U. G. Krishnamurti

VINEETO: Hi,

I spent several hours with U. G. Krishnamurti once in Australia and I have studied most of his books. I know what he teaches and what he doesn’t teach. Out of this understanding I am attempting to contact him through you.

18 month ago I met a man called Richard who has been enlightened for 11 years until he has seen through the delusion it was. He has freed himself from enlightenment and devised a method to become actually free. I have experimented with this method with overwhelming success.

Should you or U. G. be interested – because I see some common ground between him and Richard – this is the web address of Richard, his writings and correspondence: The Actual Freedom Trust, http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/default.htm

8.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: go figure! I too want to be freed from this terrible burden of enlightenment!!! HELP ME RICHARD!!!

VINEETO: Is this a NO?

12.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: I don’t know if that is a yes or a no. What are you selling?

VINEETO: Goodness me ... nothing needs to be purchased unless one wants to. Over 250,000 words are being given away for free at the following URL’s:

• http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/default.htm

What is being offered is what the 521,697 words at the U. G. Krishnamurti Web-Site cannot ever offer: A clear and unambiguous explanation of where a human being is coming from; where a human being is currently at ... and where a human being can get to and how.

I have experimented for 18 months now with Richard’s methods, checking myself out and cleaning myself up first from my social conditioning, then the beliefs and emotions, and now the instincts and the psychic world, overlaying the actual physical world-as-is. The outcome is phenomenal. I live with Peter 24 h a day in complete peace and harmony, haven’t had a ‘grumpy’ day or a disagreement for over a year, and now I am hurtling in breath-taking speed towards total extinction of the self. This journey has taken me through experiences of universal sorrow, of compassion and bliss similar to enlightenment in its convincing power, of dread as abysmal as hell and back again into the magic of the actual world...

If that is not enough to interest you, here is a response that Richard wrote answering a question from a correspondent late last year (Richard has read all that is on offer at the U. G. Krishnamurti Web-Site):

Richard: No one else, as far as I have been able to ascertain in eighteen years of scouring the books and travelling overseas, is able to see things clearly. The only person who comes close is Mr. Uppaluri Krishnamurti. But he does not know what happened to him and has no solutions to offer. He is simply a curiosity to those who go to see him. He states that he is a ‘never to be repeated sport of nature’. Whereas I know where I came from and where I am at and how I got here.

From what I have read his condition is the same as what I experience in that he has no psyche at all. But there the similarity ends. I first heard of him when I bought a computer and gained access to the Internet in February 1997. I located the Mr. Uppaluri Krishnamurti web page via another article and read all the information with rapidly diminishing interest. Something fundamental happened to him that I can relate to – the total annihilation of any psychological entity whatsoever – but he clearly states that he himself does not know what it was that happened, unfortunately. He makes it clear that he has nothing to offer to advance humankind’s knowledge about itself, which makes his a hapless condition. He makes no bones about considering himself as being a ‘sport of nature’, which is not about to be repeated, so therefore he concludes that no good will be obtained by talking with him.

To paraphrase what someone else has written, ‘Mr. Uppaluri Krishnamurti does not regard his state as a new way of living for any other person. He has no basic survival or reproductive objectives for himself or others. He says that as all desires have disappeared in him, any psychological and spiritual wants are without any foundation. He states that there is no message he can give or help he can offer. He says has no disciples, no teachings, and no practices. His ‘message’ is that he has no message for humankind. He cannot save humans from their basic dilemma or from their self-deception. Yet, being typically paradoxical, he says: ‘If I cannot help you, no one can’.

‘Of course, I am in accord with his oft-repeated statements about Spiritual Enlightenment being a waste of time, but it is one thing to speak out against something – whilst offering nothing in its place – and another thing entirely to propose a viable, liveable and delightful alternative to what one is knocking down. I did not read him saying anything about how deliciously enjoyable it is to be finally free of the Human Condition; what a pleasure it is to be alive in this moment in time; how life is an adventure in itself by the simple fact of being here; what a felicitous experience it is to be the universe’s experience of itself as a human being; to be able to fully appreciate the infinitude of this physical universe by being alive ... and so on. In short, what I read sounded existentialist and nihilistic and negative.

