Theos-Talk Archives (August 1999 Message tt00010)

For those interested in meditation, here is a Krishnamurti  insight in its
meaning and value, giving to me by a very dear person:
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Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating
self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its
ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter,
and pleasure with its great sorrows.

Meditation is a wandering away from this world; one has to be a total
outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and
the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all action
begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for
self-fulfillment or the conceit of power. (9)

What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart.
It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the
quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable. Through negation there
is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience denies
the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both
the means and the end. The mind can never be made innocent through
experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that
positive state of innocency which cannot be cultivated by thought ...
Meditation is the ending of thought, not by the meditator ... If there is
no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty,
light and color.

Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it
does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was -
and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills,
let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken
to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the
plant, the flower and the fruit ... virtue is the total perception. (14)

Meditation is not the repetition of the word, nor the experiencing of a
vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The bead and the word do quieten
the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well
take a pill ....

If you say, "I will begin today to control my thoughts, to sit quietly in
the meditative posture, to breathe regularly," then you are caught in the
tricks with which one deceives oneself. Meditation is not a matter of being
absorbed some grandiose idea or image ... it is not the pursuit of an
invisible path leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is
seeing - watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without
opinion - attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships
throughout the day ... to such a mind comes a silence that is not put
together by thought. It is not a silence which the observer can experience
... There is only silence - in which the space of division ceases. ( 18-19)

There is the silence of the mind which is never touched by any noise, by
any thought or by the passing wind of experience. It is this silence that
is innocent, and so endless. When there is this silence of the mind, action
springs from it and this action does not cause confusion or misery.

There is that strange silence that exists in a temple or in an empty church
deep in the country, without the noise of tourists and worshipers; and the
heavy silence that lies on water is part of that which is outside the
silence of the mind.

The meditative mind contains all these varieties, changes and movements of
silence. This silence of the mind is the true religious mind, and the
silence of the gods is the silence of the earth. The meditative mind flows
in this silence, and love is the way of this mind. In this silence there is
bliss and laughter. (31)

Thought cannot conceive or formulate to itself the nature of space.
Whatever it formulates has within it the limitation of its own boundaries.
This is not the space which meditation comes upon. Thought has always a
horizon. The meditative mind has no horizon. The mind cannot go from the
limited to the immense, nor can it transform the limited into the
limitless. The one has to cease for the other to be. Meditation is opening
the door into spaciousness which cannot be imagined or speculated upon.

Thought is the centre round which there is the space of idea, and this
space can be expanded by further ideas. But such expansion through
stimulation in any form is not the spaciousness in which there is no
centre. Meditation is the understanding of this centre and so going beyond
it. Silence and spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the
immensity of the mind in which a centre does not exist ... (38)


From:
Mary Lutyens (Ed.). THE SECOND PENGUIN KRISHNAMURTI READER, New York:
Viking Penguin, 1970.



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