Public Talk 6, New Delhi, 10 November 1963

Krishnamurti: I would like this evening to talk about something with which you may be familiar. Probably you are familiar with the word and not with the fact. And to go into it, as we shall during this evening, we must have a critical capacity. Because most of us accept very easily; we accept authority, tradition and the easy way of life and thereby lose the critical observation. And when we do observe, our criticism is so superficial, casual, or it is made from a particular point of view and therefore becomes narrow, cynical or merely destructive. Destruction is good; one must destroy to create; but the casual criticism of a gesture, of a word, doesn’t lead anywhere. And this evening, at least for this hour, the capacity to critically… to observe, not what the speaker is saying but to observe the natural, spontaneous responses that arise within each one, and to observe those reactions and not to accept them or casually put them aside, but to observe so that we shall be able to go into that process which is called meditation.

Without right meditation — not the traditional, accepted, monotonous, repetitive, so-called meditation which is utterly futile and juvenile — if there is no right meditation, life becomes very superficial. I mean by *life* the whole content of it, the extraordinary beauty, the sorrow, the anxiety, the utter shallowness, the lack of sensitivity, the despair, the hope, the fears, the agonies, the total process of living. And I am going to… we are going to go into that this evening. But if you would take the journey together, there must be really critical observation, never accepting a thing, either what the speaker says or what you observe of your own reactions, because it’s only a very sharp, clear, healthy, sane mind that is capable of meditation.

And if we merely accept, we destroy all feeling. Acceptance is a form of imitation, and meditation is not imitation, is not repetitive. And when you do accept, it doesn’t matter what it is — of course, you have to accept certain obvious things, like keeping to the left side of the road, paying taxes and so on; the obvious, superficial authority; but we are talking of authority at quite a different level: the psychological acceptance of authority which comes into being when there is the search and the demand for security and therefore we accept.

Please observe your own minds in operation rather than merely casually listen to the speaker; because if one is not aware of one’s own process of thought, you will not be able to follow or be able to criticise with an extraordinary passion — because passion is necessary — and there is no authority when there is passion.

And as most of us do accept — we are mostly yes-sayers — and when we do accept, all feeling is made dull. We are not affected deeply: the tree, the squalor, the poverty, the ignorance, those in power who destroy — we have no feeling when we observe all these things about us. And, for most of us, feeling is suffering — to feel very strongly about something — and that very feeling breeds sorrow. When you see this poverty, the utter callousness of people, whether they be the high politicians or the low, cunning operators in a particular party, they have no feeling. And when you do feel — if you have observed yourself — there is a great deal of sorrow involved in it, grief; not only when you feel about your own particular little sorrow of not having a good position, of being insulted by your boss every day or by the loss of a particular person; it is not only there, but the feeling, as a human being, for the whole world, for another human being. To see how power destroys, corrupts, and to feel very strongly, passionately about these things; and to feel passionately, every form of acceptance must be put aside.

And it is only when you begin to feel very strongly, out of that feeling there is love. It is only in that state that you can cooperate, because we live by cooperating and we destroy each other when there is no cooperation. And that’s what is happening throughout the world: we have intellectually, verbally, cultivated our brains, our thoughts, but we do not feel strongly. And when we do feel very strongly, we do the most stupid, silly things: trying to convert people to a particular form of belief, or joining a peace march, this or that.

I’m talking of something entirely different. We are talking about feeling, for itself, without sorrow. Because the moment there is sorrow, there is the feeling that you must do something immediately; then that feeling loses in organisation. You observe all these in yourself. And then the feeling gets dissipated, lost. And as love cannot be organised, and it’s only a man who loves that can cooperate; and as the world needs cooperation, not according to a particular pattern, the feeling of cooperation, the necessity, the urgency, to cooperate; not with the government or against the government or with a particular party or with a particular system. We cooperate when we agree, but our agreement is merely, generally intellectual, verbal. Love does not agree; love is not an idea with which you agree or disagree. You don’t agree with the heat of the sun; it is there burning, destroying, creating, making things new.

So a cooperation right through life, not at one level of life but right through, this feeling of working together efficiently, living together, not dividing the earth into yours and mine, into America, Russia, India and all the stupid, political, national, linguistic division but to feel together. And unfortunately, only hate brings us together. When you’re attacked, then we all come together. But hate is not love; and it’s only really a man who feels, feels when he sees the squalor, the dirt on the road, feels the dearth, the inward poverty of these politicians, sees the utter cupidity of the saints and their followers; to feel for all this is part of meditation. And meditation is not just a word. I am sure that word has awakened in you the traditional form, the traditional way of meditating.

You see, we need a fresh mind, a new mind, because it’s only the new mind that can have… that can create, bring about a new world; not the traditional mind, not the mind that accepts and performs a routine day-after-day; a mind that is in revolution, not a mind that is merely in revolt. There is a difference between revolt and revolution. One can revolt against something: that revolt is merely a reaction; it’s like revolting against a particular form of society, a particular order, a psychological insistence of a particular society. But revolution is something entirely different. To completely deny the whole psychological structure of society — not just parts of it, the totality of it — needs an extraordinary capacity to be critical. And you can only criticise sanely when there is real feeling. What is, as we were saying, what is necessary is a mind that is incorruptible, a mind that is made new.

Now, we are going, this evening, to go into this question and to bring about that mind instantly. Because it must be instant; it cannot take place in time — then corruption sets in. That instant mutation is revolution, not revolt. And the inquiry sanely, logically, through observation of every process of your own thinking and feeling — to observe — is the beginning of meditation. Because a mind that is not made new, that has the whole weight of the past, that merely reacts, can never be still, quiet. So we are going into a problem which is extremely subtle, needs all your attention and therefore not accepting or denying what the speaker is saying but merely to observe at the highest form of… highest capacity of critical awareness in which there is no choice, no comparative condemnation, but to observe.

To meditate, for most of us, is a problem of conflict because the… thought wanders all over the place, and to make that thought quiet is a battle, is a conflict. And when there is conflict, there is no understanding. It’s merely a battle between *what* *should* *be* and *what is,* and a mind caught in this battle, that mind cannot possibly ever know what is the right way, right process of meditation. So we must first understand this whole process of thinking; not how to still thought, not how to control thought. Every schoolboy knows how to control thought. When he wants to look out of a window and the teacher says, ‘Look at your book,’ he is frightened and looks; and we have learnt that art of concentration. But to inquire into this whole process of thinking, to find out whether thought can ever be still demands attention; and we are going to go into that.

Because, as I pointed out, meditation is an extraordinary thing. There is an extraordinary beauty in it. It gives mind sensitivity, a heightened sharpness, so that your whole life is lived completely, fully, in the active present. For most of us do not live totally, with all our conscious, unconscious state and beyond. We only touch at the periphery, and this peripheral touch we call living, with all its agonies, contradictions, bestialities, cruelties, flatteries, insults and all the rest of the human existence; that’s where we touch. We are talking of a meditative mind that is totally aware, not only the peripheral movement but the whole content of consciousness, and thereby to go beyond it. Otherwise, there is no meditation; otherwise it’s mere self-hypnotism, caught in a series of ideas, in images, a conditioned projection of Christ or Buddha or your Shri Krishna or your particular guru and seeing visions and getting terribly excited about those normal conditional responses which have no meaning at all.

So we are talking about something entirely different. We are talking about a meditative mind that is in the full flow of life without fear and therefore without hope, without despair and therefore, seeing beauty, living in a state of complete cooperation and therefore in a state of love. That’s what we are going into.

As I said… as we said just now, to understand or to find out the beginning of meditation — the beginning; if you don’t understand the beginning, you’ll not understand the end, because the end is in the beginning, not away at a distance. Therefore, you have to understand completely what the beginning is; completely, with all your being. So don’t, please, if I may suggest or request, don’t say at the end, ‘You haven’t taught me how to meditate. I haven’t a silent mind. What am I to do?’ — those are questions that are utterly immature. Those questions indicate a mind that has not gone into itself and discovered the whole process of its own thought, the flowering of this whole being.

So all we know is the observer and the observed; which is, the experiencer and the thing experienced, or the thinker and the thought. That’s all we know. That is the fact which you find out for yourself when you observe yourself: the thinker trying to control thought, the thinker trying to shape thought, the thinker trying to impose discipline, trying to understand this thing that wanders away from… moment-to-moment, this thought. And so we know only the contradiction and the conflict between the thinker and the thought.

Please, you are not listening to me, to the speaker, you’re observing yourself. What the speaker says is very little importance. What is important is to observe how your own mind is operating and merely to listen to the speaker so that he acts as a mirror for your observation and nothing else — to observe. And you will see how this process, this conflict is our life; f rom the moment we are born till we die this battle goes on, day-after-day, endlessly: the thinker accumulating, chastening his thoughts, refining or controlling; and what he wants is to so completely control all thought so that he lives in a state of sterile decay because he has controlled. And that’s all what your meditation means: just to control your feelings, your thoughts, the duties, the responsibilities, the ugliness of your… one’s life; and in that framework, you try to meditate. Therefore, you may alter character a little bit here and there; you may become a little more quiet, more considerate, but character — which is really the reaction to a particular society — however necessary, will not bring freedom of a mind that can meditate, that is in a state of an extraordinary ecstasy; and there is that ecstasy.