I asked around for any videos of him and I was able to watch three of them. I stopped watching half-way through the third one as I had had enough. He acknowledges that there are still emotions ... but that it is the body that is having them ... fear was one that I heard him talk about on the video. The writings about him talk of him getting angry at people who come to see him ... he tells them to go away in no uncertain terms. I can not relate to this at all as I experience no feelings – emotions and passions – whatsoever.. Also, on one video, he says that he looks at a clock and wonders what it is; someone asks him what the time is and he answers ‘A quarter past three’ – or whatever – and then falls back into wondering what it is that he is looking at. I know perfectly well what a clock is. Apparently he has to knock his head against a wall to know that he is here; he slams kitchen doors shut for the same reason; he goes to a doctor who examines him and says that he is indeed alive ... whereas I know that I am alive and well and thoroughly enjoying myself ... and will continue to do so for the term of my natural life. It is a strange situation he is in and he seems to be very much alone in it.

In a way it is all a bit of a dismal story. Richard, List B, No 4, 20.11.1998

Wonder what you make of it...

13.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: First, please let me clarify that I am not responding from U. G.’s home page. What happened is that a friend of mine forwarded your correspondence to U. G.’s web site and I was responding to her when I sent my ‘Help me Richard!!’ message (it was a joke). For some mysterious reason the reply went to you instead of to her. Perhaps because it was in an attachment of some kind. Nevertheless, it should be clear that neither U. G. nor the folks who keep his web site running are interested in responding to anyone. For the most part letters go unanswered.

Good luck.

VINEETO: Thank you for your explicit letter.

Have you ever been listening to rain falling on roof and ground, listening with only your sense of hearing, without any thought or emotion or sense of ‘being’, just rain falling and making this sweet, steady, wet sound? Neither thought nor emotion come between the rain and the hearing of it, neither fear nor bliss, neither love nor even ‘being’. This is the universe experiencing itself as a sensate human being, my ears delighting in this intimate experience of the perfection and purity of this magic, fairy-tale like physical world. No thought or framework is involved in that.

This is but a faint description of the Actual Freedom Richard lives in 24 hours a day.

I am not trying to convince you of anything – I don’t even know you. What you make of what you read is completely up to you. But I have met U. G. and I care about him. I would like him to know about an experience of a world he does not know yet. It is something radically different and 180 degrees in the opposite direction to what every Eastern teacher has been proposing up to now – the actual world of senses and apperception that becomes apparent after emotions, beliefs and instincts have become extinct, instead of the imaginary world of compassion, bliss and enlightenment.

All I ask you is to pass this information on to him or give me a mailing address for him, so he can make up his own no-mind. I would appreciate your understanding and assistance, if possible.

16.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: Have you ever watched a child dying of starvation? Its weak cries and vacant eyes, as it lies awaiting death? Have you ever walked past derelicts lying on the sidewalks, the stench of their rotting bodies wafting through the air as pedestrians step over them? Have you ever been raped by a stranger with a knife at your throat? Or had your toenails torn out one by one by some mad religious fanatic?

And all this without a thought of beauty, horror, fear, terror, judgment???

VINEETO: I am glad you are concerned about the suffering of other people. 160,000,000 killed in wars this century alone is sufficient evidence that something is terribly wrong with human beings. If you have a closer look, most of those wars were and are religious wars, people killing each other for their particular religious conviction and noble ideals. I know about the suffering both from experience of universal sorrow and from daily TV reports. Just the other day I saw ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’, a musical on World War I. 600,000 soldiers died on the English side alone, and at the end of the war they had gained no ground. The suffering of these soldiers was gut-wrenching, as they were living in trenches for no apparent reason but the questionable honour to die for the queen and country, in their sleepless nights listening to the cries of the wounded mates out in the fields. The survivors would even spare their wives and mothers about the horror-tales of war they had experienced.

But to have feelings of ‘beauty, horror, fear, terror’ about these facts doesn’t help anybody. ‘Horror, fear and terror’ is only an instinctual response that this might happen to me tomorrow. It won’t help me find and eliminate the cause of the violence and suffering. That you add ‘beauty’ to the list suggests the bittersweet feeling of compassion, which is just another word for ‘suffering together’ (common pathos). Compassion has been proclaimed the merciful solution to suffering but has only perpetuated it.

Mother Theresa is considered a great example of compassion, but all she did was feed and raise orphans to become a saint and be rewarded in heaven – while the pope is creating an unlimited supply of poor children with his prohibition of birth-control. I can see her compassion only as an extremely selfish behaviour. Or would you prefer the compassion of the Dalai Lama – his very title means ‘the Lord who looks down with compassion on the world of sentient beings’. In his ‘holy’ country the peasants starve while they work their butts off to pay for the dead Lamas to be replicated in gold – that is compassion! In Thailand and Vietnam, Buddhist monks have set themselves on fire for a compassionate cause, thus merely adding to the terror that was already happening.

