Ten
How is the mind to be quiet?
As we have talked about so many other things, like fear, pleasure, and the ending
of sorrow, I think we ought to talk over together the subject of meditation. Of
course, that word is loaded, especially in the East. There are all kinds of ideas of
what meditation is and what systems, what methods, what practices, what
disciplines to follow. I think we ought to consider this because it is part of life.
Like death, love, and the sense of great beauty, meditation also is not only a part
but perhaps covers the whole field of life.
I don’t quite know how to begin about it because it is rather a complex thing.
I think that we must change radically, totally, our way of living, not only
outwardly in our relationships, in our attitudes and activities but also inwardly,
most profoundly. There must be a really marvelous change so that our minds, our
very structure is entirely different. Humanity, for centuries upon centuries, has
sought a way of life that is not worldly, and so we have escaped from life. We
have denied living and created our own idea of what a religious life is. But if we
are to go into this question of meditation and what a religious life is, what a
religious mind is, we must turn our backs on everything that we have thought, or
that human beings have thought about what meditation is or what a religious life
is. We have to totally abnegate, deny all that. I’ll show you why.
Reason is excellent; the capacity to reason logically, sanely, healthily,
objectively is essential; not to get emotional, but to use the capacity of the
intellect clearly. The intellect is a part, not the whole of man. It must be able to
observe clearly, reason objectively, efficiently, sanely, not neurotically, and
realize that the intellect is only a part and cannot possibly solve all our problems.
And one asks, if one is at all serious, and I hope you are, how to bring about
change in ourselves and therefore in the world, because the world is ourselves.
We are the world and the world is us, because we are conditioned by the culture
in which we have been brought up, and that culture is created, put together by
man, by you. Therefore there is no difference between you and the world about
you. You are the world and the world is you, and if you really seriously,
profoundly see the necessity of change, then you must ask whether the structure
of the brain, the mind, can undergo a total change. Now that is what we are going
to find out. And that is the beginning of meditation—not learning how to sit
straight, breathe deeply, do various kinds of tricks hoping thereby to achieve
some kind of marvelous enlightenment.
So we’ll begin by seeing what is not meditation, and through negation come
to the positive. But you must negate, not merely verbally or intellectually,
theoretically, but actually negate everything that anyone—it doesn’t matter who
it is—has said meditation is. One has to find out for oneself, because truth is