excerpts

Question: Having seriously experimented with your teachings for a number of years, I have become fully aware of the parasitic nature of self-consciousness and see its tentacles touching my every thought, word and deed. As a result, I have lost all self-confidence as well as all motivation. Work has become drudgery and leisure drabness. I am in almost constant psychological pain, yet I see even this pain as a device of the self. I have reached an impasse in every department of my life, and I ask you as I have been asking myself: What now?

Krishnamurti: Are you experimenting with my teachings, or are you experimenting with yourself? I hope you see the difference.

If you are experimenting with what I am saying, then you must come to, `What now?', because then you are trying to achieve a result which you think I have.

You think I have something which you do not have, and that if you experiment with what I am saying, you also will get it. We approach these things with a commercial mentality: I will do this in order to get that. I will worship, meditate, sacrifice in order to get something.

Now, you are not practising my teachings. I have nothing to say. Or rather, all that I am saying is, observe your own mind, see to what depths the mind can go;

therefore you are important, not the teachings. It is important for you to find out your own ways of thinking and what that thinking implies. And if you are really observing your own thinking, if you are watching, experimenting, discovering, letting go, dying each day to everything that you have gathered, then you will never put that question, `What now?'

You see, confidence is entirely different from self-confidence.

The confidence that comes into being when you are discovering from moment to moment is entirely different from the self-confidence arising from the accumulation of discoveries which becomes knowledge and gives you importance. Do you see the difference?

Therefore the problem of self-confidence completely disappears. There is only the constant movement of discovery, the constant reading and understanding, not of a book, but of your own mind, the whole, vast structure of consciousness.

Then you are not seeking a result at all. It is only when you are seeking a result that you say, `I have done all these things but I have got nothing, and I have lost confidence. What now?'

Whereas, if you are examining, understanding the ways of your own mind without seeking a reward, an end, without the motivation of gain, then there is self-knowledge, and you will see an astonishing thing come out of it.

Question: How can one prevent awareness from becoming a new technique, the latest fashion in meditation?

Krishnamurti: As this is a very serious question I am going into it rather deeply, and I hope you are not too tired to follow with relaxed alertness the workings of your own mind.

It is important to meditate, but what is still more important is to understand what is meditation, otherwise the mind gets caught in mere technique. Learning a new trick of breathing, sitting in a certain posture, holding your back straight, practising one of the various systems for silencing the mind - none of that is important.

What is important is for you and me to find out what is meditation. In the very finding out of what is meditation, I am meditating.

It is enormously important to meditate. If you do not know what meditation is, it is like having a flower without scent. You may have a marvellous capacity to talk, or to paint, or to enjoy life, you may have encyclopaedic information and correlate all knowledge, but those things will have no meaning at all if you do not know what meditation is.

Meditation is the perfume of life, it has immense beauty. It opens doors that the mind can never open, it goes to depths that the merely cultured mind can never touch. So meditation is very important.

But we always put the wrong question, and therefore get a wrong answer. We say, `How am I to meditate', so we go to some swami, some foolish person, or we pick up a book, or follow a system, hoping to learn how to meditate.

We are now asking, not how to meditate, or what the technique of awareness is, but what is meditation - which is the right question. If you put a wrong question you will receive a wrong answer; but if you put the right question, then that very question will reveal the right answer.

So, what is meditation? Do you know what meditation is? Don't repeat what you have heard another say, even if you know somebody, as I do, who has devoted twenty-five years to meditation. Do you know what meditation is? Obviously you don't, do you?

You may have read what various priests, saints, or hermits have said about contemplation and prayer, but I am not talking of that at all. I am talking of meditation - not the dictionary meaning of the word.

What is meditation? You don't know. And that is the basis on which to meditate. (Laughter)

'I don't know.' Do you understand the beauty of that? It means that my mind is stripped of all technique, of all information about meditation, of everything others have said about it. My mind does not know.

We can proceed with finding out what is meditation only when you can honestly say that you do not know; and you cannot say, `I do not know' if there is in your mind the glimmer of secondhand information, of what the Gita. or the Bible or Saint Francis has said about contemplation, or the results of prayer which is the latest fashion, in every magazine they are talking about it. You must put all that aside, because if you copy, if you follow, you revert to the collective.

So, can the mind be in a state in which it says, `I do not know'? That state is the beginning and the end of meditation, because in that state every experience, every experience is understood and not accumulated.

Do you understand? You see, you want to control your thinking; and when you control your thinking, hold it from distraction, your energy has gone into the control and not into thinking.

There can be the gathering of energy only when energy is not wasted in control, in subjugation, in fighting distractions, in suppositions, in pursuits, in motivations, and this enormous gathering of energy, of thought, is without motion.

When you say, `I do not know', then there is no movement of thought. There is a movement of thought only when you begin to inquire, to find out, and your inquiry is from the known to the known.

Meditation is a process of purgation of the mind. There can be purgation of the mind only when there is no controller; in controlling, the controller dissipates energy. Dissipation of energy arises from the friction between the controller and the object he wishes to control.

Now, when you say, `I do not know', there is no movement of thought in any direction to find an answer; the mind is completely still. And for the mind to be still, there must be extraordinary energy. The mind cannot be still without energy, not the energy that is dissipated through conflict, suppression, domination, or through prayer, seeking, begging, which implies a movement, but the energy that is complete attention.

Editor's note: What is wrong with "prayer"? The typical prayer is not a godly exercise but merely the ego frantically expressing its neurosis of "I am not enough" and "don't have enough."

Any movement of thought in any direction is a dissipation of energy, and for the mind to be completely still there must be the energy of complete attention.

Only then is there the coming into being of that which is not to be invited, that which is not to be sought after, that for which there is no respectability, which cannot be pursued through virtue or sacrifice.

That state is creativity, that is the timeless, the real.