The man is no more present now, though the no-man is ever present.

U. G. Krishnamurti passed away in Vallecrossia, Italy on 22nd March. He was 89.

Whenever you feel high of your spiritual progress, when you begin to think you know it all, when you believe you are almost there, just read a couple of pages from UG. All these great feelings will be smashed into pieces, pulverized and powdered,  burned into ashes and blown away. UG had this exceptional talent to shock you from the core and make you stand naked with no hands to cover up. Most of them just ran away from him. Those who hung on had burns and bruises all along. Wonder how many must have come back really dead!

He detested any conceptualizations, especially that of spiritual matters. Plain simple physical functioning without the intervention of the discriminating thinking process is the natural state. According to UG, falling into that natural rhythm is all that is needed. That is freedom. But that fall is uncaused and can not be produced by will or effort. If enlightenment is nonvolitional and acausal,  then all the beliefs and efforts are futile. Nothing can bring it about and nothing can stop it either. Thus, in one stroke UG wipes off all the belief systems, spiritual practices, gurus and prophets who sells enlightenment for a price.

Some of his thoughts about thoughts follow.

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My interest is to emphasize that [thought] is not the instrument, and there is no other instrument. And when once this hits you, dawns upon you that thought is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, then there is no need for you to find out if any other instrument is necessary. No need for any other instrument. This very same structure that we are using, the instrument which we are using, has in a very ingenious way invented all kinds of things like intuition, right insight, right this, that, and the other. And to say that through this very insight we have come to understand something is the stumbling block. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless, because it is thought that has created what we call insight, and through that it is maintaining its continuity and status quo

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Questioner :  "How are we different from you, U.G.?"

U.G.  :  "It is the same for you, Sir. You are in no way different from me. It is only because you have created a thought barrier around your fictitious self that nothing physical takes place there."

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Any action that takes place at the conscious level of your thinking existence is a reaction. Pure, spontaneous action free of all previous actions is meaningless. The one and only action is the response of this living organism to the stimuli around it. That stimulus-response process is a unitary phenomenon. There is no division between action and reaction except when thought interferes and artificially separates them. Otherwise it is an automatic, unitary process, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. There is no need to stop it.

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You can't experience anything except through thought. You can't experience your own body except through the help of thought. The sensory perceptions are there. Your thoughts give form and definition to the body, otherwise you have no way of experiencing it. The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is "me". Anything you experience based on thought is an illusion.

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What is this silence you are talking about? The silence operates there in the city market. When I am talking, it is the ex-pression of the silence. You think there is no silence, when I am talking? You think there is silence when you close your eyes, sit in one corner and try to stop the flow of thoughts? You are just choked--that is not silence. Go to the forest--that roar is the silence. Go to a sea--that is silence. Go right into the center of the desert--that is silence. A volcano erupting--that is silence. Not the silent mind trying to experience "silence." Silence is energy bursting.

What is the `silence' that you are after? Do you hear those trucks passing by on the road and the flushing of the toilet? Do you want to escape from all this and go and sit in the caves? There is noise inside you wherever you go.

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It is just not possible for us to produce enlightened people on an assembly line. You know, if you look at history, even a country like India, which prides itself as a land of spirituality, has produced only a very few enlightened people. You can count them on your fingers. But unfortunately, in the market place, we have many claimants who say that they are enlightened, and they are in turn out to enlighten everybody. There is a market for that kind of thing. The demand and supply principle is responsible for that. But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in freeing or enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of knowing that he is a free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not something that can be shared with somebody, because it is not in the area of experience at all.