Students Talk 4, Stanford, California, 14 February 1969

Krishnamurti: This is the last talk. We were going to talk over together what is meditation — that is, if you want that subject to be talked about. Do you?

Audience: Yes.

K: All right. Before we go into it, I think one has to consider the question of passion and beauty. The word ‘passion’ means… it is derived from ‘sorrow’. But we are using that word in a different sense than the outcome of sorrow, or lust, because if one has not passion one can’t do very much, and passion is necessary to go into this very complex question of what is meditation.

Passion comes, in the sense we mean — and perhaps we may be giving a different significance to that word — when there is the total abandonment of the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and we and they, when there is a deep sense of austerity with abandonment. We don’t mean the austerity of the priest or of the monk — their austerity is harsh, directed, sustained through control and suppression. We are talking about a passion that is the outcome of austerity which is not harsh, and a very austere mind is really a very beautiful mind.

Beauty — again it is a rather complex question that — in our lives there is so little beauty. We live in a beautiful building surrounded by a lovely wood with marvellous old ancient trees, with the skies blue and lovely sunsets. But beauty is not the essence of experience. Beauty is not in the thing that man alone has created. To perceive what is deeply beautiful there must be not only silence of the mind but also great space in the mind. I hope I am not talking something rather absurd, but I think we’ll understand it as we go along.

We have very little space in ourselves. Our minds are so limited, narrow, shallow, concerned about oneself, committed to various forms of activities — social, personal or idealistic and so on. There is space not only between that… between the observer and the thing observed but also there is space round or within this wall of resistance which is the ‘me’. But there is a space which is not bound by the centre or by the wall of resistance, and this space — beauty and passion — there must be an understanding of what is meditation. And we are going to go into that, if you will.

I don’t know where to begin because it is quite an enormous subject, and probably most of you have really not deeply understood the meaning of that word, which has been brought over by the East to the West. The West had its own word, ‘contemplation’, but I don’t think it is the same as ‘meditation’ as is understood in the East. We are not going into what the yogis, the gentlemen who bring meditation to this country — that, one can fairly see the falseness or the truth of it. So first, let us discard what is generally understood as meditation, brought over by the — I don’t know what to call those people — money-makers, people who have some method to offer, who think through meditation you achieve a great result, a great experience. So we must examine the truth or the falseness of this idea of what they consider meditation.

Apart from what they consider meditation is — which we shall go into presently — meditation, the meaning of that word is to ponder, think over, consider, examine in a deeper sense, feel one’s way into some not completely understood things, feel one’s way into the mystery of the mind, into the secret recesses of one’s own unexplored mind and depth of feeling. And meditation, in the meaning of that word, has its own peculiar beauty. But we are talking about meditation which is really one of the most extraordinary things in life, if one knows what it means, because such a meditation transcends all experience. It is not a mystical, a romantic, a sentimental affair; it needs tremendous foundation of righteousness, of virtue, order. And also one has to understand the whole question of experience. And if you are sufficiently serious about this matter, one has to not only verbally go into it but feel our way into something that is nonverbal. Which is not some visionary, mystical state induced by thought, but rather, which comes about naturally, easily, when the foundation of righteous behaviour is laid. And without that foundation meditation then becomes merely an escape, a fantasy, a thing that one enjoys as a means to some fantastic visions and experiences.

So if you are going to go into this question of meditation — and one should because it is as important as love, death and living, perhaps much more, because out of that meditative mind there is an understanding of what truth is. So, we should, I think, first discard or see the falseness or truth of what is generally accepted, both in the East and, lately, here in this country, what meditation is. In the East it is generally understood that it is a practice in which there is control of thought. That control based upon a particular method or system; and there are very many systems in India and also in the Buddhist world, including the Zen. They offer systems, methods, the practising of which one comes to that state of silence in which reality is revealed. That is more or less… generally that’s what is understood by meditation, and there are very many forms of it. Lord, are you interested in all this?

A: Yes.

K: I don’t know why but…

Because I am really not interested in it at all. All that is rather immature and childish. But one must go through it — all right.

