Krishnamurti on Meditation 4

To Krishnamurti, meditation, if properly done, results in, not aims at, the elimination of all concepts of time, of space, of all words, of all symbols, of all images, of all feelings, of all thoughts and of all subjecitivity and opens us to the unknown because it does not aim at knowing anything but is, so to speak "pure consciousness" or of consciousness being aware of itself as consciousness at what one may describe as a higher level or even better, of that higher consciousness not being aware of itself as consciousness at the lower level. It is as if we are completely aware at each moment of what we are doing, including the act of our thinking, of how our thoughts are coming and going and of how our mind is acting on or reacting to what is happening outside of our own body and inside of our own body and our own mind, or the act of experiencing something in and of itself. In other words, it is being fully aware of ourselves in interaction with the world at the moment of its being so engaged in such interaction. In that sense, it is therefore extremely difficult to "achieve" (we are not supposed to use this word because to "achieve" implies the action of our will when we are supposed not to engage our will at all in a good or proper meditation) or to attain. Although, theoretically, we can engage ourselves in meditation everywhere and at all times, in practice, it may be better to do so in silence and in private because there would be less distractions. Our mind is already buzzling with its own acitivities, its memories of past and its anticipation of the future without our meditation being in addition interfered with by further activities outside of our own bodies and outside of our own minds. Meditation "aims" (subject to the same qualification) to attain full awareness of what the great Buddha calls "emptiness" or the Nothingness or the Void ie. the emptiness of the concept of the self, the emptiness of the concept of the world.  To him, it is the greatest mistake to think that there is a system the learning of which will bring us to it. Although some guidance may help, we must all find out for ourselves. There is no one size fit all "method" or "practice". But let the master speak for himself.

Meditation is about the Unknown

The whole of  Asia talks about meditation; it is one of their habits, as it is to believe in God or something else. They sit for ten minutes a day in a quiet room and "meditate", concentrate, fix their mind on an image, an image created by themselves or by somebody who has offered that image through propaganda. During those ten minutes, they try to control the mind; the mind wants to go back and forth and they battle with it. They play that game everlastingly, and that is what they call meditation. If one does not know anything about meditation, then one has to find out hwat it is--actually, not according to anybody, and that may lead one to nothing or it may lead one to everything. One must enquire, ask that question, without any expectation...You can sit in the right posture with your back straight, breathing correctly, do pranayama and all the rest of it for the next ten thousand years and you will be nowhere near perceiving what truth is, because you have not understood yourself at all, the way you think, the way you live. You have not ended your sorrow, and you want to find enlightenment. You can do all kinds of twists and turns with your body and this seems to fascinate people, because they feel it is going to give some power, some prestige. Now all these powers are like candles in the sun; they are like candle light when the brialiant sun is shining...If meditation is a continuation of knowledge, is the continuation of everything that man has accumulated, then there is no freedom. There is freedom only when there is an understanding of the function of knowledge and therefore freedom from the known. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content, the known, the "me".... If I meditate and continue with what I have already learned, with what I already know, then I am living in the past, within the field of my conditioning, In that there is no freedom. I may decorate the prision in which I live, I may do all kinds of things in that prison, but there is still a limitation, a barrier. So the mind has to find out whether the brain cells, which have developed through the millenia, can be totally quiet, and respond to a dimension they do not know. Which means can the mind be totally still?....Meditation is not the repeitition of the word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivation of silence. The bead and the word do quiet the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill. Meditation is not wrapping yourself in a pattern of thought, in the enchantment of pleasure. Meditation has no beginnings, and therefore it has no end. If you say, "I will begin today to control my thoughts, to sit quietly in the meditative poture, to breathe regularly, " then you are caught in the tricks with which one deceives oneself. Meditation is not a matter of being absorbed in some grandiose idea or iamge; that only quiets one for the moment, as a child absorbed by a toy is for the time being quiet and as soon as the toy ceases to be of interest, the restlessness and the mischief begin again. Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without a word, without comment, without opinion, attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. And at night, when the whole organism is at rest, the meditative mind has no dreams for it has been awake all day. It is only the indolent who has dreams, only the half-asleep who need the intimation of their own states. But as the mind watches, listens to the movement of life, the outer and the inner, to such a mind comes a silence that is not put together by thought. It is not a silence which the observe can experience. If he does experience it and recognize it, it is no longer silence. The silence of the meditative mind is not within the border of recognition, for this silence has no frontier. There is only silence--in which the space of division ceases....Meditation is to find out if there is a field which is not already contaminated by the known...Meditation is a movement in and of the unknown. You are not there, only the movement. You are too petty or too great for this movement. It has nothing behind it or in front of it. It is that energy which thought-matter cannot touch. Thought is perversion, for it is the product of yesterday; it is caught in the toils of centuries and so is confused, unclear. Do what you will, the known cannot reach out for the unknown. Meditation is the dying to the known....A system of meditation is not meditation. A system implies a method, which you practice in order to achieve soemthing at the end. Something practised over and over again becomes mechanical--does it not? How can a mechanical mind, which has been trained and twisted, tortured to comply to the pattern of what it calls "meditation", hoping to achieve a reward at the end, be free to observe, to learn? ...There are various schools in India and further East, where they teach methods of meditation--it is really most appalling. it means training the mind mechanically; it therefore ceases to be free and does not understand the problem. So when we use the word "meditation" we do not mean soemthing that is practiced. We have no method. Meditation means awareness: to be aware of what you are doing, what you are thinking, what you are feeling, aware without any choice, to observe, to learn. Meditation is to be aware of one's conditioning, how one is conditioned by the society in which one lives, in which one has been brought up, by the religious propaganda--aware without any choice, without distortion, without wishing it ot be different. Out of this awarness comes attention, the capacity to be completely attentive. Then there is freedom to see things as they actually are, without distortion. The mind becomes unconfused, clear, sensitive. Such meditation beings about a quality of mind that is completely silent--of which quality one can go on talking, but it will have no meaning unless it exists....The whole point of mediation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be the truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self isolation which is the common movement of one's everyday life...Why should you accept any authority about the inward movement of life?.... But apparently, we accept the authority of somebody who says, "I know, I have achieved, I have realized". The man who says he knows does not know.

