THE OTHER SIDE OF BELIEF: INTERPRETING U.G. KRISHNAMURTI
by Mukunda Rao Salvation Is Physical [from chapter-20]
The Mind of the Cells — or willed mutation of our species, edited by Satprem, is a record of reports of physical changes and experiences of the Mother of Pondicherry, which happened to her over eleven years, that is, between 1962 and 1973.
It is a remarkable book that makes books on mysticism or mystical reports sound like the mere prattling of a child. It is unique not because it is far superior to other texts on mysticism, but because it marks the end of mystical experience. It is an incredible journey on an uncharted sea. One could well call it the journey of billions-of-years old cells, rather a cellular journey into utterly new waters of life and intelligence, something the molecular biologists should want to discover and understand. But it is not something that could be seen or studied under a microscope in a laboratory, inside the fish bowl of one’s mind.
But strangely, it’s an incomplete journey, perhaps only to be carried forward by UG, to reach its final and full fruition and expression in his life.
Aurobindo said: ‘Man is a transitional being,’ and that he has to be surpassed. We do not know if Aurobindo experienced this ‘transition’. We know his ideas of ‘overmind’, ‘supermind’, ‘superman’, ‘supramental manifestation’. But did it happen to him? Or, was it only his prediction? Or, was it only his prediction or, merely philosophical speculation?
But going by the Mother’s reports, it seems it happened to her. She presided over this transition, this strange transmutation of the body, this bewildering mutation of the cells. It was something that was certainly not entirely in line with Aurobindo’s ideas or predictions.
Way back in 1953, the Mother made a statement to the effect that something new was beginning to take shape in her life. She said: ‘…a new world is born. It is not the old world changing, it is a New World which is born…’ although, ‘the old is still all-powerful and entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness.’
But it seems that only in 1962, when she fell ‘ill’, did she begin to notice strange changes taking place in her body. It actually was not an illness or symptoms of illness. Something strange was going on within the cells of her body, ‘…a sort of decentralization…as if the cells were being scattered by centrifugal force…’ She would feel terribly weak at times, faint now and then, yet, something, untouched, was fully conscious of what was happening. ‘…Witnessing everything…’ something like ‘matter looking at itself in a whole new way.’ This process went on for almost eleven years, until the day she passed away in 1973, at the age of ninety-five.
At first it seemed her consciousness was breaking out of its limits; it felt like waves, ‘not individual waves, rather a movement of waves.’ It was almost infinite and strangely ‘undulatory’. Vast, at times, very quiet, and there was a harmonious rhythm to it. ‘And this movement,’ she felt, ‘is life itself…’ and it moves by expansion. That is, ‘it contracts and concentrates, then expands and spreads out.’
Something was trying to get established; an utterly new way or movement of life! It was the preparation of the body, of the cells, to mutate. It was not an act of volition. ‘You can’t try to make it happen,’ said the Mother. ‘One can’t make an effort, one can’t try to know, because that immediately triggers an intellectual activity (habit) which has nothing to do with “that”.’
Then there came a sort of memory block. She did not know how to climb stairs, how to read and things of that sort. It seemed necessary to let go everything, all knowledge, all intelligence, all capacity — everything. The sense of separation was dissolving. Old habits were dying.
Taste, smell, vision, touch, sound — the sensory perceptions began to undergo complete change. Perhaps, ‘they belong to another rhythm,’ she suggested. It seemed curious and funny. ‘There is no longer “something seeing” but I Am numerous things. I LIVE numerous things… I SEE clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open, and yet it is the same vision. It’s physical vision, purely physical…fuller.’
Now and then she experienced a tremendous burst of energy that caused pain. At times she would feel that she was dying, that she was going to explode. It was not what the religious people assume to be joy or bliss, but a sense of alarm, fear, anxiety, pain. ‘…It’s really and truly terrifying…it’s a hideous labour…it’s truly a journey into nothing, with nothing, in a desert strewn with every conceivable trap and obstacle. You are blindfolded, you know nothing.’
