|
|
|
|
HOME
Meditation What is Meditation? Power of Now Concentration & Insight Law of Attraction J Krishnamurti Tao Te Ching Dhammapada Buddhist Classics
|
Random Image
Meditation
What Is Meditation?
Conversation between Jiddu Krishnamurti
& Professor Allan W. Anderson
...continued from part eight
Anderson: Yes, yes. I hope you'll bear with me in going through that...
Krishnamurti: Yes, actually you are quite right.
Anderson: ...because I know in religious thought, my academic discipline, in religious thought this confusion, well, the weight of it.
Krishnamurti: I know.
Anderson: You feel...
Krishnamurti: ...oppressed.
Anderson: And as soon as you begin to make a comment of any kind about it that is simply raising the question, the extreme rigidity and nervousness that occurs...
Krishnamurti: Quite, quite.
Anderson: ...is dramatic. Yes. Yes.
Krishnamurti: You see, sir. So I'm asking, meditation covers the whole field of living, not one segment of it. Therefore living a life without control, without the action of will, decision, direction, achievement. Is that possible? If it is not possible it is not meditation. Therefore life becomes superficial, meaningless. And to escape from that meaningless life we chase all the gurus, the religious entertainment, circuses, you follow? All the practices of meditation. It has no meaning.
Anderson: You know, well, of course you do, it's a rhetorical question: in the classical tradition we have a definition of will. We say that it's desire made reasonable. Desire made reasonable.
Krishnamurti: Desire made reasonable.
Anderson: Desire made reasonable. Now, of course, we've long since lost the idea of what the ancients meant, against their contemplative background, by the word reason. We think it means calculation. But of course that's not what the classical tradition means when it says reasonable. It points rather to that order which isn't defined. And it occurs to me that if we understood that statement correctly we'd be saying, will is the focus of desire without my focusing self-consciously.
Krishnamurti: Yes, that's right. And watching desire to flower.
Anderson: Yes.
Krishnamurti: And therefore watching the will in operation and let it flower, and as it flowers as you are watching it dies, it withers away. After all it's like a flower, you allow it to bloom and it withers.
Anderson: It comes to be and passes away in its own time.
Krishnamurti: Therefore if you are choicelessly aware of this movement of desire, control, will, focusing that will in action, and so on, so on, so on, let it, watch it. And as you watch it you will see how it loses its vitality. So there is no control. So from that arises the next question which is, direction means space.
Anderson: Yes, of course.
Krishnamurti: It's very interesting what comes.
Anderson: Yes it is, it is.
Krishnamurti: What is space? Space which thought has created is one thing. Space that exists in heaven, in our, what is it, in the universe, space. There must be space for a mountain to exist. There must be space for a tree to grow. There must be space for a flower to bloom. So what is space? And have we space? Or are we all so limited physically to living in a little apartment, little houses, no space at all outwardly, and therefore having no space we become more and more violent.
Anderson: Yes.
Krishnamurti: I don't know if you have watched of an evening when all the swallows are lined up on a wire.
Anderson: Oh, yes.
Krishnamurti: And how exact spaces they have in between.
Anderson: Yes I have. It's marvellous.
Krishnamurti: It's marvellous to see this space. And space is necessary. And we have no space physically with more and more population and all the rest of it. And therefore more and more violence, more and more living together in a small flat, thousand people, you know, crowded.
Anderson: Oh yes.
Krishnamurti: Breathing the same air, thinking the same thing, seeing the same television, reading the same book, going to the same church, believing the same thing. You follow?
Anderson: Yes.
Krishnamurti: The same sorrow. The same anxiety. The same fears. "My country" - all that. So mind, and so the brain, has very little space. And space is necessary, otherwise I stifle. So can the mind have space? And there will be no space if there is a direction.
Anderson: Clearly, yes.
Krishnamurti: You see, sir?
Anderson: Of course, of course. Yes I do. Yes.
Krishnamurti: There is no space if direction means time. And when mind is occupied with family, with business, with God, with drink, with sex, with experience, occupied, filled, there is no space.
Continue to next part...
Contact • Feedback • Typo • Privacy • Home