This Light in Oneself: True Meditation

by J. Krishnamurti

One has to be a light to oneself; this light is the law. There is no other law. All the other laws are made by thought and so are fragmentary and contradictory. To be a light to oneself is not to follow the light of another, however reasonable, logical, historical, and however convincing. You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion. Morality is not put together by thought; it is not the outcome of environmental pressure, it is not of yesterday, of tradition. Morality is the child of love and love is not desire and pleasure. Sexual or sensory enjoyment is not love.

Actual freedom is freedom from dependency, attachment, from the craving for experience. Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself.

So, in daily life, can you live without comparison? Do it once and you will find what is implied in that. Then you throw off a tremendous burden; and when you throw off a burden that is unnecessary you have energy.

If you give complete attention, with your body, with your nerves, with your eyes, with your ears, with your mind, with your whole being, there is no center from which you are attending, there is only attention. That attention is complete silence.

You have no space when your mind is crowded with attachments, with fears, with the pursuit of pleasures, with the desire for power, position. Then the mind is overcrowded, it has no space. Space is necessary, and where there is attention there is no direction, but rather space.

Meditation in daily life is the transformation of the mind, a psychological revolution so that we live a daily life—not in theory, not as an ideal, but in every movement of that life—in which there is compassion, love, and the energy to transcend all the pettiness, the narrowness, the shallowness. When the mind is quiet—really still, not made still through desire, through will—then there is a totally different kind of movement that is not of time.

Meditation is not an escape. It is not something mysterious. Out of meditation comes a life that is holy, a life that is sacred. And therefore you treat all things as sacred.

Good also means that which is beautiful. Good also means that which is holy; it is related to God, to the highest principles. That word good needs to be very clearly understood. When there is goodness in you, then whatever you do will be good, your relationships, your actions, your way of thinking. One may capture the whole significance of that word, the extraordinary quality of that word, instantly.

ONE CAN TALK endlessly, piling words upon words, coming to various conclusions, but out of all the verbal confusion, if there is one clear action, that action is worth ten thousand words.

The understanding of life and the extraordinary meaning of death is meditation.

Truth can never be experienced: that is the beauty of it, it is always new, it is never what happened yesterday.

We all want to accept somebody who promises something, because we have no light in ourselves. But nobody can give you that light: no guru, no teacher, no savior, no one.

when the wife or the husband dominate each other they destroy each other. In that there is no freedom, there is no beauty, there is no love.

Order isn’t a thing that you establish—in the denial of disorder there is order. Virtue, which is order, comes out of knowing the whole nature and structure of disorder. This is fairly simple if we observe in ourselves how utterly disorderly and contradictory we are: we hate, and we think we love—that is the beginning of disorder, of duality; and virtue is not the outcome of duality. Virtue is a living thing, to be picked up daily; it is not the repetition of something that you called virtue yesterday. That is mechanical, worthless. So there must be order. And that is part of meditation.

The ending of the “me” is part of meditation; that is the only meditation.

So dying is very important to understand. To die to everything that one knows. Have you ever tried it? To be free from the known, to be free from your memory, even for a few days; to be free from your pleasure, without any argument, without any fear; to die to your family, to your house, to your name; to become completely anonymous. It is only the person who is completely anonymous who is in a state of nonviolence, who has no violence. So die every day, not as an idea, but actually. Do do it sometime.

One has collected so much, not only books, houses, the bank account, but inwardly: the memories of insults, the memories of flattery, the memories of your own particular experiences, neurotic achievements which give you a position. To die to all that without argument, without discussion, without any fear, just to give it up; do it some time and you will see. To do it psychologically—not giving up your wife, your clothes, your husband, your children or your house, but inwardly—is not to be attached to anything. In that there is great beauty. After all, that is love, isn’t it? Love is not attachment. When there is attachment there is fear. And fear inevitably becomes authoritarian, possessive, oppressive, dominating.

Meditation is the understanding of life, which is to bring about order. Order is virtue, which is light. This light is not to be lit by another, however experienced, however clever, however erudite, however spiritual. Nobody on earth or in heaven can li...

Then there is that which man has sought through centuries, the unnameable, the timeless. And there is no verbal expression of it. The image that is created by thought completely and utterly ceases because there is no entity that wants to express it in words. Your mind can only discover it, or come upon it, when you have this strange thing called love, compassion, not only for your neighbor, but for the animals, the trees, for everything. Then such a mind itself becomes sacred.

In classical, ordinary meditation, the gurus who propagate it are concerned with the controller and the controlled. They say to control your thoughts because thereby you will end thought, or have only one thought. But we are inquiring into who the controller is. You might say, “It is the higher self,” “It is the witness,” “It is something that is not thought,” but the controller is part of thought. Obviously. So the controller is the controlled. Thought has divided itself as the controller and that which it is going to control, but it is still the activity of thought.

