that level; but it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Relaxation is similar. To the degree that you are able to let things happen or go, you are able to relax. Or you might say, your ability to relax physically in the face of the various attachments or hang-ups that show up in consciousness is indeed what enables you to become released (detached) from them. This only shows that body and mind are not really two separate entities, but two aspects of the same entity (whatever that is – see my article on the mind-body problem on this blog).

You can re-invoke this consciousness by consciously letting go everything, even if it be for just a moment. The process can be progressive shorter, telescoping a whole lot of previous self-knowledge in just a moment, as it were. But then you are back again in the thought-game.

The primary reason why release of this sort is only relative and temporary is that underneath all conscious activity is a holding on to existence which is essential to the survival of the self, self in the psychological sense. The survival appears as physical survival – after all, the psychological is only a mental extension (or abstraction, if you will) of physical survival (that’s how it appears to the self). This holding on manifests itself as fear of death, of old age, of disease and most of all of pain, as well as the contrary side of seeking continuity through pleasure seeking (the opposite of avoiding pain. We can fool ourselves that we are totally free from all this holding, but when it comes to brass-tacks we fall headlong into these whenever the opportunity presents itself when we confront objects, persons, events or situations in life and in the world.

This is the reason why I say there is a radical difference between this relative freedom and total liberation where you are free from the will to live, free from the attachment to living or the negative attachment (fear of) to death, pain, disease and old age. You could only witness rarely among human beings. I could see that in UG at the time when he was face to face with death. From my own perception as well as a detailed account I have read by Mahesh Bhatt who was with UG until the last moment of death, I could say UG never cared whether he lived or died, never sought medical help[1] to become free from pain or sickness, I mean after he had gone through his ‘calamity’. And to me that’s radical. I don’t know if this is indeed desirable for any of us, but I do know that this is what constitutes true liberation, if there is such a thing.

Unfortunately, it is not subject to conscious choice, since, as far as the psychological self is concerned, this is tantamount to not just psychological, but actual suicide. No wonder, UG kept saying that in order for such a thing to take place there must be ‘clinical death,’ not that you can consciously choose to do that.

Feelings of Ecstasy, Energy: Once you are momentarily free from the contents of consciousness (i.e., the ego or self), at that moment, one may feel a surge of energy flowing through the body with or without the accompanying feeling of bliss. This can be (and is often) interpreted as experience of enlightenment; but tradition warns against such feelings, they are mere feelings and as such fleeting. The consequence of such feeling may well be that the person feels unburdened, lighter and refreshed for the rest of the day, unless and until some concern, worry or obsession, stemming from the past, of course, takes over.

But this is not what traditionally what liberation is supposed to be. If you are liberated, it’s final, once and for all. That I can’t see happening through conscious meditation and I give below my reasons for it. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen at all, it just means that it can’t happen through my conscious effort and will, nor by any deliberate meditation.

Critique: To repeat, meditation is an activity of the mind, although it is geared to let the mind cease its activity. It’s a suicidal process, not instantly, but as a gradual procedure. There is always hope behind this activity that it will eventually take us to our goal, namely, being free from all mental activity and the activity of seeking goals. But that’s a contradictory process. It will not succeed.

Practicing meditation is much like believing and having faith and praying. You could say that you can eventually become free from the self by keeping on practicing meditation; just like you could say if you have enough faith you can move mountains. If you haven’t succeeded, it’s your own fault. It means you haven’t done enough. This is a tautological requirement: you have meditated enough only when you have succeeded in becoming free from the self and you will succeed only if you have meditated enough.

So, you can go around, walking around, without doing any ostensive meditation. But your awareness doesn’t go away. You are stuck. You can’t go forward and you can’t go backward. Whatever is happening within you, you are still aware.

You keep going on endless loops, get more and more frustrated, and trying in various ways not to meditate, to meditate, measure results, watch the activity of the self, get frustrated again, try to let go of that activity, let go of everything, and so on and so on.

There are times when you don’t care what happens and are merely aware, but only to fall headlong into the habit of thinking and responding to the world through the self. This is an endless activity. And there is no end to it nor is there any hope.

You feel cornered.

But that too may not be a problem, given the nature of the mind – this is bound to happen. You are now declutched and then again you are clutched.

Possible Conclusions: What possible conclusions can we arrive at so far? 1) It’s a waste of time to meditate. 2) Meditation can at best help you arrive at State Zero, a neutral state of awareness, but it cannot help you stay in it, for it is an unstable state, volatile; you are back in the automatic conditioning cycle each time you have to respond to something in the world. Not only the conditioned mechanism is brought into play, but simultaneously the dualism between the self and the world comes into the picture. You cannot but respond to the world ultimately in terms of the self and its interests. (For instance, however much you are enlightened, you are back to your prejudices (caste, race and religion), and also to feelings of inferiority and superiority, seeking power, pleasure, sex, and what not.) Of course, through meditation you can work your way back to the state of pure awareness; but you have to do it again and again. It’s an endless cyclical process. Perhaps, you can telescope the process somewhat. That’s about the best you could do.

Possibility: When by some chance the mind does cease its activity, there is no meditation, and none necessary. You just are in the mode of being, not in the mode of becoming, getting somewhere, the future inviting us, haunting us. And there is tension in our minds pulling us forward toward the future. This restlessness will not cease until we give up the goal of achieving anything, including anything like self-liberation through meditation; it will not cease until the very goal to meditate ceases to be. Then there is neither meditation, nor any need to meditate.

When all activity of the mind stops, there is a respite. You are not meditating, nor are you not meditating. I used to say in my Eastern Philosophy class that you are truly meditating only when you are free from the very need to meditate. (Just as UG would say, you are truly free when you are free from the very concern to be free.)

I don’t know if I would call this liberation. It’s not liberation, if liberation implies some kind of permanent state. There are no permanent states. There is only a constant dynamic, a dynamic in which sometimes you respond to the world through the self and at other times there is no response. You just are. Nevertheless, as I discussed above, there is a radical change in oneself which called ‘true liberation’.

Question: Exactly what brings about the anchoring (I mean being ‘hooked’ to a thought or situation once again)? It’s clear that there are times when you are not anchored (UG’s ‘declutched’ state); and at other times, you are automatically connected to the mental contents and respond to the world as though you are a self. It couldn’t just be as UG says that the situation calls for it and brings it about, because there are situations in the middle of which you can ‘drop out’, declutch yourself.

Here is an answer: My mind goes out to repeating a habit pattern; in this instance, there is the urge or thought to play a computer game. Then a counter thought presents itself of how this is part of the pattern of restlessness, the chatter of the mind, and what not. The idea says that instead of going through the activity, just drop everything. Then, the thought simply drops out, at least for the moment. There is just nothing. You can say, its pure awareness; but it’s not aware of anything. Then also a jerking (like a shiver) in the body indicating an explosion of energy.

This is followed by the urge to record the event, as this gives a specific answer to the above question. Of course, this is also a mental activity. No wonder none of this lasts, because thoughts and what is generated by thinking can only last that long.

Then moments later, there is a strong urge to play a computer game once more. I being one who doesn’t fight his temptations, yield to it. I let the urge play itself through. The strength of the urge must be the force of habit, or what we might call karma. Restlessness follows. Then again a dropping of the thought processes and so on and so on. So goes the story.

And that’s about all you can do in meditation – masturbation!

Surely, there are a lot of mental contents: the head is abuzz with them. It’s not that there is any problem with them.

The self’s agendas are not so easily understood nor dealt with. Feeling important, having power, having control and feeling that in some way that I am better than anyone whom I compare myself with is a central agenda. So is the seeking of pleasure and avoiding pain. Greed, appropriation of things and people are a third. Of course, these motivations are all just different forms of the self to continue. Hence, of course, the fear of death.

* * *

Possible Objection from UG: UG would object to this account by saying that you don’t know that you are in a state of awareness except by means of thought. So, thought must very well be present when you are aware of your awareness in order to claim that you have that awareness.

Reply: This is a debate I had with UG a long time ago. I asked him that same question, “How do you know that there is such a state as the Natural State or whatever?” (You can watch this discussion in the video “What am I Saying?”) I don’t believe he gave a satisfactory answer. The best he could come up with are these two answers: “I don’t know,” and “Life is aware of itself.”

UG is not consistent when he is asking a question about the account I have given. I am not claiming that there is knowledge when I am in the state of just being aware. I am just saying that there is awareness. The knowledge of it may come later when I start thinking about it. And you can’t say that there can be no awareness when you think of it later. The least you can say is that there is memory (or trace) of that awareness when you think about it and that you may not longer be in that state. That account does not bother me. I am not claiming that awareness is aware of itself (although I could say that) and that is turned later into knowledge.

Nevertheless, I must grant UG this much: if this awareness is only a mental state and does not last for more than a moment, it is entirely possible that it is thought-generated and that we are back to square zero. For one thing, you don’t know that it exists except by recognizing or remembering it by means of your thought process. For another, it too is a state and has its origins, time of stay and disappearance.

Objection Extended: UG’s objections can also spread to detachment and as a matter of fact any other action consciously undertaken: because they are done consciously, from his logic it should follow they are done by means of thought. Consciousness must then equal thought. For instance, you cannot consciously detach yourself from anything, especially without an ulterior motive. Just the same way, you cannot freely give anything selflessly, because that is done consciously and therefore with self-centered motivation.

* * *

Another Reason Why Meditation is Frustrating: There is another profound reason why meditation is fundamentally frustrating: Our mind, i.e., thought process, which I can also call the process of the self, is a seeking mechanism. It constantly seeks to be some other place than where we are at the moment. This tendency manifests itself in a very basic way by trying to know whatever state we are in. In our constant search for fulfillment (and permanent happiness, as UG would put it), we seek and strive for a state of unbecoming from where we don’t travel any further. This is an endless process.

Even if such a state of permanent happiness or fulfillment ever exists, we are not content merely being in that state. We want to know and cherish that we are in that state. And that’s where the seeds of becoming are sown. That very urge to know our state not only puts us outside of that state in order to cherish it, but also makes us seek further to continue or enhance or preserve that state by whatever means. This knowledge or consciousness is the curse of the human condition, because it puts us in the merry-go-round of alienating ourselves from ourselves and then again trying to unite with ourselves.

Since the urge to know or be aware of what we are or what we are experiencing is inherent in any meditation process, meditation is a fundamental failure and has to end ultimately in frustration. The ill-gotten gains are momentary!

From all this it should follow, that you have to be left with utter despair, with no hope what so ever, and nothing you can do about it either.

Alternatives? Then what are the alternatives left? Wait for the ‘Calamity’ to happen, which might never occur? Be disillusioned with the whole ‘awareness’ business and ‘jump in the lake’, or accept your fundamental state of helplessness and keep going in circles (for we are called ‘wheels!’). The end result might be shortening or telescoping the mental process one goes through to drop the motivational structure piece by piece. Or one may just keep going in the business as usual until one dies and then the story really ends! The last seems to be more likely than anything else.

Gloom and Doom! You are doomed to fail and there is no way out! As usual, UG is right! There is no way out!

* * *

P.S.: Objection from Advocates of Meditation: I hear a strong objection from the advocates of meditation: it’s not true that meditation yields mere awareness. It could lead to knowledge. There is a means of knowing which is beyond the ordinary: that’s what results in extrasensory powers, healing, knowledge of God, other lives, even atoms and their inner structure.

Here I am treading a totally unknown territory. I don’t have to deny that there are such means and types of knowledge. It’s entirely possible that meditation (or prayer) clears the way for them. But since they are not universal, we don’t know and there are no known methods of accessing or controlling them. I am sure there are some who believe that there are, but I have no answer to them. UG himself is believed to have had some of those powers, but, even if he did have them, I don’t believe they were consciously cultivated.

