excerpts

Meditation is not the repetition of words and formulas, mesmerizing oneself into all kinds of fanciful states. If you take opium, a tranquillizer, it will give you marvellous visions, but that is not meditation.

Meditation is actually this process of investigation into oneself. If you go into it deeply yourself, you are bound to come across all this, when it is possible to think without the centre, to see without the centre, to act so completely without idea and approximation, to love without the centre and therefore without thought and feeling.

And, when you have gone through all that, you find out for yourself a mind that is completely free and has no borders, no frontiers - a mind that is free, which has no fear and which does not come about through discipline. And if one has gone that far, one begins to see - or rather, the mind itself begins to observe the thing itself which unfolds thought - that the quality of time, the quality that is yesterday, today and tomorrow, has completely changed, and therefore action is not in terms of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Such action has no motive - all motive has its root in the past, and any action born out of that motive is still an approximation.

So, meditation is the total awareness of every movement of thought and never denying thought - which means letting every thought flower in freedom; and it is only in freedom that every thought can flower and come to an end. So out of this labour - if it can be called labour; which is really out of this observation - the mind has understood all this. Such a mind is a quiet mind, such a mind knows what it is really to be quiet, to be really still. And in that stillness, there are various other forms of movement which can only be verbal to people who have not even thought about this.

Question: After a day's hard work, one's mind gets tired. What is one to do?

Krishnamurti: The question is: after a day's work with so many occupations, one finds the little time that one has is occupied; the mind is weary; what is one to do?

You know, our whole social structure is all wrong; our education is absurd; our so-called education is merely repetition, memorizing, mugging up. How can a mind which has been struggling all day as a scientist, as a specialist, as this or that, which is so occupied for thirteen hours in something or other - how can it have a leisure which is fruitful? It cannot. How can you, after spending forty or fifty years as a scientist or a bureaucrat or a doctor or what you are - not that they are not necessary - have ten years when your mind is not conditioned, not incapable? So, the question is really: is it possible to go to the office, to be an engineer, to be an expert in fertilizers, to be a good educator, and yet, all day, every minute, keep the mind astonishingly sharp, sensitive, alive? That is really the issue, not how to have quietness at the end of the day. You are committed to engineering, to some specialization; you cannot help it; society demands it, and you have to go to work. Is it possible as you are working never to get caught in the wheels of the monstrous thing called society? I cannot answer for you. I say it is possible, not theoretically but actually. It is possible only when there is no centre; that is why I was talking about it. Think of a doctor who is a nose and throat specialist, who has practised for fifty years. What is his heaven? His heaven is nose and throat obviously. But is it possible to be a good first class doctor, and yet live, function, watch, be aware of the whole thing, of the whole process of thought? Surely, it is possible; but that requires extraordinary energy. And that energy is wasted in conflict, in effort; that energy is wasted when you are vain, ambitious, envious.

We think of energy in terms of doing something, in terms of the so-called religious idea that you must have tremendous energy to reach God, and therefore you must be a bachelor, you must do this and do that - you know all the tricks that the religious people play upon themselves, and so end up half starved, empty, dull. God does not want dull people - the people who are insensitive. You can only go to God with complete aliveness, every part of you alive, vibrant; but you see, the difficulty is to live without falling into a groove, falling into habits of thought, of ideas, of action. If you apply your mind, you will find you can live in this ugly world I am using the word `ugly' in the dictionary sense, without any emotional content behind that word - work and act, and at the same time keep the brain alert, like the river that purifies itself all the time.

Question: What is the kind of conflict you are referring to, that degenerates the mind?

Krishnamurti: The gentleman wants to know what kind of conflict degenerates the mind. Does not every conflict dull the mind - not one series of conflicts, not one specific conflict. Does not every conflict, of any kind at any depth, weaken the mind, deteriorate the mind, make the mind insensitive? If I and my wife. quarrel all day, will that not dull, weaken, the mind?