“All your questions are born of your answers” - UG

What we ‘know’ is who ‘we’ are.’

Culturally filtered, acquired knowledge makes each of us unique. We are all products of a lifetime of intellectual investment.

What each of us know, is the subset of all possible solutions and answers given by ‘others’ for day-to-day problems across every sphere of life – social, political, spiritual or the mundane.

No wonder, greed for knowledge is as powerful as the greed for money.

Every moment, consciously or unconsciously, we are seeking answers from this collective pool of what others have said, felt and experienced.

Coming to intellectual curiosity, many of the fundamental questions of humanity, to this day, have remained the same,
“What is the purpose of life? What is God? What is enlightenment?”

Some wise men and women, here and there, seem to have found their own answers to these burning questions, now part of the vast pool of common knowledge.

While questions have fundamentally remained the same, answers given by the worthies, are each strikingly different and unique.

Perhaps the intellectual makeup, the integrity, intensity, humaneness, and sincerity of the questioner throws up a unique question (specific to the individual) that results in a unique answer.

No wonder, we see multitude of answers, for seemingly, the very same question! We find that many of these answers even contradict one another, giving rise to more confusion, and more questions.

UG’s remarkable observation is that any borrowed answer will midwife the birth of new questions, tormenting you endlessly!

UG said that your question must be your own, and not borrowed from others, “I don’t have any answer” but “In a way, I could try and help you formulate your own question.”

Finally, when you come up with your own question, that doesn’t let you sleep, there is a possibility of finding your own answer!

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Selfishness is ‘survival-ness’ – UG

Selfishness is ‘survival-ness’ – UG

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Selfishness is considered evil and held in contempt by most cultures. Selfishness smacks of moral overtones and is considered synonymous with ‘greed’ in many lexicons of the world.

In this lively, captivating talk, UG calls our attention to the little-known facet or shade of ‘selfishness.’ He shows us that it is not such an evil force, after all. It is the benign life force, the primal drive playing its part everywhere in nature.

Selfishness, in this sense, ensures the ‘survival and function’ of every individual cell, and in coordination with the surrounding cells, the survival and function of the entire living organism.

‘Selfishness’, per UG, is nothing but ‘Survival-ness.’

In its benign form, ‘selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’ is the propensity or tendency of a living cell to care, nourish, protect, survive, and thrive in the natural environment. It is the primitive life force animating the plant, animal, or the human.

Most importantly every living cell is ‘actually and factually’ a phenomenal ‘team player.’ It ‘knows’ that even its own survival is not possible without the survival of all the other adjoining cells, else it is game over!

With its ‘embedded software’ and ‘hardware’, every cell ‘knows’ its part in the grand scheme of things. Like a great soccer team, the individual cell plays its contributory role, as part and parcel of a bigger team, in extraordinary coordination with all other players.

To demonstrate the necessity or significance of this 'benign' form of ‘selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’, let us consider an airplane flying at 40,000 feet above the sea level.

As we all know, every commercial jet, flying at high altitudes, is artificially pressurized (Remember the pressure bumps on your eardrums during take-offs or touch downs?). That is, all passengers will be supplied with pressurized air inside the aircraft cabin throughout the flight. This supply pressure is equal to the quality (pressure) of air that you might breathe when you are on top of a mountain, roughly 8000 feet high. We call this, the ‘cabin altitude’.

Some bigger, longer-range airplanes offer cabin altitudes of 6000 feet (much easier on your lungs during long-haul flights).

We all know that the air pressure will become lesser and lesser as we go on up and up a mountain. We begin to gasp for breath after a certain point and we cannot survive without an oxygen (pressurized) cylinder above an altitude of 15,000 feet.

Now, imagine if a door bursts open or cracks open (in the news, lately) while flying at 40,000 feet! The cabin will suddenly suffer a pressure loss , also called ‘cabin decompression’ or depressurization. No one can survive the low-pressure air in the environment at 40,000 feet altitude. It is catastrophic to all life forms. Within 8 to 9 seconds, one might lose consciousness and within a few more minutes, one could collapse and die!

Now recall the safety demo given to you before the takeoff about the dangers of cabin decompression, of how the oxygen masks deploy during such times from the overhead bins.

The cabin crew instructions are very succinct and explicit about this danger. And the instruction might even sound ‘selfish’:

“In the event of a sudden cabin decompression, pull the oxygen mask in front of you, secure the mask on yourself FIRST and start breathing normally. AND THEN AND ONLY THEN help your baby or your partner with their oxygen masks.”

