Jiddu Krishnamurti - Meditation is not the mere control of body and thought

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Meditation is not the mere control of body and thought, nor is it 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.

So 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 an 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 an 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 pleasure 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 last autumn. In awareness of all this comes attention, which is not the product of inattention. It is inattention which has dictated the pleasureable habits of the body and diluted the intensity of feeling. Inattention cannot be made into attention. The awareness of inattention is attention.

The seeing of this whole complex process is meditation from which alone comes order in this confusion. This order is as absolute as is the order in mathematics, and from this there is action the immediate doing. 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.

Source - J. Krishnamurti Talks in Europe 1967

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