No, ‘judgement’ is the only faculty I consider worth applying. Without the soothing veil of emotions I am experiencing the full impact of the horrendous amount of suffering that people create for each other every day. This very impact gives me the fuel and intent to stop being a contributor to both malice and sorrow, to become completely happy and harmless. And the only person I can change is myself. This means, not just applying the usual ethics from this or that religious conviction and be as good as one can repress oneself, or transcend oneself, but to extinguish the very entity inside that is the seat of our innate animalistic instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. To extinguish not only the ‘one I think I am’, the ego, but also the ‘one I feel I am’, the soul, the Self.

It takes courage to step outside of all of humanity’s values and the ‘tried and failed’ solutions. Your particular solution suggests I should be feeling guilty for being happy, because other people are suffering. That would add yet another person to the already vast number of suffering people. Having spent 15 years on the spiritual path I have experienced the enormous impact those ‘solutions’ have on the continuation of suffering and confusion people are living in.

The reason for the confusion is that none of the spiritual teachers and enlightened beings have ever dared to question the soul or ‘being’. They all are content with exchanging the little ego with the grand ‘feeling one with the Universe’, exuding compassion for thousands of years, while every one of them teaches a different version of their particular way to bliss, redemption, paradise or enlightenment. The outcome has been poverty, religious wars and the generally accepted notion that the solution to the world’s suffering could only be found in afterlife or by turning away into the imaginary world of bliss beyond ego. To see the poverty, discrimination, disease, sexual repression and degradation of women in India alone tells enough about the impact and effect Eastern religions have on people’s lives.

That we are ‘feeling beings’ is held as the distinction between us and the rest of the animal world. This proud distinction unfortunately is founded on the instinctually produced feelings of malice and sorrow, for which we have invented antidotes of love and compassion. Our sorrow is based on a feeling of dread at its very core, and many people know only too well the spiral down from sorrow to despair to horror and finally dread. Suffering is accepted as an integral unchangeable part of the Human Condition and is even lauded as a noble trait. To suffer rightly or deeply is held in high esteem and often evokes a bitter-sweet feeling. Compassion or empathy is also held in high esteem. As humans we are subject to physical dangers, losses, ill-health, accidents, floods, fires, etc. which can cause pain. But to have and indulge in emotional suffering additional to the hardship is to compound the situation to such an extent that the feelings are usually far worse than dealing with the facts would be. Further, the feeling of sorrow usually leads to feelings of resentment, retribution, revenge or anger and this backlash is then maliciously directed at others who will then have to suffer, and they in turn feel ... and on, and on, and on, it has gone for centuries.

What I am talking about is the complete opposite, not feeling compassionate but eliminating the cause of suffering completely, not by trying to apply ‘no-thought’, but by ridding myself of the Human Condition, the emotions, beliefs and instincts. At last I can be without sorrow and malice, without authority and fear, without beliefs and imagination. This is not only tackling ‘the nature of thought’, as you say, but the nature of the animalistic instincts that every human being is born with. Now it is proven that it is possible to completely demolish the whole animal heritage, to rid oneself not only of ego but also of soul and instincts and become a happy and harmless human being for the first time in history.

Up until now everybody has tried in one way or another to wear the rose-coloured glasses of love, good and compassion over the grey-coloured glasses of hate, fear and sorrow. It has not worked. Fear, hate and sorrow are as much evident in the world and in everybody’s psyche as ever after three thousand years of spiritual practice. Why not, for a change, dare and remove both pairs of glasses and experience the physical world as the magical, fairy-tale and safe place it actually is. It is possible to rid oneself of the human qualities of ‘beauty, horror, fear, terror’, etc. and, without ego or soul, be completely innocent and harmless – one of 6 billion people on the planet, but not contributing to suffering and violence.

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: I am glad you have found something with Richard. You can be certain that U. G. is not interested.

VINEETO: Do you mean that you are certain, that U.G. is not interested? May I remind you what you wrote only one e-mail earlier:

[U.G. Administrator]: From what I can tell of Richard’s take on U.G. it is not any different from all of us who cannot help but put him in their own framework. Each person has his or her own way of rationalizing, explaining, interpreting, etc. There is no way out of doing this because it is the nature of thought. And we are dealing with thought here.

I am surprised that with this understanding you can make such a confident statement on U.G.’s interests. Are you sure that you haven’t applied your own ‘framework’ of the instinctual urge to protect him from something you seem to find appalling?