The body had become a battleground. A battle within the cells between the old habit and something new that was trying to emerge. In the Mother’s words: ‘The battle begins to be fought deep down in the cells, in the material consciousness, between what we call “the will to haemorrhage” and the reaction of the cells of the body. And it is absolutely like a regular battle, a real fight. But suddenly, the body is seized with a very strong determination and proclaims an order, and immediately the effect begins to be felt and everything returns gradually to normal.’
It is the struggle of the body to cleanse itself of the habit developed over thousands of years of ‘separate existence on account of ego.’ Now it has to learn to continue, without the ego, ‘according to another, unknown law, a law still incomprehensible for the body. It is not a will, it’s… I don’t know…something; a way of being.’
The way human beings have lived with a separative consciousness has been nothing but a habit. A bad habit! All that must be undone, the so-called laws of nature, all the collective suggestions, all the earthly habits. ‘It is nothing but mechanical habits. But it clings, it’s really sticky, oh!… what appear to us as “the laws of Nature” or “inescapable principles”, are so absurd, so ridiculous!’
And then the body falls into a rhythm all its own. It becomes transparent. ‘All vibrations pass through it freely. It no longer feels limited: it feels spread out in everything it does, in everything around, in all circumstances, in people, movements, feelings…just spread out.’ The Mother felt that the body was everywhere. ‘I am talking here about the cells of the body, but the same applies to external events, even world events. It’s even remarkable in the case of earth quakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. it would seem that the entire earth is like the body.’
Everything is interconnected. Everything is one. The sense of separation is complete falsehood. The cause and effect only a figment of human imagination. ‘It isn’t something you see or understand or know, it’s…something you are.’ Consciousness, mind, divides everything up. But here, in the body, everything is one. Literally everything. ‘The speck of dust you wipe off the table, or ecstatic contemplation, it’s all the same.’
It’s not a product of thought, or imagination. ‘Dreaming, meditating, soaring into higher consciousness is all very well, but that seems so poor in comparison, so poor, so limited!… In mental world, you think before doing the thing; there it’s not that way… No more memory, no more habits…it’s all spontaneous… it comes, it comes in facts, in actions, in movements.’
The Mother felt it was all something beyond what all the spiritual leaders had said before, which is what UG reiterates today with absolute conviction and clarity. It was beyond moksha, beyond nirvana; it was something very physical. ‘Salvation is physical,’ declared the Mother. And she demanded to know: why did they (the spiritual teachers of the past) all seek liberation by abandoning their body? Why did they talk of nirvana as something outside the body? ‘The body is a very, very simple thing, very childlike,’ said the Mother. ‘It does not need to “seek” anything: it’s THERE. And it wonders why men never knew of this from the start: why, but why did they go after all sorts of things—religions, gods, and all those… sorts of things? While it is so simple! So simple! It’s so obvious for the body!’
When the Mother says the ‘body is very simple’ and that it does not need to ‘seek’ anything at all, she very much sounds like UG. And she confirms what UG has been saying for the last 30 odd years, when she asserts: ‘All the mental constructions that men have tried to live by and realize on earth come to me from all sides: all the great schools of thought, the great ideas, the great realizations… and then, lower on the scale, the religions; oh, how infantile all that seems! …Oh, what noise, how vainly you have tried!’
It is fairly clear that the ‘process’ took the Mother beyond even Aurobindo’s philosophy of the supramental manifestation, as well as her own, one-time ideations of this so-called spiritual evolution before the actual physical changes began to take place. But still, her past kept popping up now and then and she did refer, though reluctantly and hesitantly, to the idea of ‘supermind’ and ‘supramental’. This critical and momentous fact, which should completely change our reading of the Mother, is unfortunately lost upon Satprem, the editor of this report and author of several other books on Aurobindo and the Mother, not to speak of the devotees at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
It is a remarkable book that makes books on mysticism or mystical reports sound like the mere prattling of a child. It is unique not because it is far superior to other texts on mysticism, but because it marks the end of mystical experience. It is an incredible journey on an uncharted sea. One could well call it the journey of billions-of-years old cells, rather a cellular journey into utterly new waters of life and intelligence, something the molecular biologists should want to discover and understand. But it is not something that could be seen or studied under a microscope in a laboratory, inside the fish bowl of one’s mind.
