Meditation

MEDITATION is a very important action in life; perhaps it is the action that has the greatest and deepest significance. It is a perfume that cannot easily be caught; it is not to be bought through striving and practice. A system can yield only the fruit it offers, and the system, the method, is based on envy and greed. Not to be able to meditate is not to be able to see the sunlight, the dark shadows, the sparkling waters and the tender leaf. But how few see these things!

Meditation has nothing to offer; you may not come begging with folded hands. It doesn't save you from any pain. It makes things abundantly clear and simple; but to perceive this simplicity the mind must free itself, without any cause or motive, from all the things it has gathered through cause and motive. This is the whole issue in meditation. Meditation is the purgation of the known.

To pursue the known in different forms is a game of self-deception, and then the meditator is the master, there is not the simple act of meditation. The meditator can act only in the field of the known; he must cease to act for the unknown to be. The unknowable doesn't invite you, and you cannot invite it. It comes and goes as the wind, and you cannot capture it and store it away for your benefit, for your use. It has no utilitarian value, but without it life is measurelessly empty.

- Commentaries On Living Series II Chapter 52 Evaluation
---------------------------------------------------------------

What is meditation? Why should one meditate? To find that out, stop meditating. To find out what is real meditation, not yours or mine, your type and my type, or X's type, but what is meditation, to find out you can't hold on to some kind of meditation that you have and then enquire. That is like a donkey tied to a post. So you have to be free to enquire. First one can see very clearly that it is only a very, very quiet mind that can observe accurately. A quiet mind can observe accurately only, not a disturbed mind. So a quiet mind is absolutely necessary just to observe. But if you say, `Ah, how am I to have such a quiet mind?' Then you are asking for a system, for a method, you are going to somebody whom you think has a quiet mind, and then asking him, `Please tell me what to do.' And then you are caught in that trap because he will tell you and you will practice - if you are silly enough. But you see the importance of having an absolutely quiet mind. A mind that has no problem.

- Bombay 4th Public Talk 31st January 1979 Collected Works, Volume 5