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Jiddu Krishnamurti on Meditation
Jiddu Krishnamurti - Meditation is not following any
system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not
concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of
meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration - that is,
fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts. This
is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any schoolboy can do because he is
forced to.
It means that all the time you are having a battle between the
insistence that you must concentrate on the one hand and your mind on
the other which wanders away to all sorts of other things, whereas you
should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders.
When your mind wanders off it means you are interested in something
else.
Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; meditation is the
understanding of the totality of life in which every form of
fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is not control of thought, for when
thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind, but when you
understand the structure and origin of thought, which we have already
been into, then thought will not interfere. Thatvery understanding of
the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is meditation.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never
to say it is right or 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. Silence 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.
If you have read this book for a whole hour attentively, that is
meditation. If you have merely taken away a few words and gathered a few
ideas to think about later, then it is no longer meditation. Meditation
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 and that is not attention.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest,
and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about
yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you
say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware of all that
in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.
So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in
the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of
birds or looking at the face of your wife or child.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 mediator 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 the discipline, and that kind of discipline is
fluid, free, not the discipline of conformity.
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