Krishnamurti on Meditation 5

In this final exploration by Krishnamurti on the subject of meditation, I shall deal with some other aspects of meditation which has been touched on before but not in such great detail. These concern the complex relationship between meditation, thought, desires, will, self , solitude,  silence, emptiness, love, beauty and joy. But again, let the master explain himself.

Meditation is not experiencing something beyond everyday thought and feeling, nor the pursuit of visions and delights nor is it belief and dogma

The physical organism has its own intelligence which is made dull through habits of pleasure. these habits destroy the sensitivity of the organism and this lack of sensitivity makes the mind dull. Such a mind may be alert in a narrow and limited direction and yet be insensitive. The depth of such a mind is measurable and is caught by images and illusions. its very superficiality is its only brightness. A light and intelligent organism is necessary for meditation....The foundation for meditation has to be laid in daily life, in how one behaves, in what one thinks...For the stillness of the mind, its complete quiet, an extraordinary discipline is required; not the dicipline of suppression, conformity, or the following of some authority, but that discipline or learning which takes place throughout the day, about every movement of thought. The mind then has a religious quality of unity. From that there can be action which is not contradictory....Mediation is...one of the most extraordinary things; but you cannot possibly understand it unless you have come to the end of seeking, groping, wanting something which you consider truth--which is your own projection. You cannot come to it unless you are no longer demanding expeience at all, but are understanding the confusion in which one lives, the disorder of one's own life. In the observation of that disorder, order comes--which is not a blueprint. When you have done this,--which in itself is mediation--then we can ask not only what meditation is, but also what meditation is not, because in the denial of that which is false, the truth is....What is the significance of experience? Has it any significance? Can experience wake up a mind that is asleep, that has come to certain conclusions and is held and conditioned by beliefs? Can experience wake it up, shatter all that structure? Can such a mind--so conditioned, so burdened by its own innumerable problems and despairs and sorrows--respond to any challenge? Can it? And if it does respond, must not the response be inadequate and therefore lead to more conflict? ...Meditation is not the mere experiencing of something beyond everyday thought and feeling nor is it the pursuit of visions and delights. An immature and squalid little mind can and does have visions of expanding consciousness, and experiences which it recognizes according to its own conditioning. This immaturity may be greatly capable of making itself successful in this world and achieving fame and notoriety. The gurus whom it follows are of the same quality and state. Meditation does not belong to such as these. It is not for the seeker, for seeker finds what he wants, and the confort her derives from it is the morality of his own fears....Do what he will, the man of belief and dogma cannot enter into the realm of meditation. To meditate, freedom is necessary. It is not meditation first and freedom afterwards; freedom--the total denial of social morality and values--is the first movement of meditation. It is not a public affair where many can join in and offer prayers. It stands alone, and is always beyond the borders of social conduct. For truth is not in the things of thought or in what thought has put together and calls truth. The complete negation of this whole structure of thought is the positive of meditation....When you meditate you will find in it an extraordinary beauty; you will act rightly at every moment; and if you do not act rightly at a given moment, it does not matter, you will pick it up again--you will not waste time in regret. Meditation is part of life, not something different from life.

How it could feel to be in true meditation

Meditation at that hour was freedom and it was like entering into un unknown world of beauty and quietness; it was a world without image, symbol or word, without waves of memory. Love was the death of every minute and each death was the renewing of love. It was not attachment, it had no roots; it flowered without cause and it was a flame that burned away the borders, the carefully built fences of consciousness. It was beauty beyond thought and feeling; it was not put together on canvas, in words or in marble. Meditation was joy and with it came benediction. The flowering of love is meditation...To be completely open, vulnerable--to the hills, to the sea, to man--is the very essence of meditation. To have no resistance, to have no barriers inwardly towards anything, to be really free, completely, from all the minor urges, compulsions and demands, with all their little conflicts and hypocrisies, is to walk in life with open arms....We don't realize how important it is to be free of the nagging pleasures and their pains, so that the mind remains alone. It is only the mind that is wholly alone which is open. You felt all this suddenly, like a great wind that swept over the land and through you. There you were--denuded of everything, empty--and therefore utterly open. The beauty of it was not in the word or in the feeling, but seemed everywhere--about you, inside you, over the waters and in the hills. Meditation is this...As you watch, a great stillness came into you. The brain itself is very quiet, without any reaction, without a movement, and it was strange to feel this immense stillness. "Free;" isn't the word. The quality of that silence, that stillness, is not felt by the brain; it is beyond the brain. The brain can conceive, formulate or make a design for the future, but this stillness is beyond its range, beyond all imagination, beyond all desire. You are so still that your body becomes completely part of the earth, part of everything that is still....As you watched the sea, so very still, you really became part of everything. You were everything. You were the light, and the beauty of love. Again, to say, "you were a part of everything" is also wrong: the word "you" is not adequate because you really weren't there. You didn;t exist. There was only that stillness, the beauty, the extraordinary sense of love.

