The First Step is The Last Step

Meditation is the most marvellous thing if you know the meaning of a mind that is in meditation—not how to meditate. If you see what meditation is not, you will know what meditation is. Through negation, you come upon the positive, but if you pursue the positive, it leads to a dead end. 

 

We say meditation is not the practice of any system. You know, people who sit and become aware of their toes, of their bodies, of their movements, who practise, practise, practise. Systems cannot reveal the beauty and depth of the marvellous thing called meditation. Nor is meditation concentration. When you concentrate or attempt to concentrate, in that concentration, there is the observer and the observed. There is the one who says, ‘I must concentrate, I must force myself to concentrate,’ and so concentration becomes a conflict. When you learn to concentrate, like at school, that concentration becomes a process of exclusion, building a wall against thought with other movements of thought. So concentration is not meditation but an escape from the understanding of what you actually are. There must be complete self-knowledge, not knowledge of the higher self or the Atman and all that rubbish, which are all inventions.  

 

So, no system, no method, no concentration. And a mind that has understood all this through negation becomes very quiet, naturally. In that, there is no observer who has achieved some kind of silence. In the silence of negation, there is the emptying of the mind of all the past. Unless you do this in your daily life, you won’t understand the marvel, the subtlety, the beauty, the extraordinary nature of it. Don’t merely repeat what the speaker says. If you repeat it, it becomes propaganda, which is a lie.    

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

   The First Step is The Last Step              

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