MIND IS A MYTH

1

THE CERTAINTY THAT BLASTS EVERYTHING

U.G.: I can never sit on a platform and talk. It is too artificial. It is a waste of time to sit and discuss things in hypothetical or abstract terms. An angry man does not sit and talk and converse pleasantly about anger; he is too angry. So don't tell me that you are in crisis, that you are angry. Why talk of anger? You live and die in the hope that someday, somehow, you will no longer be angry. You are burdened with hope, and if this life seems hopeless, you invent the next life. There are no lives to come.
Q: Well, it certainly cannot be said that your talking gives hope to anyone. Why do you talk if not to console or instruct?
U.G.: What am I to do? You come, I talk. Do you want me to criticize you, to throw stones? It is useless, for you are affected by nothing, having erected an impenetrable armor around yourself. You feel nothing. Unable to understand your situation, you react through thought, which is your ideas and mentations. Reaction is thought. The pain you are going through there is clearly reflected without having to experience the pain here. Here there is no experience at all. That is all. In this natural state you feel the pain of others, whether you personally know them or not. Recently my eldest son was dying of cancer in a hospital nearby. I was in the area and visited him often. Friends said that I was in intense pain during the whole time, until he died. I cannot do anything. It (pain) is an expression of life. They wanted me to attempt some kind of healing for his cancer. If I touch that tumor it will grow, for I am adding life to it. Cancer is a multiplication of cells, another expression of life, and anything I might do only strengthens it.
Q: So you can appreciate the suffering of others and yet are free of it yourself, is that it?
U.G.: Suffering is an experience, and there is no experience here. You are not one thing, and life another. It is one unitary movement and anything I say about it is misleading, confusing. You are not a "person", not a "thing", not a discrete entity surrounded by "other" things. The unitary movement is not something which you can experience.
Q: But to talk of living without experiencing sounds irrational to our minds.
U.G.: What I am saying conflicts with your logical framework. You are using logic to continue that separative structure, that is all. Your questions are again thoughts and therefore reactive. All thought is reactive. You are desperately protecting this armour, this shield of thought, and are frightened that the movement of life might smash your frontiers. Life is like a river in spate, lashing at the banks, threatening the limits that have been placed around it. Your thought structure and your actual physiological framework are limited, but life itself is not. That is why life in freedom is painful to the body; the tremendous outburst of energy that takes place here is a painful thing to the body, blasting every cell as it goes. You cannot imagine how it is in your wildest dreams. This is why it is misleading no matter how I put it.
Q: The gurus and priests teach us also that there is no separative structure and that that is the source of our problems. How do you differ from them?
U.G.: For you, and them, it is just words. Your belief in a unitary movement of life is just a groundless belief, lacking any certainty. You have cleverly rationalized what the gurus and holy books have taught you. Your beliefs are the result of blind acceptance of authority, all secondhand stuff. You are not separate from your beliefs. When your precious beliefs and illusions come to an end, you come to an end. My talking is nothing more than the response to your pain, which you are expressing through questions, logical arguments, and other mentations.
Q: But surely your sitting here and talking hour after hour indicates that you have a philosophy, a message to give, even if it is poorly understood by your listeners.
U.G.: Not at all. There is nobody here talking, giving advice, feeling pain, or experiencing anything at all. Like a ball thrown against the wall, it bounces back, that is all. My talking is the direct result of your question, I have nothing here of my own, no obvious or hidden agenda, no product to sell, no axe to grind, nothing to prove.
Q: But the body is transient, and we all aspire for some kind of immortality. Naturally we turn to higher philosophy, religion, the spiritual. Surely, if we ...
U.G.: It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not concerned with "the afterlife" or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply NOW. The fictitious "beyond", created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought's demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body's continuity. Both are utterly false.
Q: It seems that some sort of radical change must take place, but without the interference of will ...
U.G.: If it occurs through no volition of yours, then that is the end of it. You will have no way of stopping it, of changing the situation at all. You cannot but go through it. It does no good to question reality. Question, rather, your goals, your beliefs, and assumptions. It is from them, not reality, that you must be freed. These pointless questions you are asking will disappear with the automatic abandonment of your goals. They are interdependent. One can't exist without the other.
Q: Such a prospect is just too much. We fear oblivion, utter destruction.
U.G.: If you drown, you drown. You will not sink. But what good are my assurances to you? Worthless, I'm afraid. You will continue doing what you are doing; its meaninglessness does not even occur to you. I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat. But still the hope remains there; "There must be SOME way, perhaps I am not doing it the right way." In other words, we have to accept the absurdity of depending upon ANYTHING. We must face our helplessness.
Q: We just cannot help feeling that there must be some solution for our problems.
U.G.: Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. If there were legitimate answers, there would be no problems. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. The teacher, guru, or leader who offers solutions is also false, along with his so-called answers. He is not doing any honest work, only selling a cheap, shoddy commodity in the marketplace. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naïveté‚ and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.
Q: But the whole field is so complicated that it seems necessary for us to rely on those who have studied carefully and devoted their lives to self-realization and wisdom.
U.G.: All their philosophies cannot compare to the native wisdom of the body itself. What they are calling mental activity, spiritual activity, emotional activity, and feelings are really all one unitary process. This body is highly intelligent and does not need these scientific or theological teachings to survive and procreate. Take away all your fancies about life, death, and freedom, and the body remains unscathed, functioning harmoniously. It does not need your or my help. You don't have to do a thing. You will never again ask stupid, idiotic questions about immortality, afterlives, or death. The body is immortal.
Q: You have mercilessly cut off every possibility of rehabilitation, obliterating even the faint hope of escaping this unhappiness. There seems to be nothing left but self-destruction. Why not suicide?
