The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti Page B

of enlightenment and, if so, how far had they gotten? But enlightenment seems to be a well-defended redoubt whose location cannot be triangulated by speech, the only rule being that if you have to ask yourself if you have arrived, then it is certain you have not.
    Nevertheless, it does seem that a charmed circle of individuals have reached a state that corresponds to that of enlightenment as delineated—vaguely or rapturously—in scads of scriptures, diaries, copyrighted publications, and public depositions. And they appear to have come to it unwarned, sometimes as a result of physical trauma or a Near-Death Experience. Perhaps the capital instance of enlightenment by accident is that of U. G.
    Krishnamurti, who claims to have experienced clinical death and then returned to life as the kind of being glorified in the literature of enlightenment, although it should be added that U. G. never gave the least credence to any doctrine of awakening and blasted all religions as well as spirituality itself. (Contrary to the popular holy man Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, who at the age of sixteen reported his death and enlightenment, then spent the rest of his life as a chain-smoking guru. U. G. once met with Ramana Maharshi and was not impressed.) Through his clinical death, which he called a “calamity” due to the pain and confusion he felt during this process, U. G. became a puppet of nature. To his good fortune, he had no problem with his new way of functioning. He did not need to accept it since by his account he had lost all sense of having an ego that needed to accept or reject anything. How could someone who had ceased to partake in the commerce of selves, who had discarded his personhood, believe or not believe in anything so outlandish as enlightenment . . . or any other vendibles of the seeker’s scene, none of which are hugely evident and all of which are as outmoded as the gods of antiquity or tribal deities with names that sound comical to believers in “real” religions?1
    Some would interpret U. G’s disrespect for spiritual beliefs to be in happy accord with the nature of enlightenment, which they have been taught cannot be pinned down by particulars of any kind. Others would deny this assertion, perhaps because they have been indoctrinated to believe that both irreverence and deference are off the mark once one has
    “awakened.” Neither side of this controversy would have tempted U. G. What he repeatedly exclaimed in interviews is the impossibility of human beings, except perhaps one in a billion, to keep their heads from overlaying teachings of any kind on their lives as animals who are born only to survive and reproduce, not to build either cultures or castles in the air. Mental activity beyond the basic programs of our animalism leads only 50

    to suffering, confusion, and self-deception. U. G never spoke of a solution for what our heads have made of our lives. We are captured by our illusions and there is no way out.
    That U. G. came upon a way out, as he told his countless interrogators, was nothing but luck, nothing that he knew anything about or could pass on to others. Why bother, then, to tell people that there is no such thing as wisdom and that they are doomed to live and die helpless among the slagheap of their illusions. Why? Because these people came to him and asked for his help. To their pleas he immediately replied that he could not help them, nor could they help themselves. No help could be had from any sector in which they searched. They could seek all their lives and still make it to their deathbeds with nothing but the same useless questions and useless answers with which they began. U. G.
    had his, but they would never get theirs. So why should they go on living? Naturally, no one explicitly posed this question to U. G. But they had his answer: there is no “you” that lives, only a body going about its only order of business—that of being alive and obeying biology. Whatever else