What is meditation?

Today a group of friends invited me for a morning of Vipassana meditation.

While I was sitting, the question arose: what is meditation?. This is a question that cannot be answered when you are NOT meditating, as then it would be just an intellectual answer.

So, something came to my mind: to meditate is to be OPEN and CONSCIOUS. Open to everything and conscious of that everything. Not only to what is "happening" (breathing, thoughts, etc). Happenings have a beginning and an end, they are related to "actions taking place".  But it seems there is something besides "happenings".....

utterly open

It had rained heavily during the night and the day, and down the gullies the muddy stream poured into the sea, making it chocolate-brown. As you walked on the beach the waves were enormous and they were breaking with magnificent curve and force. You walked against the wind, and suddenly you felt there was nothing between you and the sky, and this openness was heaven. To be so completely open, vulnerable to the hills, to the sea and to man is the very essence of meditation. To have no resistance, to have no barriers inwardly towards anything, to be really free, completely, from all the minor urges, compulsions and demands, with all their little conflicts and hypocrisies, is to walk in life with open arms. And that evening, walking there on that wet sand, with the seagulls around you, you felt the extraordinary sense of open freedom and the great beauty of love which was not in you or outside you but everywhere. We don't realize how important it is to be free of the nagging pleasures and their pains, so that the mind remains alone. It is only the mind that is wholly alone that is open. You felt all this suddenly, like a great wind that swept over the land and through you. There you were denuded of everything, empty and therefore utterly open. The beauty of it was not in the word or in the feeling, but seemed to be everywhere about you, inside you, over the waters and in the hills. Meditation is this.

(J. Krishnamurti)

meditation. A Christmas gift......

"In addition to the talks, what perhaps had an even greater impact on me was the opportunity each day to spend time with him alone. This was possible because so few people were really interested. I got to take walks with him. At the time, there were a lot of woods around the campus. I was very drawn to this word “meditation,” though I didn’t really know what it meant. I asked Krishnamurti many times to teach me meditation, but he simply smiled and remained silent.

The first time we took a walk, he said, “Would you mind if we just walked in silence, if we don’t speak?” I thought that was a strange request. I was certainly accustomed to taking walks with others, but it always included talking as well.

K and I would walk for half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour – around the campus, in the woods. After the initial awkwardness, I started to actually like it. He was comfortable walking in silence, so I became comfortable as well. It was new to me.

I had walked silently by myself and with close friends before, for example, along the Atlantic ocean and lake Michigan. However, I barely knew this man.

Q: What was that experience like? Were you walking along paths? Was he looking up at leaves, walking up to trees? Was he looking up at the sky? Did he stop?

A: He’d pause sometimes. Sometimes the birds would chirp and he’d stop and say, “Let’s listen for a few minutes.” So we did. Or he would stop and smile. But he didn’t make it a project, like, “Let’s stop now, I’m about to teach you meditation the natural way” – he didn’t do that. Mostly we just walked and enjoyed moving in silence. Sometimes it was in thickly wooded areas, sometimes it was a path. He seemed very happy. He saw that I enjoyed it and kept returning, so we took such walks every day.

About a day or two before it was time for him to leave Brandeis, on one of the walks, he stopped and said, “Pick out anything. A plant, a leaf, a flower, part of a tree. See if you can look at it for a few minutes without labeling it, naming it or thinking about it. Simply, with innocence, as if for the first time, just take a look at it. Let’s do that for a while.” He didn’t say how long.

I’m not sure what I picked. I think it was a leaf or a few leaves. At first, my mind got very busy and didn’t like doing this, didn’t want to simply sustain attention. There was clearly resistance to just looking. I would sneak a peek at Krishnamurti, looking for some sign that we had done this long enough and could start walking again. After a while, though, my mind settled down a bit. I was just watching when, suddenly, the leaf became interesting. I was incredibly moved emotionally, which was totally unanticipated. I started to really see, in a new and vivid way, ordinary aspects of the leaf. Its shape, color, veins, and stem really held my interest. It was all so alive. Green was now really green! There was a whole little world going.

Then he said, “Well, how was it?” So I said, “It was fascinating. It was just beautiful.” And I went on and on about it. I told him how moved I was and how much I saw and how much I learned, that I never was so interested in detail – I had just kind of glossed over nature. Here I got in really close and it was fascinating and moving and it held my interest.

He said, “OK. Now, when you want to meditate, just sit down and do the same thing with your mind.” And that was it. [laughs] Period. And we resumed the walk."

(From: Meeting Krishnamurti. Interview with Larry Rosenberg. By M. Drexler)

To look at yourself

To learn about meditation, you have to see how your mind is working. You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall. You see all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, and as you watch, you see all the movements. In the same way, watch your thinking. Do not correct it. Do not suppress it. Do not say, "All this is too difficult". Just watch; now, this morning.

(J. Krishnamurti, addressing young students in Rishi Valley, India. Passage extracted from the book "On Education")

(Dedicated to Hugo)

dentist waiting room

One of the best things about going to the dentist is to sit in the waiting room. I always feel very relaxed, as I know I have to be there, I am not wasting time, there is not the feeling that I should be doing something else....

Yesterday I went to the dentist (my dear and admired J., it is so obvious that he tries to do the best work he can, that always when I come out I feel like doing also my best in my job). The waiting room was quite full, and the "gossip" magazines were all taken, so I had to take a kind of "scientific" magazine titled something like "Very Interesting".

And I found an article titled "how do we spend our life?", and I found it very interesting, so I asked the nurse for a pen, and I copied a graph from the article: "If a person lives 70 years, he/she spends:
- 11 years: in housekeeping (washing, cleaning, cooking, etc)
- 13 years: studying and/or working
- 17 years: free time
- 29 years: vital functions (sleeping, eating, hygiene, etc.)

So, I thought, only 17 years of free time out of 70......and something came to my mind then. If we leave the religious "practice" for our free time, kind of separate from the rest of our lives, it is a very small proportion of our life....and I remembered what Krishnamurti said: "meditation" should be all the time, even in our "normal" daily life...