Meditation is the Flowering of Understanding

A mind that is inquiring must inevitably come to this; a mind that is aware, that observes "what is" in itself, is self-understanding, self-knowing...Do not make meditation a complicated affair; it is really very simple and because it is simple, it is very subtle. Its substety will escape the mind if the mind approaches it with all kinds of fanciful and romantic ideas. Meditation, really, is a penetration into the unknown, and so the known, the memory, the experience, the knowledge which it has acquired during the day, or during a thousand days, must end. For it is only a free mind that can penetrate into the very heart of the immeasurable. So meditation is both the penetration and the ending of yesterday. The trouble begins when we ask how to end the yesterday. There is now "how". The "how" implies a method, a system and it is this very method and system that has conditioned the mind. Just see the truth of this. Freedom is necessary--not "how" to be free. The "how to be free" only enslaves you....Meditation is the flowering of understanding...not within the borders of time; time never brings understanding. Understanding is not a gradual process to be gathered little by little, with care and patience. Understanding is now or never; it is a destructive flash, not a tame affair; it is this shattering that one is afraid of and so one avoids it, knowingly or unknowlingly. Understanding may alter the course of one's life, the way of thought and action; it may be pleasant or not, but understanding is a danger to all relationship. Without understadning, sorrow will continue. Sorrow ends only through self-knowing, the awareness of every thought and feeling, every movement of the conscious and of that which is hidden. Meditation is the understanding of consciousness, the hidden and the open, and of the movement that lies beyond all thought and feeling....The mediation of today is a new awakening, a new flowering of the beauty of goodness....For most of us, beauty is something, in a building, in a cloud, in the shape of a tree, in a beautiful face. Is beauty "out there", or it it a quality of mind that has no self-centered activity? Because like joy, the understanding is essential in meditation.

Meditation is Never Prayer

Meditation is never prayer. Prayer, supplication is born of self-ptity. You pray when you are in difficulty, when there is sorrow; but when there is happiness, joy, there is no supplication. This self-pity, so deeply embedded in man, is the root of separation. That which is separate, or thinks itself separate, ever seeking identification with something that is not separate, birngs only more division and pain. Out of this confusion, one cries to heaven, or to one's husband, or to some deity of the mind. This cry may find an answer, but the answer is the echo of self-pity, in its separation. The repetition of words, of prayers, is self-hypnotic, self-enclosing and destructive. The isolation of thought is always within the field of the known, and the answer to prayer is the response of the known. Meditation is far from this. In this field, thought cannot enter; there is no separation, and so no identity. Meditation is in the open; secrecy has no place in it. Everything is exposed, clear; then the beauty of love is.

