Meditation Needs Neither Focus Nor Concentration
There are different schools of meditation, different methods and systems. There are systems which say: "Watch the movement of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch it". There are others which advocate sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly or practising awareness. All this is utterly mechanical. Another method gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it, you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. It is a form of self-hypnosis. By repeating 'Amen', 'Om' or 'Coca Cola' indefinitely, you will obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet. It is a well-known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India; it's called mantra yoga. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft, but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind. Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to. It means that all the time you are having a battle between the insistence that you must concentrate on the one hand and your mind on the other which wanders away to all sorts of other things; whereas you should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders. When your mind wanders off, it means you are interested in something else. Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled, it breeds conflict in the mind; but when you understand the structure and origin of thought, then thought will not interfere. That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline, which is meditation. Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old- this silence is meditation. Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with com plete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system and that is not attention. Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life--perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy-if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus, or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds, or looking at the face of your spouse or child. Excerpted from Wisdom From The Known: Chapter XV. May 11 is Jiddu Krishnamurti's 113th birth anniversary.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Jiddu Krishnamurti kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article. The article belongs to its respective owner or owners and this site does not claim any right over it.
Courtesy: Jiddu Krishnamurti Speaking Tree,Times of India
Meditation Needs Neither Focus Nor Concentration
There are different schools of meditation, different methods and systems. There are systems which say: "Watch the movement of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch it". There are others which advocate sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly or practising awareness. All this is utterly mechanical. Another method gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it, you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. It is a form of self-hypnosis. By repeating 'Amen', 'Om' or 'Coca Cola' indefinitely, you will obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet. It is a well-known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India; it's called mantra yoga. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft, but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind. Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to. It means that all the time you are having a battle between the insistence that you must concentrate on the one hand and your mind on the other which wanders away to all sorts of other things; whereas you should be attentive to every movement of the mind wherever it wanders. When your mind wanders off, it means you are interested in something else. Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled, it breeds conflict in the mind; but when you understand the structure and origin of thought, then thought will not interfere. That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline, which is meditation. Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old- this silence is meditation. Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with com plete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system and that is not attention. Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life--perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy-if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. So meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus, or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds, or looking at the face of your spouse or child. Excerpted from Wisdom From The Known: Chapter XV. May 11 is Jiddu Krishnamurti's 113th birth anniversary.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Jiddu Krishnamurti kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article. The article belongs to its respective owner or owners and this site does not claim any right over it.
Courtesy: Jiddu Krishnamurti Speaking Tree,Times of India