excerpts

You can't practise goodness. Goodness is a flower that bursts overnight, it comes into being without your wanting, without your seeking, without your cultivating. It can only come through listening. It will take place suddenly, in full blossom. Goodness is never the repetition of what has been; you cannot be good if you remember the past, either the pleasure or the pain, or the insult or the flattery. In that soil it will never grow. It will never grow in the ground of time, but it comes into being without your knowing...

You have to find out what meditation is. It is a most extraordinary thing to know what meditation is - not how to meditate, not the system, not the practice, but the content of meditation. To be in the meditative mood and to go into that meditation requires a very generous mind, a mind that has no border, a mind that is not caught in the process of time. A mind that has not committed itself to anything, to any activity, to any thought, to any dogma, to any family, to a name - it is only such a mind that can be generous; and it is only such a mind that can begin to understand the depth, the beauty and the extraordinary loveliness of meditation...

Meditation is a part of life,just as your going to your office, or your eating your meal, or your speaking, or your acting is a part of life. And meditation, being a part of life, is not to be neglected any more than you neglect to clean your teeth, to bathe, to go to your office; but most of us neglect this side because it is much more arduous, demanding much greater energy, and of greater insistency.

Meditation is the beginning of self-knowledge. To know oneself and nothing else is meditation. To know what you are thinking, what you are feeling, what your motives are, to be choicelessly aware of them, to face them as facts without an opinion, without judgment - that is just the beginning of meditation.

If you have not done that in your life ever, but have pursued the traditional meditation of sitting down in a quiet corner and trying to focus your attention on something, then you can sit for ten thousand years and go on repeating words, mantras, you can hypnotize yourself by the repetition of words, which quietens the mind. But that quietness leads nowhere but to death, decay and withering...

The beginning of meditation, is self-enquiry, self-critical awareness, just to know what you are; and from that very simplicity grows the immense which is beyond words, beyond time, beyond thought. But you must begin at that very simple, immediate step.

Most of us do not want to know what we are. We invent ... to escape from the reality of what we are ...

So to meditate you must destroy everything totally [all the old concepts with which we identify], completely deny everything that is being imposed [by society]. You must deny nationality, you must deny the Gita, the Bible, the Koran - everything. And that is a very difficult thing to do, because we need them as a means of security... They are merely escapes - your Krishna, your saviours, and all those people.

What is of importance and of the greatest significance is your daily, everyday existence - what you think and what you feel. And you can't understand what you think and what you feel, if you are encumbered, if you are weighed down by the knowledge of the past, of what the books have said.

So, the beginning of meditation is the knowing of yourself - not what you think you should be, not what Sankara thinks you should be just as you are, as when you look at yourself in a mirror. So, if you pursue self-knowing, you begin to enquire into what you are, your daily activities, the way you talk to your servant, the way you treat your wife, your husband, the way you play up to important people, the everlasting desire to be 'somebody'...

So, the beginning of meditation is the denial of every form of authority, because you have to be a light to yourself. And a man who is a light to himself has no authority at any time, either at the beginning or at the end. But to be a light to oneself implies a great many things; and from the beginning you must be a light to yourself, not at the end. To be a light to yourself implies no fear... To be a light to yourself implies no [neurotic] attachment of any kind, neither to your wife, nor to your husband, nor to your knowledge, nor to your experiences; because these cast a shadow and prevent you from being a light to yourself. But more than that, to be a light to yourself you must enquire into experience.

according to your cultural conditioning, you will experience

Experience is the essence of time, experience builds time as knowledge, experience conditions the mind. If you are a Hindu or a Christian or a Buddhist, you are being brought up in a particular culture, which is in the religion, in the education, in the family, in the tradition of that particular culture; your mind is shaped, moulded according to that culture, according to that tradition. You either believe in Krishna or Christ or whatever you believe in, and that is your conditioning; and according to that conditioning you will experience.

experience is not neutral, objective, from 'out there', but, to a large degree, we fashion our own experience

Editor's note: This is what Kant said, as well.

A mind that experiences according to that conditioning, cannot possibly ever know the immense significance of meditation...

Because, the vision which you want, which you crave for, which you desire, is the result of your conditioning. When you see Krishna or Rama or any other person, it is your background that has projected it there. Your background has been built through centuries of time, through fear, through agony, through sorrow; and whatever vision may be born of that is utterly empty, has no meaning; and a mind caught in that can never know the freedom of meditation.

So you have to understand the meaning of the word 'experience. We all want more experience, more and more, more wealth, more property, more love, greater success, more fame, more beauty; and we also want more experience as knowledge.

Please do follow this. A mind that is experiencing is dependent on experience; and experience is after all the response to a challenge. I do hope you are following this - this is not very complex. The mind that is athirst for more, wanting more experience, more knowledge, more thrills, more ecstasy, is a mind that is dependent. And a mind that is dependent, leaning upon something - that can only indicate that it is asleep. Therefore every challenge to it is an experience of waking up for a moment, to go to sleep again...

There are innumerable challenges all our life. There are influences all the time, impregnating our minds and hearts all the time whether we are conscious or unconscious of them. The cawing of the crow [right now] has already gone into your unconscious, it is there; the colour of that sari, whether you see it or not, has already given its impression; the sunset, the cloud caught in the light of an evening that has left its mark.

So the conscious or unconscious mind is full of these impressions; and from these impressions all experiences arise. These are psychological facts...

And a mind that is dependent on experience as a means of advancement, as a means of growing, as a means of maturity, as a means of unfoldment - such a mind which is dependent on time, on experience, can never obviously penetrate that which is beyond time, beyond experience...

Experience dulls the natural creative energies of the mind for experience is composed of innumerable images built upon the stultifying authority of the past.

Experience dulls the mind. It does not enlighten the mind, because that experience is the result of a response to a challenge, and that response is from the background of what you have already known. So every experience only strengthens what you have known, and therefore there is no freedom from what you have known.

Meditation is the very beginning of the freedom from the known... Meditation gives you an astonishing sensitivity... A mind that is put together by time, by experience, by knowledge, by conflict, by assertion, by aggression, or by ambition - such a mind is not a strong mind; it is only capable of resisting...

You must understand the meaning, the depth and the quality of experience that you all want. To see Rama, Krishna, Christ, this or that - that you call meditation. It is not meditation, it is only a projection from the past, a projection of what you have been brought up on. A Christian sees the Christ, and glories in what he sees. But the man who is never brought up to worship Christ as the Saviour, or whatever it is, will never see Christ any more than you who have been brought up to believe in Krishna. You will never see other gods, you will see your own gods; and when you are caught in your own gods, you are caught in your own illusion. A mind that is caught in an experience can never, do what it will, go into the depth, into the complete silence of emptiness of space - which is part of meditation...

So, you begin to see ... that every form of repetitive thought, practice, discipline, every form of experience only engenders the demand, the urge for further experience; you are never satisfied with one experience, you want more, more and more. So, you begin to see that there is no method. A method is the practice, the tradition, of doing something over and over again, following some thought, some action - which only dulls the mind. Therefore there is no method, there is no path.

Please follow all this. There is no path to enlightenment. You begin to see that every form of experience is to be denied through understanding, because you understand that every experience dulls the mind, every experience is a translation of the known, of the past. A mind caught in time can never go beyond time...

So, meditation is the beginning of the flowering of goodness. When that goodness flowers deeply, without ... self-pity and memory, from that little beginning grows the Immensity which is not of time, which has no beginning and no end. And that is the Everlasting and the Immeasurable.