But strangely, it’s an incomplete journey, perhaps only to be carried forward by UG, to reach its final and full fruition and expression in his life.
Aurobindo said: ‘Man is a transitional being,’ and that he has to be surpassed. We do not know if Aurobindo experienced this ‘transition’. We know his ideas of ‘overmind’, ‘supermind’, ‘superman’, ‘supramental manifestation’. But did it happen to him? Or, was it only his prediction? Or, was it only his prediction or, merely philosophical speculation?
But going by the Mother’s reports, it seems it happened to her. She presided over this transition, this strange transmutation of the body, this bewildering mutation of the cells. It was something that was certainly not entirely in line with Aurobindo’s ideas or predictions.
Way back in 1953, the Mother made a statement to the effect that something new was beginning to take shape in her life. She said: ‘…a new world is born. It is not the old world changing, it is a New World which is born…’ although, ‘the old is still all-powerful and entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness.’
But it seems that only in 1962, when she fell ‘ill’, did she begin to notice strange changes taking place in her body. It actually was not an illness or symptoms of illness. Something strange was going on within the cells of her body, ‘…a sort of decentralization…as if the cells were being scattered by centrifugal force…’ She would feel terribly weak at times, faint now and then, yet, something, untouched, was fully conscious of what was happening. ‘…Witnessing everything…’ something like ‘matter looking at itself in a whole new way.’ This process went on for almost eleven years, until the day she passed away in 1973, at the age of ninety-five.
At first it seemed her consciousness was breaking out of its limits; it felt like waves, ‘not individual waves, rather a movement of waves.’ It was almost infinite and strangely ‘undulatory’. Vast, at times, very quiet, and there was a harmonious rhythm to it. ‘And this movement,’ she felt, ‘is life itself…’ and it moves by expansion. That is, ‘it contracts and concentrates, then expands and spreads out.’
Something was trying to get established; an utterly new way or movement of life! It was the preparation of the body, of the cells, to mutate. It was not an act of volition. ‘You can’t try to make it happen,’ said the Mother. ‘One can’t make an effort, one can’t try to know, because that immediately triggers an intellectual activity (habit) which has nothing to do with “that”.’
Then there came a sort of memory block. She did not know how to climb stairs, how to read and things of that sort. It seemed necessary to let go everything, all knowledge, all intelligence, all capacity — everything. The sense of separation was dissolving. Old habits were dying.
Taste, smell, vision, touch, sound — the sensory perceptions began to undergo complete change. Perhaps, ‘they belong to another rhythm,’ she suggested. It seemed curious and funny. ‘There is no longer “something seeing” but I Am numerous things. I LIVE numerous things… I SEE clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open, and yet it is the same vision. It’s physical vision, purely physical…fuller.’
Now and then she experienced a tremendous burst of energy that caused pain. At times she would feel that she was dying, that she was going to explode. It was not what the religious people assume to be joy or bliss, but a sense of alarm, fear, anxiety, pain. ‘…It’s really and truly terrifying…it’s a hideous labour…it’s truly a journey into nothing, with nothing, in a desert strewn with every conceivable trap and obstacle. You are blindfolded, you know nothing.’
The body had become a battleground. A battle within the cells between the old habit and something new that was trying to emerge. In the Mother’s words: ‘The battle begins to be fought deep down in the cells, in the material consciousness, between what we call “the will to haemorrhage” and the reaction of the cells of the body. And it is absolutely like a regular battle, a real fight. But suddenly, the body is seized with a very strong determination and proclaims an order, and immediately the effect begins to be felt and everything returns gradually to normal.’
It is the struggle of the body to cleanse itself of the habit developed over thousands of years of ‘separate existence on account of ego.’ Now it has to learn to continue, without the ego, ‘according to another, unknown law, a law still incomprehensible for the body. It is not a will, it’s… I don’t know…something; a way of being.’