So when one understands that the whole movement of the controller is the controlled, then there is no control at all. This is a dangerous thing to say to people who have not understood it. We are not advocating no control. We are saying that where there is the observation that the controller is the controlled, that the thinker is the thought, and if you remain with that whole truth, with that reality, without any further interference of thought, then you have a totally different kind of energy.

In concentration there is resistance, narrowing down the enormous energy of life to a certain point. Whereas in attention, which is a form of awareness in which there is no choice, a choiceless awareness, all your energy is there. When you have such attention there is no center from which you are attending, whereas in concentration there is always a center from which you are attending.

That attention cannot be sustained. When thought says it must find out how to arrive at or achieve attention, the movement of wanting to capture attention is inattention, is lack of attention. To be aware of the movement away from attention is to be attentive.

There is silence between two notes; there is silence between two thoughts, between two movements; there is the silence between two wars; there is silence between husband and wife before they begin to quarrel. We are not talking of that quality of silence, because they are temporary, they go away. We are speaking of a silence that is not produced by thought, that is not cultivable, that comes only when you have understood the whole movement of existence. In that there is silence, there is no question and answer, there is no challenge, there is no search, everything has ended. In that silence, there is a great sense of space and beauty and extraordinary sense of energy. Then there comes that which is eternally, timelessly sacred, which is not the product of civilization, the product of thought. That is the whole movement of meditation.

When the senses are fully awakened, flowering, then the body becomes extraordinarily quiet.

Most of us force our bodies to sit still, not to fidget, not to move about, but if all the senses are functioning healthily, normally, vitally, then the body relaxes and becomes very, very quiet.

If the mind has not brought about right relationship with another, mere inquiry into or seeking reality has no meaning whatsoever, because life is relationship. Life is action in relationship, and if that is not deeply, fully understood and established, you cannot go very far. Without that, merely to seek becomes a form of escape from the reality of relationship.

Don’t follow anybody—including the speaker. Don’t accept what anybody says, because you have to be a light to yourself. You have to stand completely by yourself, and to do that, because you are the world and the world is you, you have to be free of the things of the world, which is to be free of the “me,” the ego and all its aggression, vanities, stupidities, ambition.

That state of attention in which the “me” is totally absent is meditation.

that takes place when I am listening to you, when I am listening to the sound of a bird, or when I am looking at the marvelous mountains. So in that state of attention there is no division as the observer and the observed. When there is that division, then there is conflict.

But if the mind can observe “what is” without naming it, without categorizing it, putting it into a frame, or wasting energy to escape from it, if it can look at it without the observer, which is the past, look at it without the eyes of the past, then you are totally free of it. Do it and you will see.

And this is meditation. And this is part of our daily living; it isn’t something you do at odd moments, it is there all the time, bringing order in everything that it is doing. And in this there is great beauty. Not the beauty that is in the hills and the trees and in the pictures in the museums, or in music, because it is the thing that is beauty and therefore love.

Meditation is a process of emptying the mind of all the activity of the self, of all the activity of the “me.” If you do not understand the activity of the self, then your meditation only leads to illusion, your meditation then only leads to self-deception, your meditation then will only lead to further distortion. So to understand what meditation is, you must understand the activity of the self.

One of the demands, urges, desires of the mind, the self, is to change “what is” into “what should be.” It doesn’t know what to do with “what is” because it cannot resolve “what is,” therefore it projects an idea of “what should be,” which is the ideal. This projection is the antithesis of “what is,” and therefore there is a conflict between “what is” and “what should be.” That very conflict is the blood and the breath of the self.

Now, what is being aware? Awareness implies an observation in which there is no choice whatsoever, just observing without interpretation, translation, distortion. And that will not take place as long as there is an observer who is trying to be aware. Can you be aware, attentive, so that in that attention there is only observation and not the observer?

So a religious life is a life of meditation, in which the activities of the self are not. And one can live such a life in this world every day. That is, one can live a life as a human being in which there is constant alertness, watchfulness, awareness, an attentive mind that is watching the movement of the self. And the watching is watching from silence, not from a conclusion. Because the mind has observed the activities of the self and sees the falseness of it and therefore the mind has become extraordinarily sensitive, and silent. And from that silence it acts. In daily life.

Religion is the cessation of the “me,” and action born of that silence. That life is a sacred life full of meaning.

Some people have been to India, but I don’t know why they go there: truth isn’t there; there is romance, but romance is not truth. Truth is where you are. It is not in some foreign country, it is where you are. Truth is what you are doing, how you are behaving. It is there, not in shaving your head or in all those stupid things that man has done.

Thought has invented psychological time as a means of avoiding, as a means of postponing, as a means of indulging in that which it already has. Thought has invented psychological time out of laziness.

So, what is love? It is to meet another with the same intensity, at the same level, at the same time. Isn’t it? That is love.

