Krishnamurti on Meditation. 3

Today, I shall continue to explore a little further Krishnamurti's ideas about what meditation is and what it should be and how not to follow false trails down that path we otherwise think is meditation under the illusion that we are going in the right direction and doing something for our benefit when we are doing no such thing and how it may be related rather more important values of human life..

Meditation is not Escape from the World nor a posture but is the thoughtless, consciousness-less immediate

Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating, self-enclosing acitivity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter, and pleasure with its great sorrows.Meditation is wandering away from this world. One has to be a total outsider, then the world has a meaning amd the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this, all action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for self-fulfilment or the concept of power....If you deliberately take an attitude, a posture, in order to meditate, then it becomes a plaything, a toy of the mind. If you decide to extricate yourself from the confusion and misery of life, then it becomes an experience of imagination--and this is not meditation. The conscious mind or the unconscious mind must have no part in it; they must not even be aware of the extent and beauty of meditation--if they are, then you might just as well go and buy a romantic novel. In the total attention of meditiation, there is no knowing, no recognition, nor the rememberance of something that has happened. Time and thought have entirely come to an end, for they are the centre, which limits its own vision. At the moment of light, thought withers away, and the conscious effort to experience and the rememberance of it is the word that has been. And the word is never the actual. At that moment--which is not of time--the ultimate is the immediate, but that ultimate has no symbol, is of no person, of no god.

Meditation involves destruction of our habit and our taste for Security

Meditation is destruction to security and there is great beauty in meditation, not the beauty of things that have been put together by man or by nature but of silence. This silence is the emptines in which and from which all things flow and have their being. It is unknowable; intellect and feeling cannot make their way to it, there is no way to it and a method to it is the invention of a greedy brain. All the ways and means of the calculating self must be destroyed wholly; all going forward or backward the way of time must come to end, without tomorrow. Meditation is destruction; it's a danger to those who wish to lead a superficial life and a life of fancy and myth.

Meditation is a Transcendance of Time

Meditation is the seeing of "what is" and going beyond it. Meditation is never in time, time cannot bring about mutation. Time can bring about change, which then needs to be changed again, like all reforms. Meditation that springs out of time is always binding; there is no freedom in it and without freedom there is always choice and conflict. To meditate is to transcend time. Time is the distance that thought travels in its achivements. The travelling is always along the old path covered over with a new coating, new sights, but always the same road, leading nowhere--except to pain and sorrow. It is only when the mind transcends time that truth ceases to be an abstraction. Then bliss is not an idea derived from pleasure but an actuality that is not verbal. The emptying of the mind of time is the silence of truth, and the seeing of this is the doing; so there is no division between the seeing and the doing. In the interval between seeing and doing is born conflict, misery and confusion. That which has no time is the everlasting

Meditation is total perception and opens the door to the incalculable and the measureless.

Perception without the word, that is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception, and it is a part of meditation. Perception without the perceiver in meditation is to commune with the height and depth of the immense. This perception is entirely different from seeing an object without an observer, because in the perception of meditation there is no object and therefore no experience. Meditation can take place when the eyes are open and one is surrounded by objects of every kind, but then these objects have no importance at all. One sees them but there is no process of recognition, which means there is no experiencing. What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation, there is a movement of great ecstasy, which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is the ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain, and to the heart the quality of innocence. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, boredom, and a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, the measureless.