The way human beings have lived with a separative consciousness has been nothing but a habit. A bad habit! All that must be undone, the so-called laws of nature, all the collective suggestions, all the earthly habits. ‘It is nothing but mechanical habits. But it clings, it’s really sticky, oh!… what appear to us as “the laws of Nature” or “inescapable principles”, are so absurd, so ridiculous!’
And then the body falls into a rhythm all its own. It becomes transparent. ‘All vibrations pass through it freely. It no longer feels limited: it feels spread out in everything it does, in everything around, in all circumstances, in people, movements, feelings…just spread out.’ The Mother felt that the body was everywhere. ‘I am talking here about the cells of the body, but the same applies to external events, even world events. It’s even remarkable in the case of earth quakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. it would seem that the entire earth is like the body.’
Everything is interconnected. Everything is one. The sense of separation is complete falsehood. The cause and effect only a figment of human imagination. ‘It isn’t something you see or understand or know, it’s…something you are.’ Consciousness, mind, divides everything up. But here, in the body, everything is one. Literally everything. ‘The speck of dust you wipe off the table, or ecstatic contemplation, it’s all the same.’
It’s not a product of thought, or imagination. ‘Dreaming, meditating, soaring into higher consciousness is all very well, but that seems so poor in comparison, so poor, so limited!… In mental world, you think before doing the thing; there it’s not that way… No more memory, no more habits…it’s all spontaneous… it comes, it comes in facts, in actions, in movements.’
The Mother felt it was all something beyond what all the spiritual leaders had said before, which is what UG reiterates today with absolute conviction and clarity. It was beyond moksha, beyond nirvana; it was something very physical. ‘Salvation is physical,’ declared the Mother. And she demanded to know: why did they (the spiritual teachers of the past) all seek liberation by abandoning their body? Why did they talk of nirvana as something outside the body? ‘The body is a very, very simple thing, very childlike,’ said the Mother. ‘It does not need to “seek” anything: it’s THERE. And it wonders why men never knew of this from the start: why, but why did they go after all sorts of things—religions, gods, and all those… sorts of things? While it is so simple! So simple! It’s so obvious for the body!’
When the Mother says the ‘body is very simple’ and that it does not need to ‘seek’ anything at all, she very much sounds like UG. And she confirms what UG has been saying for the last 30 odd years, when she asserts: ‘All the mental constructions that men have tried to live by and realize on earth come to me from all sides: all the great schools of thought, the great ideas, the great realizations… and then, lower on the scale, the religions; oh, how infantile all that seems! …Oh, what noise, how vainly you have tried!’
It is fairly clear that the ‘process’ took the Mother beyond even Aurobindo’s philosophy of the supramental manifestation, as well as her own, one-time ideations of this so-called spiritual evolution before the actual physical changes began to take place. But still, her past kept popping up now and then and she did refer, though reluctantly and hesitantly, to the idea of ‘supermind’ and ‘supramental’. This critical and momentous fact, which should completely change our reading of the Mother, is unfortunately lost upon Satprem, the editor of this report and author of several other books on Aurobindo and the Mother, not to speak of the devotees at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
It is also very surprising to note here that even the serious followers and scholars of Aurobindo have either completely ignored the Mother’s report of these great physical and physiological changes, or interpreted them purely in terms of Aurobindo’s philosophy. One might quote from Aurobindo’s writings and argue that he was the first to speak about the need, rather, the inevitability of a physical transformation. Indeed he was the first to say that if any radical change has to take place, it has to take place in the body, and he did prepare the ground for the Mother’s transformation.
Even otherwise, his interpretation of the Upanishads and his criticism of Sankara’s Vedanta makes him one of our most radical mystic-philosophers. But all this should in no way take us away from the cleansing fact that the Mother, quite unwittingly as it were, went beyond Aurobindo’s philosophy, beyond all the known frames of spiritual references. This would have certainly brought a smile on Aurobindo’s face, for he would have intuitively known that something like this would happen; after all, didn’t he repeatedly warn that what is to come in future will be something hitherto unknown and unexplored!
