“There are various schools, in India and further East, where they teach methods of meditation — it is really most appalling. It means training the mind mechanically; it therefore ceases to be free and does not understand the problem.
So when we use the word ‘meditation’ we do not mean something that is practiced. We have no method. Meditation means awareness: to be aware of what you are doing, what you are thinking, what you are feeling, aware without any choice, to observe, to learn. Meditation is to be aware of one’s conditioning, how one is conditioned by the society in which one lives, in which one has been brought up, by the religious propaganda — aware without any choice, without distortion, without wishing it were different. Out of this awareness comes attention, the capacity to be completely attentive. Then there is freedom to see things as they actually are, without distortion. The mind becomes unconfused, clear, sensitive. Such meditation brings about a quality of mind that is completely silent — of which quality one can go on talking, but it will have no meaning unless it exists.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Source: movingthroughrecordedthoughts)
Fear is not only a response of the adrenal glands but also a psychological process. To understand fear, not intellectually but actually to be free of it, one requires very keen observation, one has to look at it very closely. When the mind - which has been trained in a culture that accepts fear as part of life with all its violence - understands fear then perhaps we can be completely free not only consciously but also unconsciously. To go into this question of fear one has to be aware, that is one has to watch one’s own fear, not the fear that one is told about or the fear of the unknown, but the actual fear that one has.
— J.Krishnamurti (via
urmi7)
Are you aware that you are conditioned? That is the first thing to ask yourself, not how to be free of your conditioning. You may never be free of it, and if you say, “I must be free of it”, you may fall into another trap of another form of conditioning. So are you aware that you are conditioned? Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, “That is an oak tree”, or “that is a banyan tree”, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
Death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, everyday as if it were a new loveliness, there must be a dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
—
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known (via
universoul)
