Unconditioned Meditation – Part I

Photo F.D.J ©

We open a series of three posts on a subject that constitutes, without any doubt, the most important aspect of human life. 

For a lack of a better term, we can call it “unconditioned meditation”, although this time we hope to solve any of the “contradictions” associated with the word "meditation". And to begin with, let's listen to what two good teachers said about it:

“Meditation is not a search, it's not a seeking, a probing, an exploration. It is an explosion and discovery. It's not the taming of the brain to conform nor is it a self-introspective analysis, it is certainly not the training in concentration which includes, chooses and denies. It's something that comes naturally, when all positive and negative assertions and accomplishments have been understood and drop away easily. It is the total emptiness of the brain. It's the emptiness that is essential, not what's in the emptiness; there is seeing only from emptiness; all virtue, not social morality and respectability, springs from it. It's out of this emptiness love comes, otherwise it's not love. 

Foundation of righteousness is in this emptiness. It's the end and beginning of all things.” [Notebook, Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1976.]

“Thought is mechanical and meditation is not.” 

 “Meditation is never the control of the body. There is no actual division between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are one, indivisible. It is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance. 

Every decision to control only breeds resistance, even the determination to be aware. Meditation is the understanding of the division brought about by decision. Freedom is not the act of decision but the act of perception. The seeing is the doing. It is not a determination to see and then to act. After all, will is desire with all it's contradictions. When one desire assumes authority over another, that desire becomes will. In this there is inevitable division. And meditation is the understanding of desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. Desire is the movement of sensation, which becomes pleasure and fear. This is sustained by the constant dwelling of thought upon one or the other."

“There is no self to understand but only the thought which creates the self. When there is only the organism without the self, perception, both visual and non-visual can never be distorted. There is only seeing what is and that very perception goes beyond what is.” [The Beginnings of Learning. J. Krishnamurti, London, 1979.]

“The highest form of intelligence is meditation, an intense vigilance that liberates the mind from its reactions, and this alone, without any willful intervention, produces a state of tranquility. This requires an extraordinary energy, which can only appear when there is no conflict in us, when all ideals have completely disappeared, all belief, hope and fear. Then it is not comtemplation that arises. but a state of attention in which there is no longer a sense of “I”, someone present to participate in the experience, to identify with it. So there is no experience.   Understanding this at the deepest level is important for one who wishes to know what truth is, what God is, what is beyond the construction of the human mind.”  [The Reality of Being. Jeanne De Salzmann]

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[1]. Notebook, Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1976.

[2]. The Beginnings of Learning. J. Krishnamurti, London, 1979.

[3].The Reality of Being. Jeanne De Salzmann.