MIND IS A MYTH

Q: What is it that draws us to hear you? Why are we interested in what you have to say?
U.G.: You come for the same reason you go to anyone for answers: you want to know. you believe that in knowing my story you will be able to duplicate what happened to me. You, having been brainwashed all your life, can only think in terms of imitation. You think that somehow you can repeat what happened to me, that is all. That is your motive for coming. It is not a new approach to that religious stuff. It is completely different. It has absolutely nothing to do with all that romantic, spiritual, religious stuff, nothing. If you translate what I am saying into religious terms, you are missing the point entirely. "Religion", "God", "Soul", "Beatitudes", "moksha", are all just words, ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple, harmonious physical functioning of the organism. I am able to describe the way this organism is functioning because your question has created the challenge here. Your questions create the conditions necessary for this response to happen. So, it is describing itself, but that is not the way it is functioning. It functions in a state of not knowing. I never ask myself how I am functioning. I never question my actions, before, during, or after they occur. Does a computer ask how it is functioning?
Q: But computers have no feeling, no psyche, no spiritual dimension. How can you compare ...?
U.G.: You can't fit me into that religious framework. Any attempt on your part to translate what I am saying into your religious framework is to miss the point. I am not one of your holy men who say, "I am hanging, so come hang with me." All that stuff is a form of madness.
Q: What's so mad about wanting to find out about life and death ...?
U.G.: Because just as that crazy woman there says she is not mad, you insist upon saying there is death, that you are going to die. Both are false. As far as being states of mind based upon reality, both are equally invalid.
Q: I think I am beginning to understand you intellectually ...
U.G.: Isn't it a joke to tell me that you understand what I am telling you? You say that you at least understand me intellectually, as if there were some other way of understanding. Your intellectual understanding, in which you have a tremendous investment, has not done one damn thing for you so far. You persist in the cultivation of this intellectual understanding, knowing all the while that it has never helped you at all. THIS IS AMAZING. When hoping and attempting to understand is not there, then life becomes meaningful. Life, your existence, has a tremendous living quality about it. All your notions about love, beatitude, infinite bliss, and peace only block this natural energy of existence. How can I make you understand that what I am describing has absolutely nothing to do with all that religious stuff? You see hundreds of bodies carried off in the van after death, and yet you can't possibly imagine your own death. It is impossible, for your own death cannot be experienced by you. It is really something. It is no good throwing all this junk at me. Whatever hits this is immediately burnt--that is the nature of the energy here.
The spiritual people are the most dishonest people. I am emphasizing that foundation upon which the whole of spirituality is built. I am emphasizing that. If there is no spirit, then the whole talk of spirituality is bosh and nonsense. You can't come into your own being until you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of "self". To be really on your own, the whole basis of spiritual life, which is erroneous, has to be destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books, like a bunch of drunks. It is not that at all. It is a bonfire inside of you. Everything that mankind has thought and experienced must go. The incredible violence in the world today has been created by the Jesuses and Buddhas.
Q: But surely the attempt to become civilized is an attempt to transcend the laws of the jungle ...
U.G.: It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! In nature animals don't kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called "civilized" man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival.
Q: Man has strong ideals and beliefs because he seeks truth, which the animals don't.
U.G.: There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your "logically" ascertained premise, which you call "truth".
Q: But, again, all the great teachings have stressed the importance of finding truth through practice, selflessness and renunciation.
U.G.: I renounce the only thing worth renouncing -- the idea that there is renunciation at all. There is nothing to renounce. Your mistaken ideas regarding renunciation only create more fantasies about "truth", "God", etc.
Q: It is not at all flattering to think that we are worse than other animals ...
U.G.: Because man is worse than the animals it made it necessary and possible for him to create the moral dilemma. When man first experienced the division in his consciousness--when he experienced his self-consciousness--he felt superior to other animals, which he is not, and therein sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
Q: So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that because we have falsely divided life into self and not-self, we have created a moral problem within us and in all our relationships. So our basic difficulty is thinking ...
U.G.: You can't experience anything except through thought. You can't experience your own body except through the help of thought. The sensory perceptions are there. Your thoughts give form and definition to the body, otherwise you have no way of experiencing it. The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is "me". Anything you experience based on thought is an illusion.
Q: Do not illusions persist only because awareness is not developed in us?
U.G.: The word "awareness" is misleading. Awareness is not a divided state; there are not two states -- awareness and something else. There are not two things. It is not that you are aware of something. Awareness is simply the action of the brain. The idea that you can USE awareness to bring about some happier state of affairs, some sort of transformation, or God knows what, is, for me, absurd. Awareness cannot be used to bring about a change in yourself or the world around you.
All this rubbish about the conscious and the unconscious, awareness, and the self, is all a product of modern psychology. The idea that you can use awareness to get somewhere psychologically is very damaging. After more than a hundred years we seem unable to free ourselves from the psychological rubbish -- Freud and the whole gang. Just what exactly do you mean by consciousness? You are conscious, aware, only through thought. The other animals use thought--the dog, for example, can recognize its owner--in a simple manner. They recognize without using language. Humans have added to the structure of thought, making it much more complex. Thought is not yours or mine; it is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. There is only mind -- the totality of all that has been known, felt, and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that "thought sphere", just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. The thoughts are there to function and communicate in this world sanely and intelligently.