Can you listen not only to what the speaker is saying but also to your own reaction to what is being said, and not correct your reaction to conform to what is being said? Then there is a process going on: the speaker is saying something that you are listening to, and you are also listening to your reactions to what is being said, and you give space to the sound of your own reactions and also to what is being said. It means tremendous attention, not just getting into a kind of trance and going off. If you listen, in that listening there is a miracle. The miracle is that you are completely with the fact of what is being said and listening to that, and listening also to your own responses. It is a simultaneous process. You listen to what is being said and your reaction to what is being said, which is instantaneous, and you listen to the whole sound of it, which means having space. So you are giving your whole attention to listening. This is an art that is not to be learned by going to a college, passing some degrees, but by listening to everything—to a river going by, to the birds, to an aeroplane, to your wife or your husband—which is much more difficult because you have become used to each other. You almost know what she is going say, and she knows very well what you are going to say, after ten days, after ten years; so you have shut off your hearing altogether.

If I look at my wife from all the images, incidents, memories, and hurts, I never look at her. I am always looking at her through the images of past memories. Can you look at your girlfriend, or your wife, or your husband as though for the first time without all the images, memories?

That is, meditation is the understanding of and the ending of measurement, psychologically. It is the ending of becoming, and the seeing that thought is everlastingly limited. It may think of the limitless, but it is still born of the limited. So thought comes to an end. So the brain, which has been chattering along, muddled, limited, has suddenly become silent, without any compulsion, without any discipline, because it sees the fact, the truth. And the fact and the truth are beyond time.

All the movement of thought has ended. It has ended but it can be brought into activity when there is necessity in the physical world. Now, it is quiet. It is silent. And where there is silence there must be space, immense space, because there is no self. The self has its own limited space, it creates its own little space. But when the self is not, which means when the activity of thought is not, then there is vast silence in the brain because it is now free from all its conditioning.

Then the search for experience, which we all want, must come to an end. I will show you why. Every day we have various kinds of experiences. The recording of it becomes a memory, and that memory distorts observation. If, for instance, you are a Christian, you have been conditioned for two thousand years in all your ideologies, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, the savior, and you want to experience that which you call—whatever it is. You will experience whatever it is because that is your conditioning. In India they have hundreds of gods and they are conditioned to that and so they have visions of them, because they see according to their conditioning. When we are bored with all the physical experiences, we want some other kind of experience, the spiritual experience, to find out if there is a God, to have visions. You will have visions, experiences, according to your background, obviously, because your mind is conditioned that way. Be aware of that, and see what is implied in experiences.

So thought, which is a movement of the past, meets the present completely, and ends there. This has to be meditated over, thought over. You go into it.

So to observe your consciousness wholly there must be no motive, no direction. Is that possible when you have been trained to do everything with a motive? Action with a motive is what we are trained to do, educated for. All our religions say, everything says, you must have a motive. But the moment you have a motive, which is either pleasure or pain, reward or punishment, that gives you a direction and therefore you can never see the whole. If you understand that, see that actually, then you have no motive. You don’t ask, “How am I to get rid of my motive?” You can only see something totally when there is no direction, when there is no center from which a direction can take place. The center is the motive. If there is no motive, there is no center and therefore no direction. All this is part of meditation.

This is real meditation. To start from the very beginning not knowing. Please, if you start with knowing, you end up in doubt. If you start with not knowing, you end up with absolute truth, which is certainty. I wonder if you capture this. We began by saying we must investigate into ourselves, and ourselves is the known, therefore empty the known. So from that emptiness all the rest of it flows naturally. Where there is something most holy, which is the whole movement of meditation, then life has a totally different meaning. It is never superficial, never. If you have this, nothing matters.

I hope we are communicating with each other, and I hope you have actually set those aside, not merely verbally but deeply inwardly, so that you are completely capable of standing alone and not depending on anything, psychologically. Doubt is a good thing; however, doubt must be kept on a leash. To hold doubt intelligently on a leash is to inquire, but to doubt everything has no meaning.

For a mind that says, “I do not know”—which is the truth, which is honest—what is there then? When you say, “I do not know,” the content has no importance whatsoever, because the mind then is a fresh mind. It is the new mind that says, “I don’t know.” Therefore, when you say it, not just verbally for amusement, but with depth, with meaning, with honesty, that state of mind that does not know is empty of its consciousness, is empty of its content. It is the knowing that is the content. Do you see it? When the mind can never say it knows, it is always new, living, acting; therefore it has no anchorage. It is only when it is anchored that it gathers opinions, conclusions, and separation. This is meditation. That is, meditation is to perceive the truth each second—not the truth ultimately—to perceive the truth and the false each second. To perceive the truth that content is consciousness—that is the truth. To see the truth that I do not know how to deal with this thing—that is the truth, not knowing. Therefore not knowing is the state in which there is no content.