Meditation demands intelligence, sensitivity and capacity for love and beauty, not just a system of breathing

We are inquiring together, as to whether you and I, on the instant, can completely change and enter into a totally different dimension--and that involves meditation. Meditation is something that demands a great deal of intelligence, sensitivity and the capacity of love and beauty--not just the following of a system invented by some guru.Meditation is not the mere control of body and thought, nor it is a system of breathing in and breathing out. The body must be still, healthy and without strain; sensitivity of feeling must be sharpened and sustained; and the mind with all its chattering, disturbances and gropings must come to an end. It is not the organism that one must begin with, but rather it is the mind with its opinions, prejudices and self-interest that must be seen to. When the mind is healthy, vital and vigorous, then feeling will be heightened and will be extremely sensitive. Then the body, with its own natural intelligence, which hasn't been spoiled by habit and taste, will function as it should. One must begin with the mind and not with the body, the mind being thought and the varieties of expressions of thought. Mere concentration makes thought narrow, limited and brittle, but concentration comes as a natural thing when there is awareness of the ways of thought. This awareness does not come from the thinker who chooses and discards, who holds on to and rejects. This awareness is without choice and is both the outer and the inner; it is the interflow between the two, so the division between the outer and the inner comes to an end. Thought destroys feeling--feeling being love. Thought can offer only pleasure, and in the pursuit of pleasure, love is pushed aside. The pleasures of eating, of drinking, has its continuity in thought, and merely to control or suppress this pleasure which thought has brought about has no meaning; it creates only various forms of conflict and compulsion. Thought which is matter, cannot seek that which is beyond time, for thought is memory and the experience in that memory is as dead as the leaf of the last autumn....The seeing of this whole complex process is meditation, from which alone comes order in this confusion....Order is not arrangement, design and proportion; these come much later. Order comes out of a mind that is not cluttered up by the things of thought. When thought is silent, there is emptiness, which is order.

Meditation is Undivided Life being Aware of Itself

We hardly ever listen to the sound of a dog's bark or to the cry of a child or the laughter of a man as he passes by. We separate ourselves from everything, and then from this isolation look and listen to all things. It is this separation that is so destructive, for in that lies all conflict and confusion. If you listened to the sound of bells with complete silence you would be riding on it--or rather, the sound would carry you across the valley and over the hill. The beauty of it is felt only when you and the sound are not separate, when you are part of it. Meditation is the ending of the separation, but not by any action or will or desire. Meditation is not a separate thing from life; it is the very essence of life, the very essence of daily living. To listen to the bells, to hear the laughter of a peasant as he walks by with his wife, to listen to the sound of the bell on the bicycle of a little girl as she passes by: it is the whole of life, and not just a fragment of it, that meditation opens.

Meditation is Transformative

We have to alter the structure of our society, its injustices, its appalling morality, the divisions it has created between man and man, the wars, the utter lack of affection and love that is destroying the world. If your meditation is only a personal matter, a thing which you personally enjoy, then it is not meditation. Meditation imnplies a complete radical change of the mind and the heart. This is possible when there is this extraordinary sense of inward silence, and that alone brings about the religious mind. That mind knows what is sacred. 

It is obvious that to Krishnamurti, meditation is not just a technique, one amongst numerous others, as so many people in the West , especially people in the New Age movement, seem to think, for relaxing our mind from time to time, more or less like taking a holiday, the better to re-engage into our everyday world of frenentic work, of strive, of struggle for power, for fame, for wealth, the accumulation of worldly possessions, for pleasures of the flesh and of making distinctions by our mind about everything we see, everything we experience, of attributiing values to them and thereby dividing ourselves from that underlying unity of everything, of union with everything that there is. Meditation is a practice by which we hope we may radically change the entire way in which we live in this world, by which we look at this world, by which we feel about this world, by which we hope to be able to return to that pre-divided world of the here and now which is theoretically available to all who seek it and to observe it with the eyes of innocence, with the eyes of love, to appreciate its beauty and its oneness with us and ultimately to become so accustomed to that way of looking at the world, of ourselves and of others and to that way of  reacting to them that it becomes our "automatic" response and therefore become totally un-aware of such radical awareness of what we are practising whilst we are doing it that through our unconscious way of acting and reacting influence those around us so that like a little candle, its light may shine on those around it such that they too, may become a little more enlightened and eventually become candles burning with their own light too. We must turn this world into a sea of candles, gentle but burning with the light of wisdom, the light of love and the light of Life.