Q: Still, we actually feel that there is a thinker thinking these thoughts, sort of a "ghost in the machine", that thinking involves more than the mechanical response of memory.
U.G.: The knowledge--that is all that is there. The "me", "psyche", "mind", "I", or whatever you want to call it is nothing else than the totality of the inherited knowledge passed on to us from generation to generation, mostly through education. You teach the child to distinguish between colors, to read, to imitate manners. It is relative to each culture: Americans learn American manners, Indians learn Indian manners, etc. Gestures of the body, of hands or of face constituted the first language. Later words were added on. We still use gestures to supplement our spoken words because we feel that words alone are inadequate to fully express what we want to convey.
All this is not to say that we can really know anything about thought. We can't. You become conscious of thought only when you make it an object of thought, otherwise you don't even know you are thinking. We use thought only to understand something out there, to remember something, or to achieve something. Otherwise we don't even know if thought is there or not. Thought is not separate from the movement of thought. Thought is action, and without it you cannot act. There is no such thing as pure, spontaneous, thought-free action at all. To act is to think.
You have a self-starting, self-perpetuating mechanism, which I call the self. This does not mean that there is actually an entity there. I do not want or mean to give that connotation to that word. Where is this ego, or self, that you talk of? Your non-existent self has heard of spirituality and bliss from someone. To experience this thing called bliss you feel you must control your thoughts. It is impossible, you will burn yourself and die if you attempt it.
Q: Philosophers are often heard talking of a "now", independent of past and future. Is there such a thing as an eternal present?
U.G.: The demand for more and more experience constitutes your "present", which is born out of the past. Look. Here is a microphone before you. You are looking at it. Is it possible for you to look at it without the word "Microphone"? The instrument you are using to look at and experience the microphone is the past, your past. If that is seen there is no future at all. Any achievement you are interested in is in the future. The only way that the future can come into operation is in the present moment. Unfortunately, in the present moment what is in operation is the past. Your past is creating your future; in the past you were happy or unhappy, foolish or wise, in the future you will be the opposite. So the future can't be any the different from the past.
When the past is not in operation there is no "present" at all, for what you are calling the "present" is the past repeating itself. In an actual state of "here and now" there is no past in operation and, therefore, no future. I do not know if you are following me.... The only way the past can survive and maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to experience the same thing over and over. That is why life has become a bore. Life has become boring because we have made of it a repetitive thing. So what we mistakenly call the "present" is really the repetitive past projecting a fictitious future. Your goals, your search, your aspirations are cast in that mould.
Q: One problem with understanding the past is its ephemerality. The psyche or mind has to be located somewhere if, as you say, there is no soul and no higher planes. Where, if I can put it that way, is the past?
U.G.: From your knowledge, out of the past, you ask questions, and the very motive of your asking is only to gain more knowledge from someone else, so that your knowledge structure can continue. You are really not interested in this at all. Your knowledge coming to an end means that YOU are coming to an end. Where, you ask, is this knowledge, the past? Is it in your brain? Where is it? It is all over your body. It is in every cell of your body.
These questions all spring from your search. It doesn't matter what the object of that search is -- God, a beautiful woman or man, a new car. It is all the same search. And that hunger will never be satisfied. That hunger must burn itself out completely without knowing satisfaction. The thirst you have must burn itself out without being quenched. It dawns on you that this is not the way, and it is finished.
What I am emphasizing is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the "problem" of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will pull you through, but you will die in hope just as you have lived in hope. That is the refrain of my doom song.
Q: All religions have placed the desire for freedom, heaven, liberation, or God before all others as being worthy of pursuit. But if these ultimate goals do not exist, as you seem to suggest, they are, therefore, inferior desires, being false and hence impossible to satisfy. But this repels us; we insist that some desires, especially those which ostensibly transcend "the flesh", are more divine than others. Would you comment on this?
U.G.: Unless you are free from the desire of all desires, moksha, liberation, or self-realization, you will be miserable. The ultimate goal--which society has placed before us--is the one that has to go. Until you are free from that desire, you cannot be free from any of your miseries. By suppressing these desires, you are not going to be free. This realization is the essential thing, going as it does to the crux of the problem. It is society that has placed the desire for freedom, the desire for liberation, the desire for God, the desire for moksha -- that is the desire you must be free from. Then all these other desires fall into their own natural rhythm. You suppress these desires only because you are afraid society will punish you if you act on them, or because you see them as "obstacles" to your main desire -- freedom.
If this kind of thing should happen to you, you will find yourself back in a primeval state without primitivity, and without any volition on your part. It just happens. Such a free man is not in conflict with society any more. He is not antisocial, not at war with the world; he sees that it can't be any the different. He doesn't want to change society at all; the demand for change has ceased. Any doing in any direction is violence. Any effort is violence. Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force, and so, is violent. Such an approach is absurd. You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditations, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.