[1] Except on rare occasions as when he consulted a doctor about his ‘plumbing problem’ (hiatal herinia) or when he wanted his teeth extracted by a dentist.

The Self, Meaning and the Significance of Life

2008-02-19T11:20:00.000-08:00

The Question of Meaning or Significance of Life: My former philosophy professor who later became my friend once bemoaned the fact that in spite of carrying the Bhagavad Gita under his arm for many years he could never ‘believe’ (in religious matters). He is a well-known scholar in Indian philosophy and tradition as well as in Western philosophy and logic. I told him that he could never believe nor make himself believe because he knew too much, meaning that the knowledge prevented him from naïvely believing in anything. The knowledge would prompt him to question and doubt any belief he might entertain. The same holds true with innocence in matters of living.

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” like questions such as “Who made God?” “What was there before everything?” is a metaphysical question. It does not lend itself to any satisfactory answer, because such questions are basically paradoxes created by our reason, which is a form of thought. For instance, suppose there is some meaning to life, say, for instance, serving God or His purposes, letting alone the question of whether there is a personal God or not, one could immediately ask the question of what is God’s purpose or why should one serve God. This questioning is endless. That’s why the question has no general answer.

In order to satisfactorily answer this question, we must ask in what contexts the question of meaning of life arises. I used to point out to my students when discussing the question of meaning of life that a five year-old just doesn’t run to his or her daddy and ask him, “Daddy, daddy, what’s the meaning of life?” We don’t ask such questions when our lives are moving on smoothly. Our lives must have run into some crisis and come to a halt before we ask such a question. As UG often said, a living man never asks the question of why he should live. You don’t ask such questions until you have lost your innocence in living. You must ‘know too much’ to get to ask such questions.

Normally, when we do things, engage in various activities of life, we don’t look for any external meaning to our actions except the goals we seek. It’s natural that when we confront various frustrations in life, particularly with regard to some significant goals, be it a girlfriend or boyfriend we wanted, or a job we seek or the ill-health that we try to recover from. In striving for our goals, we make constant assessment of our status, where we are and how far we still have to go, what we have achieved and what that ‘means’ to us, and so on, by reviewing not only our present situation, but also our life, constantly and repeatedly, and the reviewing becomes a habit. It is when we face some profound failures that we tend to review our life, assess its significance and ask if there is any meaning to the whole of our life. We have to arrive at a general idea of the whole of our life, which we didn’t have earlier, (even when as young people we constantly looked forward to our future,) before we could ask such fundamental questions about life. The questioning can land us in various forms of malaise: one might lose one’s taste for life, become bored with life, and worse, become an alcoholic or workaholic, or become addicted to achievement, or become chronically depressed or even go the limits of losing one’s will to live and of committing suicide.

The solution to the problem of meaning of life lies in the sources where it was generated, viz., in the initial frustrations regarding achieving one’s basic desires or goals. In other words, the solution to the problem is in its dissolution. If we were totally engaged in living and are not separate from it, the question of what is the meaning of life would not even arise.

Fulfillment and Frustration: Built into the activity geared toward goal-seeking are ideas of time and future. We labor under an implicit assumption that the satisfaction of each goal will somehow fulfill us. The feeling of fulfillment or the feeling that our life has been fruitful could come not only from satisfaction of goals such as money, a good family, a house, a boat, power, achievement and what not, but also from religious sources: you ardently believed in God and his grace, you feel blessed and or through your devotion and piety you feel that some day your life will be blessed or you will reach the presence of God.

When the goals are reached, when we get what we want, we do feel content and satisfied, and feel fulfilled for the moment. But the matter never ends there: the very awareness of what we have achieved turns it into a further goal, at least of preserving the status quo or continuing it in time, for we once again feel we lack it or feel uncertain about it in some other fashion (we may not have it tomorrow or there is a risk that someone or something might take it away from us, and so on). When our striving process proceeds without interruption, we normally do not tend to ask fundamental questions about living or its significance. If we happen to have religious beliefs, then as long as the beliefs are strong, they tend to give us support in tiding over our frustration: this life with its travails, for instance, might be viewed as a testing ground in which God or some other power morally and spiritually prepares us for a life of blessedness.

But when we find that the goals are not achieved and frustration is the only outcome, and when we confront several such failures, we tend to believe that our lives have been a waste and we start wondering whether life itself has any meaning. We could even lose our faith in God, particularly if the shock of frustration is too great and no amount of prayer has been answered. It is not as much that we look toward a higher meaning as wondering whether there is any meaning at all that is the crux of the issue.

The flow of life has been interrupted when we ask such questions; our naiveté and involvement in the life process have left us. When the frustrations are rather fundamental, no substitutions for the goals or simple patching will put us back on track. We have lost the taste for life. The lost belief or faith can never be regained. Is there any solution to such a problem short of getting into boredom, depression, suicide, alcohol or what not?

Once the question arises, one then asks the further question of how to become free from this separation, this alienation between ourselves and our life.

As long as we are attached to goals and something outside of us to fulfill us, frustrations are inevitable and the question of meaninglessness of life must arise, as we keep insisting that not only our desires must be satisfied, but that we must have no failures and we must be permanently happy ‘without a moment of unhappiness’. The problem of meaningless of life is intimately bound with the problem of time and our own future non-existence: for we try to fulfill ourselves only because we feel we lack all the things we desire.

If we can confront our own future non-existence (i.e. death), and emptiness, then perhaps we could see the superfluous nature of our values and goals we have been seeking all our lives. We can see then all the goals and values that have hitherto given meaning to our life are dispensable. This doesn’t mean that we do not pursue goals or have desires. Living simply requires us to. But we could see the tentativeness of goals and strive for them when one needs to and not be daunted by failures. Each thing we undertake would have value only on its own merits, but not as part of a life-project or ulterior meaning; and when we don’t succeed in our endeavor, we are flexible enough to try some more or in other ways or abandon the goal and move on to other things.

Notice that we are not talking about not having goals or not enjoying or suffering the results of our actions. Of course, we will as we currently do. Suppose we come to the realization that there is no external meaning to life, and whatever we do has to have its meaning stemming from the results of the action; and further suppose, that we realize that success and failure are equally possible outcomes of every action and that when we confront failures, we let that happen and move on to a further project, even if it is retrying the earlier project and perhaps keep working at that. If we can succeed in doing that, that means we have learned to become free from the residue of the disappointment generated from the previous failure or failures.

Each failure is an invitation to revisit our goals and assess their feasibility. Each failure is also an opportunity to become aware of our attachment to things, people or situations and question it. Each failure is also an opening to our own emptiness underneath all our goals and activities.

Then we tend to live life on its own terms, and not in terms of ulterior values we have acquired here and there.

I am not saying that there is no significance to life or meaning in life; I am saying that if you don’t ask fundamental questions about living, then each little thing we do will have its own temporary and tentative meaning. The metaphysical question of whether or not there is an ultimate, exterior meaning to life doesn’t bother us anymore, because we realize that that meaning is bound up with all the goals and values that we have so far found desirable and that our self is that meaning. The loss of that self is what we have been afraid of. Once we are free from that fear, we don’t have to look for any ulterior meaning. Life is its own meaning.

Meaning and the Self:[1]The world we build for ourselves, the world of our meaning is our self. The self is meaning. The loss of meaning is the loss of self. Our thought process puts together repeatedly various situations and events that occur in our life from time to time and assign meaning and value to it. Then we feel elated or depressed, depending on the outcome of the evaluation. Meaning and value are assigned, however, in terms of one’s past experience; that’s the measuring rod and the backdrop against which things and events acquire meaning. The meaning we assign to our world is our meaning and it defines us.

Our feeling secure is bound up with our being able to find meaning in our lives. The mind constantly tries to impose structure on any given situation. One has to find a place for oneself in the scheme of things and see how one measures up in relation to it. Not being able to do so makes one insecure, because the situation then is seen as fraught with uncertainty and one wouldn’t know where one is.

Boredom: One of the opposites of a meaningful life is boredom. If things are not interesting or meaningful, then we are bored. We constantly labor under the opposites of ‘boring’ and ‘interesting’ when we confront situations. What’s interesting and what is not are determined, of course, on the basis of comparing the current situation, action, idea, thought, conversation or whatever, with what we have experienced in our past as more or less interesting or meaningful than this. The ability of not looking for meaning in life is the ability to confront situations not on the basis of such comparisons, but just as themselves – i.e., neither interesting nor boring. You just do them because either you have to, or that’s what’s in your way. Everything you confront has its own interest.

Loneliness: One of the consequences of meaninglessness, particularly that stemming from frustrations in love, is the problem of loneliness. Unless you are, once again, comparing the present situation as lacking something you wanted, there is no room for isolation or loneliness. The world is filled with things and people – they all keep us company. You don’t get lost in them nor do you feel isolated.

Depression: Depression is another one of the consequences. Depression is considered as a malaise. Unless it is generated from some physical condition (such as gloomy weather) or chemical imbalance, it is always in relation to something we have been missing or frustrated about. Depression is a withdrawal response. You don’t reach out any more as you were frustrated earlier. Your energies, as it were, are turned inward. And depression is inevitable as long as you are still hooked to the person or thing you have been attached to and you can’t, for some reason or other, continue to strive for it. If and when you could let the person or thing go, then depression drops itself out of you “like a handkerchief from your pocket.”

Fear and Worrying about Future: We are not only proud of our past achievements, we also worry about our future – what will happen to our money, fortunes, job, health, family, house and so on. The worry is created by the thought process which also creates our future. We constantly live in hope and yet when there is some doubt about the future outcome we worry about it. The meaning structure, i.e. the self, is constantly at risk. We feel threatened. As long as you think about your future, you must worry. The mind is constantly calculating possibilities, measuring one’s progress against them and responding to them through worry and hope. We will never be free from one (fear) without being free from the other (hope). To be able to become free from both requires an overhaul our system -- our values and cherished desires. Worry is a form of fear. We cannot be free from fear until we take it all the way to its limits and accept the worst possible outcome. If we could ever get to do that, that would generate the possible required disillusionment with our desires and goals. Thus we become free from our attachments.

In the final analysis, the question of meaning in life as a blanket question is tantamount to the preparedness to let go of one’s set of values and meanings that one has acquired in the past, and that means the same as losing one self. By facing one’s annihilation, one is able to break up this total meaning structure into pieces. Then, perhaps, one is able to live without having to have an overall meaning, each life situation or event having a meaning in its own terms: I am currently writing, for instance, because there was some occasion in my previous writing where this sort of question arose, or someone raised a question regarding this. Once I finish writing this piece, its purpose is served and I move on to other things. I don’t have to have this contribute to my overall meaning of life, nor do I have to feel disappointed if people criticize it or do not understand it or agree with it. That’s their problem, not mine. As to the question of why I write at all, the answer is simply for lack of anything better to do. It is, as a matter of fact, one among the many things I do in my day-to-day life, some necessary for living or survival and some totally gratuitous. How else could it be? I can’t, at my age, make myself believe in some artificial or religious goal and go about assigning meaning to my life on its basis. But I have no disappointment in my life either. Life is what it is. You just live as best as you can, and then you go!

I know all this sounds totally counter-commonsensical and absurd as we are all so used to living on the basis of a set of values to which we feel so committed and attached. We feel that there is no point of living without such a basis (I can hear a resounding response, “Then why live?” in my ears!) This is just one possible analysis and solution and it may or may not appeal to you.

[1] I wrote about this in my previous article, but it can bear some repetition in the present context.

