Thought as meditation in action

 What is meditation if not ruminating or the recalibration of our inner past.

Marco Almeida 2025

- The Peg

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MEDITATION IS NEVER the control of the body. There is no actual division between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are all one, indivisible. It is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance.⁠
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Every decision to control only breeds resistance, even the determination to be aware. Meditation is the understanding of the division brought about by decision. Freedom is not the act of decision but the act of perception. The seeing is the doing. It is not a determination to see and then to act. After all, will is desire with all its contradictions. When one desire assumes authority over another, that desire becomes will. In this there is inevitable division. And meditation is the understanding of desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. Desire is the movement of sensation, which becomes pleasure and fear. This is sustained by the constant dwelling of thought upon one or the other. ⁠

Meditation really is a complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only the functioning of the body; there is only the activity of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without identification as the me and the not-me. Thought is mechanical, as is the organism. What creates conflict is thought identifying itself with one of its parts which becomes the me, the self and the various divisions in that self. There is no need for the self at any time. There is nothing but the body and freedom of the mind can happen only when thought is not breeding the me. There is no self to understand but only the thought that creates the self. When there is only the organism without the self, perception, both visual and non-visual, can never be distorted. There is only seeing 'what is' and that very perception goes beyond what is. The emptying of the mind is not an activity of thought or an intellectual process. The continuous seeing of what is without any kind of distortion naturally empties the mind of all thought and yet that very mind can use thought when it is necessary. Thought is mechanical and meditation is not.

J. Krishnamurti
Beginnings of Learning

If you find your true vocation, you will help to break down this rotten system completely. Whether you are a gardener, a painter or an engineer, you will be doing something you love with your whole being; and that is not ambition. To do something marvellously well, to do it completely, truly, according to what you deeply think and feel, that is not ambition, and in that there is no fear. To help you discover your true vocation is very difficult because it means the teacher has to pay a great deal of attention to each student to find out what they are capable of. He has to help you not to be afraid, but to question and investigate. You may be a potential writer, a poet or a painter – whatever it is, if you really love to do it, you are not ambitious because in love there is no ambition. So it is very important while you are young that you should be helped to awaken your own intelligence and thereby find your true vocation. Then you will love what you do, right through life, which means there will be no ambition, no competition, no fighting another for position or prestige. Then perhaps you will be able to create a new world. In that new world, all the ugly things of the older generation will cease to exist – their wars, their mischief, their separative gods, their rituals which mean absolutely nothing, their sovereign governments, their violence. That is why the responsibility of the teachers, and of the students, is very great.

From Life Ahead