The Teachings of U. G. Krishnamurti. U. G. Krishnamurti
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freedom of action. I don't mean the fatalism that the Indians have practiced and still are practicing: when I say that man has no freedom of action it is in relation to changing himself, to freeing himself from the burden of the past.
What is necessary is that the individual should free himself from the burden of the past, the great heritage you are talking about. Unless the individual frees himself from the burden of the past, he cannot come up with new solutions for the problems; he repeats the same old.... So it is up to the individual. He has to free himself from the entire past, the heritage which you are talking about — that is to say he has to break away from the cumulative wisdom of the ages — only then is it possible for him to come out with the solutions for the problems with which man is confronted today.
That is not in his hands; there is nothing that he can do to free himself from the burden of the past. It is in that sense that I say he has no freedom of action. You have freedom to come here or not to come here, to study or teach economics or philosophy or something else — there you have a limited freedom. But you have no freedom to control the events of the world or shape the events of the world — nobody has that power, no nation has that power.
You know that India is helpless. America — even America, the mightiest, the strongest, the richest and the most powerful nation — it has been; it is not now. Even Time magazine does not use those phrases any more to describe America. If even such countries as Russia and America are not able to control, much less shape, the events of the world, what can a poor country like India do? Not a chance.
So the individual is the only hope. And the individual also seems to be totally helpless because he has to free himself from the burden of the past, the entire heritage, not only of India, but of the whole world. So is it possible for man to free himself from the burden? Individually, he doesn't seem to have any freedom at all. You see, he has no freedom of action — that is the crux of the whole problem. But yet the hope is in the individual — if through some luck, some strange chance....
Q: These two statements seem to be contradictory. You say that there is no power outside of man....
UG: That makes the God we are talking about irrelevant — God in the sense in which you use the word. There is no power outside of man. That power is unable to express itself, because of the burden of the past; when once he is freed from the burden of the past, then what is there, that extraordinary power, expresses itself. You see, in that sense there's no contradiction.
Q: He can control events?
UG: No, not control events; you see, he stops trying to control and shape events.
Q: He simply sails along?
UG: Sails along with events, you see. You and I are not called upon to save the world. Who has given us the mandate, uh? The world has gone on for centuries. So many people have come and gone. It is going on in its own way.
So he is freed from all the problems — not only his problems, but also the problems of the world. And if that individual somehow has an impact, it has an impact; if it hasn't.... It is something which cannot be measured, you see.
Q: That is the ideal state of man?
UG: You see, the animal becomes a flower. That seems to be the purpose — if at all there is any purpose in Nature, I don't know. You see, there are so many flowers there — look at them! Each flower is unique in its own way. Nature's purpose seems to be (I cannot make any definitive statement) to create flowers like that, human flowers like that.
We have only a handful of flowers, which you can count on your fingers: Ramana Maharshi in recent times, Sri Ramakrishna, some other people. Not the claimants we have in our midst today, not the gurus — I am not talking about them. It is amazing — that man who sat there at Tiruvannamalai — his impact on the West is much more than all these gurus put together — very strange, you understand? He has had a tremendous impact on the totality of human consciousness — that man living in one corner, you understand?
I visited an industrialist in Paris. He is not at all interested in religious matters, much less in India; he is anti-Indian. (Laughs) So, I saw his photo there — "Why do you have this photo?" He said "I like the face. I don't know anything about him. I'm not even interested in reading his books. I like the photo, so it's there. I'm not interested in anything about him."
Maybe such an individual can (I can't say 'can') help himself and help the world. Maybe.
Q: One more question.... I don't know, I am putting it crudely. I am the most ignorant man.
UG: You can put it in the crudest form. You are not so ignorant; they say you are the wisest man. A man who has written the biography of Ramanujacharya can't be crude.
I sometimes tease our Professor here, who is an advocate of Advaita (Sankara's monism), "You cannot go beyond Ramanuja's position (qualified non-dualism), as far as philosophy is concerned. There it stops. Monism is something which you cannot talk about - — for all practical purposes it doesn't exist. That is the limit." I'm not pro-Ramanujacharya or anti-Sankara. As I see it — as a student of philosophy. I studied philosophy — you cannot go beyond that chappie Ramanujacharya. You may not agree with me. As far as the philosophical position is concerned, Ramanujacharya's position is the limit, the ultimate. The rest of it? Maybe there is.... If there is a monistic situation, that is something which cannot be talked about, and which cannot be applied to change anything in this world.
Q: This ideal state of man ...
UG: Man becomes man for the first time — and that is possible only when he frees himself from the burden of the heritage we are talking about, the heritage of man as a whole (not East and West; there is no East and West). Then only does he become an individual. For the first time he becomes an individual — that is the individual I am talking about.
That individual will certainly have an impact on human consciousness, because when something happens in this consciousness of man it affects (the whole), to a very microscopic extent maybe. So, this is a simile: when you throw a stone in a pool, it sets in motion circular waves. In exactly the same way, it is very slow, very
slow— it is something which cannot be measured with anything.
So, maybe that's the only hope that man has — that's the first time such an individual becomes a man — otherwise he's an animal. And he has remained an animal because of the heritage, because the heritage has made it possible, from the point of view of Nature, for the unfit to remain; otherwise Nature would have rejected them a long time ago. It has become possible for the unfit to survive — not the survival of the fittest (Laughs), but of those unfit to survive — and religion is responsible for that. That's my argument. You may not agree. You won't agree.
Q: Does it mean that this ideal man....
UG: He's not a perfect man, he's not an ideal man — he cannot be a model for others.
Q: How do you refer to him?
UG: He's an individual. He becomes the man, freed from all the animal traits in him. You see, animals follow, animals create leaders, and the animal traits are still persisting there in man — that is why he creates a leader, the top-dog, and follows.
Q: Is he something like a superman?
UG: He's like a flower, Sir. This is like a flower. And each flower is unique.
Q: His state is the natural state that you very often mention?
UG: You become yourself. You see, the shock that your dependence on the entire heritage of mankind has been wrong — the