As we said, there are many systems and a variety of systems invented by the swamis, yogis, maharishis and all the rest of them — meditate upon a series or words and their meaning, a phrase, or on a picture or on an image, or on some quotation which is supposed to have great meaning. And there is what is called also ‘mantra yoga’, which has been brought to this country, which is, you repeat certain words, Sanskrit words, which the guru gives to the disciple in secrecy, and you repeat it three or four times a day, hundred times or thousand times or whatever it is, and if you do, the mind becomes quiet and then you transcend into a different world and all that. Obviously, a mind that repeats a series of words, whether it is Sanskrit, Latin or English, does — or if you will, Greek or Chinese — does produce certain quietness. Certain quality of a repetitive word makes the mind, which is already dull, equally more dull. [Laughter] No, sir, please don’t laugh. This is quite serious because it is one of the things that is practised a great deal in the East — variations of that. The idea being that the mind which wanders endlessly is made quiet by repetition. And the word becomes very important then. And the word, especially when it is in Sanskrit, has certain tonality, quality, because Sanskrit is an extraordinary language, and it is hoped thereby you achieve something.

Now, you can repeat a word like ‘Coca-Cola’, ‘Pepsi-Cola’, whatever you will, and you will have an extraordinary feeling. And one can see such a repetition as it is has been done, not only in the East, in the Catholic churches, in the monasteries, makes the mind rather shallow, empty, dull. It doesn’t bring to it a sensitivity, a quality of perception. And the man who repeats it sees what he wants to see. So we can discard that particular form of what is called meditation. We can discard it intelligently, not because someone says so, but one can see, by repetition the mind obviously must become rather dull and insensitive. So we can discard, we can put aside that, seeing the truth or the falseness of it, depending on you. We are not, the Speaker is in no way persuading you to any form or to any method or any system — he doesn’t believe in it. There is no method to meditation, as you will see presently.

Then there is a whole series of postures which, if you sit rightly, cross-legged, breathing deeply, you will silence the mind quietly. You know, there is a lovely story of a great teacher. He is pottering about in the garden and a disciple comes to him and sits in that posture of cross-legged, and looks to him to teach him meditation. So the master sits beside him and as he sits he watches the disciple, who closes his eyes and begins to deep very breathly… deeply, and the teacher asks him, ‘What are you doing, my friend?’ He says, ‘I am trying to reach the highest consciousness.’ So the teacher picks up two pebbles and begins to rub them — perhaps some of you know this story; if you do, please forgive the repetition of it — and as he rubs, the disciple, who is on the highest plane of consciousness, opens his eyes, sees the master, what he is doing, and says, ‘Master, what are you doing?’ He says, ‘I am rubbing two stones to make one of them into a mirror.’ And the disciple laughs and says, ‘Master, you can do that for the next ten thousand years and you will never make a mirror out of a stone.’ So the master says, ‘You can sit like that for the next ten thousand years and you will never achieve what you want.’

So there are these systems of breathing, sitting rightly. One can see, if you sit straight or lie down flat, the blood naturally goes to the head. But if you bend down too much, the blood doesn’t flow easily. That is the idea of sitting straight. And breathing regularly does bring about more oxygen into the blood and therefore a little more quiet, and all the rest of that. So we can also see the importance or the unimportance of it. Then, there is — oh Lord, must we go through all this? All right. Then there are the systems, methods, practises. The idea being that if you practise the method laid down by the guru you daily achieve a degree of understanding or a degree of silence, closer to heaven, closer to the greatest thing on earth or beyond the earth. And the guru is supposed to be enlightened; he knows more than the disciple. The word ‘guru’ in Sanskrit means ‘the one who points’. Like a signpost, he just points. He doesn’t tell you what to do, he doesn’t take you by the hand and lead you. He just points the way, and for you to do with it what you will. But that word, and those who use that word for themselves, has become corrupt. These gurus offer methods.

Now, what is a method, a system? Please follow all this, because in discarding what is false, through negation you find out what is true; and that’s what we are doing — negating totally that which will not bring about any form of understanding. So if you, who have practised, and many of you I’m afraid have, at least some of you, certain systems or forms of meditation, you can see it for yourself that if you practise something regularly, day after day, getting up at two or three in the morning as the monks do in the Catholic world, or if you do in the morning or in the afternoon or the evening, sitting down quietly, controlling yourself, shaping your thought according to the system, method, what are you achieving? You are pursuing a method that promises a reward. And when you practise day after day a method, your mind becomes obviously a mind which is mechanical. There is no freedom in it.

Method implies method given by somebody who is supposed to know what he is doing. And if you are, if I may say so, not sufficiently intelligent enough to see the depth of that business, then you are caught in a mechanical process. That is, daily practicing, polishing, making your life into a routine and gradually, ultimately, it may take five, ten, a number of years, then you will be in a state to understand what is truth, what is enlightenment, what is reality and so on. Obviously no method can do that because method implies a practise and a mind that practises something day after day becomes mechanical, loses its quality of sensitivity, its freshness. So one can again see the false, falseness of the truth of systems offered.