Thought, Thinking and the Self

2008-02-07T13:05:00.002-08:00

Preamble: Here I am not so much interested in what the scientists have to say about thought and thinking, their scientific studies, which generally involve establishing correlations between thought processes (or other mental phenomena like perception, feeling, emotions and dreaming) and various brain centers or electrical and chemical processes, as understanding them from my own point of view in a commonsense fashion. The problem with scientific studies is that they don’t leave us with much we can do anything about. And they eventually will lead to commercial or political exploitation.

Beginnings of Thought: We all use the words ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’ without ever being conscious of what the words mean. I think the thinking process has its roots in consciousness which in turn has origins in the very simple activities like responding to stimuli, recognition and various stages of remembering. Response is evident even in the world of inanimate matter, as for instance, when an iron filing responds to the presence of a magnet, or a gas heater or toaster responds to a set temperature in a thermostat. In the biological world, response takes place in the form of reacting to stimuli, whether internal or external, even at the level of ameba or other primitive organisms. Here we see the beginnings of what we can term as consciousness. Responses become more and more complex as life forms become more complex and heterogeneous – forming the senses and their sensations, which serve the organism’s basic survival and reproductory needs. Some animals respond to stimuli even when they do not occur in the present: an animal like an elephant is said to be able to dream. Dogs are said to be able not merely to recognize their masters but remember where their homes are and get back to them, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Whales and birds are known to migrate thousands of miles away as their instincts and other internal stimuli prompt them. And bees can communicate to other bees with precision the location of a source of nectar.

Internal stimuli too cause responses of various kinds. But most important for our discussion is the idea of image making. Images are said to exist in some primitive form in animals, particularly in elephants, chimpanzees and gorillas, and perhaps even in cats and birds. They miss their partners when they are not present for a length of time. The grieving process and dreaming through fear presuppose some sort of imagery, however primitive and isolated it might be. Images are representations of objects which are not directly present. And to that degree they do represent concepts, although only non-verbally. A concept is a mental representation of whatever kind, even if it is just a mere sensation, when it is taken to represent something other than itself, most of the time a class of objects.

Consciousness: When animals respond to images in a primitive fashion, they are conscious, but only in an incipient sense. An explicit consciousness, as when we are self-conscious, requires the division between the self and the other mediated through a thought, whether explicitly verbalized or not. Therefore, we cannot say animals are conscious of images or of their own responses to them. We too were probably like them before self-consciousness has developed in us. Words, like images, are vehicles for concepts and physiologically they exist only in the form of sounds (which we notice in our sub-vocal speech movements).

Self-Consciousness: Then what is self-consciousness? I think the roots of typical thought processes must be sought here. Self-consciousness must involve some feeling or consciousness of oneself being conscious of whatever it is that one is conscious of (say, a sensation, an object or situation in the world, a feeling or an action). Self-consciousness does not take place in a vacuum. It is not a mere nothing either, nor is it just a consciousness. It involves an object, something we are aware of, and the subject which is aware of that something. The subject is not a mere nothing, either. It is perception, thought, feelings, reactions, plans which are all based on the background knowledge one has acquired over a lifetime. It is the ground on the basis of which we are aware of the objects. All perceptions (and recognition which is implied in them) and our reactions to objects as subjects occur by means of the past knowledge concerning the object. The subject, as subject, can never be the object of attention. It is only evident indirectly through the inner dialog that goes on in the mental processes. The knowledge we have acquired represents to us the world we live in. And the knowledge reacts through its known methods. There is no perception without such reaction.[1]

Although self-consciousness is an aid in the process of learning a new skill, as it helps us in monitoring and putting together through memory various details one has to learn, it can also hinder us in the smooth performance of a skill once it is learned. Much intellectual thinking as well as problem-solving is occurs in the field of self-consciousness in the form of a dialog one carries on within oneself.

Knowledge and Valuation: Our reactions are manifold and add to the edifice of knowledge and hence of the world we make up for ourselves. Perception first of all implies recognition of objects. Recognition is an incipient thought process. And the very recognition of the object is at the same time an evaluation. Also, the reaction to the recognized object or situation or person is simultaneously an evaluation on the basis of a scale of values one has built for oneself over time. The values reinforce experiences positively or negatively. The evaluation process is simultaneously also a process of becoming something other than oneself, something which will resolve a perceived shortcoming, difficulty or problem and steer one toward goals which presumably imply an improved situation. The process of the self (which I will describe below) is a process in time. Evidently, without the movement of thought, there is no past, present or future to the conscious mind or self. Thought is very much involved in this process. Now, what is thought?

Recognition and Judgment: Thought is not only the process of recognition, but of judgment. More often than not, the judgment implies an evaluation and a projection into the future. Images, concepts as well as language are implicated in the mental processes of judging, evaluating and projecting into the future. Some process of creative problem-solving, particularly those that involve creativity are beyond the reach of thought, or, at any rate, best carried out when conscious thinking is not present. Once the problem is solved, then it is thrown into the realm of conscious thinking and then the thought process can work out the details of the solution.

Intelligence: Intelligence has many skills such as problem-solving, scanning, assessing, evaluating, estimating, hypothesizing, drawing consequences from an idea, systematizing, comparing, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, abstracting, projecting into the future, and so forth. Thinking is one of the functions of intelligence. Animals, of course, have a lower level of intelligence as they lack the capacity to envisage in thought (or even imagery) a situation in its absence and manipulate it consciously.

The Notion of the ‘I’: Thought implying the division between the subject and object already implies the subject as the self. When one becomes conscious of one’s thought, one automatically has the notion of the ‘I’ or the self. The notion of the self becomes enriched and filled with content through further thinking and experience, as one’s knowledge grows with experience and is added to the content of the subject. In the division between the subject and the object, as one’s attitude is determined by one’s past pleasant or unpleasant experience (i.e., knowledge), one either desires or tries to avoid the object. In the process of desiring what a person feels he or she lacks, she creates for herself the need for fulfillment which is really a filling the need or lack. However, once this need is fulfilled, other take its place, for as long as in the thinking process we are aware of things in our world, desires, needs or wants are automatically created. Thus the person is set on an endless travel to realize the ultimate -- ultimate happiness, pleasure, meaning or resting place. The self is also a process to seek permanence and security, and this is where the self-protectiveness of thought comes in. While every thought we think is geared to reinforce the self in some fashion or other, it is doing so by means of the structure it has already built for itself.

While on the one hand thought seems to seek something other than itself, on the other, its search is always limited to the known. We have no clue as to what we seek if we don’t have any idea of it. The seeking serves to further strengthen the self that is already there.

The self is not only the world we built in, but also a fictitious center which holds the world together and acts as its center. All the feelings, experiences and thoughts as well as achievements, worries and projects are referred to this center. We feel as if there is a unitary entity that acts through all these mental processes and governs the body as well as our dealings with the world.

Mental States: The awareness of an object, a sensation, an image, a feeling or a thought is simultaneously a reaction to it. We hardly are ever aware of something without reacting to it. But then the reaction itself becomes an object of awareness and of further reaction. This happens particularly when we rehash an issue out from different points of view.

This constant action and reaction process linked through memory creates what we might call mental ‘states’. A state is something we ascribe to ourselves as, for instance, when we say to ourselves, “I am angry; I am depressed,” and so on. This ascription is itself a thought and is more often than not mediated by body awareness. Notice how we reinforce this feeling or awareness by beating our chest and by being aware of our speech muscles or of other parts of the head or the rest of the body. In this ascription to ourselves of a thought or a state or a feeling, associated with a certain body awareness, is what generates the illusion of the ‘I’. In each of the specifics (thoughts, body sensations, for instance) there is no ‘I’. But through the process I mentioned above, you get the feeling of ‘I’, the feeling that ‘you’ are thinking, ‘you’ have pain, ‘you’ are the agent of your actions, or ‘you’ are what is referred by other people as ‘great’, and so on. This illusion is perpetuated through repeated ascriptions linked through memory. (In other words, I remember, say two such ascriptions from my past, and in that very recollection, a feeling is generated that I have such a quality – there is an implicit feeling ‘That’s me’ in each one of these recollections.)

Mental States have continuity. And we contribute to the continuity of mental states by reacting to them either positively or negatively. You are strengthening your state through your reaction. If you stop reacting, the state ceases to be when it loses its momentum. Thus states have inertia of their own, and they tend to persist because of our participation in them. When we participate in a state, we are within a tunnel as it were. This inertia resists change, indeed even any interference from outside. And within the ‘tunnel’ the states have a tendency to perpetuate themselves either by building on themselves or keeping a fight for or against something going. These states or what I might also call ‘tracks’ include fear, loneliness, depression, pride, inferiority, superiority, and such. For instance, when we are watching a movie, we are ‘within’ the track of watching the movie, and as such, we are identified with the characters and situations and so experience the joys and sorrows expected (or not expected) of us as spectators. You can only stop the process of involvement by stepping out of it, snapping out, as it were. Then you don’t have the illusion. Then reality is reality; the movie reality has becomes a mere show without any effect on you.

Our normal states of mind are similar. We are within a tunnel and we labor hard trying to get out of it, particularly when we feel they are undesirable. But that’s a futile struggle for we labor on the basis of a certain base identification (even if it is only a negative one) and cannot extricate ourselves from it. When we can get down from outside, as it were, to the base identification and question it, then there is a chance of truly distancing ourselves from it and eventually becoming free from the entire state.

We must think about something: Without something to think about, the mind (or consciousness) in an unstable state. It keeps wanting to chew something. It tries to achieve the stability and grounding, if necessary by harping on the negative, as when the negative memories impinge upon our consciousness and we react to them by building on them, just as we react to positive memories by building on them. We try to think of the worst when we are in an uncertain situation, as that gives us more grounding and security, than the positive which can always be questionable. One way to solve the problem of sinking deeper and deeper in a negative state is to let the negative state be and if necessary focus on something innocuous, as they do in meditation, and ‘rise above’ the state. Or one could break up a mental state by interspersing it with self-consciousness, i.e. being aware of what we are doing as frequently as possible and breaking it into pieces. By ‘pulverizing’ the state, the continuity of the state is broken up and the state loses its hold on us. This will at least temporarily remove one from that state of mind. Habits are like states of mind and they too will tend to become weaker by the same processes. More lasting freedom, however, can only be found in becoming free from the source identification.

We can superimpose states upon states, say, guilt upon anger and so forth and make them multi-layered. Also, we can suppress them to a subterranean level beyond the reach of the conscious mind. You can become conscious of states, but as I said, such consciousness only reacts to the state from a point of view, generally the point of view of identification with something and tends to reinforce the state. We cannot just let the state run its course, say just be afraid and let the fear run its course and die its natural death.

States add to the notion of the continuing self: Go through a few of these states, you get the feeling that there is one constant ‘I’ running through them all. The more organized my memory is, the stronger is my sense of ‘I’, or you can say, the bigger is my ego!

To repeat: states of mind continue through memory. Each thought or feeling we have is ‘linked’ to other thoughts or feelings relevant to it – it may be the same or similar thought or feeling we have had in the past or something connected to it. This connectivity, association or linking is what gives rise to the notion of the continuing ‘I’.

Once the notion of the continuing ‘I’ is established, every thought we think is used to reconnect to the relevant past and further support the continuity. Although we can never find the specific beginnings of the ‘I’, we believe in the history of the ‘I’ with a beginning, its current life and an end.

In the process of organizing our world we arrange our goals and look for ultimate goals. And when these are not fulfilled repeatedly and we confront frustration we struggle hard to find meaning in life. Until we become involved in some other goal we become bored with life, having lost the significance in our lives.