Meditation may help us truly understand "what is"

Belief is so unnecessary, as are ideals. Both dissipate energy which is needed to follow the unfolding of the fact, the "what is". Beliefs, like ideals, are escapes from the fact and in escape, there is no end of sorrow. The ending of sorrow is the understanding of the fact from moment to moment. There is no system or method which will give understanding but only a choiceless awareness of a fact. Meditation according to a system is the avoidance of thh fact of what you are; it is far more important to understand yourself, the constant changing of the facts about yourself, than to meditate in order to find god, have visions, sensations, and other forms of entertainment....When there is only the organism without the self, perception, both visual and non-visual, can never be distorted. There is only seeing "what is" and that very perception goes beyond "what is". the emptying of the mind is not an acitivity of thought or an intellectual process. The continuous seeing of "what is" without any kind of distortion naturally empties the mind of all thought and yet that very mind can use thought when it is necessary. Thought is mechanical and meditation is not....Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or it is wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silnece put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old--this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past. 

Meditation and Solitude

..as you watched out of the window, space and time seemed to have come to an end, and the space that divides had no reality. That leaf and that eucalyptus and the blue shining water were not different from you. Meditation is really very simple. We complicate it. We weave a web of ideas around it--what it is and what it is not. But it is none of these things. Because it is so very simple, it escapes us, because our minds are so complicated, so timeworn and time-based. And this mind dicates the activity of the heart, and then the trouble begins. But meditation comes naturally, with extraordinary ease, when you walk on the sand or look out of your window or see those marvellous hills bunrt by last summer's sun. Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude, you would know what meditation is. The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone--no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginnign, which is now, and which will be always there...then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet, naturally silent, not made silent through supression, discipline and control, and that silence is immensely rich. Beyond that, no words, no description is of any avail. Then the mind does not inquire into the absolute because it has no need, for in that silence there is that which is. And the whole of this is the benedictin of meditation...what is essence is beauty. But this experience is not experienceable; experiencing must cease, for experience only strengthens the known. The known is never the essence. Meditation is never the futher experiencing; it is not only the ending of experience, which is the response to challenge, great and small, but it is the opening of the door to essence, opening the door of a furnace whose fire utterly destroys, without leaving any ashes; there are no remains. We are the remains, the yes-sayers of many thousand yeterdays, a continuous series of endless memories, of choice and despair.....In the flame of meditation thought ends and with it feelings, for neither is love. Without love, there is no essence; without it there are only ashes on which is based our existence. Out of the emptiness is.

Love may arise Meditation

In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method. Love cannot be cultivated by thought. Love can perhaps come into being when there is complete silence, a silence in which the meditator is entirely absent; and the mind can be silent only when it understands its own movement as thought and feeling. To understand this movement of thought and feeling, there can be no condemnation in observing it. To observe in such a way is a discipline, and that kind of discipline is fluid, free, not the dicipline of conformity....In the flame of meditation, thought ends and with it feeling, for neither is love. Without love, there is no essence; without it there are only ashes on which is based our existence. Out of emptiness love is born. Meditation is the action of silence....Love is meditation. Love is not a remembrance, an image sustained by thought ass pleasure, nor the romantic image which sensually builds; it is something that lies beyond all the senses and beyond the economic and social pressures of life. The immediate realization of this love, which has no root in yesterday, is meditation; for love is truth, and meditation is the discovery of the beauty of this truth.

Where there is Thought and Self, there can be no true Love

In the Space which thought creates around itself, there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the "me". Then relationship has quite a different meaning, for in that space which is not made by thought, the other does not exist, for you do not exist. Meditation then, is not the pursuit of some vision, however sanctified by tradition. To us, the little space made by thought around itsefl, which is the "me", is extremely important, for this is all that the mind knows, identifying itself with everything that is in that space. And the fear of not being is born in that space. But in meditation, when this is understood, that mind can enter into a dimension of space where action is inaction. We do not know what love is, for in the space made by thought around itself as the 'me", love is the conflict of the 'me" and the 'not me". This conflict, this torture, is not love. Thought is the very denial of love, and it cannot enter into that space where the 'me" is not. In that space is the benediction which man seeks and cannot find. He seeks it within the frontiers of thought, and thought destroys the ecstasy of this benediction.

Meditation must be Passive

Meditation has no beginning and no end; it it there is no achievement and no failure, no gathering and no renunciation; it is a movement without finality and so beyond and above time and space. The experiencing of it is the denying of it, for the experiencer is bound to time and space, memory and recognition. The foundation for true meditation is that passive awareness which is the total freedom from authority and ambition, envy and fear. Meditation has no meaning, no signficance whatsoever without this freedom, without self-knowing; as long as there is choice there is no self-knowing. Choice implies conflict, which prevents the understanding of "what is". Wandering into fancy, into some romantic beliefs, is not meditation; the brain must strip itself of every myth, illusion and security and face the reality of their falseness. There is no distraction; everything is in the movement of meditation. The flower is the form, the scent, the color, and the beauty that is the whole of it. Tear it to pieces actually or verbally, then there is no flower, only a remembrance of what was,which is never the flower. Meditation is the whole flower in its beauty, withering and living. Meditation is the freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth.