The Essence Of Meditation

There are so many different methods and techniques of meditation. Which is best?

Well, a good answer is that question is, whichever works for you.

As for me, I like what that great saboteur J. Krishnamurti, pictured below, had to say about the matter. He warned against using any sort of method or technique, for all such things as simply conditioning, thought and the past. In my posts on this blog I have often recounted this famous Zen story. A disciple says to the master, ‘I have been four months with you, and you have still given me no method or technique.’ The master says, ‘A method? What on earth would you want a method for?’ The disciple says, ‘To attain inner freedom.’ The master roars with laughter, and then says, ‘You need great skill indeed to set yourself free by means of the trap called a method.’

Krishnamurti spoke and wrote much on the subject of meditation even though he never taught any particular system or type of meditation other than the awareness of both the world and the whole movement of oneself. True meditation, he would say, is a choiceless awareness applied it to one’s whole day, indeed one’s whole life. In a similar vein Alan Watts wrote that meditation is ‘the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment’.