Whenever we perceive and relate to anything in the world, we do so by placing it in this mental world of ours, this world of the ‘I’, the ‘I’ being at the center of the world. The world of the ‘I’ is intimately bound with ourselves, because it is nothing but a multitude of identifications interconnected. Whatever happens to each of these things in the world we feel happens to us. Our interests, values and goals are bound with these identifications, determined, of course, by our earlier exposure to them.

Psychological Survival: Our instinctive biological struggle for survival is now translated into the mental world. But these are not identical because our biological survival is embellished by our imagination, which is one of the functions of thought. It can imagine a fictitious future and fear for its non-continuance. Each thought thinking thus about the future is my future that I think about and fear. Our mind can thus generate insecurity and fear of death even when our physical survival is presently not threatened.

Dialogue within Ourselves: The constant dialogue within ourselves is what provides us with the illusion that the ‘I’ exists at the center of all my thoughts. I wonder if we would have this idea of the ‘I’ without the inner dialogue. What does the dialogue imply? When the sounds (thoughts) go on in my head, there are subtle speech movements. I am always aware of myself as thinking these thoughts, and also the person who has experiences, feelings and is the author of his actions. With each such awareness, there is a feeling that ‘I’ am thinking those thoughts. With this feeling I link those thoughts and memories. Hence the feeling that there is the ever-present ‘I’ behind all my thoughts and experiences that I remember.

The same is true of our memories: as memories impinge on our consciousness we become aware of them and in that very process is generated a reaction to them and then a response to the reaction and so on and so forth. That’s partly how the inner dialogue is generated.

The self has many features: 1) It is the center, it is as the self that we try to fulfill ourselves as, it is our world, it is our self-image or self-esteem which is a result of the process of constant evaluation. We are quite sensitive when a remark is passed about us as we are constantly on guard as to how others look at us. We worry about ourselves, worrying about every little things that happens to us; we evaluate it; relate it to the rest of our lives and react to it until we are satisfied that the problem is solved. Notice how the same problem-solving skills of intelligence are exercised here to work out the problems of the self; only this time it is done through the medium of thought. Of course, the worry can easily turn into an obsession or a phobia and we can create a literal panic and hell for ourselves as we continually build on our worries. This is evident even when we notice a slight change or ache or pain in our body and react to it by panicking.

We divide our world into the positive and the negative, into right and wrong and good and bad, pleasant and painful, happy and miserable. We pursue the positive and try to avoid the negative. We constantly reflect and evaluate our lives, figuring out the direction in which it is going, and being satisfied with its progress or disappointed with the lack of it or its failures. We have now a life of constant becoming where there is no rest or peace.

2) The self is meaning: what we experience is interpreted through our past experience and it acquires meaning through it. When it acquires meaning, it becomes part of the world. The world we make up for ourselves is not just our world, but in some sense I am the world, because the things, people and situations in my world are things I am identified with, either positively or negatively. In fact, language itself, the words and sentences we hear, have meaning to us only because of the associations they have with our past experiences. They, as well as anything else that has meaning for us, must invoke our past in some sense in order for them to have meaning for us. Or else, they would remain as mere noises or marks on paper, or, if they are things, as mere non-descript objects which have no interest or meaning to us.

The process of self-evaluation is mediated often through comparison – comparison of ourselves with others, our present state with a future possible state, our actions with our own scales of values or others’ values, and so on. The process of evaluation creates feelings of elation, depression, self-congratulation, pride, inferiority, superiority, sense of power, dominion over others as well as anxiety and fear about the outcome of a given situation. Insecurity is built into this process. The uncertainty generates the anxiety and creates the unending search for security.

3) Our self-image is something we build on the foundation of our notion of the self. We fill it with various projects we have, our desire structure, our estimates about ourselves, our achievements and failures, our sentiments and beliefs and so on. This structure is held together by the center of the self. Not only each thing that occurs in our world is related to the self via the self-image, but interpreted and reacted to by means the image. The reaction in turn reinforces the self and its image of itself.

We constantly build and rebuild our self-image by feeding it with various reinforcements, particularly those stemming from not just our opinions about ourselves, our qualities and actions, but from what we hear from other people, and also from what we think other people think about us. This is a constant process which keeps building and revising our idea of ourselves.

4) This indeed is where we can notice the self-protectiveness of thought. Thinking does not take place in a vacuum. It takes places within the process of the self, within the context of the self maintaining and continuing its self-image. In fact, we are only interested in those things (in fact, even our physical perceptions not only select but seek those that are relevant to our interests) that are directly or indirectly connected to the self and its image of itself, and our perceptions are indeed limited by these interests. We seek those things and consciously or unconsciously ignore the rest of what is given in the field of our perception. (As they say, “We only hear what we want to hear.”) Our reactions to what we perceive reinforce our self-structure. We become sensitive to anything that is seen even as remotely threatening to this structure, and we not only take a mental note of it, but do everything to eliminate it, fight it off, erase it or diminish its strength.

Anything that’s seen as possibly threatening, say, a disease symptom, a pain, an insult, or something which could possibly hurt our self, raises a minor disturbance, if not a storm, in the mind. We don’t rest until the storm is quelled and equilibrium is restored. All our thinking and emotional process is utilized in this direction. When we say we want peace, normally, it’s this kind of peace we seek.

Many mental processes are carried out by means of thought and all have the self at the center. A) Desiring, striving, goal-seeking and pleasure-seeking: Anything which is perceived as attractive or desirable or pleasurable on the basis of one’s background experience is automatically turned into a goal that one seeks and becomes part of the desire process. B) Emotions and feelings: in response to the various situations, including successes and failures in our attempts to deal with the world, as well as to the self-evaluation that one constantly makes, we undergo many emotions and feelings. More often than not, these emotions and feelings are verbalized and as such exist in the form of thought – for instance, thought of envy, jealousy, anger, fear, elation, depression and so on. Without the verbalization or thinking these emotions and feelings lose their identity and reduce themselves to diffuse energy.

5) In the process of seeking our sense of time is created. There is no time without thinking. Although our striving implies time, with its future, past and present, there is something interesting about our dealings with our self. When we seek or avoid, of course, there is time, because the distance between what we seek and avoid and ourselves, implies time. However, within the structure of the self there is no time. It’s as if everything is frozen there in time. Take for instance, our memories. I have been in love with a girl say forty years ago. But my fantasies or reliving my past experiences with the girl hardly ever take into consideration the changes in time that have probably taken place in the girl over the last forty years – perhaps she is an old hag by now, or even dead, for all I know. I myself have become old and perhaps have no ability even to perform sex! But my mind knows no such age. In some sense, it acts as if it is ageless. It’s immortal!

What’s interesting is that our dealings with life are based on this notion of our ‘frozen’ self. We act, strive, accumulate wealth, and protect ourselves and our health, or good name, as though there will be never an end to us. At the same time, time is very real to us as that’s what is implied in our striving for our goals and whenever we are involved in the thinking consciously about anything. Although in some sense time is frozen in individual experiences, as a continuing self I am very much aware of time and in spite of the fact that I know of no beginning to myself in time (I cannot even imagine except through concepts and someone telling me so), I am mortally afraid of the continuity of my life ending. In fact, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself ending. No wonder as human beings we create all these fancy notions such as Kingdom of Happiness, Immortality and living after death as pure Consciousness and so forth. Those are all our lame attempts to combat our fear of death. None of that, of course, will succeed in the face of a seed of doubt!

Combine this with our constant attempt to seek our goals and our striving to restore our mental equilibrium; you will then understand what UG says about man seeking only one thing, namely, permanent happiness. This indeed is what counts for man as permanent happiness.

6) Thought processes don’t always take place at a very conscious level. We are not always aware of what goes on. When we seek a goal or fend off an offense we are not always aware. When we are aware, the awareness only takes place by means of another thought. We don’t know much about the thought until it surfaces in consciousness. We don’t even know that it exists. Say, we bear a grudge or resentment against someone. Our behavior, including what we say to the person, might show it. It may be evident to some other person. But until it is formulated as such in a thought, we don’t even know that it exists. We sometimes have subtle feels and inklings about such and many other things. And in fact, even quite a bit of problem solving can take place subconsciously. If we include these inklings, the field of thought gets expanded considerably more.

And there may be layers and layers of these mental processes. Part of the problem of either psychoanalysis or self-analysis would consist of peeling off layer after layer of these processes and get to the root, the thing, say, we are primarily afraid of or the person and reason for which we resent.

7) When we think, whether in a goal-directed fashion or to solve a problem, or otherwise, we move in a ‘mental space’. Some times we find gaps in the mental map we make in thinking which we bridge in order to solve a problem. And at other times the space is traversed in an uncharted fashion when we create like in science, music or art. When we understand or we think we know there are flashes and clicks in this mental space. In relationships also we feel this mental distance -- we may want to close it (as in a relationship we want) or keep it (as with a student in a classroom or with a stranger).

8) There is such a thing as a tunnel vision in thought: when you are thinking about a certain object from a certain point of view, the point of view or prejudice or belief governs our thinking process. Of course, we could become conscious of these points of view, but generally we are aware of them only from another point of view. When it is possible to become merely aware of them without reacting to them, the process has no longer any hold on us. For instance, take fear. When we get to our fear at its bottom level and can face it without reacting to it, that is, without trying to escape from it or justify it or build up on it, if we can face it without resistance, then the fear has no longer any strength. It simply dissipates. In doing so, we are dissolving the duality or division that has hitherto existed between ourselves and the object of fear. We become one with it, as it were. The same goes with other mental states such as anger, depression and loneliness.

9) All feelings of insecurity and loneliness, and many fears, at their base level cover our own emptiness, the vacuum which is pure consciousness or awareness or energy or whatever you call. We term that as nothingness, and are terrified by it and start covering it up with all kinds of activity, information, knowledge, achievement and other surface garbage, knowing full well that we can never completely succeed in doing so. But that doesn’t prevent us from trying. In other words, the whole mental edifice, the edifice of the self and of thought in general is based on nothing! Yet, we struggle so hard to maintain the structure.

10) Thought and desire are intimately connected with each other. As UG would say, to think is to want something – if you don’t want anything, you don’t need to think. I once expressed this idea once to UG (and later to others) in these terms: every thought we think is an attempt to change the given. It’s an attempt to become something other than ourselves. This is part of the movement of the self in which our very awareness of something as other than ourselves automatically reveals our own lack of it (threat by it), and that in turn sets a reaction mechanism going to change the given situation into a more settled one. All such processes are means of self-fulfillment as we feel inadequate without the object. Our inadequacy is enhanced through the process of comparisons which we do all the time. And our reaction mechanism always takes place against the backdrop of our background, past experience and knowledge.

11) As I mentioned in my article on selflessness, we sometimes are interested in helping others, and undertake various social work activities, charities and so on. Or we carry on intellectual activities (we claim out of curiosity), pursue knowledge and practice art. In all of them, the self is at the center and those activities are basically part of the projects of the self. To test this theory, there is just one simple method: when something we have concluded or thought of, or when a long-cherished fundamental belief of ours is attacked, of course we buttress it with various justifications; but more often than not, we feel that the very ground we stand on is taken away from us; we do not rest until we quell the opposition, even at the expense of abandoning the project and taking up another. (“I shall return!”) We resent and bear grudge against the person attacking our belief, in spite of ostensible attempts to appear impersonal and objective. We do all this because we identify ourselves with the project (or belief) – the success of the project is our success; its failure is our failure. In fact, if there are a few more of these failures, then we feel we are ourselves a failure! And that’s a disaster and it can set us on the course of a prolonged depression.

