What Is It?

What is meditation? To sincerely ask the question of yourself is the very act of meditating. It is not something you do for 30 minutes a day, but a practice that evokes awareness moment-by-moment. There is no escaping reality.

Krishnamurti explains...

But meditation is part of everyday existence; it is something that you have to do as you breathe, as you think, as you live, as you have delicate or brutal feelings. That is real meditation, and it is entirely different from systematized mediation which some of you so sedulously practice.

Like a good teacher, Krishnamurti leads you back to yourself. He is not a guru, but he does invite you to think over the question of what is meditation with him...

I would like, if I may, to go into this question of meditation, but please do not be mesmerized by my words. Don't become suddenly meditative; don't become very intent to discover what is the goal of true meditation. The meditation of which I speak has no goal, no end....

We are going on a journey together, and when on a journey you can take along only what is absolutely essential. The journey of which I am speaking is very swift, there is no abiding place, no stopping, no rest; it is an endless movement, and a mind that is burdened is not free to travel.

Krishnamurti adds the following warning...

A petty mind cannot take the journey into itself. But if through these words you are becoming aware of you own thoughts, your own state, then there is no guru.

In his talk, Krishnamurti then explores what meditation is not--it is not concentration, it is not some form of thought control, or the suppression of desires. It is not what is recognizable or known. He concludes that meditation is "the freeing of the mind from the known." He adds...

It is open, not to the sannyasis [a Hindu religious mendicant], not to the dehydrated human beings who have suppressed themselves and who no longer have any passion, but to everyone whose mind is in the state of meditation from moment to moment.

To more fully explore this question with Krishnamurti, see his Second Talk in Madras from his book The Revolution Within.