Are they encouraging selfishness?

With every passing second, chances of your survival get slimmer and slimmer in a hostile environment like the high altitudes. At 40,000 feet, instead of securing oxygen mask on yourself first, practicing some form of ‘religion’ or ‘selflessness’ will only kill you. Takes only a few seconds for you to become unconscious. You faint and become incapacitated. Without being ‘selfish’ and alive, you will be of no use to anyone – neither to yourself nor to your child nor your partner!

‘Selfishness’ or ‘survival-ness’ remains the primal force at the cellular level. Nature has designed every cell to be ‘selfish.’ At the same time, it has bestowed the intelligence in the cell to remain a ‘team player’, in total harmony and balance with neighboring cells.

On the other hand, a cancer cell is not a normal cell. It is not a team player. It has turned rogue and ‘greedy’, guzzling all nutrients only for itself, dividing and growing alarmingly, invading other tissues and organs with life threatening consequences for all, very typical of human greed!

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Transcript:

Q: Did you say that our bodies are reactors?

UG: The brain, I said.

You see, first of all, you know, the division of that unit (called the ‘human body’), if I may call it, which is not separate from the whole of nature, does not divide itself into brain, into cells, into heart, into all those divisions.

It (localization) is for the (benefit of the) doctor to localize the particular part of the body to understand, to know more and more about it.

Otherwise, you will be surprised that every cell in the body has a memory of its own now (recently discovered by science). So, it (the cell) is interested in its survival. So, it knows that its survival depends on the survival of the cell, next to it. That’s the reason there is a COOPERATION (among the 60 trillion cells in the body).

Our phony culture says that ‘you must love your neighbor as thyself’ and that ‘cooperation is something extraordinary’, ‘we should cooperate with everybody’, that’s all phony-baloney!

But here it (the cell) knows in its own way, and that knowing is only for the survival!

It is SELFISH to its very core.

The unfortunate situation we find ourselves in is ‘creation of some selfless thing (goal) out there (value system)’. So it is that (value system) that is responsible for the misery but not the selfishness ( in operation in the natural scheme) that is very essential for its survival.

This selfishness which is part and parcel of the living unit here, cannot harm (disrupt) anything.

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“What is Life? I really don’t know!” – UG

UG, afresh, full of energy and vitality, is effortlessly taking on the intellectual offensive of a roomful of sharp-tongued, theorizing philosophers. Armed with matchless logic and reasoning, the questioners are hell-bent on teasing out the definition of Life on their own intellectual terms and conditions.

As with UG, the vitality of life is on full display, overshadowing the rigidity of intellect.

A bubbling UG, unfazed by intense probing and prodding, maintains that Life is beyond thought or intellect. Life has its own rhythm, its own continuum, way beyond the grasp or boundaries of finite thinking instigated by intellect. And one can never experience Life!

The acquired, sharpened intellect is only an artificial construct, a ‘squatter’ in the biological system. Intellect is the ‘creator’ throwing up ideas and concepts as opposed to the brain which is a ‘reactor’ responding to stimuli to ensure biological function and survival.

Many times, we are easily swayed by artifice or mental conjecture of a mighty intellect, falling prey to its superior reasoning and logic. This is how powerful people and leaders of humanity continue to dictate our thinking, impacting our lives through their peculiar ideas, ideals and ideologies.

The sheer number of mega awards, rewards, prizes instituted globally to celebrate intellectual feats (mental gymnastics) is an unmistakable sign that we slavishly surrender to intellectual hegemony.

UG emphasized and re-emphasized that extreme intellectualization (over-sharpening of the instrument), other than for purposes of learning for earning, of functioning and survival, is a sheer drain on our energy and vitality.

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Q: How do you define Life? If you define a Non-Life, that is ( that will help define) for the rest of your Life…

UG: What is the point in capturing something ‘living’ within the framework of a dead structure and define it? Why do you want to define Life?

Q: Why do you NOT want to define?

UG: We are all defining Life all the time. You see…how to live?

I DON’T KNOW A THING ABOUT LIFE!

The Life never asks the question … am I alive or dead?

If you ask me the question, Are you alive? I would say certainly I am alive because of all these definitions, because of all the information given to me by the doctors and you (too are alive ) because you are sitting here and you are talking or you are responding to the stimuli, you are doing all kinds of things so you are very much alive.