So, you know there are other systems — the Zen and the various occult, only to the few the systems are taught, and all that. The Speaker has been some of that but discarded right from the beginning — they have no meaning to him.

So when you have discarded the repetition of words through examination and understanding and intelligence, and you discard the guru altogether, which is authority, the one who knows and the one who does not know. The guru or the man who says he knows, he does not know. You can never know what truth is because it is a living thing. And a method, a path that says do these things and you will reach truth — as though truth is something that’s fixed, that is permanently there, tied down for your convenience. So if you discard authority, including that of the Speaker, completely, not partially, then you discard also, naturally then, authority, systems, repetition of words.

So then we can proceed to find out what is the meditative mind — but first you must discard that. As we said, unless there is the foundation of righteousness in behaviour, not as an idea, in behaviour daily, not pursuing an idea which is considered righteous and practising in daily life, which becomes respectability, and therefore not righteous — that which is respectable, accepted by society as morality is not moral, it is unrighteous.

You accept all this? Yes?

A: Yes.

K: Sorry, its best if we go on and then you’ll ask questions later.

You know, sir, what it means to be moral, to be virtuous? You may dislike these two words. To be really moral is to end all respectability; the respectability which society recognises as being moral. You can be ambitious, greedy, envious, jealous, full of violence, competitive, destructive, kill — society considers all that moral and therefore very respectable. Now we are talking of a different morality and virtue altogether, which has nothing to do with social morality. Virtue is order — not order according to a design, to a blueprint laid down by the church, by society or by your own ideological principles. Virtue means order. Order means the understanding what is disorder and freeing the mind from disorder — the disorder of resistance, the disorder of greed, envy, brutality, fear, and out of that there comes a virtue which is not a thing that is cultivated by thought, like humility is not cultivatable by thought. A mind which is vain can cultivate humility, hoping thereby to cover its own vanity, but such a mind is not, has no humility. So we are talking of a virtue that is a living thing, that is not the result of a practice, that is not dependent on environmental influence, a behaviour which is righteous, true, deeply honest; because most of us are dishonest. Those who have ideals and pursue the ideal are essentially dishonest, because they are not what they are — they are pretending to be something else, over there.

So, one has to lay this foundation and the laying of the foundation is of greater importance than being… than understanding what meditation is. The manner how you lay the foundation, if it is… if in that laying there is any form of effort, a resistance, suppression, control, then it ceases to be righteous, because in all that there is involved effort. Effort, as we said yesterday, comes about when there is contradiction in oneself. So, is it possible for the mind to understand morality as it is practised in the world, which is really not moral? And in the understanding of it, in the seeing of it, seeing the brutality of envy, greed, acquisitiveness; seeing that, to be free of it without effort. Am I making myself clear?

Q: Yes.

K: That is, seeing envy, the totality of envy, not a particular form of envy, seeing it, seeing the whole meaning of it, not only as an idea but actually, the very act of seeing is freeing the mind from envy, and therefore in that freedom there is no conflict.

So, righteousness is not the result of conflict, is not the result of a drilled mind but a mind that understands what learning is, which is the understanding of ‘what is’. The learning itself brings its own discipline, and such a discipline is extraordinarily austere. So there it is. If you have laid that, then we can proceed. If you aren’t virtuous in that deep sense of that word, meditation becomes an escape, a dishonest activity, because a stupid mind, a dull mind can make itself quiet through drug, through repetition of words, but to be righteous demands great sensitivity and therefore great austerity, not ashes and loincloth, which again is a pretension, an outward show, but be inwardly, deeply austere, and such austerity has great beauty. It’s like a fine steel.

Now, all right, shall we proceed?

In understanding ourselves, obviously that is the first… beginning of meditation, to understand oneself. The understanding of oneself is quite a complex affair. There is the conscious mind and the unconscious, so-called deep, hidden mind — one hasn’t the time to go into it, one has to be very brief and I am going to be very brief. I don’t know why one has given such great importance to the unconscious. It is the treasure of the past, if it can be called a treasure. The racial inherited thing there, the tradition, the memories, the motives, the concealed demands, urges, desires, pursuits, compulsions, and the conscious mind obviously cannot through analysis explore all the unconscious, the deep, hidden, secret layers of the mind, because that would take many years. And a conscious mind that examines the unconscious must be extraordinarily alert, unconditioned, sharp, whose perceptions must have no bias. So then it becomes an extraordinary problem. And it is said that the unconscious reveals itself through dreams, intimations and all that, and those who say — the professionals — that you must dream otherwise you go mad.

