Louis Brawley - Goner: The Final Travels of UG Krishnamurti

This book is possible thanks to Mukunda, Balaji, Mahesh, Anirban,
the Guhas, Roger, Nancy, Aiden, Jesse and, of course, UG.

GONER

First edition published May 2011 by N ON D UALITY P RESS
Revised edition June 2013

Louis Brawley 2011, 2013
Non-Duality Press 2011, 2013

N ON - D UALITY P RESS | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ
United Kingdom

eISBN: 978-0-9566432-7-8
www.non-dualitypress.org

You are trying to present me as a religious man, which I am not. You are failing to comprehend the most important thing that I am emphasizing. There is no religious content, no mystical overtones at all, in what I am saying. Man has to be saved from the saviors of mankind! The religious peoplethey kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind. Throw them out! That is courage itself, because of the courage there; not the courage you practice.

goner
n
Slang a person or thing beyond help or recovery, esp a person who is dead or about to die

Collins English DictionaryComplete and Unabridged HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

UG often professed a liking for American underground slang. More than once he told the story that while he was down and out in London with his head missing he would sit in the British Library in the chair where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital . He spent hours reading a tome called the Dictionary of American Underground Slang to pass the time. Goner was one of his favorite words to describe the people who hung around him.

CHAPTER 1

March 13, 2007

On March 13, 2007 I walked out the door to what we called his cave knowing it was the last time I would see him alive. A life of constant travel with a sage was coming to an end and I was so exhausted I couldnt think. After spending day and night with him for almost eight weeks the door clicked shut behind me and a five-year encounter with oblivion ended, or so it seemed at the time. The curtains were pulled against the fresh smell of the garden where the grass was glistening with dew and the scents of a lush Italian garden. The two-hundred-year-old palm tree in the middle of the garden threw a long cool shadow across the sparkling green lawn where for eight weeks UG Krishnamurti spent his final days sitting up long enough to shout at us, collapsing after increasingly shorter bursts of invective against everything mankind thought, felt and believed.

He monitored his own death with indifferent curiosity.

How am I doing, doc? he would ask any one of his medical friends.

Yet, unlike the recovery after his last fall, he grew gradually weaker each day. He seemed incapable of or uninterested in doing anything that might prolong the misery; that was his assessment of the usual medical treatment we seek in order to sustain life in a constant battle of ideas verses the natural order. Seeking medical help in any form was out of the question, so it took a while to realize that he might actually die, because of his indifference to the outcome of his situation. To the end of his days there was a wild card up his sleeve. Hed come close to dying more than once in his life already. The fact is, by all accounts hed already died and been re-born years before, not spiritually, but literally, physically.

Our last meeting was silent. He allowed me to come on the condition there would be no talking. For days Id been thinking I should thank him, tell him what he meant to me, how lucky I was to have met him, but the timing never seemed right. Old friends were professing their love, giving heartfelt testimony about the gratitude they felt, asking for final blessings or just saying goodbye, yet Id been in there with him every night and day for weeks and I knew that he knew everything I was thinking and feeling. It was unnecessary.

Suddenly I was out in the garden, swept into a new life on a fierce current. That was it. The human tornado that had been blowing through my life was gone.

Mahesh was waiting for me in the driveway. It seems fitting that a Bollywood director was taking over for the final days of packing him up. Everything about the most obscure man in the universe was a contradiction that made perfect non-sense.

Well?

Thats it. He gave me everything I need; asking for more would be ridiculous.

I know it doesnt look like it now, but when you look back on this day it will be the most important day of your life.

I wasnt so sure about that, but after Maheshs pep talk, walking across the garden to the apartment, a warm fear wormed right up my spine. It felt like I was walking off a cliff.

I knew I was already lucky to have met, let alone spent so much time with a man like him. It was a stroke of dumb luck in an otherwise ordinary life. He had everything I wanted, or so I thought as long as I was sitting in front of him. He was a human wilderness, fearless and unpredictable. The first day I met him he confirmed my darkest suspicions about the bullshit world surrounding me; at the same time he was an affirmation of life at every turn. His words were simple and baffling, hilarious, repetitive and boring at times, but his actions were clear as a bell ringing in a forest.

When I left his side that day, I carried the words inside me where he left them like gifts to be opened later. His company was a teaching. He was so alive there was no room for understanding. He was too quick for that sort of crap.

I sensed all this more than I understood it from the first encounter with him. Very soon after meeting him I knew Id stumbled into something like a cosmic lottery win. As my misery intensified, I stuck it out, knowing damn well that whatever happened to me as long as I was around him would be for the best. For a bunch of crazy reasons I was able to get close to him almost immediately and from then on my life raced in unforeseen directions like a log broken loose from a jam and thrown over a waterfall.

What can I say? Hanging around with him was just like that.

CHAPTER 2

I was born and brought up in small-town America at the height of the cold war and the explosion of capitalist pop culture. Being Catholic in my family meant attending church every Sunday which was more than enough to turn me off religion as a kid. Parochial school and the sadistic nuns who went along with it the rest of the week sealed the deal. By the time I escaped the clutches of that school I had lost any interest in religion or god, at least for the time being. Public high school was a relief from the force-fed religion my mother took more to heart than my father, for whom being Catholic was a matter of pride. My father was also proud of being Irish like the Kennedys and wore Brooks Brothers suits and spit-shine wing-tip shoes. Being middle class in any country is like being sandwiched between a tortured urge to be rich and the terror of being perceived as poor. My response to my fathers bullshit ambitions was juvenile delinquent behavior. Heavy drinking, drug consumption and shoplifting were my remedies for being habitually annoyed by adults and chronically short of cash.