So the question then is: is it possible to remove this conflict totally between the thinker and the thought? Please see the problem, understand the problem, first. If you exercise will to bring about a complete harmony between the thinker and the thought, between the innumerable experiences of the past and the present movement of experiencing, which is the response of the past in the present, if you don’t… if you merely exercise a decision, exercise will to control, who is the entity that exercises that will? It is still the thinker. You may call it the higher self, the *atman* or give it all kinds of superficial or traditional names, but it is still within the field of thought. Therefore, what is within the field of thought is not the real. Thought is merely the response of memory. You have been brought up to believe in an *atman*, and another man might not be brought up to believe in anything. You are just conditioned. Because you repeat the word… use the word *atman* or *God*, you’re not godly. To find God, to realise that extraordinary thing you need a mind that is astonishingly new, innocent, a mind that has that energy which is not contaminated by conflict.

So what is necessary is not will but being aware of this duality, of this contradiction between the thinker and the thought; just to be aware, just to see it, just to observe it. You will find that to merely observe is one of the most difficult things, and through that… that very observation itself is discipline, not the discipline enforced. So meditation then is the observation of yourself; just to observe the movement of your own being, to observe your thoughts, not to correct them, not to put them in certain categories of good or bad but just to observe them. When you so observe, then you will see that there is no thinker and the thought, only a state of observation, not that *you* observe. And this is very important to understand because most of us — no, not most of us — all of us are second-hand human beings.

Sirs, please don’t take notes. Just listen. Listen with your hearts, not with your mind only. We are second-hand human beings. There’s nothing new, original, pristine, uncorrupt. We are all put together by society; which again is a fact. And how can a second-hand mind, though it has had thousand experiences, how can such a second-hand mind discover something that has never been touched by thought, an energy that has never known what it is to be in conflict, a thing that is beyond time, something that’s beyond all forms of the known? So do what you will, meditate for the rest of your life traditionally, you will never free that mind. You will never bring about a new mind unless you have totally understood, completely, the whole process of experiencing and thinking. It is only when you have really understood the problem of experiencing and thinking, only then the mind can be still.

Because for most of us experience is very necessary. We are fed up with our daily experiences, daily going to the office, with the usual sexual enjoyments. We are fed up with the traditional acceptances and we want something more; we want to experience something much more. So what do we do? We take drugs — that’s the latest craze — drugs which will give us heightened sensitivity, expand slightly our consciousness. And in that state we have extraordinary feelings, that there is no distance between you and you, between the flower and you, between the sky and you, between the tree, between every feeling and every state of being; there is no distance; you are completely unidentified and therefore you are with it — not that I have taken it; I have… we have talked to people who have — but that is still within the field of time, within the field of consciousness. That doesn’t bring about that… an extraordinary freedom from the known.

So you have to understand experience. Please, from the moment I began the talk this evening till now, it is a process of meditation. If you haven’t understood this, you won’t go any further. So to… a mind that is made up of experience is a second-hand mind, because there is nothing new in experience, however deep, however wide the challenge be. Because when there is a challenge, you respond according to your conditioning. If you are a politician, you will obviously respond as a politician to a demand, to a challenge that asks you to respond totally; and you, as a politician, respond according to your party politics, to your country, to your fears, to desire for your power, to remain in your position, and all the rest of the stupid nonsense that goes on in this world. Or if you want a wider, deeper, extensive experience, you will experience according to your conditioning, whatever that be.

Therefore, a mind that has understood experience and therefore is free from the demand of experiencing, and therefore is in a state where there is no experience, because it’s only the mind that has no experience that is an innocent mind. And it is only the innocent mind that can observe that which is beyond the measure of time. Therefore, meditation is the understanding of experience — do follow all this — and therefore, freeing itself from experience. A mind that is alight, afire, without a shadow, which is completely a light to itself, how can such a mind demand experience? It is only the mind that is seeking, wanting, desiring, hoping, escaping, it’s only such a mind wants more and more and more experiences.

So meditation is the freeing… meditation takes place when the mind understands and is freeing itself from all experience. But to free itself from all experience — if one understands it rightly — one has to understand the conscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind, we know what it is: the educated, the technological, the present mind that has learnt how to read and write and go to the office and follow the leaders, accept the traditional forms of belief and gods and their goddesses and all the rest of it. That’s the superficial mind. There is the whole unconscious mind, the unconscious mind with its motives, with its collected, collecting, accumulated and accumulating impressions, the residue of a particular race, all man’s endeavour. It is there, hidden, deep-down in you. You may be a Hindu deep-down there — outwardly, you put on, you smoke, you drink, and you carry on, highly civilised; but deep-down you’re still the whole centuries of propaganda, centuries of assertions, centuries of belief, which are so conditioned deep-down. That demands exploration, that demands understanding, that demands that that must be totally freed, all conditioning broken down.

