aflatun wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:45 pm
Saengnapha wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:37 pm
robertk wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2017 10:23 am
it would be interesting to.hear more about U.G....
Not sure what you would like to know. Is there something in particular?
Loaded question, but can you give a summary of his teachings based on your experience with him? I've watched some videos and while I find some things he says interesting, and his sometimes rough handling of his followers entertaining, I have to say I can't quite follow him!
And...How did he feel about your interest in Buddhism?
Aflatun,
A belated response to your post. Since this is a Buddhist board, I didn't want to introduce UG into it to dissuade anyone from Buddhist practice. UG never discouraged anyone from pursuing whatever they wanted. He simply talked about his own state, what happened to him, and the subsequent 'condition' that it left him in. When people brought him views of others, he would simply take them apart in his inimitable way to show you what you were attempting to do, why you were attempting to do it, and how your own desire was leading you in the wrong direction. It was never a matter of making more of an effort, or a different effort, or no effort. What he talked about was his own state, the natural state, where there was never any effort to be or become anything. His whole 'teaching', was how our attempts to do something about our state, our suffering, furthered the suffering because the tools we used were created by what he called 'the world-mind', which is conditioned and only interested in its own survival. Thought was the main tool he criticized as being part of the fabrication of world-mind and not capable of leading you away from this circular fabrication.
The inevitable question put to him was 'well what do we do if everything we know and experience is this world-mind that creates suffering?' His answer was there is nothing you can do. This was said not to depress you, but to awaken you. To free you from the wrong effort and the ideas that the world-mind imparts. He often told me that the first thing that has to stop is your seeking, that it is taking you in the wrong direction. You have to become disenchanted and dispassionate as the Buddha stated. Then there is the possibility of that moment that happened to him, that he called his 'calamity', which brought the whole house down.
For me, seeking is a sign that disenchantment and dispassion are not established. These seem to be conditions for awakening but they seem to come about only after exhausting all one's attempts at getting 'there'. UG often would say that 'there' is part of the world-mind's influence and has no reality to it. It simply doesn't exist. That when you discover that you have been fooling yourself, discover the deception, it is nothing like you ever imagined it to be.