From U. G. Krishnamurti:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti
We have strange ideas in the religious field—torture this body, sleep on nails, control, deny things—all kinds of funny things. What for? Why deny certain things? I don't know. What is the difference between a man going to a bar for a glass of beer, and a man going to a temple and repeating the name of Rama? I don't see any basic difference... I am not against escapes, but whether you escape through this avenue or that avenue, an escape is an escape. You are escaping from yourself... What you do or do not do does not matter at all. Your practice of holiness, your practice of virtue—that is socially valuable for the society, but that has nothing to do with this.
People call me an enlightened man. I detest that term. They can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I've searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn't arise. I don't give a hoot for the sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.
I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize—that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize—and you say to yourself, "What the hell have I been doing all of my life?!" That blasts you.
Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is 'you'. There is nothing there inside you other than that.
The holy men are all phonies—they are telling me only what is there in the books. That I can read—'Do the same again and again'—that I don't want. Experiences I don't want. They are trying to share an experience with me. I'm not interested in experience. As far as experience goes, for me there is no difference between the religious experience and the sex experience or any other experience; the religious experience is like any other experience. I am not interested in experiencing Brahman; I am not interested in experiencing reality; I am not interested in experiencing truth. They might help others but they cannot help me. I'm not interested in doing more of the same; what I have done is enough.
You see, people usually imagine that so-called enlightenment, self-realization, God-realization or what you will (I don't like to use these words) is something ecstatic, that you will be permanently happy, in a blissful state all the time—these are the images they have of those people... There's no relationship at all between the image you have of that and what actually is the situation... That's why I very often tell people, "If I could give you some glimpse of what this is all about, you wouldn't touch this with a barge pole, a ten foot pole." You would run away from this because this is not what you want. What you want does not exist, you see.
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 people—they kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind. Throw them out!
Understanding is a state of being where the question isn't there any more; there is nothing there that says, "Now I understand!"—that's the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.