No Way Out

'Whatever you experience has already been experienced by someone else. Your telling yourself, 'Ah! I am in a blissful state,' means that someone else before you has experienced that and has passed it on to you. Whatever may be the nature of the medium through which you experience, it is a second-hand, third-hand, and last-hand experience. It is not yours. There is no such thing as your own experience. Such experiences, however extraordinary, aren't worth a thing.'

Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti (1918-2007), better known as U.G., was an Indian speaker who questioned the state of enlightenment as a real thing. Instead of using the word 'enlightenment', he used 'calamity' and 'natural state' to describe an event in his life. He claimed that the return to the natural state is a rare, a causal, biological occurrence, an event which he referred to in his own life as 'the calamity'. Because of this, he discouraged people from pursuing the 'natural state' as a spiritual goal. He rejected the very basis of thought and in doing so negated all systems of thought and knowledge. Hence he explained his assertions were experiential and not speculative - 'Tell them that there is nothing to understand.'