12) Relationships, although seemingly between people, really take place in our mental world between the self and others who are part of our world. And these relationships, no matter how much we white wash them in the name of love, affection, unconditioned love and so forth, are part of the projects of the self. We desire a person and try to have a relationship with him or her for various reasons: it may be sex or companionship we want; or we simply are identified with the person to the degree that the person’s welfare and accomplishments become our accomplishments. I am not saying we don’t do anything for other people just to benefit them. Of course, we do. But when we do, our self is in some way or other involved in it. We do not simply know how to act otherwise. When things fail in relationships, of course, as UG says, “’Love’ is our trump card.” We blame the other person claiming that he or she does not love us.

13) Thought is capable of creating illusions: it always seeks a state where there is no striving any more where all its desires are fulfilled -- the utopia; the kingdom of permanent happiness, moksha. But such things are all based on illusions. As long as thought is there, there is no end to striving, for they are synonymous. And it cannot find a state of total fulfillment as long as it keeps seeking it; for seeking presupposes a sense of a lack of fulfillment. Seeking presupposes that we are an independent entity capable of a destiny. And apart from the set of thoughts and experiences we have created for ourselves, there is no independent ‘I’. The ‘I’ as the contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, is a ‘gravitational pull’. We can never directly see it. As Sartre puts it, “We can only see it with the corner of our eye.” In other words, it only appears to be there when we are not directly looking at it. When we look it directly, it’s not there. Yet, it is for this fictitious ‘I’ that we strive and struggle so much. Knowing all this, thought might even want to end itself. And that’s the grandest of all illusions! Ending of thought cannot be achieved by itself. It cannot be achieved by will, which in turn is thought. Of course, when we physically die, our thoughts will die with us.

14) If the thought process is suspended for any reason, either it happens for some unknown reason, or thought is utterly frustrated having exhausted all its resources, and is disillusioned by all its goals, and collapses as a consequence. Then there are no problems. At that moment, the body knows how to handle itself. You are in the field of pure awareness. But this cannot be contrived. Nothing we do or can do can make it happen. None of our methods of spiritual realization actually work, because they all take place with thought and contrivance as their background. We constantly look for and calculate the results. (Just don’t point to me all those examples of people who are liberated: they don’t impress me. In my opinion, those examples don’t prove what they are supposed to show.)

But unfortunately, we, as conscious human beings, don’t know how to live without thought or what to do with the pure awareness. We just don’t know.

[1] I once asked UG about what he meant by ‘knowledge’. He answered by saying that it is the knowledge of whatever gives you pleasure or pain.

Is There Such a Thing as Selflessness?

2008-01-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

UG says man is selfish to the core. In fact, one of the articles written on him many years ago in a Kannada newspaper in Bangalore which he showed to me had the caption of a quote from him, “Only selfishness is real, selflessness is an illusion.” UG always proclaimed that man “is selfish to the core.” My answer to the caption at that time was, “Yes, it’s a selfishness which does away with the very self!.”

The questions of egoism and altruism arise in the context of morality. Any moral theory must reconcile the conflict between self-interest and duty – at least that’s how it is traditionally conceived. Hobbes is a philosopher who claimed that man is like an animal driven only by self-interest, by desire which “only ends in death.” Some theories like that of Hume argue that there is basically no conflict between interest and duty and that if one only looked deeply enough into self-interest one would discover that duty is included in it. Similarly, Joseph Butler’s moral theory claims: “Every particular affection, even the love of our neighbour, is as really our own affection as self-love; and the pleasure arising from its gratification is as much my own pleasure as the pleasure self-love would have from knowing I myself should be happy some time hence would be my own pleasure.”(Quotation from Internet sources.) The extension of this is the modern theory of enlightened self-interest.

Various forms of utilitarianism attempt to reconcile the conflict in different ways with varying degrees of success: a more recent one, proposed by Rawls, includes self-interest in its notion of “acting under the veil of ignorance,” according to which, people when they constitute themselves as a society should opt for such policies of the state that they would accept not knowing which position (high or low) they would be occupying in the society. (Rawls, Theory of Justice) This notion seems like a version of the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

The political theory of Adam Smith, the theory of laissez-faire, believes in the Invisible Hand which guarantees that if everyone in a society acts for his own self-interest, the interest of the society is automatically taken care of.

My interest here is really not to address the issue of the conflict between interest and duty, but to inquire into the degree to which man is selfish: particularly to discuss the thesis that no matter what man does is really for his own pleasure (or self-interest). This is the thesis of psychological egoism. There are two problems with this thesis in the realm of morality: one is how is it possible that if by nature one is not endowed with an ability to act sometimes in the interests of other people, which is required by morality. The second problem, which is related to this, is that only one theory of morality becomes possible and that is ethical egoism. Ethical egoism leads to self-contradictions in contexts where two people’s interests conflict and according to the theory they both must be right.

Now, rights and wrongs aside, the question must occur to anyone inquiring into human relations, the question whether other people’s interests have any role to play in our lives except as promoting our own self-interest. Of course, we sometimes act contrary to our own self-interest, particularly when we don’t know what it is – we think it is one thing and it turns out that it is not truly to our self-interest. And we also act for other people’s interests – interests of our friends, relatives or strangers when we act charitably. When we do so we enjoy our action. We find them in some way gratifying or fulfilling.

But can we act selflessly and contrary to our self-interest when the situation (and you might say, morality) demands it? The answer pretty much depends on what we mean by selflessness. Do we mean by it acting contrary to one’s self-interest? If that’s the meaning of selflessness, one might answer that such actions are really born out of our self-interest, because we act charitably (or contrary to our self-interest) only when it suits us, when it gives us pleasure. When we no longer get the pleasure we seek in giving to others or in sacrificing our interests, as for example, when we don’t get the thanks we expected or our actions are not appreciated or when the recipient turns hostile instead of being grateful. The opponent here will constantly seek for the hidden motive of seeking pleasure even when it is not apparent on the surface. Then the thesis that whatever we do is for our self-interest (or pleasure) becomes tautological.

I think this approach (of psychological egoism) probably misses some points. More specifically it ignores the mechanisms of our behavior, particularly our goal-seeking process. Our normal procedure is that we want things (or avoid them) and we direct our actions to achieving what we desire or avoiding what we don’t want. Whatever we desire we desire because we hope it gives us satisfaction or pleasure. If our action gives us the desired result, we feel satisfied. If we perform the action repeatedly and it no longer gives the satisfaction we expect out of it, the action tends to drop off, unless it is a long-standing habit and quitting it seems more painful than keeping it. Masochism, although it seems painful on the surface, is pursued only because for the psychological pleasure we get in physically inflicting pain on ourselves. Here pain is pleasure.

Now, to repeat, my question here is, when we think something is right and it is not really according to our self-interest or gives us pleasure, would we still do it? If we can, then altruism and morality are possible. If not, then only psychological egoism is true and morality is not possible. The answer below explores the psychological process of action, goal-seeking and the self.

It’s the mechanism of thought which has the built in process of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Everything it seeks, including doing good to others, has to fit into this scheme in order for it to be meaningful to us. The values we seek and the things we desire are what give us satisfaction. They enhance our self. The thought process, in other words, is the process of the self. Through desire and fear, the thought process reinforces the self. All actions, even those we intend to help others, must form part of this ‘self (or mental) economy’. Even when the actions we perform don’t seem to give us satisfaction, or only give us pain, we would still do them if they conform to our values or concepts of what we want to achieve. The self, among other things, is a hierarchy of values we have built for ourselves whether consciously, or simply absorbed from the influences around us through osmosis. As values are bound up with our notion of our selves, we would do something painful, because, as a value, it is bound up with the notion of our selves. In other words, we sometimes do things for others even though they are painful, not as much because we gain some hidden pleasure or self-interest, but our very identity may be at stake, and not to pursue that value would amount to loss of self to that extent.

The present pain is tolerated for a future satisfaction of a value or a goal. When even that fails, and the goals or values are not achieved, we quit the whole enterprise, or console ourselves saying that we have tried, or tell ourselves that the goal is not worth it, or that’s not what I really wanted, or that we will try for it another time when conditions are more in our favor, or who needs it anyway and so forth. More often than not, we replace one goal with another. But constant striving for goals we never quit, because we have an underlying belief that our happiness or fulfillment lies in achieving things which are out there, outside of ourselves.

When we become disillusioned with that too, then perhaps not only the striving drops off, along with it our goals, but also the thought process which is geared to achieving them. But that almost never happens in people.

Short of this total collapse of the self, which is perhaps possible in principle, at least temporarily, whatever we do is for gratification, directly or indirectly, of the self. Only when such a collapse occurs, we are truly selfless. But then is there any action? (I am speaking here of action other than automatically satisfying one’s biological needs.) Or would a person’s movements be merely random? If there is action, (I can’t deny there is), it wouldn’t be premeditated, or based on some moral or other rules or laws, but would depend on the situation. It might even seem self-centered to others and no rules can be made out of such actions as they are so specific to a situation.

You might ask, why would one even act in such a circumstance? There is no answer to that question, for an answer presupposes a motive on behalf of the person, and that by definition is precluded in a selfless state. The action is gratuitous. It’s just as if the person had no choice but to act that way. It is as if the action is extracted out of him, forced out of him by the situation.

Why I am a Vegetarian, On Taking Life and Abortion

2007-12-31T14:28:00.000-08:00

Why I am a Vegetarian

People always ask me why I am a vegetarian, why I don’t eat meat, fish or eggs, don’t I kill the vegetables I eat, and so on. My answer is the following:

First, yes, I don’t eat meat, fish or eggs. For one thing, I don’t like them – I don’t even like the flavors, smells or taste of any of them. I have tried them both in India and in the US many times. Furthermore, I don’t like to eat meat or fish because I don’t like to kill animals.

I have no quarrel with those who eat meat. Still, I believe that most of those who do eat meat (or even fish) don’t quite realize what they are doing. Of course, a butcher kills animals or at least breaks them up into different parts as a routine to make his living. I don’t really know how many butchers like their jobs or do it as a habit or do it because they have no choice. Most of the rest of us eat meat by killing animals by proxy.

My argument, if you call it one, is not based on religion or morality. I think a person is justified in eating meat if he or she can kill an animal with his own bare hands, dress it, cook it, bring it to the table and eat it with relish repeatedly. As for myself, I can’t do any of them.

I will recount a couple of experiences in this context: One, when I lived in Berkeley, a Jewish girl from New York, her Norwegian boyfriend at that time and I went on a camping trip. When the young man caught an oyster in the water and crushed it in his palm, the girl fainted at the sight of blood in his hand. I won’t forget that scene.

The other is from my own past: once, in 1968, when I was in Waltair (Visakhapatnam), India, I lived in a cabin in the Santi Ashram. The cabin had a patio, a bedroom and a kitchen part of which is also used to take a bath. One night I woke up in the middle of the night to go to pee in the bathroom and I saw a rather long and very-slow-moving snake coming through the drainage hole in the wall. It was moving so slow either because it had eaten a heavy meal or it was hurt. I couldn’t tell which. I first used a broom and then an iron rod to move it forward with a view eventually to get it out of the cabin without harming it. But somehow it managed to get up on the door and hang right on top of the head of my bed. Tense and overcome by fear, I brought it down and beat it to death with the iron rod. Then ants collected around the snake and I called the caretaker of the ashram to come in to take the dead snake out. An elderly man, the caretaker asked me in a voiced mixed with respect, disapproval and pity for the snake, “You killed it, sir?”

The memory of that experience pricks my conscience (if I still have one!) to this day! Although I am not a believer in karma or rebirth, I wonder at times whether my long-standing cancer and other ailments I suffer from are not a result of my own misdeeds.