Man has abandoned the natural intelligence of the body. That is why I say--it is my "doom song"--that the day man experienced that consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other animals, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction. This warped view of life is slowly pushing the entire thinking towards total annihilation. There is nothing you can do to halt it.
I am not an alarmist. I am not frightened, I am not interested in saving the world. Mankind is doomed anyway.
All I am saying is that the peace you are seeking is already inside you, in the harmonious functioning of the body.
Q: It sounds more and more like the joke about the Buddha saying, "Don't just do something, stand there." Not making movement in any direction at any level is not so easy.
U.G.: Anything you do to free yourself from anything for whatever reason is destroying the sensitivity, clarity, and freedom that is already there.
Q: If it were possible to see things as they really are ...
U.G.: There is no question of your seeing things as they are. You can't see things as they are. You never leave any experience or feeling you have alone. You have to capture and interpret that feeling within the framework of the known. You are happy or unhappy only as you have knowledge about and experience of happiness and unhappiness. So everything has to be brought within the framework of the known before you can experience it. The movement of the known is gathering momentum within you. Its only interest is to continue. There is no entity, no self there to give itself continuity; it is just the movement of thought, the self-perpetuating separation. It is mechanical. Anything you try to do about it only adds momentum to it.
Q: Eastern teachers have said that desire is an evil, that it must be transcended ...
U.G.: It is the desire to reach a particular goal, an all important goal, that must go, not the countless petty little desires. The only reason you try to manipulate or control the petty desires is that such control is a part of your strategy to attain the highest goal, the desire of all desires. Eliminate that main goal and the others fall into a natural pattern and pose no problem for you or for the world. You won't get anywhere by trying to endlessly control and manipulate these numerous desires. It is vicious in its nature.
Q: Is there any higher goal at all?
U.G.: The so-called "highest goal" is like the horizon. The further you move towards it, the further it recedes. The goal, like the horizon, is not really there. It is a projection of your own fear and it moves away from you as you pursue it. How can you keep up with it? There is nothing that you can do. Still, it is desire that keeps you moving; no matter in which direction you move, it is the same.
Q: You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded?
U.G.: What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say.
Q: If you say that my relative, subjective world view is biased and therefore illusory, I am prepared to agree with you. But you also deny any outside, objective measure of absolute reality, do you not?
U.G.: There is no such thing as absolute. It is thought, and thought alone, that has created the absolute. Absolute zero, absolute power, absolute perfection, these have been invented by the holy men and "experts". They kidded themselves and others.
Down the centuries the saints, saviors, and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everybody else. Perfection and absolutes are false. You are trying to imitate and relate your behavior according to these absolutes, and it is falsifying you. You are actually functioning in an entirely different way; you are brutal, you feel you must be peaceful. It is contradictory, that's all I'm pointing out.
Q: We wonder at your eagerness to deny all the religious and philosophical authorities ...
U.G.: The certainty that dawned upon me is something which cannot be transmitted. It does not mean that I am superior, a chosen one, one in whom all the virtues are rolled into one. Not at all. I am just an ordinary man and have nothing to do with it. This certainly blasts everything, including the claims of the so-called enlightened ones selling things in the marketplace.
Q: If the holy men and saviors have been wrong about man's proper place in the scheme of things, surely they have been at least partially right in pointing towards a higher unity, God, if you will.
U.G.: What I am trying to put across is that there is no such thing as God. It is the mind that has created God out of fear. Fear is passed on from generation to generation. What is there is fear, not God. If you are lucky enough to be free from fear, then there is no God. There is no ultimate reality, no God -- nothing. Fear itself is the problem, not "God". Wanting to be free from fear is itself fear.
You see, you love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don't want THAT to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.
Q: Until we somehow find the courage to die to our fears we continue to ...
U.G.: ... hope, pray, practice virtues. The man who practices virtue is a man of vice. Only such a man, a man of vice, would practice virtue. There is not a virtuous man in the world. All men will be virtuous TOMORROW, until then they remain men of vice. Your virtue only exists in the fictitious future. Where is this virtue you are talking of? It is no good hoping to be virtuous in a future life either; there is no guarantee that there is any future life, much less that you will be free in it.
Q: I think I am beginning to see what ...
U.G.: You are blind. You see nothing. When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realize, no psyche to purify, no soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument. You have invested everything in that--the soul, mind, psyche, whatever you wish to call it--and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick; you are finished.
Q: It is radical, and perhaps a little dangerous, to call the spirit, the soul, and God the shoddy inventions of frightened minds, is it not?
U.G.: I don't care. I am ready to go. I don't see anything other than the physical activity of the body. Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the MIND IS A MYTH.
Your traditions are choking you. But, unfortunately, you don't do anything. You actually love being choked. You love the burden of the cultural garbage-sack, the dead refuse of the past. It has to drop away naturally. It just drops. You don't depend upon knowledge anymore, except as a useful tool to function sanely in this world.
Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow". Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. It (thinking) does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape ...


MIND IS A MYTH:

Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G.

Edited by: Terry Newland

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

 

When the questions you have resolve themselves into just one question, your question, then that question must detonate, explode and disappear entirely, leaving behind a smoothly functioning biological organism, free of the distortion and interference of the separative thinking structure. -- U.G.