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Krishnamurti on Meditation (long)
Simplify
Veteran
I thought this might offer a new perspective to some people. It is by Jiddu Krishnamurti from a speech that was put into the book The Flight of the Eagle.
Any system, any method, that teaches you how to meditate is obviously false. One can see why, intellectually, logically, for if you practice something according to a method - however noble, however ancient, however modern, however popular - you are making yourself mechanical, you are doing something over and over again in order to achieve something. In meditation the end is not different from the means. But the method promises you something; it is a means to an end. If the means is mechanical, then the end is also something brought about by the machine; the mechanical minds says, 'I'll get something'. One has to be completely free from all methods, all systems; that is already the beginning of meditation; you are already denying something which is utterly false and meaningless. And again, there are those who practice 'awareness'. Can you practice awareness? - if you are 'practicing' awareness, then you are all the time being inattentive. So, be aware of inattention, not practice how to be attentive; if you are aware of your inattention, out of that awareness there is attention, you do not have to practice it. Do please understand this, it is so clear and so simple. 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 front with the driver, there were three behind who were talking about awareness, wanting to discuss with me what awareness is. The car was going 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; they never knew what had happened! You laugh; but that is what we are all doing, we are intellectually concerned with the idea of awareness, the verbal, dialectical investigation of opinion, yet not actually aware of what is taking place.
There is no practice, only the living thing. And there comes the question: how is thought to be controlled? Thought wanders all over the place; you want to thing about something, it is offf on something else. They say practice, control; thing about a picture a sentence, or whatever it is, concentrate; thought buzzes off in another direction, so you pull it back and this battle goes on, backward and forward. So one asks: what is the need for control of thought at all and who is the entity that is going to control thought? Please follow this closely. Unless one understands this real question, one will not be able to see what meditation means. When one says, 'I must control thought', who is the controller, the censor? Is the censor different from the thing he wants to control, shape or change into a different quality? - are they not both the same? What happens when the 'thinker' sees that he is the thought - which he is - that the 'experiencer' is the experience? Then what is one to do? Are you following the question? The thinker is the thought and thought wanders off; then the thinker, thinking he is separate, says, 'I must control it'. Is the thinker different from the thing called thought? If there is no thought, is there a thinker?
What takes place when the thinker sees he is the thought? What actually takes place when the 'thinker' is the thought, as the 'observer' is the observed? What takes place? In that there is no separation, no division and therefore no conflict; therefore thought is no longer to be controlled, shaped; then what takes palce? Is there then any wandering of thought at all? Before, there was control of thought, there was concentration of thought, there was the conflict between the 'thinker', who wanted to control thought, and thought wandering off. That goes on all the time with all of us. Then there is the sudden realization that the 'thinker' is the thought - a realization, not a verbal statement, but an actuality. Then what takes place? Is there such a thing as thought wandering? It is only when the 'observer' is differrent from thought that he censors it; then he can say, 'This is right or this is wrong thought', or 'Thought is wandering away I must control it.' But when the thinker realizes that he is the thought, is there a wandering at all? Go into it, sirs, don't accept it, you will see it for yourself. It is only when there is a resistance that there is conflict; the resistance is created by the thinker who thinks he is separate from the thought; but when the thinker realizes that he is the thought, there is no resistance - which does not mean that thought goes all over the place and does what it likes, on the contrary.
The whole concept of control and concentration undergoes a tremendous change; it becomes attention, something entirely different. If one understands the nature of attention, that attention can be focused, one understands that it is quite different from concentration, which is exclusion. Then you will ask, 'Can I do anything without concentration?' 'Do I not need concentration in order to do anything?' But can you not do something with attention? - which is not concentration. 'Attention' implies to attend, that is to listen, hear, see, with all the totality of your being, with your body, with your nerves, with your eyes, with your ears, with your mind, with your heart, completely. In that total attention - in which there is no division - you cand do anything; and in such attention is no resistance. So then, the next thing is, can the mind in which is includeed the brain - the brain being conditioned, the brain being the result of thousands of thousands of years of evolution, the brain which is the storehouse of memory - can that become quiet? Because it is only when the total mind is silent, quiet, that there is perception, seeing clearly, with a mind that is not confused. How can the mind be quiet, be still? I do not know if you have seen for yourself that to look at a beautiful tree, or a cloud full of light and glory, you must look completely, silently, otherwise you are not looking directly at it, you are looking at it with some image of pleasure, or the memory of yesterday, you are not actually looking at it, you are looking at the image rather than at the fact.