Silence and Emptiness are the essence of Meditation

Meditation is never control of the body. There is no actual divison between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are all one, indivisible. it is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance....The mind and the brain and the body in complete harmony must be silent--a silence that is not induced by taking a tranquilizer or by repeating words, whether it be "Ave Maria" or some Sanskrit word. By reptitition your mind can become dull and a mind which is in a stupor cananot possibly find what is true. Truth is soemthing that is new all the time--the word "new" is not right, it really is "timeless". There has to be silence. That silence is not the opposite of noise or the cessation of chattering: it is not the result of control, saying, "I wil be silent", which again is a contradiciton. When you say, "I will", there must be an entity who determines to be silent and therefore practices something which he calls silence; therefore there is division, a contradiciton, a distortion... Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. The known is the past. The emptying is not at the end of accumulation but rather it means not to accumulate at all. What has been is emptied only in the present, not by thought but by action, by the doing of "what is" . The past is the movement of conclusion to conclusion, whether it be of the past or of the present, and it is this conclusion that prvents the constant emptying of the mind of the known; for the known is always conclusion, determination. The known is the action of the will, and the will in operation is the continuation of the known, so the action of will cannot possibly empty the mind...  Meditation is a complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only the functioning of the body; there is only the activity of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without identification as the "me" and the "not me". thought is mechanical, as is the organism. What creates conflict is the thought identifying itself with one of its parts which become the "me", the "self" and the various divisions in that self. There is no need for the self at any time. There is nothing but the body, and freedom of the mind can happen only when thought is not breeding the "me". .....we do not see the danger of all this fragmentation of the "me" and "not me". The moment there is that fragmentation in yourself there must be conflict; and conflict is the very root of corruption. So it behooves one to find out for onself the beauty of meditation, for then the mind, being free and unconditioned, perceives what is true....Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought, for thought and feeling dissipate energy; they are repetitive, producing mechanical acitivities which are a necesary part of existence. But they are only part, and thought and feeling cannot possibly entre into the immensity of life. Quite a different approach is necessary, not the path of habit, association and the known; there must be freedom from these. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known.  It cannot be done by the thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness....On this morning the quality of meditation was nothingness, the total emptiness of time and space. It is a fact and not an idea or the paradox of opposing speculations. One finds this strange emptiness when the root of all problems withers away. This root is thought, the thought that divides and holds. In meditation, the mind actually becomes empty of the past, though it can use the past as thought. This goes on throughout the day and at night, sleep is the emptiness of yesterday and therefore the mind touches that which is timeless....The empty mind cannot be purchased at the altar of demand; it comes into being when thought is aware of its own activities--not thinker being aware of his thought

Meditation is Forever New because it is a Discontinuity

Meditation is always new. It is not the touch of the past for it has no continuity. The word ¨new¨ doesn´t convey the quality of freshness that has not been born before. It is like the light of a candle which has been put out and relit. The new light is not the old, though the candle is the same. Meditation has a continuity only when thought colors it, shapes and gives it a purpose. The purpose and meaning of meditation given by thought becomes a time'binding bondage.But the meditation that is not touched by thought has its own movement, which is not of time. Time implies the old and the new as a movement from the roots of yesterday to the flowing of tomorrow. But meditation is a different flowering altogether. It is not the outcome of the experience of yesterday, and therefore it has no roots at all in time. It has a continuity which is not that of time. The word "continuity" in meditation is misleading, for that which was, yeserday, is not tkaing place today.