I can’t make any general rules out of my experience (or any one else’s). I don’t believe much in anything. Yet, I feel a person is justified in eating meat if he or she realizes what they are doing. And of course, in some areas on the globe you just have no choice.

Once a lady colleague who wanted me to give a talk on the subject in her department heard my argument and countered it saying, “You can’t always build a house from the scratch with your own hands in order to live in it.” I said the cases are not analogous (you don’t eat your house!). Of course, she promptly cancelled her invitation!

To be sure, I kill vegetables and fruit to eat them. Some ancient sages in India lived on fallen grain and fruit just for that reason. But I can’t. J. Krishnamurti addressing this question once said, “You have to draw a line somewhere.” Some people don’t draw a line at all, and I draw it at meat, fish and eggs. Why not eat eggs, you might ask. Actually, my family does. I for myself don’t like the flavor or smell or the after taste of eggs. Also, the fact that it is a potential animal. Rarely, I might eat something which has eggs in it when I don’t smell or know that there is an egg in it, and would learn about it later. If ate it inadvertently, I wouldn’t beat myself for doing it.

On Taking Life

Am I opposed to taking life? What would I do if I am attacked; my sister is attacked, etc. Am I a pacifist? How about abortion? How about preventing babies from birth defects to be born?

First, my attitude to killing: I am not a pacifist. Yet, when I became a citizen of this country, I told the Immigration Department that I can’t take an oath that I would defend this country and its constitution by arms if necessary. They asked me to write a statement of my religious faith. I told in it that I consider all men as my brothers and that I can’t bear arms for any country including the United States. They ended up by giving me a special oath which did not involve bearing arms. Thus I became a citizen of the US by being a conscientious objector.

They just can’t make me take a gun and shoot another human being. I would rather go to prison or something. What would I do if someone attacks me and gets ready to kill me? I don’t know. I will find out when I face such a situation. It’s hard to answer hypothetical questions like that.

But there was a time when a student actually assaulted me in my office for calling him stupid (the word just slipped out of my mouth!) in an argument. I complained to the campus police and told them that I just wanted him to get him off my back and that I didn’t want to make any other trouble. His papers were later graded by my colleague. Each situation is resolved in its own fashion. I can’t generalize and make up policies or rules of behavior for myself or for others on the basis of one or more experiences.

* * *

For similar reasons, I also don’t sit on a jury bench. Of course, I am called once every couple of years (because of my driver’s license) to jury duty. So far, I have managed to avoid it. A couple of times I was selected to be on the jury. The first time, I was a bit disturbed and talked to a lawyer (a freebee from my credit union! I don’t see lawyers otherwise.) He said, after consulting another lawyer, that I had to appear before the judge and if called to be on the jury, I could explain to the judge why I wouldn’t want to be on the jury. Something like that happened and when I sat on the jury bench, the judge asked if anyone had objections to serving on the jury. I raised my hand. He asked, “What!” I answered, “My conscience does not permit me to sit in judgment on my fellow human beings.” He said, “You are excused!” I left the courtroom in great relief.

The second time, when I was selected again, they asked me along with others to answer a questionnaire in answering which I had an opportunity to express my objection again. And that evening I was excused again.

The lawyer I consulted the first time asked me why I was opposed to being on the jury. I gave him my answer. He is a reputed lawyer who represented Cesar Chavez and others. I could see Mother Teresa’s picture hanging in his office. He said, “There are a lot of evil guys out there.” I answered him, “I can’t deny that. But, as a philosopher, I can’t be part of a system which only punishes people for their acts without considering their side of the picture and seeing what could be done to help or prevent it.”

* * *

Abortion

This is one of the knotty issues that troubles people all over the world. Of course, an embryo is not a full-fledged life. But the issue of abortion is not so simple. Read on:

Many years ago, my then girl-friend became pregnant. I told her that she wasn’t in a position to raise a child and maybe she should get an abortion. She was adamant and wanted the baby. I said, “As a woman, you have every right to have a baby. If you insist on carrying the pregnancy to full-term and have the baby, I will be with you (at that time, there was some question of my being with her) and help you raise the baby until you are ready to take care of it yourself.”

And she did give birth to a child and she asked me as soon as she was born, “Now that she is born, what do I do with it?” I said, “Raise it!”

I did stay with her for another three and-a-half years. My girl-friend, whom I later married, was now ready to leave me and leave the child with me. I had to get the help of a past student to live with me and take care of the child. Later, my current wife came into the picture and took care of her.

But the real reason for the above story is that when the child was about four and-a-half or five (or may be a bit older than that, I can’t remember the exact time), came into the bathroom where I was on the toilet and asked me, “Daddy, you wanted to get rid of me when I was in my mom’s belly, did you?” By now I knew that she heard (it doesn’t matter from whom) the news of what had happened. I had to collect my wits quickly and come up with a satisfactory answer or I would be my daughter’s enemy for life. I said, “I didn’t know it was you, if I did, why would I want to get rid of you?” Lucky for me, the answer pacified her and she never raised the question again. In fact, I recalled that story to her when she was grown up and she listened to it with amusement.

My ex-wife did go through an abortion (of a baby from someone else) and I know the depression, guilt, anxiety and nightmares she had had from that abortion. I know several other women who had the same response. In many cases, it doesn’t hit until after the abortion. For men, it’s more a matter of convenience, economics, etc. I remember, in the case of both my children, it’s the sight of them and my holding them physically that bonded me to them. But the issue is a lot deeper for women. They know the baby that was aborted, even though it was mere flesh, came from their womb and they are deeply affected by the experience.

Now would I say I am opposed to abortion; of course not. Am I then in favor of it. That’s where what I said above should come into play. How do you feel about it? Can you live with that decision? I can sermonize all I want, but if you feel so burdened by the baby and don’t event want the stigma or the travail of carrying the pregnancy to completion, and you feel your life would be ruined by it, who can blame you for aborting? But do consider how you would feel if you did abort and see if you can live with that decision. Talk to people who have had an abortion.

I see part of the problem that is generated in the controversy between the advocates of abortion (or right to decide about your own body) and pro-life people has to do with receiving government support. There indeed are poor people who probably can’t afford the funds to carry on an abortion. And the pro-life proponents don’t want the tax-payer’s money spent on causes they don’t approve. The question then becomes political and I have no answer to that.

Whither Morality?

2007-12-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.

Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral? -- U.G. in Mystique of Enlightenment.

We do question our actions before and after, whether we like it or not. For one thing, we are worried about the consequences of our actions, whether they will be just as we expect them, or they are liable to cause harm to ourselves or others, or what will happen to us if certain consequences follow our actions, and so on. We also feel guilty if the current action goes against our own previously accepted norms of right and wrong, loss or gain and good and bad.

I am not as much concerned here with which theory of morality (and moral judgments) is correct, whether utilitarianism is better than deontology or vice-versa, for instance, or whether we should opt for egoism or hedonism, and so on. My issue with morality is that even if we agree on which moral standards we use in our judgments, we are still left with a major problem.

The main problem with morality is not even that we worry about whether our actions may turn out to be wrong, but it is that more often than not we don’t act according what we ourselves admit is the right thing to do. It was Aristotle who first grappled with the problem of incontinence. The problem became translated in Christianity as the problem of the weakness of the will – “the spirit is willing but the flesh does not obey.” Socrates, followed by Plato, always taught that if only a person knew what is good, he would automatically be good and therefore act accordingly. So the ultimate evil is really ignorance. Plato’s Republic is an attempt to connect knowledge of the good with a person’s (and by extension with the state’s) happiness, thus ensuring the moral conduct of the individual (and by extension of the society).

Whether we approach the problem as one of ignorance or as one of the weakness of the will, the problem of the gap between one’s beliefs and intentions and one’s actions remains. As a consequence, no matter what our ideas of right and wrong are, most of us say or believe in one thing and act in another way. Our desires and passions, or our ‘self-protectiveness’, as UG said in the above passage, are the impediments to morality.

Once we act, publicly we tend to justify our actions or defend them, although, internally we may regret or feel guilty. We learn to lead double lives – in public we appear to be virtuous and in private we constantly plot against other people and try to get our way. No wonder morality becomes a farce.

As I used to say in the very first class of my Moral Issues class, “Morality is for other people only!” We are quick to judge other people’s actions as good or bad, right or wrong, using the judgments, more often than not, to bolster our own egos, to feel superior to others or to feel that we are on a higher moral ground than them.

People always look for policies of living, for a policy which will make them permanently happy and be in harmony with the rest of the society. Unfortunately, even if they found one, I can hardly think of a single individual who doesn’t violate his own policies (or moral standards) at the next turn.

Then why this sham? Why morality at all? Why the standards of right and wrong (and of good and bad which are supposed to be their basis)?

I have thought for a long time that morality in these terms has really no place in our lives. Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating ‘immoral behavior’ such as murder, rape, violence, lying or stealing, or acting on impulse or passion without regard to consequences. (The above passage of UG might tempt you to think that he may be advocating this; but that’s far from the truth).

UG talks about acting with the self-protectiveness of thought. Unfortunately, we do think, and more often than we are self-protective. To me, it’s interesting to see how in fact we act in concrete situations: we have desires, some of which conflict with one another. And we have fears. In the face of any given situation, we consider the conflicts and act in a way constant with the equilibrium of our mental economy. I think that’s most assurance we could have for moral behavior. Consider the following possibility:

Take, for instance, a young woman who comes to me for advice regarding an unwanted pregnancy. I could take a moralist pro-life position and tell her that she should carry the pregnancy to a full-term, give birth to the child, and if she has problems raising the child, give it for adoption to another couple. Or, I could take the pro-choice position and tell her to go ahead and get an abortion. (I actually did advice someone to do this once, but I had a vested interest in giving that advice, leaving alone the main consideration of whether it is good for the mother or the unborn child.) But what my advice ignores is so many other factors the lady has to consider in making her decision, such as not just her economic plight after the baby is born, the social stigma or disapproval of relatives, but more importantly, her having to deal with her loneliness, feelings of guilt, feeling of being betrayed and so forth. Were I to not take these under consideration in advising her, I might be missing the point and only imposing on her an advice from outside, thereby putting only more pressure on her instead of helping her solve her problem. Is my position that of a moral judge or a friend and advisor? (In fact, even using of terms such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ would only exacerbate the matter.) Where do I stand in this matter?

If I were to adviser her on this situation, my advise is first, not to tell her what to do, and second, to tell her that the issue is not one of right or wrong, that she has to make up her own mind, listening to her feelings about the situation and considering how she would feel about the possible consequences. I tell her that after considering all these she should come up with a decision which she could live with, and if she can’t come up with a decision right away, she should keep working at it until she can come up with a solution, i.e. ‘sit’ on the problem. I also tell her that when she finds the right solution to her satisfaction, her mental turmoil would diminish and she could live peacefully. She would then know that as far she is concerned that’s the ‘right’ answer. If she finds later that she was mistaken in her previous decision, then again she gives herself a chance to rethink the matter until she comes up with a more satisfactory solution. And unfortunately, there are no rules for this. Of course, she knows that whichever way she decides, she has to face the moral judgments of other people, and that she has to live not with herself, but with society, and more especially with the law.

I think this approach to the dilemmas we face bypasses the whole issue of rights and wrongs and goods and bads. (One might say, by taking consequences into consideration, she is adopting utilitarian approach. But I think it’s much more than that.) It’s not that I provide any specific rules or guidelines for acting. But I think this approach more or less approximates actually the way we in fact act and I also think that by broadening this approach (which aims at a state of equilibrium in our mental economy) has a significantly better chance of bridging the gap between our professions and our actions. I know this is no easy solution to our problems, but I don’t know of any easy ones.

