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We say that 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 practice, practice, practice. A machine can do that. Systems cannot reveal the beauty and depth of the marvelous thing called meditation. Meditation is not 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," so concentration becomes conflict. When you do learn to concentrate, like a schoolboy, then that concentration becomes a process of exclusion, building a wall against thought, which is another movement of thought. Concentration is not meditation. Meditation is not an escape from the understanding of what yourself actually is. So there must be complete self-knowledge---not of a higher-self or the Atman and all that rubbish, which are all inventions. What is fact is real, inventions are not.
So, a mind that has understood through negation that there is no system, no method, no concentration becomes very quiet naturally. In that, there is no observer who has achieved some kind of silence. In that silence 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 extraordinariness of it. Don't merely repeat what the speaker says. If you repeat it, it becomes a propaganda, which is a lie.
So when the mind has complete order, mathematical order, and that order has come into being naturally through the understanding of the disorder of our daily life, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet. This quiet has vast space. It is not the quiet of a little room. It is not the silence of the ending of noise. It is not the mind that has understood the whole problem of existence, love and death and living, the beauty of the skies, the trees, the people. All your religious gurus have denied beauty, and that's why you destroy your trees, nature. When you have understood all this, then you will know what happens in that silence. Nobody can describe it. Anybody who describes it doesn't know what it is. It is for you to find out.
You must ask questions, not only of the speaker but of yourself, which is far more important. Ask yourself why you believe, why you follow, why you accept authority, why you are corrupt, angry, jealous, brutal, violent. Question that and find out the answer; and you cannot find out the answer by asking another. You see, you have to stand alone, completely alone, which doesn't mean you become isloated. Because you are alone then you will know what it means to live purely. Therefore you must ask endless questions. And the more you ask of yourself, do not try to find an answer but ask and look. Ask and look and when you ask there must be care, there must be affection, there must be love in your asking of yourself.....
{Inward Revolution ~ J. Krishnamurti}
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