The natural man – UG

U.G.Krishnamurti, U.G., as he was popularly known and nicknamed as the ‘Un-Guru’, was not an Avatar or a Godman. He was not a Guru or a teacher. He was not a prophet or a cult-figure. He was not a yogi. Not a transformed individual. He can at best be described (for a lack of better word) as a ‘Philospher of sorts’. He insisted that the whole spiritual trip was a non-sense, the whole notion of enlightenment an illusion. In fact, he would say that the very idea of mind or spirit as something different from the body is a myth. 

U.G. was born in a Telugu Brahmin family on July 9, 1918 in Masulipatam in Andhra Pradesh. His mother died seven days after he was born. His grandfather, a staunch Theosophist and a very rich lawyer in Gudivada, brought him up in the religious atmosphere. U.G., at quite an early age started on the age old quest for God. At the age of 21, he met and interacted with the sage Ramana Maharshi. The one answer from the sage made a great impact on his heretical mind after which he stopped shopping around for gurus and began to explore himself. 

He joined the University of Madras and studied philosophy and psychology, but it gave no answers to his deep questions. Later, he drifted into the Theosophical Society and also attended Jiddu Krishnamurti talks. During those years he had several mystical experiences. In 1943 at the age of 25, U.G. married a girl and had four children. For some years he toured within India and several countries lecturing all over the world. But his heart was not in it.

At the age of 42, his burning quest for ‘Moksha’ assumed alarming proportion breaking up his marriage. He wandered about London for three years ‘like a man with no head, blown about like a dry leaf’. At last, he ended up at the Indian Consulate, Geneva, totally a derelict, penniless and ready to be deported to India. At that juncture, Mme.Valentine de Kerven, a 63 year old Swiss lady working in the Indian Consulate came to his rescue and created a home for him in Saanen, a mountain village high up in Alps, Switzerland.

In the April of 1967 in his 49th year in Paris, marked the beginning of the most astounding and almost incomprehensible mystical experiences one could ever read in the history of mysticism. On his 49th birth day U.G. was sitting on a bench overlooking the beautiful Saanen valley. His body underwent a ‘nuclear explosion’ shattering every cell, every nerve, every gland in his body. That was the beginning of what he calls the ‘Calamity’—an utterly non-religious biological mutation, which went on for seven days resulting in irreversible biological changes in his body. He ‘died’ only to be reborn in what he calls the ‘Natural State’. His life from then on consisted of a series of disjointed events. What was there was a clean, smoothly functioning, highly intelligent and responsive ‘biological machine’ which is the ‘Natural State’ 

“It is not the state of a self-realized or God-realized man” says U.G.,” “It is not a thing to be achieved or attained. It is the living state. It is your State as much as mine.” For this reason, U.G. had not founded schools, ashrams, or meditation centers. He had no teaching to protect or disseminate. U.G. died on 22nd March 2007 at the age of eighty-nine in Vallecrocia, Italy. The effect that he has had, and will continue to have on legions of his admirers is difficult to put in words. Till his last breath, U.G. remained vigorously enigmatic, frustrating all the attempts of those around trying to fit him in some frame or the other.