You have read about states.
The state of presence. The state of flow. The state of pure awareness. The state the meditators describe after the long retreats.
You have been hoping to get there.
The hoping has its own quality. A leaning forward. A small ache. A sense that here is not it, and there is.
This essay is about the place where there is not it either.
When U.G. was forty-nine, something happened to his body that he could not describe and refused to mythologize.
He called it the calamity. He said it lasted a week. He said his senses rewired. He said the man who had been searching for forty years stopped, not because the search succeeded but because the searcher quit.
Afterward he lived in what he called the natural state.
He spent the rest of his life saying it was not a state.
A state is something you enter and leave. A state has features. A state can be described, compared, ranked against other states.
The natural state, he said, had none of these.
It was not better than the state you are in. It was not different in any way you could verify. It was not even continuous, in the sense that there was no one there to hold it together from one moment to the next.
This is not enlightenment.
He said this constantly. It was the line his listeners most wanted to ignore.
They had come hoping he had reached something.
He told them he had reached nothing. He told them there was nothing to reach. He told them that what had happened to his body was a freak event, like a lightning strike, and that no practice could produce it.
They wrote down what he said and looked for the practice that would produce it.
You are doing this now.
You are reading about the natural state and your mind is sorting it into the category of things to attain.
It cannot help itself. That is its job.
Watch the sorting.
Watch the small lean forward when the essay describes what the state is like.
Watch the small disappointment when the essay says it is not a state.
The leaning and the disappointment are happening to a body that is already breathing, already sitting, already in the only condition it has ever been in.
There is no other condition.
You imagine that there is a quality of being you have not yet experienced.
The teachers describe it. The books describe it. The friends who came back from the retreat describe it.
What if there is no such quality.
What if everything that has ever been pointed at by the word awakening is what is happening to you right now, with no special character at all, and the only thing missing is the absence of the search for it.
The mind hears this and protests.
But I do not feel awake. I feel tired. I feel scattered. I feel like there must be more.
The feeling tired, the feeling scattered, the feeling that there must be more, are the condition. They are not obstacles to the condition.
This is harder than the gentler essays make it sound.
The gentler essays say the recognition is here. They imply the recognition has a flavor. The flavor is sometimes described as peace, sometimes as spaciousness, sometimes as the absence of struggle.
U.G. would say there is no flavor.
There is just the body. Breathing. Sitting. Reading these words.
That is the state. It is not a state.
If it had a flavor, you could be missing the flavor.
If it had no flavor, there is nothing to miss.
The natural state has no spiritual content whatsoever.
He said this in different ways for forty years. It was the line his listeners refused to hear.
They wanted the content. They had paid for the content with their lives.
You have paid too.
You have paid with hours on the cushion. With books. With retreats. With the small daily attention to your inner weather.
If you find out the natural state has no content, what was the payment for.
This is the question the essay cannot answer.
It is the question that has to sit in your chest unanswered for a while.
The honest version is this.
The payment was the payment. It bought what payments buy, which is the experience of paying. The experience of paying is not the natural state. The experience of paying is one of the things the natural state contains, the way the natural state contains the tea on the table and the dust on the windowsill.
There is no exchange rate between paying and arriving.
There is only paying, and then more paying, and at some point the paying stops, and what is left is what was always there.
What was always there has no name.
The name natural state is already wrong.
Every word the essay uses for it is wrong.
U.G. knew this. He used the words anyway. He had to use something.
He used them with the explicit instruction that they were wrong.
You are sitting in a chair. The body is breathing. The light is in the room.
This is not the natural state.
There is no natural state.
There is only this, with no name on it, and the lifelong habit of looking for something behind it.
The habit is what tires you.
Not the looking. The leaning that the looking sits inside.
When the leaning stops, nothing happens.
The room is the same. The body is the same. The mind keeps producing thoughts.
The only difference is that there is no longer anyone leaning toward a state that does not exist.
That is the whole report.
You will find it disappointing. The disappointment is the last form the leaning takes.
When the disappointment stops, you are simply here.
You have always been simply here.
The essay ends because there is nothing else to say.
Sources: U.G. Krishnamurti, The Mystique of Enlightenment (1982), No Way Out, The Courage to Stand Alone.