Meditation: a Shift in Perception
These are the reflections on What is meditation? presented by a member of the Vancouver Krishnamurti Group at a recent session: Meditation is a way to discover the basic flaw in our perception that the World ‘out there’ is different form the World that I perceive. There is no World ‘out there’, outside of my being conscious of it. The idea that objects exist independently of those who perceive them, is wrong. When K talks about the observer and the observed, he directly points to the solution of this riddle. Because if I condition myself to think that: “There’s an ugly World out there, but thank goodness I am here”, I can now criticize that World out there, because I must be different from that. I am the good guy and out there is the bad guy. This, to me, is the fundamentally wrong position to take, because I have to come to realize that whatever I perceive, whatever enters my consciousness, including the entire Universe, all that can be created in the mind, is the content of the consciousness of all of us. And this content contains the entire Universe and the entire World. It does not exist outside of us, yet we react to this content with a position of: “I like this”, or “I dislike that”, as we are caught up in the polarity of either, or, good, bad, dark, and light and this polar thinking is part of our identity. Meditation, as Krishnamurti presents it, and as I believe it is meant to be, is a way to come to the discovery of this basic flaw in our way of perceiving the World. I have never meditated in the tradition sense, but I have with my eyes open, as I am a painter. A musician may have a way of doing it to music. Different people have a different constitution, through which they can experiment and discover the truth of the statement above, even if it sounds preposterous. I discovered this by seeing how my perception changes with the state of my being. This perception can be so different when there is no reactor, or perceiver to what is observed, but through being in the observing, thinking, seeing, and hearing. It’s not that I am hearing something in particular, because as soon as I do, I enter it immediately with the polar mind: “I like it”, “I don’t like it”. And there is nothing wrong with this, as long as I don’t identify with either of these polarity states, but remain aware of these polar appearances as simply being the revelations of my own psyche, of my own nature. When the observer stops, however, and I am only observing, the picture changes, because I am no longer observing just fragments of the spectacle. For instance, if one looks at a landscape and he likes trees, the first thing in his view will be the trees, then the houses in between the trees. As observation becomes more and more like meditation, the objects lose their presence, and you don’t see the landscape in fragments, but you now see the whole totality of the separate parts. A movement can be observed that is not the movement of the mind, it is the movement of ‘what is’. And this movement of ‘what is’ is not describable as the movement of the objects, because it seems to just unfold in movement rather than is being perceived by the perceiver. You have to be in your ‘being’ to be able to see the movement of reality. Once you go into meditation and begin to experiment with the idea that there is nothing ‘out there’, but that everything is in the mind, you begin to discover that the observer IS the observed. It’s a meditative process to come to actually connect with the ‘real’ World, as opposed to the personal view World. Steve Salay