Now, the question is: is it possible to inquire into the unconscious? I haven’t time to go into it too deeply, but I hope you will follow this. Unless you understand the unconscious completely, do what you will consciously, your meditation or your inquiry or your seeking God or trying to become non-violent and all the rest of the show has no meaning, because the unconscious shapes our thought and our feeling. So you have to inquire into it. You understand? You have to find out. And to find out about something of which you don’t know. You don’t know your unconscious; you may know hints, some intimations of it, through dreams and so on, but you don’t know the depth of it, the contours of it, the frame, the boundaries of it. You have to know. And to find out, your conscious mind must be completely… be quiet. You understand? The conscious mind; the mind that is in constant battle; the mind, the conscious mind that is ambitious, that’s greedy, envious, frightened, licking the boots of those in power — you know? — showing respect to those people in power and not showing respect to anybody else.

You know, the conscious mind; that mind which is not only put together by the psychological structure of society, that mind must be completely quiet; that means you must be free from ambition, not verbally. You must be free from the desire for power, position, prestige. It must be free from fear and therefore in a state of complete humility, and it’s only then the superficial mind is quiet. Then you will find, when that mind, superficial mind is quiet, then the whole content of consciousness comes into view. You understand?

By analysing the unconscious — you know, the analytical process — will never solve this problem, because there will always be the analyser, who is conditioned and, therefore, whatever he analyses is still conditioned. Therefore the analytical process has no value, or the self-introspective process has no value. But what has value is for the conscious mind to be aware of its… psychological structure of a particular society in which it is caught, and to be free of that psychological structure. Then only the conscious mind is quiet, completely quiet — conscious mind; the unconscious is not yet — then you will see, when the conscious mind is very quiet, not at any given moment, but all the time, as you’re going to the office, as you walk home, as you bicycle, as you go in a bus, to be quiet; not enforced because you understand how important it is for a superficial mind to be quiet, the necessity of it, the urgency of it, therefore it is quiet. You cannot make it quiet, then it becomes stupidly dull, inactive, is not aware, and all the beauty of life slips by.

So the conscious mind, by observing the necessity of quietness, is quiet. Then the unconscious projects all the things, all its contents. As you observe a tree, as you observe a woman, as you observe a man, a child, all the responses, the motives, the hidden dark corners of the mind spill out; and therefore, they’re understood immediately because the conscious mind is not judging, is not evaluating, comparing. It is there, watching, completely still, because it’s no longer seeking, no longer wanting experience. Then you will see, if you have gone as far as that, then the whole content of consciousness is emptied.

These are not words. Don’t repeat it after me and ask, ‘How is the consciousness to be emptied?’ Either you are doing it, or you will never do it. If you’re doing it, you will go on for the rest of your life. If you’re not doing it now, you will never do it, because this is not an act of memory; this is an act in the living present because you understand it and therefore that very understanding is an action which goes on and on and on, in spite of you, whether you like it or not.

So such a mind is not a mind concentrated — because what is there to concentrate upon? You understand? — it is aware, it is attentive. A mind that is concentrated on something narrow, exclusive… it becomes exclusive and therefore inattentive; it’s merely focused on a particular thing. What we are talking is of a mind that has understood this whole problem of thought, experience: the contradictions, the conflicts, the miseries, therefore it has become completely attentive; it is in a state of attention. And such a mind then can concentrate; then it won’t be exclusive.

Now, all this — as I said from the beginning — is part of meditation; all this, from the beginning till now. Then you will see, out of… from this, naturally, as a flower opens, there comes a stillness, a quietness of the mind. And such stillness of the mind is absolutely necessary for a man who would discover what is true. Because then such a mind has no belief, is not seeking, is not wanting more experience. Then out of that complete quietness, in which thought is not, but yet it is completely awake, then you will see, out of the stillness there comes quite a different movement.

Please, you will naturally translate what I am saying… what we are talking about, into your own terminology — *samadhi* and all the rest of those words which you use. Moment you translate what is being said into your own terminology, you have stopped meditating. You have to break down all the words, all the terminologies, all the traditions, all the things that man has put together, in his fear, in his hope, in his despair.

Then you will see that the mind is completely alone; it has a quality of incorruptibility. And it’s only such a mind that has completely understood and is free of the whole psychological structure of society, it’s only such a mind which is innocent can see that which is eternal, that which has no name, that cannot be put into words, that cannot be experienced.

Right sirs.