Spiritual Teachers

On Beyond UG Krishnamurti
November 4, 2019 | meestereric | 32 Comments

“Pathological” – Francis Lucille, quoting his teacher Jean Klein, regarding U. G. Krishnamurti



...In other words, there is some kind of ego, or residue of ignorance operating before and after his supposed experience. As evidence for this, look at his meeting with Ramana Maharshi and how he projected arrogance onto one of the purest of souls.

More fundamentally, he was asking “what is this state?” of enlightenment for decades, before supposedly realizing he was in that state. No wonder he claims it’s biological: his central mistake was thinking it was a state. States are for bodies, for persons, for separate entities. Thus the state of harmonious functioning he talks about would be just the materialist interpretation of being not separate from one’s environment, surroundings, culture, and so forth. Further, and even more fundamental, states come and go. What we are looking for is that which does not change, which is always true and real.

But the most fundamentally important question is not asked in the right way: who or what is experiencing this state? In other words, in what does all the passing phenomenon of experience play out in? Is it not awareness, which does not come and go? He gets rid of the self by saying there is no central coordinator unless he is answering a question or functioning biologically.

In a nutshell, UG’s mistake was that of the materialists: of mistaking “enlightenment” as a state, for a someone, a body. It’s the central mistake of separation. He folds this in with a quasi-materialist unitary view, but overlooks the fact that the materialist view is itself self-contradictory: matter is a concept (or abstract model of the world that we learned), not an experience, that requires a mind to hold onto, and is a belief, like any other religious belief, we are aware of either consciously, or hold unconsciously. In fact it is the central belief of Western Society. But beliefs are not facts of experience, they are thoughts that represent non-facts. Thus his philosophy never really gets off the ground, and always stays at one level. It is superficial in this sense....



.....But that doesn’t happen with UG. He, like most materialists, denies or won’t notice or acknowledge the simple fact that he is aware, and aware of awareness, and stay with this central undeniable (unless you are an academic philosopher!) fact of experience. He is making the same mistake as the spiritual teachers and students he criticizes, and assumes the abstractions he talks about are real.

He made an observer out of the mind, and later saw that that’s what he was doing: merely a mind observing a mind. In other words he made a separate entity, a two-ness, a duality, and only admitted of one side of it. But how can a mind observe? A mind only has contents, not consciousness. One has to resolve the duality of observer and observed, subject and object either by saying it’s all material (like he does) or it’s all consciousness, like the traditions of Advaita do. Either way it’s One.

A non-transcendent non-duality is not non-duality at all.

In other words he made a separate entity, a two-ness, a duality, and only admitted of one side of it.

What we are looking for is that which does not change, which is always true and real.