U.G.: If you commit suicide, it does not help the situation in any way. The moment after suicide the body begins to decay, returning back to other, differently organized forms of life, putting an end to nothing. Life has no beginning and no end. A dead and dying body feeds the hungry ants there in the grave, and rotting corpses give off soil-enriching chemicals, which in turn nourish other life forms. You cannot put an end to your life, it is impossible. The body is immortal and never asks silly questions like, "Is there immortality?" It knows that it will come to an end in that particular form, only to continue on in others. Questions about life after death are always asked out of fear.
Those leaders who would direct your "spiritual life" cannot be honest about these things, for they make a living out of fear, speculations about future life, and the "mystery" of death.
And as for you, the followers, you are not really interested in the future of man, only your own petty little destinies. It is just a ritual you go through, talking for hours and hours about mankind, compassion, and the rest. It is YOU that you are interested in, otherwise there would not be this childish interest in your future lives, and your imminent demise.
Q: But for many of us life is a sacred thing. We struggle to protect our children, the environment, to avert another war ....
U.G.: You are all neurotic people. You talk against birth control, drone on and on about the preciousness of life, then bomb and massacre. It is too absurd. You are concerned with an unborn life while you are killing thousands and thousands of people by bombing, starvation, poverty and terrorism. Your "concern" about life is only to make a political issue out of it. It is just an academic discussion. I am not interested in that.
Q: Yes, but many of us see all this and nevertheless are interested in changing things. It is not just egoism on our parts.
U.G.: Are you really interested? Are you interested in the future of mankind? Your expressions of anger, righteousness, and caring have no meaning to me. It is just a ritual. You sit and talk, that's all. You are not at all angry. If you were angry at this moment, you would not ask this question, even to yourself. You sit everlastingly talking of anger. The angry wouldn't talk about it. The body has already acted with regard to that anger by absorbing it. The anger is burnt, finished then and there. You don't do anything; the body just absorbs it. That is all. If all this is too much for you, if it depresses you, don't ever go to the holy men. Take pills, do anything, but don't expect the holy business to help you. It is a waste of time.
Q: You make me want to just drop the whole thing, to renounce ...
U.G.: As long as you think you have something to renounce, you are lost. Not to think of money and the necessities of life is an illness. It is a perversion to deny yourself the basic needs of life. You think that through a self-imposed asceticism you will increase your awareness and then be able to use that awareness to be happy. No chance. You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.
Q: Are you denying the importance of yogic practices, religious renunciation, or the value of a moral upbringing? Man is more than a machine, surely.
U.G.: All moral, spiritual, ethical values are false. The psychologists, searching for a pragmatic way out, are now at the end of their tethers, even turning to the spiritual people for answers. They are lost, and yet the answers must come from them, not from the encrusted, useless traditions of the holy business.
Q: This makes us all so helpless. No wonder people have relied upon messiahs, mahatmas and prophets.
U.G.: The so-called messiahs have left nothing but misery in this world. If a modern messiah came before you, he would be unable to help you at all. And if he can't help, no one can.
Q: If an anointed person, a savior or sage for example, can't be of help, then perhaps it is as the scriptures say, we must "know the truth and the truth shall make us free."
U.G.: Truth is a movement. You can't capture it, contain it, give expression to it, or use it to advance your interests. The moment you capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something that cannot, under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self-denial is to enrich the priests. You deny yourself your basic needs while that man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated like a potentate. He, and the others in the holy business, thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians, similarly, thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.
Q: Your emphasis is always on the negative side, the classic "neti neti" approach. Are you not pointing out the necessity of dropping all excess baggage, including the scriptures, gurus, and authorities, if one is to find that state you indicate is our natural birthright?
U.G.: No. Doing away with the gurus, temples, and holy books as a prescription for freedom is ridiculous. You search for answers only as remedies for your problems, to avoid pain. Everything that is born is painful. There is no use asking why it is so. It is so. You think that by renouncing gurus and authorities you will suffer some divine endurance; endurance of pain is not going to help you spiritually. There is no way.
Q: But we know you to be more than a fatalist, a cynic. You are pointing out a different destiny for man, not just critiquing his present predicament, are you not?
U.G.: There is a solution for your problems--death. That freedom you are interested in can come about only at the point of death. Everybody attains moksha eventually, for moksha always foreshadows death, and everyone dies.
Q: But I infer you do not mean death in any poetic or fanciful sense. It is not psychological, romantic, or abstract death you are describing, but real, actual, physical death, is it not?
U.G.: Yes, that is it. When you die the body is in a prostrate position, it stops functioning, and that is the end of it. But in this case the body somehow renewed itself. It happens daily as a matter of course now; the whole process took years to stabilize. For me life and death are one, not two separate things. Just let me warn you that if what you are aiming at -- moksha -- really happens, you will die. There will be a physical death, because there has to be a physical death to be in that state. It is like playing around with controlling your breath because you find it amusing. But if you hold the breath long enough, you choke to death.
Q: So we must become aware of death, making it an object of our meditations, and treating it in such a romantic, mystical way. Is that it?
U.G.: To describe that state as a meditative state full of awareness is romantic hogwash. Awareness! What a fantastic gimmick used to fool themselves and others. You can't be aware of every step, you only become self-conscious and awkward if you do. I once knew a man who was a harbor pilot. He had been reading about "passive awareness" and attempted to put it into practice. He, for the first time, nearly wrecked the ship he was guiding. Walking is automatic, and if you try to be aware of every step, you will go crazy. So don't invent meditative steps. Things are bad enough. The meditative state is worse.

Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G.

Edited by: Terry Newland

Originally Published by: Dinesh Publications, Goa, 403 101 INDIA. 1988