What U.G. Krishnamurti did for Yoga | Mark Whitwell

“But it grieves my heart love

To see you tryin’ to be a part of

A world that just don’t exist

It’s all just a dream, babe

A vacuum, a scheme, babe

That sucks you into feelin’ like this”

— Bob Dylan, To Ramona

For thousands of years, humanity has suffered the proposal that Truth or God is absent and needs to be found. The population has been brainwashed into the pursuit of a transcendent Truth that supposedly lies ‘beyond the veil’ of ordinary, presently arising conditions.

In the belief that there is somewhere amazing to get to, the intrinsic wonder of ordinary conditions — the body, birth, sex, women, and death — is denied. The search for God obliterates our ability to notice the wonder that is already present in us, as us and around us.

Whether religious or no, the movement of mind toward an imagined future state is the axiom of all patriarchal cultures. Few are spared. It is the very source of human suffering.

Convinced of a future possibility of perfection, union with God, or permanent happiness (a.k.a. enlightenment), the mind tries to get us there with all its energy and intelligence; and the mind’s urgent effort toward God as ‘other’ produces a tremendous stress in the body-mind.

“You can’t imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body,” my friend U.G. Krishnamurti observed.

“Society has put before you the ideal of a perfect man. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages and saints, and so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you which you call the self […] You are a living creature yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life. That is something very unnatural.” — The Natural State

Although, he was recognized by the orthodoxy of Vedanta as a Jivamukti (a liberated soul), U.G. would reject all such claims, terms and titles and was utterly unwilling to be identified with the cultural logics of religious or spiritual seeking.

Due to his steadfast refusal to abide the idea that one person could be senior to another (or second to another) within the hierarchies of spiritual/ religious attainment, he gained the nickname ‘the raging sage’ — videos of U.G. yelling at people that their problems are not real can be found on youtube. “The very fact that you are here is your problem,” he would say to seekers who came to his door looking for a boon.

U.G. declared and embodied the fact that everybody is in the natural state already; everybody is the wonder, harmony and beauty of the cosmos already; that the body does not care in the slightest for your samadhis and bliss-states; that Life does not come in the form of a problem or a solution or even a question; Life is simply happening in all its radiance and you are that: and that is the end of the story.

Although he remains relatively obscure within the worlds of mainstream yoga, U.G. made a significant contribution to yoga by clarifying for all time that Yoga is participation in the natural state of the body and not a thought-created struggle for a future peace known as ‘enlightenment.’

The natural state of the body is the peace, power, harmony, relatedness, intelligence and extreme sensitivity that is always functioning as the body-mind of every person; the natural state is a perfect balance of strength and softness, male and female, receptivity and penetration. Yoga is to unqualify the whole body from the imposition of mind and let it bloom like a flower.

It was U.G.’s birthday on July 9th. He was a dear friend who is missed by many. What his life represented continues to flow into the world: the rejection of hierarchy; the disenchantment of exalted spiritual states; the blasting of spiritual commercialism; and a presence that was utterly loving as well as mischievous.

Thank you U.G.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.