So we are asking what is meditation.
And why should one meditate?
Is it natural?
Natural – you understand?
Like breathing, like seeing, like hearing.
Is it natural?
And why have we made it so unnatural?
Taking postures, following systems.
Buddhist meditation, Tibetan meditation,
Christian meditation,
the Tantra meditations.
You don’t know them perhaps. Some of you may know.
And the meditations set by your favourite guru.
We are asking, aren’t all those really abnormal?
Are you following?
Why should I take a certain position to meditate?
Why should I practise, practise, practise – to arrive where?
You understand my question?
To follow a system:
twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes in the afternoon,
twenty minutes in the evening, to have a quiet mind.
Having achieved a little quiet mind I can go off
and do other mischief all day long.
These are actual facts I am telling you.
Is there a way of meditating
which is none of these things?
You understand my question?
Until now, we say meditation is to quieten the mind, first,
to have a mind that is capable of observation.
To have a mind that is completely centred,
completely concentrated.
So that there is no thought except one thought.
One picture, one image,
one centre upon which you are looking.
I don’t know if you have gone through all this.
The speaker has played with them,
for half an hour of each of these meditations,
ten minutes, five minutes, and they meant nothing.
So you have to go into this question –
who is the controller and the controlled?
Are you getting tired?
Our whole life, if you observe, is this –
controlling and not controlling.
I must control my emotions,
I must control my thinking.
I can only control my thinking by constant practice.
And to practise I must have a system.
The system implies a mechanical process,
making the mind mechanical, more and more,
and it is already mechanical now but we want to make it much more
so that it gradually becomes more and more dull.
We go through all this.
Why?
If you are meditating according to TM,
or according to somebody else, why?
Because you want to have an experience
either through drugs,
and you know drugs do you harm,
therefore you say no, you put that aside,
but by practising something you will experience something else.
I don’t know if you have ever gone into the question of experience;
why human beings are demanding experience.
Either the mind is asleep,
therefore an experience means a challenge.
Or the mind is awake and therefore doesn’t need an experience.
I don’t know if you are following this.
So one has to find out if your mind is asleep,
or bored with the experience that you have,
sex, drugs, all the rest of other experiences,
you want something far beyond all that.
Because you are always craving for experience:
more delightful, more extravagant, the more communicable, etc.
Why does the mind demand experience?
Ask yourself, please.
There is only one thing:
a mind that is very clear,
is free from all entanglements of attachment and so on,
such a mind is a light to itself.
Therefore it doesn’t want any experience,
there is nothing to experience.
You cannot experience enlightenment.
The very idea of experience, it is such a stupid thing to say,
‘I have achieved enlightenment’ – it is really dishonest.
You cannot experience truth
because there must be an experiencer to experience.
If there is no experiencer,
there is no experience at all.
I wonder if you see that.
But we are attached to our experiencer
and therefore we are always asking more and more.
So meditation generally as is accepted now,
is the practice of a system, breathing properly,
sitting in the right position,
the lotus position or whatever position you take,
wanting or craving for greater experience,
or the ultimate experience.
This is what we are doing.
And therefore all that is a constant struggle,
a never ending struggle.
This never ending struggle is hoping to end all struggles.
You understand? Look what I have done.
I am struggling, struggling, struggling to end struggling,
which is sometime in the future.
See what tricks I have played on myself.
I am caught in time.
I don’t say, ‘Why should I struggle at all?’
If I can end this struggle, that is enlightenment.
To have no shadow of conflict.