GOING WITHIN: A SERIES ON MEDITATION

Meditation is one of the greatest Arts in Life, perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from someone else.  That is the beauty of it.  It has no technique and therefore no authority.  When you open up to learn about yourself -  observe yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate the jealousy.  If you are aware of all that is within yourself, without any judgement, you have achieved an essential level of your meditation practice.  Meditation can take place any where -  when you are sitting in a bus, walking, washing dishes, sitting in a yoga position or looking into the face of a friend.


Meditation is to find out whether the brain, with all its activities, all its experiences can be absolutely quiet.  Not forced, because the moment you force there is duality.  The person who thinks, "I would like to have a marvelous experience, therefore I must force my brain to be quiet", will experience difficulty.  It is as you begin to inquire, observe, listen to all the movements of thought, its conditioning, its pursuits, its fears, its pleasures and watch how the brain operates, that you will feel the brain quiet.  That state of quietness is not sleep. In fact, it is tremendously active, a large dynamo that is working perfectly yet hardly making a sound. Its only when there is friction that there is noise.


Meditation is a state of mind that observes everything with complete attention, not just parts of it.  When you give total attention there is complete silence.


If you deliberately take an attitude, a posture, in order to meditate, then it becomes a plaything, a toy of the mind.  If you determine to extricate yourself from the confusion and misery of life, then it becomes an experience of imagination and this also is not meditation.


In meditation, it is not the organism that one must begin with, but rather the mind with its opinions, prejudices and self-interest that must be seen to.


It is far more important to understand yourself - the constant changing of the facts about yourself - than to meditate in order to find God or have visions, sensations and forms of entertainment.


Meditation is not concentration, which is an exclusion, a cutting off, a resistance - and so, a conflict.  To have no resistance, to have no barriers towards anything, to be completely free of all minor urges, compulsions and demands with all their little conflicts and hypocrisies, is to truly know Life.

Meditation is hard work.

It demands the highest form of discipline,

awareness.

J. Krishnamurti

 Going Within begins a series on the art of meditation.

~ Elizabeth Botta Brandes ~