Freedom from the Known
About 40 years ago, I read my first book by J Krishnamurti.
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Here is the last part of Chapter 15 of Freedom from the Known. Like almost everything else that he discusses, his take on Meditation is very different from what you may think, or from what you may have read or have been taught.
"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.
"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.
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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 in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.
If you have read this book for a whole hour attentively, that is meditation. If you have merely taken away a few words and gathered a few ideas to think about later, then it is no longer meditation.
Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete 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 wife or child.
In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method.
Love cannot be cultivated by thought.
Love can perhaps come into being when there is complete silence, a silence in which the meditator is entirely absent; and the mind can be silent only when it understands its own movement as thought and feeling.
To understand this movement of thought and feeling
there can be no condemnation in observing it.
To observe in such a way is the discipline,
and that kind of discipline is fluid, free,
not the discipline of conformity."
"Freedom from the known is the essence of intelligence". JK
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If you have read this book for a whole hour attentively, that is meditation. If you have merely taken away a few words and gathered a few ideas to think about later, then it is no longer meditation.
Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete 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 wife or child.
In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method.
Love cannot be cultivated by thought.
Love can perhaps come into being when there is complete silence, a silence in which the meditator is entirely absent; and the mind can be silent only when it understands its own movement as thought and feeling.
To understand this movement of thought and feeling
there can be no condemnation in observing it.
To observe in such a way is the discipline,
and that kind of discipline is fluid, free,
not the discipline of conformity."
"Freedom from the known is the essence of intelligence". JK
HOME
What it is About
Earthfamily Principles
Earthfamilyalpha Content III
Earthfamilyalpha Content II
Earthfamilyalpha Content
Links
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
Labels: personal philosophy
posted by oZ @ 9:10 AM
3 Comments:
People should revisit Krishnamurti often. Thanks for posting this.
Werner
Werner, thanks for the nice solar tour in Germany
This book doesn't simply fill our fragiles brains with more and more ''content'' just to give us a false sense of hope. On the contrary, it explores WHAT are the effects of ''content'' in our own cognition, therefore going straightly to the root of the problem.
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