Meeting Life

So thought has brought about not only the structure of religions, the divisions, but also thought has projected the gods, the saviours, the teachers, the gurus. So can thought discover, or come upon something which is not of time, which is incorruptible by time, which is not yours or mine, or theirs or his? And to discover that meditation is necessary. I hope we are following each other, we are sharing together what the speaker is saying. If you are at all serious it behoves each one of us, seeing what the world is, how extraordinarily confused, destructive, disintegrating it is, only the religious mind can bring about a regeneration of man and a new culture, not based on measurement which is the self, the me, my selfish activities and so on. To understand or come upon that which is not put together by thought meditation is necessary.

Now here comes our difficulty. Because each one of you, I am quite sure have been corrupted - if I may use that word - by the recent fashion to meditate. The word 'meditation' means, by the dictionary, to ponder over, to consider, to go into, to explore. All that is involved in the word 'meditation'. And the gurus that have come from India with their traditional authority, with their technique, with their assertions, with their absurdities, and the Americans on the whole being rather gullible, have taken to it, paying lots of money and being fed up with the old church and old traditions, take on a new tradition of India and their mysteries and their absurdities. The word 'guru' in Sanskrit means one who resolves ignorance, takes away your ignorance. But generally the gurus impose their ignorance on you, their burden on you for so much money; or they assert they have got enlightenment. Some few years ago a very famous guru came to see us, with a few of his disciples. He was rather pompous, absolutely certain. And he said, 'I have got it, I am enlightened, I have reached, I have attained' - and we asked him what is it that he had attained. 'Oh,' he said, 'I have attained the immeasurable, it is in my heart, in my mind'. And we said, 'Can you hold the sea in your hand, can you hold the heavens in your fist, can you see the whole of the earth in observing one piece of the earth?' He was rather annoyed and left because he never wanted another to question what he had attained. So if you have gurus, and I hope you haven't, ask them what they have got, what their pretensions are. Truth is not something that you get, that you have, that you possess. It is a pathless land, nobody can lead you to it. You have to be a light to yourself from the very beginning so that you yourself stand alone, purified from all the absurdities of man's endeavour, search and explanations. And most of us like to depend on somebody and so the gurus are there to exploit people.

So authority and following another, whether it is a system, a method, a practice, has no place in meditation. Practice of a system, however promising, however noble, whatever the practice will give you, becomes mechanical. If you do something over and over again every day, your mind naturally not only becomes dull, routine, but mechanistic, it is not free to observe, to learn, to hear. So when you understand that, see the truth of it, then practice comes to an end. But practice implies also discipline. The word 'discipline' means essentially in the dictionary, to learn. And the ordinary sense of that word 'discipline' means conformity to a pattern, a conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. And where there is conflict in any form, outwardly or inwardly, there is disintegration. So meditation is not a movement in conformity, a movement in practice; meditation is not a search. Please do follow all this. You may disagree with all this but do listen to it. Probably nobody will tell you all this.

And in meditation one of the factors both in the East and in the West is control. As we said, what we are talking about is a very, very serious thing and if you don't understand what the speaker is saying, leave it alone. Do your own absurd meditations, practices, go to India and accept their tradition, which is dead, or go to Japan to learn Zen meditation, which is also dead - they are merely repetitive and not something free, creative. But if you are seriously interested in what the speaker is saying, and you must be - to be interested you must be serious, and as we are going into something very, very serious and very deep, you have to consider the whole question of control - control of thought. Who is the controller of thought? Is not the controller another fragment of thought? One fragment of thought tries to control other fragments of thought and when it does that there is conflict. There is the controller and the controlled. And the controller is the controlled. I hope you see all this.

So is there a way of living in daily life, please listen to this, is there a way of living in daily life which has order and a life in which there is no control whatsoever - which doesn't mean doing what you want! Because all religions have said, 'Control'. All experts, Tom, Dick and Harry who think they know what meditation is, they all keep reminding or insisting that you must control thought. They never investigate who is the controller. If there is a controller different from thought how then can he control that which is different from himself? And if the controller is part of thought, one of the fragments of thought, that fragment assumes the authority and exercises that authority over that which he wishes to control. The controller then is merely the superior entity who thinks, or assumes, that he has super-knowledge, or extra knowledge with which he can control the thing that has to be brought under dominion. So there is always conflict - haven't you noticed it in your own life? If you are trying to sit... if you are trying to watch your mind, if you are trying to sit and meditate, as you call it, one thought runs off and then you try to pull it back. There is this constant battle going on. And is there a way of living in daily life - for meditation covers the whole of life, not just part of life, meditation is concerned with the whole of existence - and can thought which has exercised such extraordinary importance, can thought free itself from this idea of control and yet highly austere in the sense of not harsh, not severe, but be free.

