Has Anyone Read This Book?

[Shanmugam]

Has anyone read the book  'Mystique of Enlightenment' by U.G Krishnamurti?  His story seems to be very different.. He is also a different type of guy than everyone else who claims Enlightenment or a stage in the whole process.

You can read the book for free here:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0125/1442/t/2/assets/U.G.-Krishnamurti-The-Mystique-of-Enlightenment.pdf

He says  "I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination."

And he says  "Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, but what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are."

Note: He is not teaching anything. As he says above, he only describes what happened to him. You may find it interesting to read, just to kill some time.

Edited July 13, 2017 by Shanmugam

[Shanmugam]

A quote from the book, the last line really made me laugh :

"The personality does not change when you come into this state. You are, after all, a computer machine, which reacts as it has been programmed. It is in fact your present effort to change yourself that is taking you away from yourself and keeping you from functioning in the natural way. The personality will remain the same. Don't expect such a man to become free from anger or idiosyncrasies. Don't expect some kind of spiritual humility. Such a man may be the most arrogant person you have ever met, because he is touching life at a unique place where no man has touched before.
It is for this reason that each person who comes into this state expresses it in a unique way, in terms relevant to his time. It is also for this reason that if two or more people are living in this state at the same time, they will never get together. They won't dance in the streets hand in hand: "We are all self-realized men! We belong!"

[Shanmugam]

Another quote that I found to be insightful :

"What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving way from yourself. You want to be happy, either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences, and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.

Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

We are all living in a 'thought sphere'. Your thoughts are not your own; they belong to everybody. There are only thoughts, but you create a counter-thought, the thinker, with which you read every thought. Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you, which you call the 'I'. This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life, but isolated from it; it can never touch life. You are a living creature, yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life -- that is something very unnatural.

The natural state is not a 'thoughtless state' -- that is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years on poor, helpless Hindus. You will never be without thought until the body is a corpse, a very dead corpse. Being able to think is necessary to survive. But in this state thought stops choking you; it falls into its natural rhythm. There is no longer a 'you' who reads the thoughts and thinks that they are 'his'. "

[Shanmugam]

As I read this book, I am beginning to think that everybody's enlightenment is so unique and they way they express it, what they choose to do after that, the symptoms (sometimes a lot of them are physical for some people, like U.G and Ramakrishna.. If someone puts a coin under Ramakrishna's bed, he used to feel extreme pain, which is very strange), the words they used to describe it are completely different for everybody.

The only thing that seems to be common for these people is to be free of the sense of a separate self (and of course the relief and peace that comes with it)

When you read this book, you may be able to relate with some of them and you may feel some of them to be fiction. Whether you consider it as a testimony of enlightened person or a fictitious novel, it is still interesting. 

[Milos Uzelac]

Thanks for submitting this, needed this straight forward  descripition . I will check this book out 

[Shanmugam]

This is true:

"You must always recognize what you are looking at, otherwise you are not there. The moment you translate, the 'you' is there. You look at something and recognize that it is a bag, a red bag. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. Why does thought interfere? And can you do anything about it? The moment you look at a thing, what comes inside of you is the word 'bag', if not bag', then 'bench' or 'bannister', 'step', "that man sitting there, he has white hair." It goes on and on -- you are repeating to yourself all the time. If you don't do that, you are preoccupied with something else: "I'm getting late for the office." You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at this moment, or else you are looking and saying to yourself "That's a bag, that's a red bag," and so on and so on -- that is all that is there. The word 'bag' separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the 'you'; otherwise there is no space between the two.
Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the 'you' does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this 'you' is the thinking. Actually there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is 'somebody' who is thinking your thoughts, 'somebody' who is feeling your feelings --- that's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion; but it is not an illusion to you."

"This labeling is necessary when you must communicate with someone else or with yourself. But you communicate with yourself all the time. Why do you do this? The only difference between you and the person who talks aloud to himself is that you don't talk aloud. The moment you do begin to talk aloud, along comes the psychiatrist. That chap, of course, is doing the same thing that you are doing, communicating to himself all the time -- 'bag', 'red bag', 'obsessive', 'compulsive', 'Oedipus complex,' 'greedy', 'bench', 'banister', 'martini'. Then he says something is wrong with you and puts you on the couch and wants to change you, to help you.

Why can't you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to the 'you'."

[Shanmugam]

I am just posting some excerpts that I found to be good, so that people who don't want to read the entire book can just go through these, that I am posting.. Even I myself skipped certain boring passages from the book. Here is the next one:

"Q: Sir, what will happen after death?

UG:  All questions about death are meaningless -- and especially for a young person like you. You have not even lived your life. Why do you ask that silly question? Why are you interested in that? A person who is living has no time to ask such questions. Only a person who is not living asks "What will happen after my death?" You are not living. First live your life, and when the time comes.... Let us leave it like that. I am not interested in that kind of philosophy.

Nothing will happen. There is no such thing as death at all. What do you think will die? What? This body disintegrates into its constituent elements, so nothing is lost. If you burn it, the ashes enrich the soil and aid germination. If you bury it, the worms live on it. If you throw it into the river, it becomes food for the fishes. One form of life lives on another form of life, and so gives continuity to life. So life is immortal.
But that is not going to help anybody who is caught up in the fear of death. After all, 'death' is fear, the fear of something coming to an end. The 'you' as you know yourself, the 'you' as you experience yourself -- that 'you' does not want to come to an end. But it also knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do -- you experience the deaths of others -- so that is a frightening situation because you are not sure whether that (`you') will continue if this (body) goes. So then it projects (an afterlife). This becomes the most important thing -- to know whether there is an afterlife or not. Fear creates that, so when the fear is gone, the question of death is also gone."

Edited July 13, 2017 by Shanmugam

[Joseph Maynor]

@Shanmugam I will read this.  Thanks!  

[Sri McDonald Trump Maharaj]

 Jed McKenna seems to have been quite influenced by him. I remember watching this video a few months ago, something started to click... On the other side it's pretty hilarious to watch him talking about Dalai Lama being a CIA agent, that mankind should be wiped out, that the american bastards didn't and on the moon but on Iceland and saying that he kicked his mother right after his birth.  I have not read anything by him but I must say that he is a pretty interesting character.

 

Edited July 14, 2017 by Sri McDonald Trump Maharaj