What happened to the Mother was something she had least expected, just as UG had not expected his ‘calamity’ even in his wildest dreams! A careful consideration of the Mother’s report would reveal that all through these changes she felt a sort of total helplessness, ‘choicelessness’, and had absolutely no precedence or frame of reference she could relate or point to. Her admissions:
What happened to the Mother was something she had least expected, just as UG had not expected his ‘calamity’ even in his wildest dreams! A careful consideration of the Mother’s report would reveal that all through these changes she felt a sort of total helplessness, ‘choicelessness’, and had absolutely no precedence or frame of reference she could relate or point to. Her admissions:
‘I don’t know…can’t say…have no idea…no words to express…blindfolded… you see, I feel I am right in the middle of a world I know nothing about, struggling with laws I know nothing about… it is something like a condition: the unreality of the goal—not its unreality, its uselessness. Not even uselessness: the non-existence of the goal… it happened in my bathroom upstairs, surely to show that it is in the most trivial things, in everything, continuously… You see, it’s even fairly easy to pose as a superman! But it remains ethereal, it isn’t the real thing, not the next stage of terrestrial evolution… So simple! It’s so obvious for the body!’,
and so on, more than reveals her incredible journey into unknown waters of life and intelligence, and she did go beyond Aurobindo and her own ideas and beliefs before the process began. We do not know. Perhaps the Mother did not live long enough for everything to change, for the process, the mutation, to complete itself. However, to use her own words: ‘… but some things changed and have never reverted.’
The Mother died in 1973. For UG the ‘calamity’ occurred in 1967. It was a full-blown mutation of the body, enabling the human being to become fully human. It was not a mystical experience, nor a Kundalini experience (though Kundalini experience could just be the beginning, almost elementary). And it has nothing to do with the spiritual goal (as opposed to the material, the body) that the spiritual traditions of the world with their band of teachers have been proclaiming for centuries.
Evidently, this biological mutation, or ‘Natural state’ as UG would call it, or ‘cellular revolution’ as the Mother would put it, is not entirely unprecedented. But now we have someone, in the shape of UG, to tell us, in clear physical, physiological and material terms, what it is all about.
The Mother died in 1973. For UG the ‘calamity’ occurred in 1967. It was a full-blown mutation of the body, enabling the human being to become fully human. It was not a mystical experience, nor a Kundalini experience (though Kundalini experience could just be the beginning, almost elementary). And it has nothing to do with the spiritual goal (as opposed to the material, the body) that the spiritual traditions of the world with their band of teachers have been proclaiming for centuries.
Evidently, this biological mutation, or ‘Natural state’ as UG would call it, or ‘cellular revolution’ as the Mother would put it, is not entirely unprecedented. But now we have someone, in the shape of UG, to tell us, in clear physical, physiological and material terms, what it is all about.
Books, Interviews, and References THE OTHER SIDE OF BELIEF --iNTERPRETING u.g. kRISHNAMURTI: By Mukunda Rao. Published by Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panschasheel Park, www.well.com/~jct/lists.html
U G Krishnamurti Books, Articles, Photos and Video of UG Krishnamurti. ... to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. ...
U G Krishnamurti Books, Articles, Photos and Video of UG Krishnamurti. ... to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. ...
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Download THE MYSTIQUE OF ENLIGHTENEMENT to know all about UG's 'calamity'/ biological mutation.
Download THE MYSTIQUE OF ENLIGHTENEMENT to know all about UG's 'calamity'/ biological mutation.
Here is from Sri Aurobindo on his "calamity" much, much earlier:
ReplyDelete"From 1910, more particularly from 1914 to 1921, a vast power came pressing down upon me and into my being; there was a ceaseless rush of universal consciousness, tremendous force and light from the supramental planes..."
"At this time it seemed that the body might get crushed or consumed. My life seemed moving along a tenuous wire. A little lack of caution, a slight unbalance would leave the body broken to pieces or its mechanism put out of gear."
— excerpt from Satprem's book 'The Tragedy of the Earth'