Now from there we can proceed: what is meditation? Not how to meditate - that is too childish. When you ask how, you are asking for a system, you are asking for a method, and when you practise a method, a system, as we have pointed out, your mind becomes dull, insensitive, following the routine because the 'how' means a reward, and a mind that is seeking a reward in meditation either through experience or whatever it is, a reward, better stop what it calls meditation because meditation is not rewarding, there is no reward. Now if that is all clear then we can begin to find out what is meditation. Setting aside all that people have said about it, not out of your vanity, not because you say, 'I know more and they don't', but you are learning for the first time as it were what is meditation. And therefore not knowing you begin to learn. Which means there must be great humility. That is the first thing. Great humility to find out. That means you have set aside all the things that man has said or written, or insists upon, you have put it aside so as to find out through your exploration.

You know self-centred activity, in which most people indulge, it creates its own narrow little space, it creates the space of resistance, the resistance created by hurt, or by certain desires and so on, there is the space created by the self, the 'me'. Therefore it is very limited. We are talking of a space where the mind is not occupied with itself. And space implies also having no direction. Direction implies will; direction implies achievement from here to there, and achieving that, to achieve that exercise of will. And freedom implies space and a mind that does not function in the field of will. Which means the total absence of the 'me' with all its selfishness. Can the mind live without time, which is movement, from here to there, time being measurement, time being thought, can thought, which is measurement, time, come to an end so as to allow space? And this is part of meditation because without space the mind cannot be completely silent. And silence is necessary, because it is only in total silence there can be perception, there can be a listening. And in this silence, not manufactured by thought or by desire or as a means of escape from the turmoil, in that silence there is a totally different kind of perception.

And so one must understand the nature of silence. That is, meditation is not outside the field of daily life. It is concerned with daily life, your thoughts, your behaviour, your desires and so on. meditation implies freedom from all self-imposed, or exposed controls, which does not mean to do whatever you want to do. In that understanding of freedom from control, there is order. That order is brought about, comes naturally through the understanding of the disorder of our lives. And from there meditation is the understanding of space, which means the freedom from any movement of time, because thought is time, thought is measure, therefore thought as time comes to an end in meditation. And in that freedom there is silence. Not the silence between two noises, not the silence in the interval between two thoughts or between two experiences, it is beyond all that. Because it is only in complete silence the mind, which in itself is silent, can see something which is immeasurable, timeless. All that is meditation, in which there is no experiencing at all, because experiencing implies the experiencer, the one who sees or desires experience. As we have talked about it and I won't go into it again. There is freedom from experience and therefore the mind is a light to itself. It is only the mind that is caught in darkness, in illusion, in pain that seeks something beyond itself. When the mind itself is completely alight, aware, totally attentive, such a mind does not need or demand experience because there is no experiencer.

Q: What happens to the mind when one is in deep meditation?

K: What happens to the mind when you are in deep meditation. Of whom are you asking that question?

K: Wait sir, wait sir. Many times you have asked that question. What happens to your mind when you are in deep meditation. What is your mind? Mind being consciousness, isn't it? Consciousness with all its content. The content makes up consciousness. The content - please do listen - it is quite interesting, it is even fun to find out. (Laughter) We said consciousness is its content, the content is your knowledge, your experience, your desires, your appetites, your fears, your pleasures, the attachments and the struggle to be detached, the hopes, the fears, the despairs, the achievements, the acquisitions of knowledge and so on, all that is your consciousness. The identification with your house, with your family with your name, with your body, with your gold and so on, all that is your consciousness, which is the content of the mind, with its brain. The brain with its knowledge, accumulated, stored up as memory, all that is consciousness. Now what happens to that consciousness, to that mind, in meditation? As we said, when there is this meditation, the true meditation takes place there is no content; the content is the 'me', is the 'me' which is attached to my house, to my family, to my pictures, to my books, to my habit, to my tradition, to the furniture, to the bank account, all that is the 'me'. And in meditation, the deep meditation, that me is not, and if it is, it is not in deep meditation, it is playing around.

K: Right, I understand. I have meditated before and I find my mind chatters endlessly, what am I to do. What am I to do when my mind chatters endlessly, apart from meditation? Why does the mind chatter - apart from meditation? I just want to see first why the mind chatters. Why is the mind so astonishingly restless? Go on sir, explain it, think about it. Your whole life is restless, isn't it? Would you say it is, or it is not? Aren't you restless?

So all that is part of consciousness, the 'me' with all its disorders and achievements. And when in deep meditation - I do not know if you have ever gone into deep meditation, I am afraid most of you don't know even what it means - if you haven't established order in your life, order being virtue, conduct, behaviour, a life without violence and all that, without laying the foundation in righteous behaviour, you cannot possibly have deep meditation. And when you do have this extraordinary deep meditation in which there is no experiencing at all, then the whole content of consciousness is empty, there is no content, it is something entirely different.