Meditation Eliminates all Words, Thoughts, Symbols, Images, Time and Subjectivity

It is only the still mind that understands that in a quiet mind there is a movement which is totally different, that is of a differerent dimension, of a different quality. That can never be put into words, because it is indescribable. What can be described is what comes up to this point, the point when you have laid the foundation and seen the necessity, the truth, and the beauty of a still mind...Meditation is the ending of the word. Silence is not induced by a word, the word being thought. The action out of silence is entirely different from the action born of the word. Meditation is the freeing of the mind from all symbols, images, and remembrances...Meditation is the emptying of the content of consciousness. That is the meaning and the depth of meditation, the emptying of all the content--thought coming to an end. Meditation is the atention in which there is no registration. Normally, the brain is registering almost everything, the noise, the words which are being used; it is registering like a tape. Now is it possible for the brain not to register except that which is absolutely necessary? Why should I register an insult? Why? Why should I register a flaterry? It is unecessary. Why should I register any hurts? Therefore register only that which is necessary in order to operate in daily life--as a technician, a writer and so on--but psychologically, no registration except the prractical facts of living,  going to the office, working in a factory and so on--nothing else. Out of that comes complete silence, because thought has come to an end--except to function only where it is absolutely necessary. Time has come to and end, and there is a totally different kind of movement, in silence.....In the total attention of meditation, there is no knowing, no recongition nor the remembrance of soemthing that has happened. Time and thought have entirely come to an end, for they are the center which limits its own vision. At the moment of light, thought withers away, and the conscious effort to experience and the remembrance 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....There is no meditator in a meditation. if there is, it is not meditation.

Meditation is best done in the present and in private 

Can you practice awareness? If you are "practising" awareness, then you are being inattentive. So beware of inattention, you do not have to practice. You do not have to go to Burma, China, India, places which are romantic but not factual. I remember once travelling in a car in India with a group of people. I was sitting in the front with the driver. There were three behind who were talking about awareness, wanting to discuss with me what awareness is. The car was very fast. A goat was in the road, and the driver did not pay much attention and ran over the poor animal. The gentlemen behind were discussing what is awareness, but they never knew what had happened! You laugh, but that is what we are doing...When you look at a tree, or the face of your neighbor, or the face of your wife or husband, and if you look with that quality of mind that is completely quiet, then you will see something totally new. Such silence of mind is not something that can be attained through any practice; if you practice a method you are still living within a very small space which thought has created, as the "me", the "I" practising, advancing. That space is full of conflict, full of its own achievements and failures, and such a mind can never be quiet, do what it will....Mediation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention--totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, that is is not attention....Meditation is the innocence of the present, and therefore it is always alone. The mind that is completely alone, untouched by thought, ceases to accumulate. So the emptying of the mind is always in the present. For the mind that is alone, the future--which is of the past--ceases. Meditation is a movement, not a conclusion, not an end to be achieved. One must really understand this question of the past--the past as yesterday, through today, shaping tomorrow from what has been yesterday. Can that mind, which is the result of time, of evolution, be free of the past? Which is to die. It is only a mind that knows this, that can come upon this thing called meditation. Without understanding all this, to try to meditate is just childish imagination...You know, you should never meditate in public, or with antoher or in a group; you should meditate only in solitude, in the quiet of the night or in the still, early morning. When you meditate in solitude, it must be solitude. You must be completely alone, not following a system, a method, repeating words, pursuing a thought, or shaping a thought according to your desire. This solitude comes when the mind is freed from thought. When there are influences of desire or in the past, there is no solitude. Only in the immensity of the present this aloneness comes. And then in quiet secrecy in which all communication has come to an end,in which there is no observer with his anxieties, with his stupid appetites and problems--only then, in that quiet aloneness, meditation becomes something that cannot be out into words. Then meditation is an eternal movement. I don't know if you have ever been alone, by yourself, far away from everything, from every person, from every thought and pursuit, if you have ever been completely alone, not isolated, not withdrawn into some fanciful dream or vision, but far away, so that in yourself there is nothing recognizable, nothing that you touch by thought or feeling, so far away that in this full solitude the very silence becomes the only flower, the only light, and the timeless quality that is not measurable by thought. Only in such meditation love has its being. Don't bother to express it; it will express itself. Don't use it. Don't try to put it into action; it will act, and when it acts, in that action will be no regret, no contradiction, none of the misery and travail of man. So meditate alone. Get lost. And don't try to remember where you have been. If you try to remember it, then it will be soemthing that is dead. And if you hold on to the memory of it, then you will never be alone again. So meditate in that endless solitude, in the beauty of that love, in that innocence, in the new--then there is the bliss that is imperishable. The sky is very blue, the blue that comes after the rain, and these rains have come after many months of drought. After the rain, the skies are washed clean and the hills are rejoicing, and the earth is still. And every leaf has the light of the sun on it, and the feeling of the earth is very close to you. So meditate in the very secret recesses of your heart and mind, where you have never been before.