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Meditation
What Is Meditation?
Conversation between Jiddu Krishnamurti
& Professor Allan W. Anderson
...continued from part thirteen
Anderson: We've been talking about meditation in relation to religion and I simply feel I must ask you to speak about the interrelationship of prayer to meditation, with meditation, because conventionally we always refer to prayer and meditation.
Krishnamurti: No. I don't, to repeat a prayer has no place in meditation. To whom am I praying? Whom am I supplicating? Begging? Asking?
Anderson: A prayer as petition has no place in it.
Krishnamurti: Petition, right.
Anderson: Is there any use of the word prayer that would be consonant with what we have been talking about?
Krishnamurti: If there is no petition, you understand, deeply, inwardly, there is no petition...
Anderson: No grabbing, grasping.
Krishnamurti: ...because the grabber is the grabbed.
Anderson: Exactly.
Krishnamurti: If there is no petition what takes place? I petition only when I don't understand. When I'm in conflict, when I'm in sorrow, when I'm in - you follow? When I say, "Oh, God, I've lost everything. I'm finished. I can't arrive. I can't achieve."
Anderson: When there is no petition I am free to look. Yes. Exactly.
Krishnamurti: A woman came to me once, some time ago. She said, "I have prayed, enormously, for years. And I have prayed for my refrigerator. And I got it!" Yes, sir! I pray for peace, and I live a life of violence all the time. I say, "I pray for my country", and I have divided the country opposed to another country, and I pray for my country. It becomes so childish.
Anderson: In conventional prayers there is usually both petition and praise, both are there.
Krishnamurti: Of course. Praising, and receiving.
Anderson: Praise.
Krishnamurti: You must know in Sanskrit it always begins, some parts of it, praising and then begging. There's a marvellous chant which is asking protection of the gods. Protection. And it says, "May you protect my steps."
Anderson: Yes, yes.
Krishnamurti: Praising God, then saying, please protect my steps. So if there is no petition, because the petitioner is the petitioned, the beggar is the begged, is the receiver, then what takes place in the mind. No asking.
Anderson: An immense quietude. Immense quietude. The proper sense of whatever the word tranquillity points to.
Krishnamurti: That's right, sir. That is real peace, not the phony peace they are all talking about - politicians and the religious people. There is no asking a thing.
Anderson: There is a very beautiful Biblical phrase, "The peace that passeth understanding."
Krishnamurti: I heard that phrase when I was a small boy.
Anderson: I've always asked myself since a child, how it's the case that there is so much talk about such a thing and there's so little evidence of it?
Krishnamurti: Sir, I think you know, books have become tremendously important. What they have written. What they have said. And so the human mind has become second-hand. Or the mind that has acquired so much knowledge about what other people have experienced about reality, how can such a mind experience or find, or come upon that thing which is original?
Anderson: Not that route.
Krishnamurti: No. And can the mind empty itself of its content? If it cannot it cannot meditate, and therefore instead says "acquire, then reject, then receive." You follow?
Anderson: Yes.
Krishnamurti: Why should I go through all those things? But I'll look. There is no book in the world that is going to teach me. There is no teacher that is going to teach me. Because the teacher is the taught. The disciple is the teacher.
Anderson: That is in itself - as a statement, if one will, as we said in an earlier conversation - at the inception of looking if one will hold that very statement, "I am the world and the world is me", is an occasion for healing.
Krishnamurti: Yes, sir.
Anderson: But that very statement, "I am the world and the world is me" sounds, as you have said so often, so absurd that at that point one starts to bolt again.
Krishnamurti: I know.
Anderson: Panic again. Meditation, when undertaken, as it must be, continuously, because we talked about that movement...
Krishnamurti: That means one has to be very, very serious. It isn't a thing we play with.
Anderson: No. It's not what's called these days a fun thing.
Krishnamurti: No sir!
Anderson: In no sense. No, no, no. The discussion that you have undertaken concerning it is so total. A meditation isn't a thing that you do among other things.
Krishnamurti: Meditation means attention, care. That's part of it, care for my children, for my neighbor, for my country, for the earth, for the earth, for the trees, for the animals. Don't kill animals. You follow? Don't kill them to eat. It's so unnecessary. It's part of the tradition which says, "you must eat meat". Therefore, sir, all this comes to a sense of deep, inward seriousness, and that seriousness itself brings about attention, caring and responsibility and all that we have discussed. It isn't that one has gone through all this. One sees it. And the very perception is action which is wisdom. Because wisdom is the ending of suffering. It isn't callousness, its the ending of it. And the ending of it means the observation, the seeing of suffering. Not to go beyond it, to refuse it, rationalize it or run away from it. Just to see it. Let it flower. And as you are choicelessly aware of this flowering, it comes naturally to wither away. I don't have to do something about it.
Anderson: Marvellous. Marvellous how energy can be free to pattern itself or not pattern itself. The pattern is free to be energized or... the whole thing is simply all round.
Krishnamurti: Yes, sir. It covers the whole of man's endeavour, his thoughts, his anxieties, everything it covers.
Anderson: So, in our conversations, all through, we have reached the point of consummation here where it is round. I wonder if Shakespeare had some intimation of this when he said, "Ripeness is all." He must have been thinking of that, not simply as setting a term to the career of fruit.
Krishnamurti: And also sir, time comes to an end, time stops. In silence, time stops.
Anderson: In silence time stops. Immensely beautiful. I must express to you my gratitude from the bottom of my heart. I hope you will let me. Because throughout the whole career of our discussions I have been undergoing a transformation.
Krishnamurti: Quite. Because you are willing enough to listen, good enough to listen. Most people are not, they won't listen. They won't take the time, the trouble, the care to listen.
Anderson: I've already seen, in my relation to my classes, in the activity my students and I share, the beginning of a flowering.
Krishnamurti: Flowering, quite.
Anderson: The beginning of a flowering.
Krishnamurti: Quite.
Anderson: Thank you, so much again.
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