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Jiddu
Krishnamurti on Concentration and Meditation
Question: I have practised meditation most earnestly
for twenty-five years, and I am still unable to go beyond a certain
point. How am I to proceed further?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : Before we inquire into how to
proceed further, must we not find out what meditation is? When I
ask, "How am I to meditate?", am I not putting a wrong question? Such a
question implies that I want to get somewhere, and I am willing to
practise. a method in order to get what I want. It is like taking an
examination in order to get a job.
Surely, the right question is to ask what meditation is; because right
meditation gives perfume, depth, significance to life, and without it
life has very little meaning. Do you understand, sirs? To know what is
right meditation is much more important than earning a livelihood,
getting married, having money, property, because without understanding,
these things are all destroyed. So the understanding of the heart is the
beginning of meditation.
I want to know what is meditation. I hope you will follow this, not just
verbally, but in your own hearts, because without meditation you can
know nothing of beauty, of love, or sorrow, of death and the whole
expanse of life. The mind that says, "I must learn a method in order to
meditate" is a silly mind, because it has not understood what meditation
is.
So, what is meditation? Is not
that very inquiry the beginning of meditation? Do you understand,
sirs? No? I will go on and you will see. Is meditation a process of
concentration, forcing the mind to conform to a particular pattern? That
is what most of you do who `meditate'. You try to force your mind to
focus on a certain idea, but other ideas creep in; you brush them away,
but they creep in again. You go on playing this game for the next twenty
years; and if at last you can manage to concentrate your mind on a
chosen idea, you think you have learned how to meditate. But is that
meditation? Let us see what is involved in concentration.
When a child is concentrating on a toy, what is happening? The attention
of the child is being absorbed by the toy. He is not giving his
attention to the toy, but the toy is very interesting and it absorbs his
attention. That is exactly what is happening to you when you concentrate
on the idea of the Master, on a picture, or when you repeat mantrams,
and all the rest of it. The toy is absorbing you, and you are merely a
plaything of the toy. You thought you were the master of the toy, but
the toy is the master.
Concentration also implies exclusiveness. You exclude in order to arrive
at a particular result, like a boy trying to pass an examination. The
boy wants a profitable result, so he forces himself to concentrate, he
makes tremendous effort to get what he wants, which is based on his
desire, on his conditioning. And does not this process of forcing the
mind to concentrate, which involves suppression, exclusiveness, make the
mind narrow? A mind that is made narrow, one-pointed, has extraordinary
possibilities in the sense that it may achieve a great deal; but life is
not one-pointed, it is an enormous thing to be comprehended, to be
loved. It is not petty. Sirs, this is not rhetoric, this is not mere
verbiage. When one feels something real, the expression of it may sound
rhetorical, but it is not.
So, to concentrate is not to meditate, even though
that is what most of you do, calling it meditation. And if
concentration is not meditation, then what is? Surely, meditation is to
understand every thought that comes into being, and not to dwell upon
one particular thought; it is to invite all thoughts so that you
understand the whole process of thinking.
But what do you do now? You try to think of just one good thought, one
good image, you repeat one good sentence which you have learnt from the
Gita, the Bible, or what you will; therefore your mind becomes very
narrow, limited, petty. Whereas, to be aware of every thought as it
arises, and to understand the whole process of thinking, does not demand
concentration.
On the contrary. To understand the total process of thinking, the mind
must be astonishingly alert, and then you will see that what you call
thinking is based on a mind that is conditioned. So your inquiry is not
how to control thought, but how to free the mind from conditioning. The
effort to control thought is part of the process of concentration in
which the concentrator tries to make his mind silent, peaceful, is it
not? "To have peace of mind" - that is a phrase which all of us use.
Now, what is peace of mind? How can the mind be
quiet, have peace? Surely, not through discipline. The mind
cannot be made still. A mind that is made still is a dead mind. To
discover what it is to be still, one must inquire into the whole content
of the mind - which means, really, finding out why the mind is seeking.
Is the motive of search the desire for comfort, for permanency, for
reward? If so, then such a mind may be still, but it will not find
peace, because its stillness is forced, it is based on compulsion, fear,
and such a mind is not a peaceful mind. We are still inquiring into the
whole process of meditation.
People who `meditate' and have visions of Christ, Krishna, Buddha, the
Virgin, or whoever it be, think they are advancing, making marvellous
progress; but after all, the vision is the projection of their own
background. What they want to see, they see, and that is obviously not
meditation. On the contrary, meditation is to free the mind from all
conditioning, and this is not a process that comes into being at a
particular moment of the day when you are sitting cross-legged in a room
by yourself. It must go on when you are walking when you are frightened,
when you are getting into the bus; it means watching the manner of your
speech when you are talking to your wife, to your boss, to your servant.
All that is meditation.
So meditation is the
understanding of the meditator. Without understanding the one who
meditates, which is yourself, inquiry into how to meditate has very
little value. The beginning of meditation is self-knowledge, and
self-knowledge cannot be gathered from a book, nor is it to be had by
listening to some professor of psychology, or to someone who interprets
the Gita, or any of that rubbish. All interpreters are traitors because
they are not original experiences, they are merely secondhand repeaters
of something which they believe someone else has experienced and which
they think is true. So beware of interpreters.
The mind which understands itself is a meditative mind. Self-knowledge
is the beginning of meditation, and as you proceed deeply into it you
will find that the mind becomes astonishingly quiet, unforced,
completely still, without motion - which means there is no experiencer
demanding experience. When there is only that state of stillness without
any movement of the mind, then you will find that in that state
something else takes place.
But you cannot possibly find out intellectually what that state is; you
cannot come to it through the description of another, including myself.
All that you can do is to free the mind from its conditioning, from the
traditions, the greed, and all the petty things with which it is now
burdened. Then you will see that, without your seeking it, the mind is
astonishingly quiet; and for such a mind, that which is immeasurable
comes into being.
You cannot go to the immeasurable, you cannot search it out, you cannot
delve into the depths of it. You can delve only into the recesses of
your own heart and mind. You cannot invite truth, it must come to you;
therefore don't seek it. Understand your own life and then truth will
come darkly, without any invitation; and then you will discover that
there is immense beauty, a sensitivity to both the ugly and the
beautiful.
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