What One of the Brightest Indian Philosophers Said About Meditation (EP-33)
What is meditation in J. Krishnamurti's words
But, who is Jiddu Krishnamurti, you ask.
Background
Jiddu Krishnamurti, commonly known as J. Krishnamurti, was an influential Indian philosopher, speaker, and writer.
In his early years, Krishnamurti was groomed by the Theosophical Society to be the vehicle for the coming of the World Teacher, a messianic figure. He was proclaimed as the "World Teacher" and "Maitreya" by the Theosophical Society.
In 1929, Krishnamurti underwent a profound transformation and renounced the messianic role that had been thrust upon him. He dissolved the Order of the Star and rejected any form of religious or spiritual authority.
Following his rejection of formal authority, Krishnamurti spent the rest of his life traveling the world, giving public talks, and writing extensively on subjects related to human consciousness, self-awareness, freedom, and the nature of thought.
His Thoughts on Meditation
His take on meditation is very different from anything you might have heard or read in common parlance. So, keep your minds open and read attentively:
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, that is part of meditation.
So, that means meditation can take place anywhere, anytime. When you are walking, talking, listening, anytime and not just only when you are sitting cross-legged in a corner of your home.
Meditation is to find out whether the brain with all the activities, all its experiences, can be absolutely quiet. Not forced, because the moment you force, there is duality. The entity that says,’I would like to have marvellous experiences, therefore I must force my brain to be quiet’, will never do it. But if you begin to inquire, observe, listen to all the movement of thoughts, its conditioning, its pursuits, its fears, its pleasures, watch how the brain operates, then you will see that the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet.
According to popular psychology literature, an average human brain has 60,000 thoughts/day. And we can not force our brains to be devoid of thoughts. That is impossible.
So, we need to observe and inquire into the functioning of our brains. With the observance the brain becomes quiet, we can not make the brain quiet. It becomes on its own accord.
If you set out to meditate, it will not be meditation. If you set out to be good, goodness will never flower. If you cultivate humility, it ceases to be. Meditation is the breeze that comes in when you leave the window open; but if you deliberately keep it open, deliberately invite it to come, it will never appear.
It means meditation can only happen, you can not do it. Our very effort is the hindrance. Just like sleep, have you ever tried to force yourself to sleep? Did it ever work?
Happiness and pleasure you can buy in any market at a price, but bliss you cannot buy. Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure or the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes - unsought and uninvited.
There is a vast difference between happiness and bliss. I am of the opinion that all of us have momentarily experienced bliss in some way in our lifetimes. And we can attest that we were not seeking bliss directly at that time. It just happened.
Happiness has an opposite word - sadness, but bliss does not have any. It is pure joy. It can not be described either.
I do not know if you have ever noticed that when you give total attention there is complete silence. And in that attention there is no frontier, there is no centre as the ‘me’ who is aware or attentive. That attention, that silence, is a state of meditation.
When meditator disappears then meditation happens. There is no one inside doing the meditation.
Meditation is that state of witnessing with no subject-object relationship.
It is indeed difficult to wrap our heads around this concept intellectually. But I guess, it will start to make sense when we just start observing.
Reading and thinking about the concepts has its own importance.
But it is the experiential learning, the practice, keeping the window open that will bring about the real transformation.