Meditation - ( A College Interview )

Introduction : This Interview is an extract from the talks and discussion held by J. Krishnamurti with students of Rishi Valley Schools (INDIA). He communicates his ideas of education as an instrument of the transformation of the human mind.

Student: The world is full of callous people, indifferent people, cruel people, and how can you change those people?

Krishnamurti: The world is full of callous people, indifferent people, cruel people, and how can you change those people? Is that it?

Why do you bother about changing others? Change yourself.

Otherwise as you grow up you will also become callus. You will also become indifferent. You will also become cruel.

The past generation is vanishing, it is going and you are coming, and if you also prove callous, indifferent, cruel, you will also build the same society.

What matters is that you change; that you are not callous, that you are not indifferent. When you say all this is the business of the older generation, have you seen them, have you watched them, have you felt for them?

If you have, you will do something. Change yourself and test it by action. Such action is one of the most extraordinary things. But we want to change everybody accept ourselves.

Which means, really, we do not want to change, we want others to change and so we remain callous, indifferent, cruel, hoping the environment will change so that we can continue in our own way. You understand what I am talking about?

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Student: You ask us to change, what do we change into?

Krishnamurti: You ask us to change, what do we change into? You cannot change into a monkey, probably you would like to, but you cannot.

Now when you say, “I want to change into something” — — listen to this carefully — — if you say to yourself, I must change, I must change myself into something”.

The “into something” is a pattern which you have created, haven’t you? Do you see that?

Look, you are violent or greedy and you want to change yourself into a person who is not greedy? Not watching to be greed is another form of greed, isn’t it?

Do you see that? But if you say, “I am greedy, I will find out what it means, why I am greedy, what is involved in it”, then, when you understand greed, you will be free of greed. Do you understand what I am talking about?

Let me explain. I am greedy and I struggle, fight, make tremendous efforts not to be greedy. I have already an idea, a picture, an image of what it means not to be greedy.

So I am confirming to an ideal which I think is non-greed. You understand?

Whereas if I look at my greed, if I understand why I am greedy, the nature of my greed, the structure of greed, then, when I begin to understand all that, I am free of greed.

Therefore, freedom from greed is something entirely different from trying to become non-greedy. Do you see the difference? Freedom from greed is something which is entirely different from saying, “I must be a great man so I must be non-greedy”. Have you understood?

I was thinking last night, that I have been to this Valley, off and on, for about 40 years. People have come and gone. Trees have died and new trees have grown. Different children have come, pass through this school, have become engineers, housewives and disappeared altogether into the masses. I meet them occasionally, at an airport or at a meeting, very ordinary people. And if you are not very careful, you are also going to end up that way.

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Student: What do you mean by ordinary?

Krishnamurti: To be like the rest of men, with their worries, with their corruption, violence, brutality, indifference, callousness. To want a job, to want to hold on to a job, whether you are efficient or not, to die in the job. That is what is called ordinary — — to have nothing new, nothing fresh, no joy in life, never to be curious, intense, passionate, never to find out, but merely to conform. That is what I mean by ordinary. It is called being bourgeois. It is a mechanical way of living, a routine, a boredom.

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Student: How can we get rid of being ordinary?

Krishnamurti: How can we get rid of being ordinary? Do not be ordinary. You cannot get rid of it.

Just do not be it.

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Student: How, Sir?

Krishnamurti: There is no “how”. You see that is one of the most destructive questions: “Tell me how”. Man has always being saying, throughout the world, “Tell me how”.

If you see a snake, a poisonous cobra, , you do not say, “Please tell me how to run away from it”, You run away from it. So in the same way, if you see that if you are ordinary, run, leave it, not tomorrow, but instantly.

Since you will not ask any more questions, I am going to propose something. You know people talk a great deal about meditation. Don’t they?

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Student: They do.

Krishnamurti: You know nothing about it. I am glad. Because you know nothing about it, you can learn about it. It is like not knowing French or Latin or Italian. Because you do not know, you can learn, you can learn as though for the first time.

Those people who already know what meditation is, they have to unlearn and then learn. You see the difference? Since you do not know what meditation is, let us learn about it.

To learn about meditation, you have to see how your mind is working. You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall. You see all its four feet, how its sticks to the wall, and as you watch, you see all movements.

In the same way, watch your thinking. Do not correct it. Do not suppress it. Do not say, “All this is so difficult”. Just watch, now, this morning.

First of all sit absolutely still. Sit comfortably, cross your legs, sit absolutely still, close your eyes, and see if you can keep your eyes from moving. You understand? Your eyeballs are apt to move, keep them completely quiet, for fun. Watch it as you watched the lizard. Watch thought, the way it runs, one thought after another. So, you begin to learn, to observe.

Are you watching your thoughts — — how one thought pursues another thought, thought saying, “This is a good thought, this is a bad thought”? When you go to bed at night, and when you walk, watch your thoughts. Just watch thought, do not correct it, and then you learn the beginning of meditation. Now sit very quietly. Shut your eyes and see that the eyeballs do not move at all. Then watch your thoughts so that you learn.

Once you begin to learn there is no end to learning.

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