This was our first on-site meeting of the year and part of the Centre facility’s reopening after the winter season.  We met on the grounds in front of the main house on a sunny, warm afternoon. Oda Lindner, who is joining us from Ontario for the month of April, was our facilitator.

We began simply — each sharing what draws us to these teachings. Then Oda invited us into a quiet attentiveness: to feel the body as it is, to notice the breath, the subtle restrictions, the aliveness in the hands and feet — and to let that awareness gently spread.

From there, the question emerged: What is meditation?

Many spoke of awareness — of watching reactions as they arise, of seeing conditioning in daily life. But then came a deeper turn: What is the problem of meditation? It was already there as a hint in the meaning of the word “to ponder”, “to measure”.

Gradually, we saw it — the meditator himself. The one who seeks, measures, evaluates, and hopes to become something. In that very movement, meditation is lost.

The dialogue unfolded into a shared insight: that meditation is not separate from life, and its flowering must be in the everyday — in relationship, in reaction, in the ordinary moments we often overlook.

There were questions about society, disorder, and what humanity may become. But again and again, we returned to the importance of not projecting the future and instead staying with the intensity of what is here and now.

Perhaps meditation begins when nothing is sought — when there is only a quiet, open observation of what is, without a goal.

And maybe that is where change truly begins.

• Anastasia Shtamina

The presenter began the meeting by reviewing the series of The Urgency of Change and the unfolding of the universal human challenge of how to live in this world. He emphasized the central importance of awareness in meeting that challenge, as it is the factor that makes for right perception and the ending of conflict, meditation being the culmination of awareness as the ground of goodness. He touched on the related questions of stopping thought, thought’s relationship to language, and the subjects of beauty, art and expression. He concluded his introduction by mentioning the chapter entitled ‘What Is’, which he had previously overlooked but which drives home the need to face things as they are if we are to live without illusion.

He pointed out that for Krishnamurti meditation is not measurement, method or a means to an end but opening a space for the emergence of wholeness, beauty and truth. It begins with the observation of what is in choiceless awareness, i.e. without judgment or division. He recalled that K had given practical indications for the active exploration of meditation and the need for persistence. One new aspect was K’s statement that meditation is the essence of energy, perhaps meaning the summation of it by reducing wasteful activity and conflict, introducing clarity and a non-frictional quality into relationship. The stopping of thought is fundamental in this, because the predominance of thought in our existence is equivalent to living in the past, which is not living at all. The past is the observer, which is the factor that destroys relationships through division and conflict. So stopping this movement is a life-or-death issue. But thought cannot be stopped by effort or will, which are part of thought. It stops when we perceive its destructive impact in relationship. Thought is language, a symbolic system whose re-presentations introduce the past into observation, giving rise to the duality of the observer and the observed, the dreamer and the dream. K had suggested that without this duality there would be no need for dreaming, thus extending the wakefulness of awareness to the deepest states of meditation in sleep. The mind would thus be always awake, which is the heightened sensitivity of the greatest art of all, the art of living. This art involves the absence of self, which is the essence of skill in action in the whole of life, which is living beauty and living love.

The discussion began with the theme of art as the absence of self and creative skill in action. This led into an exploration of wakefulness as a causeless state and K’s view of cause as motive, desire and will, which are all structures of thought, of the past, whose endless chain of cause and effect is the definition of karma. The breaking of this chain of psychological causation is freedom. It was remarked that the Buddhist approach is very similar. This chain was illustrated by the example of past conditioning shaping our lives and creating the feedback loop of self-recognition that is the principle of psychological isolation and conflict. The question was raised about how seeing ends the past or reduces its power to dominate the present. It was suggested that the very act of seeing naturally puts the past in its place by revealing its constructive or destructive nature in relationship. So seeing is the greatest skill. The conversation concluded with a reflection on the brain’s creation of symbolic structures to protect itself from the full impact of direct experience. This led back to the theme of meditation and energy, which the presenter related to K’s ‘process’ and its challenge to the brain, which may have developed the self to keep that overwhelming flow at bay. The notions of analytic idealism and Donald Hoffman’s conscious agents theory were mentioned as suggesting the necessity of such protective boundaries, but there was no time left for the group to go into this.

• Javier Gómez Rodríguez

The presenter began the session by citing Krishnamurti’s description of the layers of consciousness, with a first superficial level, below which is memory, under which is the will to become and, surrounding it all, a vast emptiness. The driving force is the will to become, which is an escape from the ocean of nothingness enveloping what is essentially a bubble of memory, thought, self and time. He suggested that the fear of nothingness may have its roots in the fact that thought can only deal with things and cannot grasp nothingness. This fear is focused on the psychological entity or self because the emptiness threatens its existence and continuity. So the whole investigation of self-knowledge at the core of K’s teachings concerns the understanding of this movement and the merging of consciousness with its original nothingness. K places the focus of conditioning in the self, which is the essence of fragmentation, conflict, and suffering. This conditioned identity is the product of tradition and the interconnection of thought and feeling, which is the content and movement of consciousness. A conditioned consciousness is dangerous because it relates to its own past, isolating it from the actuality and creating a division with what is. This conditioning is shared by all humanity, thus what unites us and should be our first priority in resolving our problems.

The presenter finished by sharing a curious aspect of the readings for this chapter, namely that the sense of nothingness results from comparing ourselves with others, creating a feeling of inferiority and self-pity. This that traps us in a vicious circle in which we are constantly running away from the false emptiness we ourselves create with our comparative measurements. Transformation therefore requires stopping this cycle and embracing what is. He quoted K saying that nothingness is not real, i.e. not a thing, but it is the truth. So living in truth may involve stepping outside reality, the field of thought, a rather challenging proposal for mankind.

In the discussion that followed, one of the participants had a list of questions. She began by asking whether we can ever see the truth, given that the movement of conditioned experience prevents it. In response, the presenter mentioned K’s statement that freedom is in the first step of our existence, i.e. in the now, which is beyond time and thought. He emphasized that perceiving the danger of thought or when thought reaches its limit and stops, the energy of silence breaks the momentum of the past and makes for insight, i.e. the perception of truth without a shadow of doubt. The second question concerned the possibility of awakening for people requiring a psychological centre or structure for existential security. Awakening means not being asleep, which humanity is on account of living in the past, the essence of which is the ‘me’. Awakening means becoming aware of and dissolving this self-identity. The third question concerned the nature of death as K understands it, which involves the ending of the illusory ‘me’, so it is at the heart of awakening. But if the self is illusory, what is it that dies? We are creatures of thought, of memory and time, of the past that overshadows our being. What dies is that structure of thought that runs our lives and in that dying we are reborn to being, which is in emptiness – not the fake emptiness of self-pity or self-denial but the actual one.   

It was commented that it is not only a question of thought but of the body, which as a living organism is naturally afraid of death. The question was raised about ‘intelligence’. It was explained that in the context of this inquiry it means reading between the lines, i.e. the truth or falseness of thinking and, still deeper, having an insight into the nature of thought itself.   

• Javier Gómez Rodríguez