MIND IS A MYTH

Q: But there does seem to be something like peace of mind when one finishes one's prayers or meditations. How do you explain that?
U.G.: It is the result of sheer exhaustion, that's all. Your attempts to control or suppress your thoughts only tire you out, making you sort of battle-weary. That is the effortlessness and peace of mind you are experiencing. It is not peace. If you want techniques for thought control, you have come to the wrong man.
Q: No sir, I feel that I am benefited by talking with you. Are you saying that no religious commitment, no spiritual path, no sadhana is necessary?
U.G.: I say no. Somebody else says yes. Where does that leave you? Understanding your goal is the main thing. To achieve that goal implies struggle, battle, effort, will, that is all. There is no guarantee that you will reach your goal. You assume the goal is there. You have invented the goal to give yourself hope. But hope means tomorrow. Hope is necessary for tomorrow, not for today.
You know. You want more knowledge so you can develop better techniques for reaching your goal. You know that there is no guarantee that more experience, more knowledge, more systems and more methods will help you reach your goal. Yet you persist; it is all you know how to do. Seeing today demands action. Seeing tomorrow involves only hope.
Q: What is it that we are trying to see with the help of techniques?
 
U.G.: You want to see meaning in your life. As long as you persist in searching for a purpose or meaning to life, so long whatever you are doing will seem purposeless and meaningless. The hope you have of finding meaning is what is causing the present state of meaninglessness. There may not be any meaning other than this.
Q: It is understandable that people should look for meaning in their lives, isn't it?
U.G.: The energy you are devoting to the search, to techniques, to your sadhana, or whatever you wish to call it, is taking away the energy you need to live. You are obsessed with finding meaning in life, and that is consuming a lot of energy. If that energy is released from the search for meaning, it can be used to see the futility of all search. Then your life becomes meaningful and the energy may be used for some useful purpose. Life, the so-called material life, has a meaning of its own. But you have been told that it is devoid of meaning and have superimposed a fictitious layer of "spiritual" meaning over it.
Why should life have any meaning? Why should there be any purpose to living? Living itself is all that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of living. You have been fed all this rubbish about the ideal, perfect, peaceful, purposeful way of life, and you devote your energies to thinking about that rather than living fully. In any case you are living, no matter what you are thinking about. Life has to go on.
Q: But isn't that the goal of culture and education, to teach us how to live?
U.G.: You are living. As soon as you introduce the question "how to live?", you have made of life a problem. "How" to live has made life meaningless. The moment you ask "how", you turn to someone for answers, becoming dependent.
Q: You are saying that all search is doomed because there is nothing to achieve or understand.
U.G.: There is nothing to be achieved, nothing to accomplish. Because you have created the goal--say, selflessness--you remain stuck in selfishness. If the goal of selflessness is not there, are you selfish? You have invented selflessness as an object to pursue, meanwhile continuing to be selfish. How can you ever end your selfishness as long as you pursue selflessness? A certain amount of practical selfishness is necessary for survival, of course, but with you it has become a tremendous, unsolvable problem.
Here there is no need to sit in special postures and control your breath. Even while my eyes are open, in fact no matter what I am doing, I am in a state of samadhi. The knowledge you have about samadhi is what is keeping you away from it. Samadhi comes after the ending of all you have ever known, at death. The body has to become like a corpse before that knowledge, which is locked into every cell in the body, ceases.
Q: You infer that a complete radical break with one's past is essential if one is to get beyond the prevalent mediocrity, if one is to live creatively. But there have been a great many intelligent, inventive people who have not undergone any death process or physiological "calamity", as you call it.
U.G.: Your highly praised inventiveness springs from your thinking, which is essentially a protective mechanism. The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests. There is no good or bad in this sense. Don't you see? All these bad, brutal, terrible people, who should have been eliminated long ago, are thriving and successful. Don't think that you can get off this merry-go-round, or that by pretending to be spiritually superior you are avoiding any complicity. You are the world; you are that. This is all I am pointing out.
Q: Are you also brushing aside the concern for what might happen to one in a future life? If, in a later life, I shall reap what I have sown, should I not be concerned with how to be moral?
U.G.: Past lives, future lives, karma -- these things are emphasized in this so-called "spiritual" country. It is a total failure! They say that they will have to suffer for their bad actions in the future, tomorrow. But what about now? Why is he getting away with it now? Why is he so successful right now?
Q: Despite the obvious chaos and brutality in the world, most of us find that hope springs eternal and that love must ultimately rule the world ...
U.G.: There is no love in the world. Everybody wants the same thing. Whosoever is the most ruthless gets it -- as long as he can get away with it. Getting what you want in this world is a relatively easy thing, if you are ruthless enough. I had everything a man could want, every kind of desirable experience, and it all failed me. Therefore, I can never recommend my "path" to anyone, having eventually faced the falseness of that path myself and rejected it. I would never even hint that there was any validity in all those experiences and practices.
Q: Contrary to what you have said, the great saviors and leaders of mankind have agreed that ...
U.G.: The saints, saviors, priests, gurus, bhagavans, seers, prophets and philosophers were all wrong, as far as I am concerned. As long as you harbor any hope or faith in these authorities, living or dead, so long this certainty cannot be transmitted to you. This certainty somehow dawns on you when you see for yourself that all of them are wrong.
When you see all this for yourself for the first time, you explode. That explosion hits life at a point that has never been touched before. It is absolutely unique. So whatever I may be saying cannot be true for you. The moment you see it for yourself you make what I am saying obsolete and false. All that came before is negated in that fire. You can't come into your own uniqueness unless the whole of human experience is thrown out of your system. It cannot be done through any volition or the help of anything. Then you are on your own.




MIND IS A MYTH:

Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G.

Edited by: Terry Newland