BENGALURU: So there are these two essential things that must be completely understood if we are to go into the question of what is meditation - order, with the understanding of what is disorder, and control, with all its implications, of its duality, contradictory, contradiction, and, as we explained the other day, the observer is the observed, the one who is angry and tries to get rid of anger, is anger himself.
And when he divides himself from anger or from jealousy or from despair or from the desire to fulfil there must be contradiction and therefore conflict and therefore distortion. Right? This is the foundation. And without this really you cannot possibly know what meditation is. Don’t fool yourself by all the books they write about meditation, all the people that come to tell you how to meditate, or the groups that are formed in order to meditate. Because you see, if there is no virtue, which is order, there must be distortion, the mind must live in contradiction, in effort.
And how can such a mind know or be aware of the whole implication of what meditation is? And, as we said the day before yesterday, we must also, not intellectually, with one’s whole being, come upon this strange thing called love, and therefore no fear. Without love - you know what we mean by love - love that is not touched by pleasure, by desire, by jealousy, love that knows no competition, that does not divide my love and your love. There must be that.
All this is necessary because then the mind, including the brain, the emotions are in complete harmony, must be, otherwise meditation becomes self-hypnosis. Right? You know, sirs - don’t go to sleep over this. Because as we said, we are communicating with each other, which means we are sharing together, we are journeying together, you are not left behind for someone else to go ahead, either we are going together or not at all, which means you must have worked during this week, very hard, to find out your own activities of the mind, how it functions, your self-centred activities, the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’, you must have been quite familiar with yourself and all the tricks that the mind plays upon itself, the illusions and the delusions, the image, and the imagination that one has.
And the romantic ideas, with a mind that is capable of sentimentality is incapable of love, because sentiment breeds cruelty, brutality, violence, not love. So if you have, and I hope for your own sake, not because of me, of the speaker, you have more or less deeply established this in yourself. Which is quite an arduous, demanding, tremendous inward discipline, discipline being learning, not learning from another, but learning by observing what is going on in yourself.
And that observation is not possible if there is any form of prejudice, conclusion, a formula according to which you are observing. If you are observing according to some psychologist, you really are not observing yourself, you are observing what the psychologist has said to you, and through that you are observing. Therefore there is no selfknowing.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti