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SA62T9 - Meditation is an extraordinary thing that demands no effort
Saanen, Switzerland - 9 August 1962
Public Talk 9



0:00 This is J. Krishnamurti’s public ninth talk in Saanen, 1962.
0:07 Krishnamurti: As we said, day before yesterday, we are going to talk this morning about meditation.
0:21 It is a very complex affair, and yet very simple.
0:28 It is not at all mysterious, or something oriental, with all kinds of romantic, nonsensical ideas round it.
0:42 But to go into it very deeply, which I propose to do this morning, there are certain obvious things that are necessary.
1:00 First of all, the word is not the thing.
1:12 The word mountain is not the mountain, and so one has to be extraordinarily aware that one does not merely stay at the verbal level and thereby merely treat meditation as something intellectual, fanciful, and not of great significance in daily life.
1:51 And also it requires a mind that is very subtle and very sensitive.
2:09 Subtlety and sensitivity go together when the mind is no longer seeking.
2:25 I mean by that word seeking, trying to achieve a goal, trying to find out, grasping at visions, caught in self-hypnosis; and I’m going to go into all that presently.
2:55 And it demands a logical, rational, clear thinking.
3:12 And when one thinks very clearly, without any pressure behind it you will find that thought comes to an end; and it is essential to find out what is meditation that… for thought to end.
3:46 And I am again going into that as deeply, as in detail as possible.
3:56 But before we go into this question of meditation, we must also understand what is the religious mind.
4:13 The religious mind is not the confused, tangled mind which is caught in belief, in dogma, in ritual.
4:28 It is not a slave to authority.
4:36 It does not belong to any group, to any religion, therefore it has no belief.
4:49 It doesn’t look to any saviour, and therefore no master, no guide.
5:00 It is a light to itself.
5:10 And a religious mind is a mind that is free from all influence, because any form of influence distorts the mind.
5:38 And one has to be aware of these influences because you cannot get rid of an influence. One has to be aware of them; aware consciously as well as unconsciously; aware of what you have read about meditation; aware of all the systems of meditation that have been offered in order to persuade the meditator to achieve a certain result.
6:23 One has to be aware of all that and thereby put the whole idea of adjusting, conforming, pursuing a pattern.
6:41 And a religious mind is a very simple mind; it’s not a complicated mind.
6:53 I mean by that word simplicity a mind that is not caught in conflict.
7:08 It does not mean living with one meal a day, or having few clothes, or withdrawing into a monastery.
7:22 That’s not a religious mind at all. It’s a conforming mind to a pattern laid down by somebody else, or imitating a pattern laid down for itself as a reaction to the complexity of life.
7:52 So a religious mind is a simple, direct mind which is not caught in words, which has no time interval between what is and what should be.
8:22 It perceives facts, psychological facts directly and therefore seeing, perceiving directly it does not give the soil to problems.
8:37 I have explained… we have explained all this in our previous talks.
8:46 And if we would go, as I hope we will this morning, step by step into this question of meditation, which I feel is as important as taking a bath, having a meal, seeing the mountains and the beauty, and the shallowness of the mind.
9:11 It’s as important as anything that you do, as earning a livelihood, and if you do not know how to meditate rightly, you have missed a great deal of life; probably the enriching, the completely beautiful, the splendid awakening of life.
9:45 And so I would beg of you to listen.
9:58 Because meditation is an extraordinary thing that demands no effort.
10:17 And as most of us are conditioned to make effort, to achieve a result, to sustain a particular experience, to gather knowledge, which all implies various forms of conflict.
10:39 And without understanding conflict, this state of effortless being is not possible.
10:49 And again we went into that question of effort, which implies conflict, and conflict implies contradiction, a division between the thinker and the thought.
11:14 So it’s important, it seems to me, that as we do not know what right meditation is, we should find it out for ourselves.
11:34 I am… we are not teaching you a method, because any form of method, a system, a pattern of meditation merely cultivates habit, and a mind caught in habit is a dull mind, an insensitive mind, an unintelligent mind.
12:07 So we must understand and be free of this idea of conforming, pursuing, imitating a pattern; it does not matter by whom that pattern is laid.
12:27 One has to understand the significance of the mould, the system.
12:36 A system perhaps might offer a result, and they do offer results in meditation.
12:52 And when you pursue that system regularly, earnestly, it does bring about a certain experience, a certain states but that system, that pattern has moulded the mind, has shaped the mind according to the pattern, and therefore the mind is not a free mind.
13:27 It does not matter what that system is.
13:35 So one must, in inquiring, as we are doing now, what is meditation, there must be freedom from this imitative, conformative process.
13:57 You see, it is such an enormous subject, with extraordinary nuances and subtleties that it’s quite difficult to find out where to begin.
14:33 Because for most of us, life being what it is - turmoil, constant change, travail, misery, fleeting joy, and all the dark shadows and the light, which are always changing and never anything real, permanent, we seek unconsciously or consciously a permanency.
15:15 That permanency we call peace, happiness or God or enlightenment.
15:26 Being in conflict, in flux, we want something permanent, a permanent state; and there is no permanency.
15:40 If you achieved a permanent state, your mind is a dead mind .
15:53 So meditation is not the achievement of any permanency.
16:08 Meditation is not prayer. Prayer implies supplication, begging, looking to another for comfort, psychological comfort, psychological security.
16:39 Meditation is not contemplation.
16:47 Contemplation implies thinking, contemplating about something, putting your mind on something, or expecting, watching, which implies that there is a watcher and the thing to be watched.
17:22 So meditation is not contemplation, nor prayer, nor pursuing a particular pattern in order to achieve a result; nor is it the awakening of visions.
17:56 Visions are the reaction, the response of your background. If you are a Christian, you will see Christ, and you think that is a marvellous experience – it’s not at all; it’s a most immature, un-thoughtful; it’s a conditioned experience, as the Buddhist will see his own Buddha, or the Hindu his own deity.
18:25 They are the response of his conditioning, and one must be free of that conditioning, and the freeing the mind of that conditioning is part of meditation.
18:47 And we have been discussing for the last two weeks, or perhaps nearly three weeks, this question of conditioning, effort, fear, sorrow and death.
19:10 And also we have more… we have touched upon love and compassion.
19:19 Where there is fear, where the mind is clogged with sorrow, such a mind cannot possibly be in a state of meditation.
19:31 So for a mind that would really understand the depth and the beauty of meditation fear must cease; there must be no sorrow of any kind.
19:55 Then when the mind is free from sorrow, from fear, from all the psychological structure of society - which is ambition, greed, envy, the desire for success, the demand for power, position, prestige - when all that has been broken down and understood, then the brain becomes very quiet.
20:36 And it must be quiet if one has been aware of all these processes, when the mind is free of fear, free from sorrow, free from the desire for power, position, prestige, ambition and greed and envy.
21:03 It can only be free when you are aware of it, aware without effort.
21:13 Not to change fear into courage but to understand the whole significance of fear.
21:24 Then you will find the brain is quiet. For as we explained, the brain is the result of centuries of animalistic, conditioned existence.
21:41 And that brain must be completely quiet, and it cannot be quiet through discipline, through enforcement.
21:54 It becomes quiet naturally, easily, gracefully, of its own accord when there is an understanding of all these things that we have talked about.
22:08 So far, it is fairly clear.
22:21 Now there comes a very difficult problem: there must be total elimination of all conflict, and I’m going to go into that a little bit.
22:50 Conflict exists as long as there is a division between the thinker and the thought; as long as there is a contradiction, a division, a time interval, a space between the thinker and the thought.
23:25 For most of us the thinker is separate from thought.
23:33 For most of us, the experiencer, who is the result of many, many centuries of memory, experience, he or it is different from the thing which he is going to experience.
23:52 So there is a division and as long as there is a division there is conflict.
24:01 Now, to bring about a complete - I was going to say unity; it is not unity - a complete cessation of this division is absolutely necessary, because that’s the origin of all conflict.
24:36 Because the thinker is the censor; the thinker is the result of centuries of egocentric activity; it is the centre of fear, of conflict, envy and all the rest of that; it is that which is conditioned.
25:01 Please, I am going step by step into what is meditation.
25:11 Don’t wait till the end. What we are talking now is part of this meditation.
25:23 So one has to understand, not how to bring about a unity, an integration between thought and the thinker, between the contradictions, but one has to be aware of the thinker itself, not of the thought.
25:52 The thinker, as we have pointed out, is the psychological entity which has accumulated experience as knowledge, which is time-bound, which is the result of every changing environmental influence, and from that centre he looks, from that centre he listens, from that centre all experience is known.
26:41 And as long as one does not understand the structure and the anatomy of this centre, there must always be conflict, and a mind in conflict cannot possibly understand the depth and the beauty and the significance of meditation.
27:13 So there must be in meditation no thinker, and you will see when there is no thinker, thought comes to an end, and therefore thought, which is urged forward by the thinker to do various things in order to achieve a certain result, comes to an end.
27:56 And therefore you will see meditation is not achieving a result; meditation is not a series of deep breathing, looking at your nose, awakening certain tricks and all the rest of that immature nonsense.
28:28 So you will find, if you have gone that far - and I hope you have - in listening to all these eight talks, that you have more or less grasped and are in that state of mind which is always meditative, because this meditation is not separate from life.
29:01 When you are driving, when you are sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly carried away by the wind - all of that is part of meditation.
29:32 Then comes another thing, which is: the difference between concentration and attention.
29:49 A child given a toy becomes completely absorbed in that toy and he has lost all interest in everything else; he is quiet, not mischievous, not chattering; he is so completely quiet, if you have observed a child who is absorbed by the toy.
30:29 For most of us, we want toys which will absorb us, whether it is the toy of knowledge, the symbol of a saviour, the concentration in a Mass, or certain forms of respiration and control and discipline, a picture - all these are toys which absorb our mind, and thereby the mind becomes concentrated, limited, taken over by the toy.
31:22 And when you reject the toy, as most intelligent people do, then you have your own impetus to control, to be absorbed by your own thought, by your own image, by your own experience and knowledge.
31:52 That brings about certain concentration; you can concentrate, but if you observe that concentration, it is exclusion.
32:11 Like a boy in a school, he wants to look out of the window and the teacher says, ‘Don’t look out of the window but concentrate on the book, look at the book.’ And the boy trains himself not to look out of the window but to see the book and that brings about a certain concentration, which is a resistance, which is an exclusion.
32:56 And a mind that is in concentration, a mind that has learned to be concentrated, as most people can fairly easily learn to be concentrated, to such a mind there is always a distraction.
33:16 You understand what I’m…? I hope I’m making myself clear. A mind that is concentrated, to such a mind there is always a distraction, and therefore he’s fighting distraction.
33:35 That’s what most of us do.
33:42 We resist so-called all distractions in order to be concentrated on something which we think we ought to be.
33:59 So there is a vast difference between concentration and attention.
34:12 When you attend, you can listen to that stream, you can hear the train go by, the wind among the leaves, the movement of the people, see the various colours, the shape of the tent; be attentive completely without a border, and such a mind can concentrate without exclusion.
34:51 But a mind that has learned to be concentrated cannot be attentive.
35:04 And this attention without resistance, without conflict, without being forced into a particular narrow groove is absolutely necessary, this state of attention.
35:33 And when one has gone that far, then you will see for yourself how easily, how gently silence of the mind comes into being.
35:51 The silence, the peace that most of us are seeking is the silence and the peace of death and decay, which the monks, the people who have withdrawn from the world have achieved, a state of complete insensitivity, a state of dullness.
36:26 And they do have a certain silence but the silence of which we are speaking is the state of attention in which every noise, every movement of thought, every movement of feeling, inwardly as well as outwardly one is… there is an awareness.
37:13 Then you will see for yourself… then out of this complete silence in which there is no experience but only that state of silence.
37:29 If there is an experiencer who experiences that silence or an observer who observes that silence, then it is not silence, it is something he has projected himself and therefore it is not the real thing.
37:57 Then, in this state of attention, hear that aeroplane going by, the train that went by, and yet the mind is completely attentive, completely quiet, listening, seeing everything.
38:26 And then out of this immense silence and quietude, when there is no longer seeking, expecting, wanting, demanding, there is a movement which is creation, that creation which is beyond time, beyond expression.
39:10 It is not the creation of the writer, the painter, the musician; it is something far beyond.
39:20 It is that creation which is energy - energy as death, energy as love.
39:38 And this whole process, from the beginning to the end - and there is no beginning and there is no end - comes about only through self-knowledge, self-knowing, and with this self-knowing there comes this extraordinary state of immensity which has no time, no beginning, no end, and this is meditation.
41:17 (Pause) I hope you’re not being mesmerized.
41:52 Unless you yourself go into it ruthlessly, putting aside all the pettiness of envy, greed and the desire for fame, putting… dying to every form of technique and talent that one has gathered, when one is nobody at all, then you will know for yourself.
42:31 Now, I’m afraid, you are merely listening to me, and perhaps experiencing, perhaps feeling this state, influenced by another.
42:51 And if you are influenced it’s not meditation.
43:11 Questioner: Is there any division between an innocent mind, attention and meditation?
43:31 K: Is there any division, the questioner asks, between an innocent mind…
43:38 Q: And attention.
43:43 K: …and attention.
43:49 Q: In attention; an innocent mind in attention… (inaudible).
43:56 K: An innocent mind in attention and meditation. I think the gentleman means this, if I may translate - please, I don’t quite understand it, therefore I’m trying to find out what you mean.
44:11 We have talked about innocency, and he asks is that innocency different from meditation.
44:44 You know, we have talked at many of the meetings that we have had in this tent the quality of innocency, the state of innocency.
45:02 A mind that is not caught in the psychological structure of society, a mind that is not in conflict, a mind that is innocent is not weighed down by the recognition, the remembrances of things past - which is not a state of amnesia, which is not a state of blankness - there is that innocency which is no longer held in technique, though technique is necessary.
46:01 He says is there a difference between that innocency and the meditation of which we have talked about this morning.
46:12 You see, our difficulty is, it seems to me, that we get hold of one word like innocency, or immensity, or creation, and then try to relate everything to those few words.
46:40 As I said, the word is not the thing. The word meditation is not the state of meditation; the word innocency is not innocence.
46:57 But when there is that state of innocency, it is meditation.
47:07 But you cannot come to that innocency if you are ambitious, if your mind is petty, if you’re caught in your social structure, if you’re nothing but a technique, as most of us are because we have jobs; we have got jobs, we have got to earn a livelihood, that’s what we are, we are nothing else but machines; very clever, very cunning, subtle machines.
47:49 A machine is not an innocent mind.
47:56 Perhaps the computers are; you know, the computers, electronic brains, probably they are very innocent, but they are metals, they are not living things as we are.
48:12 Probably eventually they will come to invent a machine that will have a life of its own; probably they are very near to it already.
48:26 But to reduce ourselves to machines by our own technological efforts, by our own knowledge, by our own experience, does not bring about innocency.
48:44 Innocency is that state of mind which is always young, fresh; which has no fear of death or no fear of any kind, and therefore free of time.
48:59 Q: When there is attention or meditation, an awakened state from moment to moment does that attention always follows when we sleep?
49:19 K: Ah…
49:21 Q: Have you understand?
49:24 K: Yes, sir. The gentleman asks – we’ll wait for the train – the gentleman asks: perhaps one can understand the attention when one is awake, but what happens to that attention when one goes to sleep?
49:57 Is that right, sir?
49:59 Q: When there is attention from moment to moment.
50:02 K: Yes, sir; yes, sir.
50:04 Q: (Inaudible).
50:05 K: During the day that one can from moment to moment be aware, but during the night when one is asleep, what happens to that attention – is that right, sir?
50:18 Q: Yes, sir.
50:26 K: I wonder if you’re not tired.
50:38 I’m going to explain that question.
50:45 But you should be tired at the end of nearly an hour of attention.
51:00 What is the state of mind which is awake during the day and the state of mind which is asleep during the night, at least supposed to be asleep?
51:16 Are we awake during the day? We assume we are. Are we awake when you are caught in habits of thought, of activities, of routine behaviour?
51:40 Are we awake then? When you so easily condemn, compare, judge, evaluate, when you recognize yourself to belong into to a particular race, nationality, custom and all the rest of it, are you awake?
52:04 And if you are not awake, then sleep is merely a continuity of that state of mind which is caught in habit.
52:17 Whether you are asleep or awake it makes very little difference then. You may go to church regularly, repeat a prayer, Ave Maria and… as what they do in India and all the rest of the things the religious people do; or the political or the artistic world do – repeat, repeat, repeat - is that a state of awakened intelligence?
52:47 And if one has broken down, understood all that, and one is awake, when one is a light unto oneself, when one has no nationality, no God, no church, one doesn’t depend on music, painting, mountains, all the rest of… family, husband, wife and children, when one is so completely awake inwardly – if that is possible and I say it is possible - then what is sleep?
53:35 Do you understand the question, sir? We ask the question as though we are awake, and then what happens if we are asleep. I question if you are awake. And if one is totally awake, both the unconscious as well as the conscious mind, then what is the significance of sleep?
54:01 It is the dull mind, it is the mind that is in conflict that dreams.
54:14 Dreams are merely hints from the unconscious, and all the dreams need interpretation and all the rest of it, which we won’t go into now.
54:31 And a mind that is awake during the day, watching, observing things about itself - not from a centre of itself, which is merely a contradiction, a projection, a sense of condemnation, comparison - watching, observing, seeing, feeling; not from a centre and therefore completely awake, then you will see such a mind when it sleeps is not dreaming; there are no dreams at all.
