MIND IS A MYTH

Q: It seems to me that a special sort of valor is necessary for what you are describing. Am I right?
U.G.: Yes. But it is not courage in the usual sense. It is not the courage you associate with struggle or overcoming. The valor I am talking about is the courage that is naturally there when all this authority and fear is thrown out of the system. Courage is not an instrument or quality you can use to get somewhere. The stopping of doing is courage. The ending of tradition in you is courage.
Q: Even with courage there is no guarantee that one isn't wrong about life, or that one is not mistaken about the important things.
U.G.: When once you are freed from the pairs of opposites -- right and wrong, good and bad -- you will never be wrong. But until then the problem will be there.
Q: Reaching the end of opposites has rather frightening implications ...
U.G.: It is like accidentally touching a live wire. You are much too frightened to touch it through your own volition. By sheer accident this thing touches you, burning everything ...
Q: Including the search for God and freedom?
U.G.: It burns out this search, the hunger. The hunger stops, not because it is satisfied. The hunger can never be satiated, especially by the traditional food that is offered. With the burning away of that hunger, the duality ceases. That is all.
There is a certain uneasiness when listening to you ...
U.G.: You are incapable of listening to anyone. You are the medium of my expression. I respond to your questions; I have nothing of my own. The expression of what is here occurs because of you, not me. That medium -- you -- is corrupt. The medium is only interested in maintaining its own continuity. So anything that happens there is already dead.
Q: You seem bent upon demolishing everything other teachers have taught ...
U.G.: My interest is not to knock off what others have said (that is too easy), but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. This is why my talking sounds contradictory to others. I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third, and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis, but the total negation of everything that can be expressed. Anything you try to make out of my statements is not it.
You sense a freshness, a living quality to what is being said here. That is so, but this cannot be used for anything. It cannot be repeated. It is worthless. All you can do with it is to try to organize it; create organizations, open schools, publish holy books, celebrate birthdays, sanctify holy temples, and the like, thus destroying any life it may have had in it. No individual can be helped by such things. They only help those who would live by the gullibility of others.
Q: How exactly did the system free itself from tradition in your case?
U.G.: My explanation is that there was an outburst of energy, which is utterly different from the energy that is born out of thinking. All spiritual, mystical experiences are born out of thought. They are thought-induced states, nothing more. The energy here that is burning all thought as it arises tends to accumulate. Eventually it has to escape. The physical limitations of the body act as obstacles to the escape of this unique energy. When it escapes it goes up, never down, and never returns. When this extraordinary energy -- which is atomic -- escapes, it causes tremendous pain. It is not the pain you are familiar with. It has nothing to do with it. If it did, the body would be shattered. It is not matter converting into energy; it is atomic. The process goes on and on, while the pain comes and goes. It is like the tremendous relief when a tooth is extracted. That is the kind of relief that is there, not the spiritual. The translation of this as bliss or beatitude is very misleading. Through thought anyone can create those experiences; but it is not actually bliss. The real thing is not something that can be experienced. Anything you can experience is old. That means everything you experience or understand is tradition.
In other words, I am trying to free you not from the past, the conditioning, but, rather, from what I am saying. I am not suggesting any way out because there is no way. I have stumbled into this and freed myself from the paths of others. I can't make the same mistake they did. I will never suggest that anyone use me as a model or follow in my footsteps. My path can never be your path. If you attempt to make this your path, you will get caught in a rut. No matter how refreshing, revolutionary or fantastic, it is still a rut, a copy, a secondhand thing. I myself do not know how I stumbled into this, so how do you expect me to give it to another?
My mission, if there is any, should be, from now on, to debunk every statement I have made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I have said, you will be in danger.
Q: Great teachers and seers in the Eastern tradition have at least attempted to convey some idea of higher states, while you insist they are incommunicable. Why?
U.G.: You take for granted that they are what they say they are. I say it cannot be transmitted to another because there is nothing there to transmit. Neither is there anything to renounce. What is it that these teachers suggest you should renounce? Even your scriptures -- the Kathopanishad -- say that you must renounce the very search itself. The renunciation of renunciation happens not through practice, discussion, money, or intellect. These are the least of things. A rough translation of the original Sanskrit is, "Whomsoever it chooses, to him it is revealed." If this is so, then where is the room for practices, sadhana, and volition? It comes randomly, not because you deserve it.
If you are lucky enough to have this dawn on you, you will die. It is the continuity of thought that dies. The body has no death, it only changes form. The ending of thought is the beginning of physical death. What you experience is the emptiness of the void. But there is no death for the body at all. I am sure this is of little consolation to you, though. Just wanting to be free of egoism is insufficient; you must go through a clinical death to be free from thought and egoism. The body will actually get stiff, the heartbeat slows, and you will become corpse-like.
Q: The theory of reincarnation also denies death, but in a different way. They speak of an eternal atma or soul which outlives the physical death ...
U.G.: Whatever answers are given regarding death, you are not satisfied with them, and so you must invent theories about reincarnation. What is it that will reincarnate? Even while you are alive, what is there? Is there anything beyond the totality of the knowledge which existed inside you now? So, is there death at all, and if there is, can it be experienced?
Q: So you will only confirm the existence of a natural state, is that it?
U.G.: The ideas you have about that natural state are totally unrelated to what it actually is. You are trying to capture and give expression to what you hope is that state. It is an absurd exercise. What is there is only the movement to capture, nothing else. All the rest is speculation.

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.