The Influence of UG Krishnamurti on Yoga
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Mark Whitwell and UG Krishnamurti in a home somewhere.
“You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditation, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don’t have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn’t care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.”
What to make of such statements?
There was no denying UG Krishnamurti was an ususual and extremely attractive person, in the way that a cat is attractive. He was a natural man.
Because I was a student of Desikachar and Krishnamacharya, a student of yoga, I had to relate what UG Krishnamamurit was saying to yoga.
He made it easy, he spoke about it a lot and he sat on the ground with myself and with Melissa Forbes and showed us what natural movement looked like without any struggle, without any seeking.
It became clear that should any yoga arise, it is completely natural. It is what the body does naturally when it has been traumatised.
A body in a state of trauma will begin to move and breathe in beautiful rhythmic patterns with the breath. But this entire world of yoga has been linked to the spiritual and religious psychologies of working away on yourself trying to get somewhere.
Therefore the yoga is toxified by efforts in the mind and body to try and get somewhere.
This trying to get somewhere obstructs noticing the unitary condition that the body is already in. So if we take that seeking out of the yogas, the seeking trying to get somewhere, and know that it is a completely natural thing to do, an animal thing to do, to move and breathe and use the anatomy of the entire body to participate in the breath, then it is something quite different.
You can safely say that everyone has been programmed to seek through yoga. Trying to realise something through yoga.
People try to work out if yoga is “good or bad” as if the word itself did not encompass so many hilariously divergent practices, with potential for completely opposite moods of practice. I say that UG “held Krishnamacharya to the fire of his own teaching.” The Yoga Krishnamacharya and Desikachar were sharing was undoubtedly Tantric — the union of opposites.
Yet there was some latent tension as this powerful tradition came filtered through their Vedantic Brahmanic cultural background. Krishnamacharya made great strides in his commitment to teaching women, his insistence on adapting Yoga to the individual, and his refusal of orthodox positions of religious power for the sake of fulfilling his teachers’ request for him to teach Yoga—not a high status activity in India compared to other roles he might have held. Yet of course there lingered aspects of his own cultural framework — the longing search to combine with Ishvara, the Lord, in his case with Lord Vishnu.
UG himself was the embodiment of the union of opposites — literally half male and half female, like the mythic figure of the ardhanarishvara, half Shiva half Shakti. And Krishnamacharya saw this, and called him the greatest Yogi he had ever seen. UG studied with Krishnamacharya for three and a half years to try and manage his energy after his ‘calamity’, so it was not a passing judgement. Krishnamacharya humbly admitted that UG’s objection to the Yoga he taught — that it reversed his energy flow — was outside of his experience. This refinement of Krishnamacharya’s yoga to completely remove all and any seeking is the priceless contribution of UG to Yoga.
Desikachar loved UG. Melissa Forbes recalls being with UG when Desikachar would come to visit, and he would place his hands on UG's chest and back, front and back of the heart, and just walk around like that for some time. UG would never let people touch him sycophantically or anything like that, so this way very unusual. It was a sincere love relationship.
UG Krishnamurti (right) with TKV Desikachar and his students at the sannidhi of krishnamacharya
Both Desikachar and Krishnamacharya had immense love and respect for UG. UG was recognised by the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram as a jivamukti or liberated person, although he scorned and mocked such language himself, and this garnered immense respect within the Hindu world—besides which UG was just a naturally attractive and kind person.
UG would talk about “the nostril-holding arrogance of the yogis,” and to me this is similar to Krishnamacharya saying that the person who says they are a guru is not a guru. UG would throw deliberate provocation, insisting that all gurus should be “shot on sight, at sight.” If too many people started congregating around him, he would see the shoes gathered and say “this place is starting to stink like an ashram.”
He has a special siddhi to remove people’s seeking for alternative realities, alternative states. Sometimes this was almost like a psychic surgery. A person would show up thinking that UG was gonna be the one to “do it” for them, awaken their kundalini and make them explode out the top of their sahasra or something. Instead, he would devastate their hopes by telling them they were not qualified to become enlightened, and that it did not exist anyway. In the wake of disappointment and even defensive anger, many many people found a new kind of freedom without their habitual search for other states and experiences.
UG was saying, I am saying, that you don’t have to realise something through Yoga, that there is nothing to realise, you are already the unity of life, and you can’t deny that. It is a scientific fact, and you cannot deny that. You cannot deny that your body is an extraordinary intelligence in an extraordinary harmony with the cosmos already. You can’t deny that the beauty of life is arising as you, as the whole body. It is already given.
“First the death must take place, then yoga begins. Yoga is actually the body’s skill in bringing itself back from the state of clinical death.”
So that mathematical statement is understood and heard, and you can go, “oh ok, I’m good, I’m done, I’m happy sitting here in my house in lockdown. My body is a unity with the stars. With the entire Mother Earth, with the sun and moon, with the plant kingdom, with the water and earth, and any unseen conditions of the cosmos.” Because it’s true!
Your body is in a profound harmony with all tangible and intangible conditions of the cosmos. And if you feel the factual truth of that statement, you will do a big exhale and go, okay, I’m good. Even at home in lockdown! And then, if any yoga does arise for you, it will be simple participation in this given reality, not a seeking.
The reason I stand for yoga, the yoga from Krishnamacharya and Desikachar but as refined by UG, is that our patterned world of denial of life and the great mass patterning of society, the patterning of dissociation that causes us so much misery everywhere has to be deprogrammed somewhere.
We give these yogas to people and it deprograms them — it enables them to slough off the cultural patterns.
And I’ve got a plan for the whole world, that we all get deprogrammed from the lack of understanding, from the inability receive life.
There is a need to put this yoga into the world, so people can move and breath and reprogram their nervous system to relax. And then they might be able to hear this. Not a yoga of seeking. Not a manipulation of the body mind in any way.
“Real silence is explosive, it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. This is volcanic in its nature; it’s bubbling all the time – the energy, the life – that is its quality.”
