"Meditation is the dying to the known."
Meditations |
"Meditation is destruction; it's a danger to those who wish to lead a superficial
life and a life of fancy and myth."
Krishnamurti's Notebook, p.82 |
"Meditation has no beginning and no end; in it there's no achievement and no failure,
no gathering and no renunciation; it is a movement without finality and so beyond and
above time and space..."
Krishnamurti's Notebook, p.88 |
"...Meditation is the movement that destroys the observer, the experiencer; it's a
movement that is beyond all symbol, thought and feeling..."
Krishnamurti's Notebook, p.91 |
"Meditation is danger for it destroys everything, nothing whatsoever is left,
not even a whisper of desire, and in this vast, unfathomable emptiness there is creation and love."
Krishnamurti's Notebook, p.110 |
"Meditation is the understanding of the totality of
life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased..."
Freedom From the Known, p.115 |
"Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind;
meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of
fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is
not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in
the mind, but when you understand the structure and origin of thought...then
thought will not interfere. That very
understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is
meditation.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old – this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past. ...To understand this movement of thought and feeling there can be no condemnation in observing it..." Freedom From the Known, p.115 |
"When you sit down to meditate, you fix your mind on a word, on an image, or on a picture but the
mind wanders all over the place. There is a constant interruption of other ideas, other thoughts,
other emotions and you try to push them away; you spend your time battling with your thoughts.
This is the process you call meditation. That is you are trying to concentrate on something in
which you are not interested and your thoughts keep on multiplying, increasing, interrupting, so
you spend your energy in exclusion, in warding off, pushing away; if you can concentrate on your
chosen thought, on a particular object, you think you have at last succeeded in meditation. Surely
that is not meditation, is it? Meditation is not an exclusive process - exclusive in the sense
of warding off, building resistance against encroaching ideas.
...So what is meditation? Surely meditation is understanding...How can there be understanding if there is exclusion?...In understanding there is peace, there is freedom; that which you understand, from that you are liberated." The First and Last Freedom, p.218 |
"A man who is fully aware is meditating; he does not pray, because he does not want anything."
The First and Last Freedom, p.221 |
"Many who seek quietness of mind withdraw from active life to a village, to a monastery, to the
mountains, or they withdraw into ideas, enclose themselves in a belief or avoid people who give them
trouble. Such isolation is not stillness of mind. The enclosure of the mind in an idea or the
avoidance of people who make life complicated does not bring about stillness of mind. Stillness
of mind comes only when there is no process of isolation through accumulation but complete
understanding of the whole process of relationship...
In that stillness, there is no formulation, there is no idea, there is no memory; that stillness is a state of creation that can be experienced only when there is a complete understanding of the whole process of the 'me.' Otherwise, stillness has no meaning. Only in that stillness, which is not a result, is the eternal discovered, which is beyond time." The First and Last Freedom, p.278-279 |
"It is not the silence cultivated by thought.
It is the silence of intelligence, silence of supreme intelligence. In that silence
comes that which are not touched by thought, by endeavor, by effort. It is the way
of intelligence which is the way of compassion. Then that which is sacred is everlasting.
That is meditation. Such a life is religious life. In that there is great beauty."
Unkown source |
"Do you know what practicing every day does to your brain? Your brain becomes dull,
mechanical, it is tortured, making effort to achieve some silence, some state of
experience. That is not meditation. That is just another form of achievement like a politician becoming a
minister."
Unkown source |
"Now to live without measurement, to be totally, completely, free of all
measurement, is part of meditation. Not that 'I am practicing this,
I will achieve something in a years time.' That is measurement which is the
very nature of one’s egotistic activity. Meditation is the ending of measurement,
the ending of comparison completely."
Unkown source |
"You can sit on the banks of the river Ganga or some place and do all kinds of
tricks with yourself. That is not meditation. Meditation is something that is
of daily life..."
Unkown source |
"Then what is meditation?" |