By ‘to live with oneself’ I mean that you work at a problem in a situation you confront until it is resolved in your mind and that it’s no longer a problem to you; I mean to resolve a conflict, until you can live in peace with yourself. And, of course, only you can be the judge of that.

One might ask the question, what if I lie or cheat or dig the ground under someone’s feet, and still live in peace with myself, because I feel that I am justified, or that I did it because someone else did something else, and so on. The answer to the question, of course, varies with the situation:

For one thing, I have to live in fear of consequences: (of course, I could just be paranoid and live in fear of unreal, non-existent possibilities). I remember that once, a long time ago, after trying to smoke pot a couple of times, I refused to do it again, not just because I didn’t like the taste of it, but I didn’t think the possible consequences of getting arrested or going to jail were not worth it.

For another, if my lying or cheating does cause a problem to another person, and there indeed are consequences as a result of that, then I still have a problem on my hand. I have to work to resolve that.

If, on the other hand, what I do causes no problem to someone else or to myself, then why should I bother even to think about it?

One advantage of thinking in these terms is that such thinking provides a tool of self-knowledge and a way to free oneself from all kinds of ‘unnecessary’ goals, fears and worries, which will hopefully ultimately lead to a life without self-protectiveness. Another advantage is, I am not quick in judging other people’s behavior.

This thinking is not really Fletcher’s situationism. There is no talk here of God or love. And of course, it would be subject, nevertheless, to charges of moral relativism, which was leveled again situationism. But my thinking in a given situation is relative not just to the situation but also to myself, because my reaction or response to a situation is a complex result of what I see as the situation and of all the factors that go to make up myself including my background, conditioning, personality traits and psychological complexes and so forth. It is that complex which determines my response to the situation.

But the response is not a fixed response which can be judged as right or wrong instantaneously. Of course, other people would judge it as such. But as far as I am concerned, at any given moment, it is either satisfactory or it is not. If it is satisfactory now, it may cease to be so when other factors come into the picture, and I may find another response more satisfactory and modify my previous one accordingly. If I can’t change my response, of course, I am willing to suffer the consequences.

A nun, we have heard, for instance, made a decision to carry her ‘unwanted’ pregnancy to full term and give birth to the child. She was willing to face the consequences of her action, including becoming a lay woman, finding a job to support herself and her child, face social disapprobation and so forth. In other circumstances, the consequences I am willing to face may include physical punishment, prison or even death. But that’s my choice and that’s the way I have decided to live. If I become chicken and change my mind, I have to face my fickleness too and that in turn becomes part of my situation I have to resolve.

And it goes on and on.

Notice here, that there are no objective standards such as right and wrong or good bad that I use to judge my actions. (If others judge my actions with those standards, I, of course, have to face those judgments.) I can only talk about the responses I can live with and are satisfactory to me, and those I can’t live with or have problems with.

Another objection that could be raised against this approach is that the approach is purely psychological and has nothing to do with moral issues of actions being right or wrong and that it would take away the most powerful element in our thinking about actions and moral education.

I was saying above that we use morality as a tool not merely judge other people’s actions, but to build our own self worth through those judgments, to feel righteous and morally or otherwise superior to other people. The one big problem I see in our society is that we are so quick to judge others (say politicians about their sexual morals, for instance), knowing full well that we are not really much different from them and that under similar circumstances, we would act the same way or worse. Then I ask why play this game of morality?

How could it help educating our children if what we are showing them in our lives is different from the way we actually live?

What about situations like war? Don’t I take away the powerful tool of moral judgment, i.e., my ability to say that such and such a war, for instance, is morally wrong? My answer is the following: by criticizing either side in situations of war, we tend to polarize the situation further instead of resolving it. Instead of solving the problem of war, we perpetuate it by taking one side or the other. I remember the times when I was demonstrating against the War in Vietnam in the downtown mall in Riverside, California (as I also did earlier in Berkeley). While I was standing there in the mall holding hands with others in protest, I could see the animosity I was causing by my mere standing there -- people’s hostile looks and angry debates and so forth. I asked myself, “What am I doing standing here? Instead of solving the conflict in Vietnam, I am adding further conflict to it.”

My reflections drove me to consider the sources of war and violence in general, and discover to my utter chagrin that I myself was not free from intolerance, greed, aggression, violence, search for domination and glory, which I saw as the sources of war. I similarly saw that the problem of hunger and poverty the world over have also roots in the ways of my (and others’) living: my self-protective self-interest, my urge to amass wealth beyond my need, and so on.

How can I save myself and others from such problems? Then I look for possibilities of change in my ways of living (before I can even possible contemplate changing others’ ways of living or making quick judgments about them.) I think this sort of approach is more helpful than moral judgments. It in fact helps people see things more clearly and perhaps help us solve problems better in the long run.

Of course, the same goes with educating children. If you could show a child that hitting another child hurts the child (once I demonstrated this to my daughter by actually snapping sharply on her forearm just once and telling her, “this is how it feels to her, don’t do it!”– and I never had do it again), then that’s the best education you could give her. Of course, nothing I do might change her dislike for the other child, but at least I provided an awareness of a problem (at least she had to deal with me!) To be sure, she might do it later stealthily, or she might like being violent for just the kicks of it, and so on and on ... but I don’t need to dwell on the point. Of course, the need to educate my child may be my own need (I wouldn’t say moral need, but her behavior toward other kids did present a problem for me that I had to deal with.)

The problem with the traditional moralistic approach is that it doesn’t address the gap between our professions and our actions: it ignores our desires, feelings and passions and our make-up in general. As long as we have our desires, there is bound to be a gap between what we ought to do and what we end up doing. My question behind my approach is, how do we bridge that gap?

You might say that I am removing morality from the objective realm to the subjective realm, thereby making it in accessible to any public discussion. This is much the same as saying that you can’t morally judge someone’s actions as right or wrong, we can’t a point a finger at the action of a person, however horrible it is, and say it is wrong, we can’t publicly discuss such actions, and therefore, we can’t praise or blame them. That implies we can’t change people’s anti-social behavior. While this all may be true, much of what we do in the public realm can be transferred, practically in tact, into the realm of problem-solving and in fact make better progress that way.

You might also ask the question, suppose someone does make a moral judgment, would I say that such making a judgment is morally wrong? I say it’s neither, as far as I am concerned. I might find a problem with it, and in fact even feel guilty because of someone pointing out a problem with my behavior (as it might have gone contrary to my own standards about myself) and I would deal with the judgement in those terms.

What about feeling guilty then? Is that not a moral issue? (This is the crux of the objections to my approach.) Guilt and guilty conscience are expressions of conflict within a person of what he feels he ought to have done and what he in fact has done. The question of ‘ought’ is not necessarily a moral ‘ought’. It could just be a possible action which the individual finds more according to his beliefs about how he should live or behave toward other people. That may or may not include moral standards.

One more remark about conscience: one might say my approach is akin to appeal to one’s conscience in order to decide whether or not to act in a given fashion. This remark is only partially true as ‘conscience’ normally presupposes an inner moral voice with its dictates, whereas the problem-solving approach includes the ‘moral’ as well as other considerations such as one’s interests and passions and so forth.

The fact of the matter is that we do have moral standards about ourselves as we do about other people and other groups or nations. We have acquired those standards from our society and use them to beat ourselves or approve ourselves. Of course, we believe in them. What my approach does is to bring them under the head of ‘feeling’. We feel that such and such should be done or ought not to be done. Right and wrong are just expressions of those feelings. There is nothing very objective about them, although we might believe that they are.

You might ask then whether those feelings are just what I think, or are they according to me what ought in fact to be the case. This is really the charge of subjectivism. My answer is that from my point of view there is no difference between them and that I claim they are merely part of my mental economy.

It might be claimed that this approach is not basically different from that of any moral theory where an attempt is made to reconcile between one’s interest and one’s duties, taking into consideration how one’s interests must take into consideration other people’s interests in order to secure a moral society. To that degree, it might also be asserted, this theory is similar to the utilitarian or deontological ethics whose primary interest is to safeguard the welfare of the society as a whole.

My answer is that the claim is essentially true except for this basic difference that it doesn’t lay an unnecessary burden of rights and wrongs on the individual and secondly, it allows the integration of a person’s interests and feelings better within the context of a situation and finally, it tends to diminish the gap, for the above reasons, between one’s interests and one’s duties.

One final remark: again, one might claim that this is not very different from Hume’s theory of morality or a modern version of it such as an ‘enlightened self-interest’ which is a form of egoism. Here one might say that I am advocating an individual’s happiness (in my terms an ‘equilibrium in one’s mental economy’) as the ultimate good and all actions are judged as good or bad or right or wrong according to this norm. My answer is, once again, that it may very well sound like that, except that my approach tends to include moral psychology in the picture which moral theories generally do not.

How I Met UG

2007-11-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

First Introduction: The first time I heard about UG was with Terry Newland (then Agnew). I knew Terry in Berkeley around 1969 when I was living in Berkeley. I once saw an announcement in the campus newspaper that there was going to be a J. Krishnamurti discussion group meeting in the Student Union Building on campus. I went there mainly out of curiosity (and perhaps also out a ‘need’ to belong to a group). Terry was conducting the meeting. It seemed like an organizational meeting. After the meeting we became friends.

It must have been some months later in the same year. Terry took a fancy to me and invited me to Sonoma State for a philosophy talk in a professor’s class. He also asked me to talk to a student group. Then I visited an elementary school where Terry was teaching at the time. He asked me to speak to the kids there and then showed me his yoga class. About that time he had a fall out with the Krishnamurti people, particularly in Switzerland. Terry was duly kicked out of the Krishnamurti circle. Earlier, he was specially invited to go to Switzerland to meet and spend time with Krishnamurti. At the same time, he was also listening to UG.

Later, Terry invited me and three of my friends to spend the night in his place in Sebastapol on our way to Carson City where we were also going to visit another friend who was teaching in the Indian Reservation School at that time. Early in the morning, I got to watch Terry do yoga. He looked like the image of health – sounds of breath coming out of his nostrils like steam from pipes and perfectly precise and graceful asanas, all done seemingly effortlessly with a robust and statuesque body.

That morning Terry gave us a breakfast of musilex. He also showed me a picture of UG and referred to him as an enlightened man. Terry had heard him speak in Switzerland. He told me later how UG took him out for a coffee and talked to him about himself.

UG had invited him to spend three months in India (in Bangalore) with him and write his biography. Terry described how UG’s physical features had changed because of the transformation he had undergone: ashes falling out of his forehead, arms being turned backward, glands swelling, eyes not blinking, and so on.[1]

Terry was obviously quite touched by the attention UG showered on him. Apparently, UG would get up early in the morning before Terry and arrange for his hot water for his bath![2] The biography he was supposed to write, for which purpose he took a typewriter with him, never came about. I heard several such accounts about UG from Terry and simply stored them away in memory without doing much about them.

Second Introduction: The next occasion I heard about UG was when I was in Hawaii with Terry. Around 1971, my then-partner Linda and I went on a trip to Hawaii on a special invitation from Terry to spend a month with him and learn Yoga. Soon after we got to his cabin in Molakai, there was an accident while he was lighting a stove to make dinner for us and the whole cabin burned down to ashes. We escaped with a few belongings, but lost our air tickets to the fire. We spent the night in Terry’s friends’ house and the next day moved to another friend’s rather large house miles away. There Linda and I stayed for a week and learned some yoga from Terry anyway. We came to the main island of Oahu after that, got replacement airline tickets and headed back to the mainland.

A day or two after the cabin was burned down, I went with Linda and Terri to one of his lady friends’ place. It was a lone house amid fields and pineapple plantations. There he played a tape of UG speaking. Again, I felt no reaction. I remember UG’s voice in the tape being somewhat shriek.