Good, I am delighted that I am alive but the fact that I am alive is very difficult for me to experience.

What is death?  What is Life? I REALLY DON’T KNOW. It is expressing itself…

The expression of Life is energy. You are the expression of Life, I am the expression of Life, the mosquito, if there is, that is the expression of life.

Everything that is there around, is the expression of the same Life!

There is an integral unity but unfortunately we separate ourselves and we have given to ourselves the tremendous IDEA that we are quite different, place ourselves on the top of the whole creation but we are not (different or separate from Life). We ( existing as psychological entities) are NOTHING in the scheme of things. You are no more important!

All of us, all these human bodies will be used by nature because it needs this energy somewhere else. If not cancer, if not AIDS, it will be something else, it will wipe us all out! You can have any number of doctors in this world. They are not going to do it! It is not a pessimistic (view)

…You are no more important in the scheme of things but through our THINKING we are made to believe that we are something extraordinary, that we are souls, that we are life…

'Primal Thinking vs Conceptual Thinking' - UG's perspective

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Basic thinking vs Conceptual thinking

In this spellbinding exchange, UG lays out that ‘thinking’ in its most raw form is a primal survival mechanism, not just limited to humans, but prevalent across entire creation. He then explicates how culture or human value system has distorted this basic, fundamental thinking into its most abusive, disruptive and dangerous form.

Raw or primal thinking is common to the ant, the dog and the human. This form of thinking is solely for purposes of efficient functioning (food and shelter) and survival (protection against threats). UG holds that inventing any other purpose or goal for thought or thinking would be an abuse of the primal mechanism or the gift of nature! Period.

As opposed to this fundamental purpose for thought or thinking, the human society or culture coaxes us to use the instrument to chase after its fabricated goods - the unnatural and artificial ideas, ideals, goals or purposes. This fosters the ‘goal-driven’ or ‘purpose-driven’ or ‘demand-driven’ or ‘conceptual’ thinking in humans.

No doubt, conceptual thinking has given us some great wonders of technology - electricity, computer, the airplane etc. but it has also invented the most destructive instruments of war like the nuclear bomb etc. !

The movement away from the basic or primal thinking to conceptual thinking is a culturally driven phenomenon that imposes a huge (stressful) cognitive load on our biology. This guzzles huge amounts of energy causing neurological and pathological disorders.

UG raises the red flag about such culturally driven, disruptive forms of thinking saying, ‘Thought is your enemy!’

His sagely counsel is to : ‘Stop thinking (chasing after goals) and start living’!

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Transcription of the Clip:

Q: When the person is born, the organism is born, you mean to say that the brain will not think at all and only the society puts in the values?

UG: It all depends upon, you see, what you mean by ‘thinking’, even animals do a sort of thinking in the sense that the dog knows that you are the master or you are not the master, the dog knows its way back home. You see, that’s what you want to call it ‘thinking’, is all together a different thing.

But what you mean by thinking is to use thoughts put in by the society or culture or whatever you want to call, ‘to achieve certain goals’. So, you place so called spiritual goals on so called ‘higher level’, achieving a goal. It doesn’t matter what the goal is (say) happiness.

We are not concerned about God, truth, reality, enlightenment and all that stuff, you can brush all that aside but everybody, whether he is here or in India or in America or in Australia or Russia – is only interested in one thing! That is, happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without one moment of pain! That is what everybody wants!

So our God, enlightenment, all that stuff, is the ultimate pleasure that is placed before us as the goal. And the instrument which you are using to achieve your so called spiritual goals – permanent happiness, permanent bliss, eternal happiness, God knows what, is the same instrument that everybody, even the thief there in the prison is using (exactly the same instrument) to get out of prison, as the one you are using to achieve your spiritual goals. It is matter. Thought is matter. So all your spiritual goals are materialistic.

When you go to a temple or church, what do you do? … What are your prayers? You want this, you want that, you want material goods, if you don’t want material goods, you want spiritual goods, if you don’t want spiritual goods, some eternal goods…

Q: You are saying that the survival mechanism that has gone in the wrong direction?

UG: The survival mechanism that is necessary for the survival of the body is already there, you don’t have to do a thing about it!

Q: Then why is it there? Why the demand (to achieve a goal) is there?

UG: The demand is introduced by culture, that is all I am pointing out! It is the tragedy of man!

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