18.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: You are not telling me anything new. In fact, you are misinterpreting what I said, and my intentions, in my response to you. This correspondence does not serve anyone. I have no interest in what you or Richard has to say. It has all been said before. There is no need to continue this game. If, you were to sit before me in person that might be another matter. Perhaps we could enjoy a round of verbal barking at each other. But when it comes to this e-mail ping-pong game, it is truly boring. Thank you very much. Nice talking to you, and good bye.

VINEETO: Strange, you should call our conversation ‘barking’. I didn’t know I was talking to a dog.

It seems such a pity, that people stop when the conversation becomes really interesting, talking about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the conversation with you immensely and I have found it very interesting.

As for the ‘misinterpreting’, I do not live in your world of thought and therefore do not necessarily understand what you are hinting at or intending to. I responded sincerely to what I had understood you from what you had written. You are very welcome to explain to me what it is that I have misinterpreted.

U. G. said in his interview with Professor HSK (Mystique of Enlightenment, Part 3):

[quote]: So the individual is the only hope. And the individual also seems to be totally helpless because he has to free himself from the burden of the past, the entire heritage, not only of India, but of the whole world. So is it possible for man to free himself from the burden? Individually, he doesn’t seem to have any freedom at all. You see, he has no freedom of action – that is the crux of the whole problem. But yet the hope is in the individual – if through some luck, some strange chance... [endquote].

Well, I know from my own experience that it is possible to break free from the burden of the past, the entire heritage of mankind, because I broke free from 90% of it. Richard has discovered this freedom and taken the luck out of it, he has delivered the method as well.

I am surprised that you are a friend of U. G. and yet you so easily discard of the option for freedom, a new, non-spiritual, down-to-earth freedom. I do not understand what it is then that you are learning from him, if not how to be free?

Truly wondering.

19.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW BORING YOU ARE!!!

VINEETO: This is the second time that you are using the word ‘boring’. If you find me boring, that only tells that you are bored.

Boredom is one of the many facets of the disease called ‘The Human Condition’. Every single human being is born with it, with emotions and instincts, which then are overlayed by the social conditioning. To get rid of boredom one can simply let it be there, neither repressing nor expressing it. It will then show its underlying quality – fear. To experience life without fear, the psychological and psychic entity within has to be completely eliminated – the ego, the self, the being, everything we ‘think and feel we are’ has to disappear.

Without fear life is never boring, but a thrilling, sparkling, magnificent and wonderful adventure, every moment fresh and delightful, without any grudges against anybody. This life is worth a thousand deaths. I have visited this actual world many times and ‘being normal’ becomes more and more rare, the more I nibble away the remainders of my self. In the actual world there is no separation between me-as-this-body and anything that I hear, smell, touch, see, taste or anybody I talk to. I experience a direct intimacy with everything and everybody I come across, a delightful interaction without tension about the outcome, a simple and exquisite enjoyment of the moment as it is. To experience this intimacy 24 hours a day I am more than willing to disappear as a separate entity, I have no objections whatsoever.

How about you? Have you already given up on the sparkle that you may have felt when first coming across a man like U. G.?

U. G. considers himself a ‘never to be repeated sport of nature’, but that is not the case. There is now a possibility to become free, there exists a map and method to freedom and, above all, it is a wide and wondrous path all the way. How can you be contented with boredom?

22.11.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: Are you really interested in me? Or just in promoting yourself and your agenda. From the beginning of this correspondence, I believe that I have made it abundantly clear that I am not interested in an email dialogue with you, and that I am not interested in Richard. I feel absolutely no interest or need for what you are saying. none of it is new to me and you sound so full of yourself that it’s actually quite sickening.

SO, LET IT BE KNOWN THAT THIS IS THE LAST TIME I WILL RESPOND TO YOU. I WILL NOT READ YOUR NEXT EMAIL. IT WILL BE DELETED BEFORE IT IS OPENED – DISAPPEARING INTO THE GREAT AND INFINITE INTERNET VOID. ADIOS AMIGA!!!

VINEETO: A newly born sperm was slowly becoming conscious, and as time passed he asked the sperm next to him:
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Not long’ came the reply.
‘What am I?’

*

I’m just checking, if you really can contain your curiosity.

Good luck.

4.12.1998

U.G. ADMINISTRATOR: Having just returned from tango dancing in Buenos Aires, and being in somewhat of a stupor, I inadvertently opened your e-mail. I was amazed to find that you actually have a sense of humour!

VINEETO: Since you inadvertently answered my last mail and inadvertently pressed the send button, I am delighted to resume our conversation. Here is a picture that I found adequately representing my adventure.