On Meditation

Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating
self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and
its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food and clothes
and shelter, and pleasure with its great sorrows.
Meditation is a wandering away from this world; one has to be a total
outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens
and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all
action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the
search for self-fulfilment or the conceit of power.
What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the
heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but
rather the quality of the mind that is innocent and vulnerable.
Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to
live in experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not
a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. The mind can
never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of
experience that brings about the positive state of innocency which
cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent. Meditation
is the ending of thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is
the meditation. If there is no meditation then you are like the blind
man in a world of great beauty, light and colour.
Wander by the sea-shore and let this meditative quality come upon you.
If it does, don´t pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of
what it was – and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander
among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of
life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and the ending of it.
Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is
words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root.In
this separation action does not bring about goodness; virtue is the
total perception. Meditation is not the repetition of the word, nor
the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The
beads and the word do quieten the chattering mind, but this is a form
of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill.
Meditation is not wrapping yourself in a pattern of thought, in the
enchantment of pleasure. Meditation has no beginning and therefore has
no end. Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to
some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching,
listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion –
attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout
the day. As the mind watches, listens to the movements of life, the
outer and the inner, to such a mind comes a silence that is not put
together by thought.
It is not a silence that the observer can experience. If he does
experience it and recognise it, it is no longer silence. The silence
of the meditative mind is not within the borders of recognition, for
this silence has no frontier. There is only silence – in which the
space of division ceases.
Meditation is the unfolding of the new. The new is beyond and above
the repetitious past – and meditation is the ending of this
repetition. The death that meditation brings about is the immortality
of the new. The new is not within the area of thought, and meditation
is the silence of thought.
Meditation is not an achievement, nor is it the capture of a vision,
nor the excitement of sensation. It is like the river, not to be
tamed, swiftly running and overflowing its banks. It is the music
without sound; it cannot be domesticated and made use of. It is the
silence in which the observer has ceased from the very beginning.


The mind freeing itself from the known is meditation. Meditation is
the total denial of everything that the mind has accumulated. The
known is the observer, and the observer sees only through the known.
The image is of the past, and meditation is the ending of the past. It
is only when the mind transcends time that truth ceases to be an
abstraction. Then bliss is not an idea derived from pleasure but an
actuality that is not verbal.

Thought cannot conceive or formulate to itself the nature of space.
Whatever it formulates has within it the limitation of its own
boundaries. This is not the space which meditation comes upon. Thought
has always a horizon. The meditative mind has no horizon. The mind
cannot go from the limited to the immense, nor cannot it transform the
limited into the limitless. The one has to cease for the other to be.
Meditation is opening the door into spaciousness which cannot be
imagined or speculated upon. Thought is the centre around which there
is the space of an idea and this space can be expanded by further
ideas. But such expansion by stimulation of any form is not the
spaciousness in which there is no centre. Meditation is the
understanding of this centre and so going beyond it. Silence and
spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the immensity of
the mind in which a centre does not exist. The perception of this
space and the silence is not of thought. Thought can perceive only its
own projection, and the recognition of it is its own frontier.
Meditation is hard work. It demands the highest form of discipline –
not conformity, not imitation, not obedience, but a discipline which
comes through constant awareness, not only of the things about you
outwardly, but also inwardly. So meditation is not an activity of
isolation but action in everyday life which demands cooperation,
sensitivity and intelligence. Without laying the foundation of a
righteous life meditation becomes an escape and therefore has no value
whatsoever. A righteous life is not the following of social morality,
but the freedom from envy, greed and the search for power – which all
breed enmity. The freedom from these does not come through the
activityof will but through being aware of them through self-knowing.
Without knowing the activities of the self, meditation becomes
sensuous excitement and therefore of very little significance.
Meditation is the emptying of experience and is going on all the time,
consciously or unconsciously, so it is not an action limited to a
certain period during the day. It is a continuous action from morning
till night – the watching without the watcher. Therefore there is no
division between the daily life and meditation, the religious life and
the secular life. The division comes only when the watcher is tied to
time. In this division there is disarray, misery and confusion, which
is the state of society. So meditation is not individualistic, nor is
it social; it transcends both and so includes both. This is love; the
flowering of love is meditation.
Meditation is a movement in stillness. Silence of the mind is the way
of action. Action born of thought is inaction, which breeds disorder.
The silence is not the product of thought, nor is it the ending of the
chattering of the mind. A still mind is possible only when the brain
itself is quiet. The brain cells – which have been conditioned for so
long to react, to project, to defend, to assert – become quiet only
through the seeing of what actually is. From this silence, action
which does not bring about disorder is possible only when the
observer, the centre, the experiencer has come to an end – for then
the seeing is the doing. Seeing is possible only out of a silence in
which all evaluation and moral values have come to an end.
Intelligence is not discernment and judgement, or critical evaluation.
Intelligence is the seeing of what is. The ¨what is¨is continually
changing, and when the seeing is anchored in the past, the
intelligence of seeing ceases. Then the dead weight of memory dictates
the action and not the intelligence of perception. Meditation is the
seeing of all this at a glance. And to see, there must be silence, and
from this silence there is action which is entirely different from the
activities of thought. Meditation is not a separate thing from life;
it is the very essence of life.

JK