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Overview
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) went from his origins in a small south Indian village to become one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. He taught that the only way to create peace on earth is to transform the human psyche—but that there is no path to this transformation, no method for achieving it, and no gurus nor spiritual authorities who can help. Rather, the transformation is a truth that each of us must discover within ourselves. This classic collection of brief excerpts from Krishnamurti’s books and talks presents the essence of his teaching on meditation—a state of attention, beyond thought, which brings total freedom from authority and ambition, fears and separateness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780834824836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Shambhala |
| Publication date: | 09/10/2002 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 352 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
From
Meditations
A
meditative mind is silent. It is not the silence which thought can conceive of;
it is not the silence of a still evening; it is the silence when thought—with all its images, its words and perceptions—has entirely ceased. This meditative mind is the religious mind—the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants.
The religious mind is the explosion of love. It is this love that knows no separation. To it, far is near. It is not the one or the many, but rather that state of love in which all division ceases. Like beauty, it is not of the measure of words. From this silence alone the meditative mind acts.
*
It's curious how all-important meditation becomes; there's no end to it nor is there a beginning to it. It's like a raindrop: in that drop are all the streams, the great rivers, the seas and the waterfalls; that drop nourishes the earth and man; without it, the earth would be a desert. Without meditation the heart becomes a desert, a wasteland.
*
The words "you" and "I"
separate things. This division in this strange silence and stillness doesn't exist. And as you watched out of the window, space and time seemed to have come to an end,
and the space that divides had no reality. That leaf and that eucalyptus and the blue shining water were not different from you.
Meditation is really very simple. We complicate it. We weave a web of ideas around it—what it is and what it is not. But it is none of these things. Because it is so very simple it escapes us, because our minds are so complicated, so timeworn and time-based. And this mind dictates the activity of the heart, and then the trouble begins. But meditation comes naturally, with extraordinary ease, when you walk on the sand or look out of your window or see those marvelous hills burnt by last summer's sun. Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is.
The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone—no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything. Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.
*
Meditation has no beginning and no end; in it there is no achievement and no failure, no gathering and no renunciation; it is a movement without finality and so beyond and above time and space. The experiencing of it is the denying of it, for the experiencer is bound to time and space, memory and recognition. The foundation for true meditation is that passive awareness which is the total freedom from authority and ambition, envy and fear. Meditation has no meaning, no significance whatsoever without this freedom, without self-knowing; as long as there is choice there is no self-knowing. Choice implies conflict, which prevents the understanding of "what is." Wandering off into some fancy, into some romantic beliefs, is not meditation; the brain must strip itself of every myth, illusion and security and face the reality of their falseness. There is no distraction; everything is in the movement of meditation. The flower is the form, the scent, the color, and the beauty that is the whole of it. Tear it to pieces actually or verbally, then there is no flower, only a remembrance of what was, which is never the flower. Meditation is the whole flower in its beauty, withering and living.
*
Any authority on meditation is the very denial of it. All the knowledge, the concepts, the examples have no place in meditation. The complete elimination of the meditator, the experiencer, the thinker, is the very essence of meditation.
This freedom is the daily act of meditation. The observer is the past, his ground is time, his thoughts, images, shadows, are time-binding. Knowledge is time, and freedom from the known is the flowering of meditation. To follow another, his example, his word, is to banish truth.
Only in the mirror of relationship do you see the face of "what is." The seer is the seen. Without the order which virtue brings, meditation and the endless assertions of others have no meaning whatsoever; they are totally irrelevant. Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down.