So one asks, can the totality of the mind, the brain included, be completely still? People have asked this question -really very serious people - they have not been able to solve it, they have tried tricks, they have said that the mind can be made still through the repetition of words. Have you ever tried it - repeating 'Ave Maria', or those Sanskrit words that some people bring over from India, mantras - repeating certain words to make the mind still? It does not matter what word it is, make it rhythmic - Coca Cola, any word -repeat it often and you will see that your mind becomes quiet; but it is a dull mind, it is not a sensitive mind, alert, active, vital, passionate, intense. A dull mind, thought it may say, 'I have had a tremedous transcendental experience', is deceiving itselft.
So it is not in the repetition of words, nor in trying to force it; too many tricks have been played upon the mind for it to be quiet; yet one knows deeply within onself that when the mind is quiet then the whole thing is over, that then there is true perception.
How is the mind, the brain included, to be completely quiet? Some say breath properly, take deep breaths, that is, get more oxygen into your blood; a shoddy little lmind breathing very deeply, day after day, can be fairly quiet; but it is still what it is, a shoddy little mind. Or practice yoga? - again, so many things are involved in this. Yoga means skill in action, not merely the practice of certain exercises which are necessary to keep the body healthy, strong, sensitive -which includes eating the right food, not stuffing it with a lot of meat and so on (we won't go into all that, your are all probably meat eaters). Skill in action demands great sensititvity of the body, a lightness of the body, eating the right food, not what your tongue dictates, or what you are used to.
Then what is one to do? Who puts this question? One sees very clearly that our lives are in disorder, inwardly and outwardly; and yet order is necessary, as orderly as mathematical order and that can come about only by observing the disorder, not by trying to conform to the blueprint of what others may consider, or you yourself may consider, order. By seeing, by being aware of the disorder, out of that comes order. One also sees that the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, sensitive, alert, not caught in any habit, physical or psychological; how is that to come about? Who puts this question? Is the question put by the mind that chatters, the mind that has so much knowledge? Has it learned a new thing? -which is, 'I can see very clearly only when I am quiet, therefroe, I must be quiet.' Then it says, 'How am I to be quiet?' Surely such a question is wrong in itself; the moment it asks 'how' it is looking for a system, therefore destroying the very thing that is being inquired into, which is: how can the mind be completely still?- not mechanically, not forced, not compelled to be still. A mind that is not copelled to be still is extraordinarily active, sensitive, alert. But when you ask 'how' then there is the division between the observer and the thing observed.
When you realize that ther is no method, no system, that no mantram, no teacher, nothing in the world that is going to help you to be quiet, when you realize the truth that it is only the quiet mind that sees, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet. It is like seeing danger and avoiding it; in the same way, seeing that the mind must be completely quiet, it is quiet.
Now the quality of silence matters. A very small mind can be very quiet, it has its little space in which to be quiet; that little space, with its little quietness, is the deadest thing - you know what it is. But a mind that has limitless space and that quietness, that is stillness, has no center as the 'me', the 'observer' at all; that quality of silence has vast space, it is without border and intensely active; the activity of that silence is entirely different from the activity which is self centered. If the mind has gone that far (and really it is not that far, it is always there if you know how to look), then perhaps that which man has sought throughout the centuries, God, truth, the immeasureable, the nameless, the timeless, is there - without your invitation, it is there. Such a man is blessed, there is truth for him and ecstasy.
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Comments
I think a big part of it is he was frustrated with people who wanted an easy answer, he didn't want to give them an intellectual fact for them to hold on to, he wanted them to look inside to see it themselves.
Is that something that can be taught?
Will I just read this on Wikipedia,
I guess my prospects are, well, dismal!
If you want to know more about Krishnamurti, seek out kowtaaia. I haven't seen him on a Buddhist forum for a while, but he has an account here, so you could try PM'ing him.
haha that's exactly what I was hoping it meant
When he talks about the 'observer being the observed', he gives no method but does give an example, and gives this example many times throughout his life. He says that when you look at a beautiful landscape, a flower or some other part of nature and see the beauty of it, at that moment the observer and the observed are the same.
I have always lived amongst nature, deep in the woods. I have spent weeks in the desert, in the high mountains, in places of astonishing beauty. But I have never felt that the beauty I was observing was me.
This morning while meditating I did experience about half a second where I mistook my breath as me - which seems pretty weird as I had no intention of that at all this morning but have been thinking about it in intellectual terms the past several days. I don't know how the intellectual thought could create an experience like that, because the intellectual thought seems so removed from the actual experience of living.