One never asks why you should dream at all. We have accepted that we must dream. You know, we are the most traditional-bound people, even though we are very modern, greatly sophisticated, we accept tradition; we are yes-sayers. We never say no, we never doubt, we never question. Some authority, special comes along and says this, and we say, ‘All right, sir, you know better than I do. Yes, lets do what you say.’ Now, we are going to question the whole thing of the unconscious, conscious and dreams. Why should you dream at all? You dream obviously because during the day your conscious mind is so occupied with the job, with the quarrels, with the family with the — you know, amusement. It is chattering away all the time, endlessly soliloquising to itself, talking to itself, counting. You know what all it does. And therefore at night when you somewhat… when the brain is somewhat quiet and the body is somewhat peaceful, then the deeper layers are supposed to project into the mind what it has… what it hopes you will understand. Hints, intimations, which become the dreams and so on.

Have you every tried that during the day, to be watchful without correction, to be aware without choice, your thoughts, your motives, what you are saying, how you are sitting, the manner of your usage of words, your gestures, watching. Have you every tried? If you have tried during the day, watching not correcting, not saying what a terrible thought that is, I mustn’t have it, but just watching, then you will see during the day you will uncover your motives, demands, urges, you know, all the rest of it, so that when you go to sleep at night your mind and your brain are more quiet. Then you will find, as you go into it very deeply, no dreams are possible and therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily alive, active, fresh, innocent when it wakes up. Will you do all these things or is it just a lot of words? I am not asking you, sorry.

So, then there is the other problem. The mind, as we have, is always calculating, comparing, pursuing, driven, endlessly chattering to itself or talking about somebody else, gossiping — you know what it does every day, all day long. Such a mind obviously cannot possibly see what is true or perceive what is false. And perception is only possible when the mind is quiet. When you want to listen to the Speaker, what he is saying, if you are interested your mind is naturally quiet, it isn’t chattering, it isn’t thinking about something else. If you want to see something very clearly, if you want to understand your wife or your husband, or if you want to see the cloud in all its glory and its beauty you look, and the looking must be out of silence, otherwise you can’t see. So can the mind which is so endlessly talking, moving, chattering, pursuing, chase, frightened, can that mind be quiet? Not through drill, not through suppression, control, but be quiet.

So, they say, the professional meditators say control. Now, control implies not only the one who controls but the thing controlled. As you watch your mind, watch, your thought wanders off and you pull it back, and it’s off again, and you pull it back. So this game goes on endlessly. And if you can at the end of — ten years? — at the end of some time if you can control so completely that your mind has no thought at all, doesn’t wander away at all then it is said that you have achieved a most extraordinary state. On the contrary, you haven’t achieved anything at all, because control implies resistance. Please follow this a little bit. Resistance. Concentration is a form of resistance — narrowing down thought to a particular point. And when you do, and the mind is being trained to completely concentrate on one thing, so it loses its elasticity, its sensitivity. It doesn’t, it is incapable of seeing the total field of life. And yet there must be control, in the sense not subjugation, conformity, suppression.

So how is a mind to have this sense of concentration without exclusion? You are following all this? You know, it is fairly easy to concentrate; every schoolboy learns this. Though he hates to do it, he is forced to do it, to concentrate. Now when you do concentrate, surely you are resisting. Your whole mind is focussed on something, and if you train it day after day to concentrate on one thing, naturally it loses its sharpness, its width, its depth. It has no space. So the problem then is, can the mind be… have this quality of concentration — it isn’t really the word ‘concentration’ — quality of paying attention to one thing and not lose the total attention. That’s it. Right? To pay attention to one thing completely, without losing the total attention. Am I… is the Speaker explaining himself? Because when there is total attention, that is, the attention which is with all your mind, in which there is no fear, no pain, no profit motive, no pleasure, because you have understood what the implications of pleasure are. So when there is… when the mind gives attention completely, your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole being attends. Then such an attention can give attention to one little thing. When you wash your dishes, you can give complete attention to it, without this resistance, without this narrowing down which is implied in concentration.

So then the mind, now, having laid the foundation naturally without any distortion, without any effort, and discarding all authority and no longer seeking experience… Oh Lord, one has to go into that too, hasn’t one? All right, sirs.