55:19 Though psychologists say – not that I’ve read any psychology – psychologists say it must dream.
55:26 On the contrary, it will never dream because every form of hint, intimation is immediately observed, recognized and understood while you are awake, as you’re getting into a bus, listening to a concert, walking alone or with people, you are aware of all the things that are going on, inwardly as well as outwardly; without reaction, and therefore every hint, every intimation is understood, and when it goes to sleep it is quiet.
56:10 And then you will see such a mind which has been so awake during the day, when it does go to sleep it reaches into greater depths, because the body is quiet, the things about it are quiet and there is a general sense of silence outwardly, and then you will see then that sleep brings a freshness, a newness, an innocency, so the next day the day is different, there is a newness.
57:04 But all this demands an astonishing, inward awareness.
57:25 Q: Are there unconditioned visions?
57:43 K: Are there unconditioned visions. Aren’t they contradictory, those two words? The questioner asks: are there unconditioned visions. Aren’t they… the word vision and conditioned, are they different?
58:06 As I explained, sir, our minds are conditioned.
58:17 We can’t help that, being conditioned.
58:24 From childhood our minds are shaped, by education at schools, and later when we have finished with schools and colleges, our minds are shaped by society.
58:41 And you are either a Christian, a Jew, a Catholic, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a communist, God knows what else, and according to your conditioning you have visions; more refined those conditions are, the more refined your visions are.
59:14 And a mind that is unconditioned – I have gone into that so I won’t go into that now, what it means, in what… is it possible to uncondition the mind or not; we have discussed that.
59:34 A mind that is unconditioned has no visions. God is not a vision.
59:37 Q: Please, sir, I do not see what is the relationship between the state of meditation and sorrow, love and death. I do not feel what is the relation… (inaudible).
1:00:07 K: The lady asks: she does not see the relationship between death, love and sorrow and meditation.
1:00:48 To understand fear there must be a state of meditation.
1:01:02 To understand the whole significance of sorrow - which we went into – to understand it, not just verbally, intellectually agree or disagree; to be free of this corroding thing called sorrow, to go into it very, very deeply, your mind must be in a state of meditation.
1:01:35 All inquiry is a state of meditation; and to see the meaning of death, the dying to all one’s talents, to all the qualities, work, the memories, to die to everything every day one has to be attentive, aware; and that state of attention is meditation.
1:02:21 There is no difference in the understanding of sorrow and meditation, but the understanding of sorrow is the beginning of meditation.
1:02:38 And to go very far into meditation, mind must be free of all these entanglements.
1:02:50 And in a state of freedom only it can go very far.
1:02:57 And this movement which is not distance or of time, that is creation.
1:03:06 That’s all this is part of meditation.
1:03:09 Q: (Inaudible) great artists (inaudible) different from the state… (inaudible)?
1:03:27 K: Is the state of creation of great artists different from the state of creation of which we are talking about.
1:03:37 I’m afraid it is.
1:03:45 Do you want an explanation of this? Yes? Why, sirs? Ah, wait, wait. Why, sir? All right.
1:03:54 Q: Well, it seems to me there are some others who loves creation that are similar to the creation you speak about.
1:03:58 K: The question is: great artists who create, and the creation of which we are talking about, is it different.
1:04:28 I asked do you want an explanation.
1:04:30 Q: Yes.
1:04:32 K: And you say, sir, we do need explanation because at moments, perhaps rare, we do have this sense of creation.
1:04:46 Sir, look, I don’t want to go this morning into this whole question of expression, the artist and creation.
1:05:11 Look, sir, creation does not demand any expression, the creation of which we are talking about.
1:05:33 It doesn’t depend on any technique, on any gift or talent.
1:05:40 On the contrary, every talent, every gift must come to an end to find this immense creation.
1:05:56 And you will then ask what is the value of such creation if it cannot be expressed, if it can’t be put on a canvas, in a poem, in a music, then what is the value of it?
1:06:13 It has no value whatever. It is not marketable. You cannot get any benefit from it.
1:06:31 It is something absolute.
1:06:39 And a mind that wants to translate it into an action, that creation wants to put into words, into a frame can never do it.
1:06:54 Perhaps the artist may have a feeling at rare moments of something beyond his own petty little self, but that thing beyond himself is not that immensity.
1:07:11 That immensity can only come into being when the mind is a religious mind.
1:07:23 I think that’s enough this morning, isn’t it?