Meditation
What Is Meditation?
Meditation means without effort. It takes effort to sit down and do meditation. It takes effort to try to suppress your thoughts or try to let your thoughts go. It takes effort to control your breath. Meditation takes no effort.
Meditation means without effort
To sit and meditate sounds like you’re doing something. When you sit at your desk and think, you’re doing something. There’s a movement of thought, which takes time. Thought is time. Meditation, in a sense, is the absence of time.
If you consider doing vs being, you are. You are being, right now. How is that different than meditation? Meditation is a quality of being. There’s no “doing” in it.
Meditation is an extraordinary thing, if you know. I’ve talked to various types of people who meditate, Tibetan, Hindu, Buddhists, Zen, you know, all the rest of it. It’s all a conscious deliberate effort.
It isn’t something you do for the love of it. You know, you can love and yet be selfish, but I mean in the sense, to do meditation without conscious effort.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1984 at Brockwood Park
Doing implies effort. Effort is work. Meditation is not work. Let’s put aside the term “deliberate”, because deliberate means conscious, it means intentional. Intention implies the future, it implies an outcome. Conscious implies attention.
"The now contains the past, the present, and the future." - JKIf you are doing, then you are doing something towards a desired outcome. If you are simply being, then there is no outcome in mind. While it’s worth noting that now contains past and future, when you are meditating, you are meditating now. I’m not saying now is all there is.
Is meditation neurotic?
I love the way JK talks about human neurotic behavior. He didn’t mean, I don’t think, neurotic is the sense of neurosis, but in the way Jews talk about being neurotic. It’s a playful use of the word. This is not serious. And yet it is the most serious thing.
Neurosis is a psychological condition referring to a mental illness - now, whether we say that a mental illness is real or not, and I’m not disputing there are real mental illnesses, but what I think he means is the obsessive practice of sitting down for an hour per day or doing yoga for 30 years and not getting anything out of it.
There is a way, as Iris Murdoch, who spoke with JK in 1984, puts it that any means that one adopts towards goodness is likely to become a barrier. The same is true for people in religion - some go because they are seeking spirituality and leave with morality. That’s not what they were looking for, but perhaps it feels like a substitute.
The quality of breath
I love to meditate on what meditation is. And I was just thinking about how the breath is an anchor, because it’s so easy to recognize. It’s stronger than your heart beat. But there is a degree to which we actively breathe.
There are some breaths that have an active component. When you push the air completely out, your lungs partially inflate naturally. You have no control over the air being sucked into your lungs. That moment takes no effort.
Consciousness
Exploration
Meditation is an exploration of the field of consciousness. That’s my opinion, you may not agree. The dictionary defines meditation as contemplation or to ponder. That
implies thought.
What is consciousness?
The content of consciousness is its content. Therefore there’s no division as consciousness separate from its content. I can extend or widen the consciousness, horizontally or vertically, but it is still within that field. I can extend it and say, God is immense. That’s my belief. And I’ve extended my consciousness by imagining that it is extended. Whatever thought has created in the world and inside me is the content.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s worth clarifying that JK was not religious. You don’t have to be. That’s what people like about him - no dogma, no doctrine, no method. Don’t believe him, think for yourself, find out for yourself. No guru, no therapist. You. Find out what you think.
Contemplation
Whether I’m contemplating thought or not engaging with thought, am I meditating? If I’m walking down the street and I have an idea in my head, I’m wondering what I think about that idea, I notice what other thoughts come up. The same happens when I’m driving long distance, or inn the shower. I’m not necessarily engaged in the thought, but it’s there and I let it be there. I notice what else comes up and certain dots connect, I might even get a stoke of wisdom - something may occur to me that I have never thought about, and it might be extremely impactful. I may need to write it down. Is that meditation?
I’m sitting with my eyes closed and I notice the thoughts until there are no thoughts. Am I meditating? When I want to see what there is beyond thought, above thought, is that meditation? If I have a glass of wine and I’m enjoying it, and then I have another, my mind slips below thought. Is that meditation? No, that’s not meditation - the absence of thought isn’t necessarily meditation. Meditation transcends thought.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to drop a comment below.
I don’t care about typos anymore. I’ve noticed several in my posts after they’ve dropped. And I just don’t care. I hope you don’t mind. As long as they don’t confuse the meaning I don’t change them. Thank you for your understanding.