17 March

Krishnamurti In India: The Last Decade

Rajghat 1985  – 3rd Public Talk

39    K: Meditation as is generally practised is to cultivate this dullness. Right? And therefore gradually make the brain subservient, quiet. And when you feel quiet, you say, ‘My God, everything is achieved’. For the speaker that is not meditation at all. Don’t ask how to meditate. It is like asking a carpenter how to build a beautiful cabinet. If he is a good carpenter, you don’t have to tell him. So we are not asking how to meditate, but we are asking what is meditation? Two different things altogether. Not how, but what is meditation? As is generally practised, it is a series of achievements. Right? And you say, ‘Buddha is enlightened’. I don’t know what that means but that doesn’t matter.

40    So, when you compare, which is meditation – ‘ma’ as I said means in Sanskrit ‘measure’. ‘I was this today, I’ll be better tomorrow’. That is measurement. Right? So measurement has no place in meditation. Measurement has great place from the Greeks onwards. Measurement is necessary in all technology – in all technology, whether you build a chair, or the most complicated trajectory to go to the moon. Measurement is necessary. So we are saying, meditation implies total freedom from all comparison and measurement. Now this is difficult because meditation is something marvellous if you know what to do – not you, meditation.

41    The meditator is different from meditation. As long as there is a meditator, there is no meditation. You understand all this? Because the meditator is concerned about himself – how he is progressing, what he is doing, ‘I hope I will be better tomorrow’, anxiety, in meditation there is no meditator at all. Once you have seen this, sir, for yourself, the beauty of it, the depth of it, the subtleness of it.

42    So, the practice of meditation is no meditation. Sitting on the banks and looking… You know – making the mind more and more dull, and say, ‘Yes, I’ve spent an hour, marvellous’, and you prostrate to him, touch his feet. By the way, please don’t touch my feet. That’s most undignified, as a human being. You can hold my hand any amount you like, but not the feet of somebody, it’s inhuman, undignified. Right. So meditation is something that cannot be practised, as you practise a violin, a piano. In singing you practise. That means that you want to reach a certain level of perfection. And in meditation there is no level, nothing to be achieved. Therefore it is not a conscious, deliberate meditation. I wonder if you understand all this. There is a meditation which is totally undirected, totally, if I can use the word, unconscious. It is not a deliberate process. Let’s leave that. We can spend a lot of time on this – an hour, more, a whole day, the whole of your life to find this out.