Third Introduction: Linda, to whom I now was married, our daughter Bujji and I went to India in the summer of 1975. Just that past year, I began teaching in the Monterey Peninsula College. We spent a few days in Madras and then went to Tiruvannamalai, visiting my old friend, the famous writer Chalam. Just as I entered Chalam’s front yard (across the street from Ramanashram), and was approaching the main house, I heard UG’s audio cassette being played. I distinctly remember him in the tape saying something about the space between two thoughts. At that time, I was suffering from a bout of the flu. I went upstairs in a few minutes, as the talk didn’t make much impression on me. Some kind of Vedanta, I thought. I also saw a picture of UG on a wall in Chalam’s house for the first time. Sowris, Chalam’s daughter and a mystic, said that UG was her distant cousin. I later learned from Chandrasekhar that a few years before I went there, he told them about UG and showed them a picture of him.[3] Then Sowris recognized him as the one to whom she could have been married when she was young, except that UG wasn’t interested. Chalam and his family met UG through Chandrasekhar.

Sowris, Chalam and Sowris’s ‘gang’ used to visit UG in Bangalore. Apparently, after the initial visits, UG, in his usual fashion, started tightening screws on Sowris and bluntly told her that if she wanted to see him, she should come without all her followers. He also forbade her singing in his presence (singing was one of her attachments!). Later, when Chalam, being already on a wheelchair, was having trouble visiting him in Bangalore, UG said, “Why should that old man come here all the way? I will go and visit him myself,” and went there to visit.

My First Meeting with UG: Then, some years later, early in 1981, I got a letter from Nartaki, the lady who lived in Chalam’s family for much of her life.[4] She said that UG was coming to the U.S. and suggested that I should go and visit him. (I don’t remember if she gave me an address or a phone number.) I, of course, promptly ignored the letter.

At about the same time, Terry also called from Mill Valley saying that UG was in town and was asking about me (“Where is this Dr. Narayana Moorty?”). Apparently, Nartaki had given him my phone number and address which he promptly lost. She later told me that she said to him, “You go and see everyone everywhere; why don’t you go see this man also?” Terry asked me if I wanted to come and visit UG in Mill Valley. I replied that I was too old to go see ‘teachers’ (I was already burned out with J. Krishnamurti), and if he was passing through here in Seaside, he would be welcome here. So, I didn’t go then.

It must have been about a month or so later: one morning (this must be in 1981, around October), I got a phone call from Ramesh Ganerwala, an engineer who worked for the California Energy Commission, from Carmel. He was driving UG and Valentine from San Louis Obispo after visiting James Brodsky (later Jane) or some other person. He said that UG and Valentine were with him and that UG wanted to know if they could come and visit. I said they would be most welcome and that they could have lunch at my place as well.

I had a large quantity of upma made for my in-laws who were visiting me that morning. After breakfast they had all gone out with my wife, Wendy. I was home alone. The time was about noon. Ramesh drove UG and Valentine in his small old beat-up BMW. I watched through the living room window UG getting out of the car and walking on the pavement toward my house. With his arms hanging loose, he had the gait of a zombie. His face was expressionless and he looked like a man on the death row.

Valentine and Ramesh as well as UG, all came in. I greeted them, led them into the kitchen and seated them at the kitchen table. UG sat next to the wall in the kitchen and I sat across the table from him. I served lunch to everyone. UG was praising my upma to Ramesh saying that it was the ‘authentic stuff’. UG started talking mostly about himself. During the conversation he and I exchanged notes about our backgrounds -- he coming from Gudivada and I from Vijayawada, both towns in Andhra Pradesh, just twenty miles apart -- and about the people we had known in common. He went to Madras University for his Honors studies and had known T.M.P. Mahadevan who was also my thesis supervisor. We both also knew my Sanskrit lecturer in S.R.R. & C.V.R. College, Vijayawada, and a few others. Apparently he dropped out of his Philosophy Honors in Madras University, not having taken the final examinations.

During the conversation, UG joked about Satya Sai Baba, saying how he used to materialize Swiss watches before, but how he materialized only Hindustan watches now, after Indira Gandhi imposed an import restriction on Swiss watches.

They stayed for about two hours. As they were leaving, I tried to put my arm around UG’s shoulder as a gesture of affection, but he quickly moved away. I realized that he was not open to such physical contact. In the living room, as he was leaving, I shook his hand to say goodbye, addressing him as ‘Mr. Krishnamurti.’ He said that I could just as well call him ‘number 69,’ like a jail convict, and that people called him ‘UG.’

It was a pleasant experience meeting UG. I had the strange feeling as we were standing at the kitchen door and holding each other’s hands, that he was so similar to me in many ways, and that I was meeting myself. The feeling was one of closeness. I was already bonded with UG!

As he left, he invited me to visit him in Mill Valley. I thought that it was merely a formal invitation. I said, “OK, thank you,” and didn’t take the invitation seriously.

First Visit to UG: I think UG came a second time, when Elena, a Russian young lady, was also present.[5] It must be about a month or so after his first visit. I can’t remember much about this visit except that this time he invited both Elena and me to visit him. Again, I didn’t respond except saying “OK, thank you.” But the night before Thanksgiving that year, I got another phone call from Ramesh in Mill Valley saying that UG would like to see me, could I come? Earlier, I had built all kinds of excuses in my mind not to go to see UG in Mill Valley, that the invitation was only a formality and he wasn’t probably very serious about it; that I didn’t like driving long distances; that my old AMC car wouldn’t make it that far; and that I didn’t like traveling -- to mention a few. But all those excuses had evaporated now, as the invitation this time was so specific and I couldn’t as well turn it down. Also, Kodvatiganti Subbarao, an engineer from Berkeley who worked for the FEMA and was visiting us for Thanksgiving, was leaving on Thanksgiving Day and was willing to give me and Elena a ride to Mill Valley. So, we all three drove to Mill Valley.

We arrived at UG’s house in Mill Valley around 5 in the afternoon. Subbarao and UG quickly got into an argument on the subject of the Bhagavad Gita. The argument got nowhere and Subbarao left after about an hour.

Julie Wellings, whom I had met long before (in 1975) in Tiruvannamalai, where she was living in Chalam’s household and learning Telugu from Sowris, was also visiting UG. She brought her own beer that night and drank it, to my surprise[6]. The next day a few pictures were taken.

UG gave me a room upstairs with a big (soft) bed and some sheets. Not much else. I couldn’t sleep very well. I was there a couple of nights. The next day in the kitchen, UG asked me if I could “look into” the cooking which Kim was doing. I put a few spices like cumin (or anything suitable I could find on the shelf) in the food.

On the second day I was there, Ramesh was also there. Then UG went on talking hours on end about his past life, his wife, family and so on. Then a young man visited UG. He sat at the table and they talked about Zen. UG challenged the man, holding a cup in his hand, “Tell me what this is.” “Do you really see this? What do you really see here?” And he kept repeating the questions. Soon he enlisted my help. I remember saying, “There is something funny about Zen. How can anyone certify that someone had satori or enlightenment and to what degree?” UG appeared to agree with me.

It was during this visit that Terry brought mimeographed copies of conversations with UG (later to become part of The Mystique of Enlightenment) and distributed them to people around. He collected five dollars per copy for the cost of mimeographing. I got a copy for myself.

That was where Elena met Krim, a young American of Russian origin, who had known UG in Switzerland and in the US for a number of years. I remember going out for a short walk with them. Apparently, UG cautioned to Krim as we were leaving, “Make it, short—kurtz promenade!” That was the beginning of the disastrous relationship between Krim and Elena which ended a few years later. UG repeatedly mentioned how he warned him. I wonder if he knew what was to come.[7]

That afternoon, an elderly man and a young couple, all Americans, came to visit UG. I was told that they were friends of Alan Watts. UG received them cordially and soon got involved in a discussion with them. At one stage, I interjected saying something trying to help the discussion and UG immediately interrupted me saying, “I want to stop him right there.” I got the message and shut up.

I was ready to leave after two days. Kim was driving Ramesh’s BMW car for UG in those days. On the third day, sometime in the afternoon, Kim was ready to drive me to the Bus Depot in San Francisco. (I was going to take a bus, but UG would have none of that.) I remember giving a hug to Ramesh and whoever before I left. UG decided to drive with us to the bus depot. I felt flattered. At the bus depot, he got out of the car and bid me farewell. I felt so special that he came to see me off there. I bought myself a ticket, got on the bus and returned to Monterey.

[1] Till his final days, on special occasions, especially on full moon days, UG demonstrated the swollen glands to people around him.

[2] I know that treatment: there were times when I slept in UG’s living rooms. He would come early in the morning at 6 or 7 am, stand by my side and say in a feeble and gentle voice: “It’s 7 o’clock now, will you try to get up?”

[3] Chandrasekhar was a frequent visitor to Chalam’s house and regarded Chalam as his ‘father’ besides being devoted to Sowris.

[4] Having been a widow and had no place to go, she took shelter in Chalam’s place and became part of the household.

[5] She had lived with us for about a month. I think she just got out of living with a Russian old lady in Monterey. She was separated from her husband Ian and apparently they had both met UG once before in India).

[6] I thought people didn’t drink or smoke in front of spiritual people like UG.

[7] He did make a few futile attempts later [sometimes with me helping him] to break up the relationship. They ended up having a child and then separating.

Additions to "Teaching" Post

2007-11-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

I have added the following three pieces to my "Being with UG: His Teaching Process" post, as I felt they are important to understanding UG and his teaching process:

1) Being Around UG: To be around UG can be quite a challenge. UG always maintained that wanting permanent happiness without a moment of unhappiness is the source of our misery. In his own life, things constantly changed. If you spend a whole day around UG and go along with all the changes he goes through or puts you through, you will leave totally exhausted and wiped out. You wonder how anyone could live through so much change in a day without ever looking back. I have not seen another person like UG who could do that! Being around UG and moving with him were in themselves a great learning experience.

2) Power: Few knew the role of power in human relationships as well as UG. He pointed out how relationships are mostly based on each person getting his or her way. Many times he himself was an absolute monarch, but only when he had a say or choice in the matter. (He had that manner of a prince dealing with his subjects. That was so evident when he gave gifts to people -- children or adults.) Even then, he would sometimes yield to people's desires and pressures and some other times would be as friendly as anyone could possibly be. It all depended. Often he pointed out how if you don't care about what the other person (or authority) could give you or do to you, you could not only be fearless, but free to do precisely whatever you wanted to do. He always dictated his terms and encouraged friends to do the same, of course, depending on what they wanted.

One good reason why he stayed away from institutions, governments and people who held high offices was that he kept his freedom and didn't have to compromise with their rules and regulations. But there was another: institutions bred power and power-mongering. He did not let any institutions to be built around him just for that reason. (No one then could claim exclusive rights over his teachings!) He did not subject himself to any scientific research done on him because he bemoaned the fact that the results of that research would only be exploited by businesses and governments for money and power purposes. The Internet served as a suitable medium for publishing books on him or reports of his dialogs, because they were released free of copyright and other commercial strings. He never voted. His argument , if I remember right, was, "I don't have to choose between two evils." In fact, he never paid taxes, as he didn't stay in any country long enough to establish residency. His passport was Indian, and of course, he had to have to it to be able to travel.

UG's own 'energy' was such that you could never take him or your relationship with him for granted. When he (or IT) was dealing with you, he (IT) knew nothing personal. (And as I said, there is no 'person' there in UG.) He could attack you wildly or even throw you out!

3) It must be mentioned here that UG had a way of making everyone around him feel special. That's a unique experience people had when they tried to relate to UG.