THE NATURAL STATE-Initial Life of U.G.K; Chapter 1.1

       

I was brought up in a very religious atmosphere. My grandfather was a very cultured man. He knew Blavatsky [the founder of the Theosophical Society] and Olcott, and then, later on, the second and third generations of Theosophists. They all visited our house. He was a great lawyer, a very rich man, a very cultured man and, very strangely, a very orthodox man. He was a sort of mixed-up kid: orthodoxy, tradition on one side and then the opposite, Theosophy and the whole thing on the other side. He failed to establish a balance. That was the beginning of my problem.

[U.G. was often told that his mother had said, just before she died, that he "was born to a destiny immeasurably high." His grandfather took this very seriously and gave up his law practice to devote himself to U.G.'s upbringing and education. His grandparents and their friends were convinced that he was a yoga bhrashta, one who had come within inches of enlightenment in his past life.]

He had learned men on his payroll and he dedicated himself for some reason—I don't want to go into the whole business—to create a profound atmosphere for me and to educate me in the right way, inspired by the Theosophists and the whole lot. And so, every morning those fellows would come and read the Upanishads, Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi, the commentaries, the commentaries on commentaries, the whole lot, from four o'clock to six o'clock, and this little boy of five, six or seven years—I don't know—had to listen to all that crap. So much so that by the time I reached my seventh year I could repeat most of those things, the passages from the Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi and this, that and the other.

So many holy men visited my house—the Ramakrishna Order and the others; you name it, and those fellows had somehow visited that house—that was an open house for every holy man. So, one thing I discovered when I was quite young was that they were all hypocrites: they said something, they believed something, and their lives were shallow, nothing. I lived in the midst of people who talked of these things everlastingly—everybody was false, I can tell you. So somehow, what you call existentialist nausea—revulsion against everything sacred and everything holy—crept into my system and threw everything out

That was the beginning of my search. I did everything, all the austerities. I was so young but I was determined to find out if there was any such thing as enlightenment. I wanted that very much. Otherwise, I wouldn't have given my life. Then my real search began. All my religious background was there in me. Then I started exploring. For some years I studied psychology and also philosophy, Eastern and Western, mysticism, all the modern sciences, everything. The whole area of human knowledge I started exploring on my own.

Before my forty-ninth year I had so many powers, so many experiences, but I didn't pay any attention to them. The moment I saw someone I could see their entire past, present and future without their telling me anything. I didn't use them. I was wondering, puzzled, you see, "Why do I have this power?" Sometimes I said things and they always happened. I couldn't figure out the mechanism of that. I tried to. They always happened. I didn't play with it. Then it had certain unpleasant consequences and created suffering for some people.

[U.G. was travelling all over the world, still lecturing. In 1955, leaving his daughters in India, he and his wife moved to the United States in search of treatment for his son Vasant's polio. By 1961 his money was finished, and he felt beginning within him a tremendous upheaval which he could not and did not wish to control, and which was to last six years and end with the 'calamity'. His marriage broke up. He put his wife and sons—a second, Kumar, had been born in Chicago—on a plane to India, and he went to London. He arrived penniless and began roaming the city. For three years he lived idly in the streets. His friends saw him as heading on a headlong course downhill, but he says that at the time his life seemed perfectly natural to him. Later, religious-minded people were to use the mystics' phrase 'the dark night of the soul' to describe those years, but in his view there was "no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling with urges, no poetic climaxes, but just a simple withering away of the will."]