In Palm Springs with U.G. Krishnamurti

Each one of us is a unique creation of nature and an incomparable movement. A great intelligence is continuously working to maintain this living movement and its equilibrium with the external world. If somehow a complete trust—in Bengali we call it Sparipurno astha’ — develops in us, the naturally-induced order that is pre-programmed at birth, will begin to unfold. Life then begins to function in a very different way. The internal power that is associated with the pre-programmed order is so far beyond our imagination that its exhibition and extension are incomprehensible. Everything that you need to move in the field of living is very naturally supplied by that power, the power that comes out of that order.

- Sabyasachi Guha

U G. Krishnamurti replied directly, “No way!” A research physicist in New Jersey's Rutgers University, the forty-two-year-old Sabyasachi had searched everywhere for God, Brahman and self-knowledge, and had finally asked U.G. directly, “What is the way?”

This answer took him back twenty-one years to a secluded bank on the Ganges in the middle of the night in Varanasi. There while gazing unmindfully at the river, he suddenly saw the dead body of a young boy his age floating under his feet. He thought to himself that the turbulent time he was passing through because of his political involvement in the past few years could have also turned him into a corpse. He was surprised that he was still alive.

The eldest son of Dr. Ajit Ranjan Guha and Sulekha Devi, Sabyasachi started skipping school when he was in sixth or seventh grade. This prompted his worried mother to send him to her guru Paramhansa Durgaprasanna Brahmachari's ashram and boarding school in Palashi, West Bengal. There he organized a football team with the village boys, and they would begin their day with an early morning match before gathering to pay salutations to the guru. When his Socialist father was put behind bars during a national Emergency, he returned to Hindmotor, his hometown, after two years. Now he wanted to be a football star. Sensing his highly energetic son's lack of motivation for a suitable career, his father handed him two books - one on Swami Vivekananda and the other on Albert Einstein. Swami Vivekananda's impact was not felt immediately but Einstein made a huge impres sion on his young mind. In order to understand the theory of relativity, he taught himself Calculus in tenth grade and surprised his parents by earning a national scholarship and admission to the renowned Presidency College in Kolkata to study science. There he was soon drawn into the massive labor movement that was sweeping across not only Bengal but large parts of India and around the world as well. He traveled through villages and cities with almost no food or shelter, living amongst the most impoverished and exploited people. Exhausted and disillusioned, he had landed in Varanasi as a fugitive. He spent most of his time in the Banaras Hindu University library reading spiritual books and trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. All this reading did not appease his internal restlessness.

After finishing his studies in India, he married Bhamidipathy Lakshmi Rao, whom he had met in Rourkela, where he was completing his Master's degree. Soon afterwards, she moved to the USA as a post-doctoral fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Guha then joined her and began working in the Physics department of the same university. Seven years later, through strange circumstances, he met U.G. Krishnamurti who shattered his knowledge about spirituality and practices, enabling him to approach his most desirable destination, where emancipation is written all over the skies ... yet, according to U.G., it is a “No way!”

Sabyasachi Guha presently spends his time travelling and talking to interested friends. He is affectionately called Pradeep (meaning lamp in Bengali) by his friends from his hometown. They believe he has been lighting countless “lamps” tirelessly. Other close friends call him Guha, which means cave in Bengali. They say it is easy to enter this cave but impossible to measure its depth.

This book is an extraordinary and moving account of one of Guha's early interactions with U.G. Rajat Paul Dwapan Majumda Swapan Majumdar Kolkata 2009 (Translated from Bengali Book)

The idea for Fourteen Days in Palm Springs with U.G. Krishnamurti (Bengali) took root when I started writing letters to my dear friend Ramakrishna Chatterjee in Kolkata to describe my experiences with U.G. Krishnamurti when I spent fourteen days with him in Palm Springs, California in 1996. Ramakrishna's deep interest and enthusiasm in spiritual matters helped me to complete this work. My friends Swapan, Dipankar, Shankar, Rajat, Kamal, Utpal, Subhasis, Tapas, Sangita, Partha and Sunanda have all helped me in various ways. The Bengali book would not have been published but for Pinaki Chakraborty, who took full responsibility for getting it printed.

U.G. Krishnamurti is the soul and the prime mover of this book. His memory is my fundamental inspiration.

From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Franz Kafka

I was introduced to Sabyasachi Guha in 2002 on the same Iday that I first met U.G. Krishnamurti. Guha answered the hotel room phone that day when I called up to gain access to room 2107. I remember being taken aback by the question, “What do you want?”, but I realized later that the question came from the man sitting next to him. Indeed, what I wanted at the time was to figure out how the hell this guy U.G. got out of the dilemma I seemed to face. I already sensed that this question would get me nowhere, so I said I just wanted to thank him for freeing me from my obsession with “the other Krishnamurti”. That day I was reduced to a state of profound confusion similar to but distinctly different from what happened when I was exposed to the teachings of the “other”, older, Krishnamurti named Jiddu. What I did not know at the time was that the JK obsession was one Guha and I both shared once and was probably a strong reason the two of us came to see U.G. This JK character had been the main focus of U.G.'s life too until the moment of his own "calamity”. Guha's diary, In Palm Springs with U.G. Krishnamurti a beautifully rendered document of a transformative encounter, has brought these events of my life into intense focus after what seems like a long time.

U.G. always had a series of one-liners to sum up his friends' quirks. In the case of Guha, U.G. variously joked that the he was an example of what is known as “the glee of insanity” manifested in his frequent outbursts of laughter. Toward the end of his life, he was also fond of announcing to the room that Guha was “the man to solve your energy crisis in the west, sir!”, a reference to the focus of his research in superconductivity at Rutgers University, New Jersey. My understanding is that superconductivity refers to a material in a state wherein maximum energy passes through the said material with zero resistance. This may also be the perfect metaphor for Guha as he appears here in these pages, a person with zero resistance to U.G. who was himself an unleashed source of natural energy

**Contents and Sample Pages**