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Rating: 
Summary: Final message is good, but style may not be pleasing to some
Review: As it is said that TRUTH can't be explained in words, one should understand the nature of TRUTH directly. The words of UG will strongly discourage you from using the 'thinking apparatus' for this purpose. The style is aggressive, blaming and fuming (many times). I think, not all will be happy with his style. One has to search out the message for himself. There may be a more pleasant way of comunicating the same message. His anti-guru, anti-religion voice is some thing you may have to bear with and get moving, and take only the clues about 'enlightenment'.UG has undergone various practices in yoga and vedanta. Though now he denounces 'any system', he does use terminology from various Hindu disciplines, to explain the 'natural state'. I too appreciate UGs views that if we can free ourselves from all the 'past', that will be enlightenment. He is communicating that 'liberation' is being free from notion of an individual-self and he says that it is the 'natural state'. He also says that it is not volitional i.e you can not get to that state by your choice and effort. But, he also says that you can not escape 'sadhana' by volition. So, people who are trying to understand and live that state of 'absence of individual-self', at this time by volition, will surely benefit by reading his expression of what it means to live as 'no individual-self'. Here are some paragraphs, which I picked from the online book at http://www.well.com/user/jct/ They may help to understand this phenomenon of enlightenment. It will not go waste if any seeker reads it. But be warned that he is not going to come out as a 'kind' teacher. I regret that I am not able to present here many beautiful thoughts of UG, because of space limitaion. ***
I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize -- that's the realization I am talking about. Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage. In the natural state there is no entity who is co-ordinating the messages from the different senses. Each sense is functioning independently in its own way. When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to co-ordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a response, still there is no co-ordinator, but there is a temporary state of co- ordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there is only the unco-ordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart -- not that it was ever there; but the illusory continuity -- it's finished once and for all. The personality does not change when you come into this state. You are, after all, a computer machine, which reacts as it has been programmed. It is in fact your present effort to change yourself that is taking you away from yourself and keeping you from functioning in the natural way. The personality will remain the same. Don't expect such a man to become free from anger or idiosyncrasies. Don't expect some kind of spiritual humility. Such a man may be the most arrogant person you have ever met, because he is touching life at a unique place where no man has touched before. This is not a state of omniscience, wherein all of man's eternal questions are answered; rather it is a state in which the questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for those questions. --- Your emotions are more complex, but it is the same process. Why do you have to tell yourself that you are angry, that you are envious of someone else, or that sex is bothering you? I am not saying anything about fulfilling or not fulfilling. There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labelling brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. What you call "I" is nothing but this word 'red bag', 'bench', 'steps', 'banister', 'light bulb', 'angry', 'blissful', 'jealous', or whatever. Why can't you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to the 'you'. --- You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot co-exist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock, once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the 'you', would collapse, and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at -- that is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there, again experiencing the old, what you know. What is necessary for man is to free himself from the entire past of mankind, not only his individual past. That is to say, you have to free yourself from what every man before you has thought, felt and experienced -- then only is it possible for you to be yourself. The whole purpose of my talking to people is to point out the uniqueness of every individual. Culture or civilization or whatever you might call it has always tried to fit us into a framework. Man is not man at all; I call him a 'unique animal' -- and man will remain a unique animal as long as he's burdened by the culture. The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: "How, how, how?"
Rating: 
Summary: Great Philosophy
Review: Krishnamurti is best understood if one understands the religions that dominate his culture in India (and even ones that are influenced from hindu belief, even those far removed, like Taoism). Much of what the critic below says is true, that Krishnamurti does not offer many positive words, that he often tells a speaker that what he is saying is false. These practices were/are common in eastern religions. These are methods to get the seeker to throw away any thoughts they have by presenting the opposite, since thought is considered to them the root of all problems in life (if you stop thinking you have a problem or not think you need this or that, then you have no problem). Krishnamurti doesnt precisely respond in this way, but it might be beneficial to understand eastern thinking in order to understand Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti was affected by this, and his language is only unique as it comes from him, instead of someone else. He is not saying many new things - perhaps nothing he says is new - he just says old things in interesting ways that might perk up your ears.
But ultimately I found that what Krishnamurti says can be intepreted as either negative or positive (or anywhere in between), depending upon the listener. His intention is not to influence you in either direction. And Krishnamurti does not demand that he is the only one that possesses the truth (in fact he would say, I think, that one can never understand the truth), but the critic below would have you believe that what he is critizing about Krishnamurti is truth. We all say what we think. You can take it or leave it. And for some it may be better that they leave it.
Rating:
Summary: The Mystique of a man called UG.
Review: U.G. Krishnamurti is definately a character in the "spiritual" (he dislikes that word associated with him)community.
It is quite difficult to describe him and his system of thought since he doesn't really have one. I will attempt to do so only for the sake of the reader, not that it will be totally accurate since it will still be a label which he would probably himself disagree with. He's part philospher, guru, social commentator, and ironically-an anti-guru.
He seems to be a self realized man. His main attitude is that of breaking down all these spiritual systems, gimmicks, money making, scamish guru businesses. In short, pointing out the stranglehold that society can create in an individual who has been sucked into the system of always trying to fix yourself, change, improve or naively following a false spiritual teaching only to become more confused than when you started. His books do a lot of bashing. He's not a gentle, passive kind of guy, he's a negator of man made concepts and their many traps. Mostly he's tearing down ideologies not creating them.
From what I can absorb, most of what he says is quite true. You may not agree with it at first, but he plants a seed in you that germinates later, and makes you question. He even can come across a bit repulsive because he's so on the attack always.
Personally, I find him to be more enlightened than the famous J. Krishnamurti who UG. bashes also because he felt that altough J. Krishnamurti kept claiming the "no guru is necessary" philosphy, UG. felt that he was being hypocritical since his teachings became a bit of a system that was very institutionalized, he came out with dozens of books and got trapped in his own following, so U.G. Krishnamurti argues that JK. was in essence another self-inflated guru with a gimmicky system.
It's a bit difficult to get a direct positive outcome of U.G. Krishnamurti's teachings becuase most of the time he's on the negative, discarding mode, however in the discarding process, one can be forced to give up all these gimmicks and learn to just BE once again. Function from a more natural state of BEING instead of DOING practices all the time.
For "no-nonsense" type "seekers" that enjoy these types of teaching I very strongly recommend Nisargadatta Maharaj. Starting with his book I AM THAT and moving into his even more direct works that came later. Nisargadatta Maharaj while also being a annhilator of mind made concepts for the spiritual seeker, offered a more positive tone that is direct yet a bit more practical than UG. He was one of the few guru's that never got trapped and who sincerely pointed earnest seekers in the right direction
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