You know most of us lead such a dull life, a routine life, a life which obviously has not very much meaning, so we want, through drugs, through various forms of stimuli, wider, deeper experiences. And when one has experience, to recognise it as an experience you must already have had it, otherwise you wouldn’t recognise it. That is, the Christian, conditioned as he is to the worship of a particular saviour, when he takes drugs or when he is seeking great experience through different ways, obviously sees that to which he is conditioned, and therefore what he see is his own projection and that may be most extraordinary, with extraordinary light and depth and beauty and all that, but it is still his own background being projected. Therefore the mind that seeks experience as a means of giving significance, meaning to life, is projecting its own background. And a mind that is not seeking because it is free, is quite a different quality of mind. Right.

So now, all that has been said from the beginning of this talk till now is part of meditation. Right? To see the truth as we go along, to see the falseness of the guru, the authority, the system, to lay the foundation of behaviour, which is not the outcome of environment, in which there is no effort at all — all that is… implies a quality of meditation. Right? Can we go on from there?

So when one has gone that far, or not travelled at all any distance but is there, having understood this whole business of living, in which there is no conflict at all for him, then he can proceed to inquire: what is silence? If you inquire without doing all the previous thing, your silence has no meaning whatsoever, because a mind that is silent without understanding what is beauty, what is love, what is death, what is virtue, such a mind being shallow it can produce silence, and that silence is death.

But now, if one has this evening, and I hope that you have taken the journey with the Speaker, then we can ask what is silence, what is the quality of silence. Because, you know when one wants to see anything very clearly, without any distortion, without any effort, the mind must naturally be quiet. If I want to see your face, if I want to listen to the beauty of your voice, if I want to see what kind of person you are, the mind must be quiet, must not chatter. If it is chattering, wandering all over the place then I can’t see the beauty of you or the ugliness of you. So silence is necessary. As night is necessary for day, so is silence necessary. But that silence is not the product of noise, it is not the cessation of noise; that silence comes naturally when all the other qualities have come into being. You know, in that silence there is space, not the space that exists between the observer and the thing observed.

You know, to see this microphone I must… there must be space, otherwise I can’t see it. And a silent mind has great space not created by the object or the observer. I do not know if you have ever watched what space is. There is space round the microphone. The microphone displaces and there is space round it. There is space round the ‘me’, round the ‘you’. When we say ‘we’ and ‘they’, it’s a space; we have created space round ourselves. Right? When you say you are Christian, Catholic, Protestant, communist, there is a space, as you have limited yourself. And that space inevitably breeds conflict because it’s limited, it divides. But when there is silence there is no… there is not the space of division but there is quite a different quality of space. And there must be space — then only that which is not measurable by thought can perhaps come. And that immensity, that which is supreme cannot be invited. A petty mind practising indefinitely still remains petty. And most people who are seeking truth are inviting truth. Truth cannot be invited. The mind has not enough space; mind is not sufficiently quiet.

So meditation is from the beginning to the end, and in meditation there is the skill in action. So all this is meditation. And if you are… if you can do this the door is open. And it’s for you to come to it. And what lies beyond it is not something romantic, emotional, something you wish, something to which you escape, but you come to it with a full mind which is intelligent, sensitive, without any distortion. You come to it with great love, otherwise meditation has no meaning.

[Pause]

Isn’t that enough?

[Clapping]

K: No, please, sir, don’t… Please.

What, sir?

Q: In the middle of your talk you mentioned that meditation was not what you wanted to talk about; it was necessary to talk about it. Is there another subject?

Alain Naude: You said that what you were saying didn’t interest you, and he wants to know if you wanted to talk about something else instead.

K: Ah! Oh Lord! Sir, what didn’t interest me was the explanation of the obvious — the obvious being method, systems, repetition of words, the gurus. It’s so obvious. And to keep on talking about the obvious is rather useless. What is important is not to follow anybody but to understand oneself, and I assure you — I’m sorry, I don’t assure you — if you go into yourself without effort, without fear, without any sense of restraint, really delve deeply, you will find extraordinary things. And you don’t have to read a single book. The Speaker has not read a single book about any of these things — philosophy, psychology, sacred books — because in oneself the whole world is. And if you know how to look and learn then the door is there, the key is in your hand and nobody on earth can give you that key or the door to open, except yourself.

Isn’t that enough?

Q: Is there a reason for being?

K: Is there a reason for being. Why do you want a reason for being? [Laughter] You are here, and because you are here and you don’t understand yourself, you want to invent a reason.

Sir, you know, when you look at a tree, the clouds, the light on the water, when you know what it means to love, you have no reason to be. You are, there is. Then all the museums in the world, all the concerts, they have secondary importance. Then beauty is there for you to look, if you have the mind and the heart to look. Not out there in the cloud, in the tree, in the water, in the face, but in yourself.

That’s enough, sirs.

[Clapping]