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Jiddu Krishnamurti on Prayer, Meditation and
Concentration
Jiddu Krishnamurti : We must differentiate between
prayer and meditation. What do we mean by prayer? Generally it means
supplication or petition. You demand, beg, or ask from what you call
God, something which you want. To put it plainly it means that you are
in need and you pray. You are in suffering and you pray. You are
mentally confused and you pray. That is, you petition or you supplicate
somebody to tell you what to do.
To whom are you praying? You say to God. But surely God or Truth is
something unknown and which cannot be formulated. If you say I know God
it is no longer God. God and Truth are not created. it must come to you
and you cannot go to it and ask. When you ask you are creating it and
therefore it ceases to be God or Truth. So before you ask, you must know
whether you want peace from God, that is, Truth.
When you yourself create this chaos in this world you look to another
for help. So God cannot give you peace, because it is your fabrication.
What is the good of praying? Is not then prayer an escape? Please do not
bring personalities into it. Let us think about it directly. It does not
matter who prays. Once a person in America came to see me and he said
that he had prayed to God to give him a refrigerator and he said that he
had the refrigerator. But you pay for it in the end.
If you want peace you will have it, but it will not be peace, it will
only be decay, stagnation and regimentation. Peace is something very
dynamic which is creative and you cannot have something creative through
supplication. But prayer is completely different from meditation. A man
who prays can never understand what is meditation, because he is
concerned with gain.
Meditation is a process of understanding. Understanding is not a result
and it is not something you gain. It is a process of self-discovery.
That means meditation is an awareness of your whole process of living.
Meditation is a process of understanding, the process of your whole
being, not only a part of it, and that means that you have to be aware
of everything that you are doing. it is not concentration. You take a
picture and you focus your attention on that.
That is comparatively easy. That is exclusive, you exclude all thoughts
and you focus your attention on one point. Surely that is not
meditation. Meditation is an awareness constantly becoming deeper and
deeper as a result of clearly seeing through the many layers of
consciousness. It is like a pool that is still when the process is over.
When the problem ceases through awareness the solution becomes
stillness. It cannot be made quiet.
So prayer, concentration,
meditation, are entirely different things and
he who prays can never know what meditation is; neither he who
concentrates can ever know what meditation is. For meditation is
spontaneous and therefore it requires spontaneity and not a regimented
mind. Spontaneity comes into being when there is awareness, awareness in
which there is no condemnation, no judgment and no identification. If
you go deeper and deeper and let it flow freely it becomes meditation,
in which the thinker is the thought and there is no division between the
thinker and the thought.
Related Article:
Jiddu Krishnamurti on Chattering of
Mind and watching the Mind
Jiddu Krishnamurti
on What is Meditation. Meditation is to live a
diligent life ^Top
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