Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti on meditation

Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti on meditation:

Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue.
The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious.
If there were legitimate answers, there would be no problems. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. The teacher, guru, or leader who offers solutions is also false, along with his so-called answers. He is not doing any honest work, only selling a cheap, shoddy commodity in the marketplace. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naïveté‚ and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.
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To describe that state as a meditative state full of awareness is romantic hogwash. Awareness! What a fantastic gimmick used to fool themselves and others. You can't be aware of every step, you only become self-conscious and awkward if you do. I once knew a man who was a harbor pilot. He had been reading about "passive awareness" and attempted to put it into practice. He, for the first time, nearly wrecked the ship he was guiding. Walking is automatic, and if you try to be aware of every step, you will go crazy. So don't invent meditative steps. Things are bad enough. The meditative state is worse.
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If your meditations, sadhanas, methods and techniques meant anything, you wouldn't be here asking these questions. They are all means for you to bring about change. I maintain that there is nothing to change or transform. You accept that there is something to change as an article of faith. You never question the existence of the one who is to be changed. The whole mystique of enlightenment is based upon the idea of transforming yourself. I cannot convey or transmit my certainty that you and all the authorities down through the centuries are false. They and the spiritual goods they peddle are utterly false. Because I cannot communicate this certainty to you it would be useless and artificial for me to get up on a platform and hold forth. I prefer to talk informally; I just talk, "Nice meeting you."
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They sell you spiritual pathedrins, spiritual morphine. You take that drug and go to sleep. Now the scientists have perfected pleasure drugs, it is much easier to take. It never strikes you that the enlightenment and God you are after is just the ultimate pleasure, a pleasure moreover, which you have invented to be free from the painful state you are always in. Your painful, neurotic state is caused by wanting two contradictory things at the same time.
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Meditation is itself an evil. That is why all the evil thoughts swell up when you try to meditate. Otherwise you have no reference point, no way of knowing if the thoughts are good or evil thoughts. Meditation is a battle, but you only experience more pain. I can assure you that not only is the goal of meditation and moksha put into you by our culture, but that ultimately you will get nothing but pain. You may experience some petty little mystical experiences, which are of no value to you or anyone.
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Yoga, meditations, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states.
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You have also been told that through meditation you can bring selfishness to an end. Actually, you are not meditating at all, just thinking about selflessness, and doing nothing to be selfless. I have taken that as an example, but all other examples are variations of the same thing. All activity along these lines is exactly the same. You must accept the simple fact that you do not want to be free from selfishness.
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The "peace of mind" you want is an extension of this war of effort and struggle. So is meditation warfare. You sit for meditation while there is a battle raging within you. The result is violent, evil thoughts welling up inside you. Next, you try to control or direct these brutal thoughts, making more effort and violence for yourself in the process.
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Please don't say that there are thousands of seers and sages; there are only a very few. You can count them all on your fingers. The rest are merely technocrats. The saint is a technocrat. That is what most people are. But now with the development of drugs and other techniques, the saint is dispensable. You don't any longer need a priest or saint to instruct you in meditation. If you want to control your thoughts, simply take a drug and forget them, if that is what you want. If you can't sleep, take a sleeping pill. Sleep for a while, then wake up. It is the same.
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...You can try all kinds of things, but it won't help. You will only succeed in creating disturbances within the body, disturbing the harmony that is already there. By bringing about strange hallucinations and unnatural metabolic changes you only harm the body. That's all there is to it. There is nothing you can do to reverse this, to change direction.
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So all your experiences, all your meditations, all your sadhana, all that you do is a self-centered activity -- it is strengthening the self, it is adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centered activity. You can't divide these things into two; the process you adopt to reach what you call 'being' is also a becoming process. I don't know if I make myself clear. So there is no such thing as being and becoming. You are always in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do about this. Anything you do to put yourself in that state of being is a becoming process -- that is all that I am point out.
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There is a constant demand on your part to experience everything that you look at, everything that you are feeling inside, because if you don't do that you are coming to an end. You as you know yourself, you as you experience yourself, are coming to an end, and you do not want that to come to an end. You want the continuity. So all spiritual pursuits are in the direction of strengthening that continuity. It's a self-centered activity. Through self-centered activity how can you be free from the activities of the self? All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centered. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centered activity.
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Whatever energy is there, the same energy is in operation here. So any energy you experience through the practice of any techniques is a frictional energy. That energy is created by the friction of thought. The demand to experience that energy is responsible for the energy you experience, but this energy is something which cannot be experienced at all. This is just an expression of life, a manifestation of life. You don't have to do a thing.
Anything you do to experience that is preventing the energy which is already there, which is the expression of life, which is the manifestation of life, from functioning. It has no value in terms of the values we give to whatever we are doing—the techniques, meditation, yoga and all that. I am not against any one of those things, please don't get me wrong, but they are not the means to achieve the goal that you have placed before yourself. The goal itself is false.
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If the suppleness of the body is the goal you have before you, probably the techniques of yoga will help you to keep the body supple. But that is not the instrument to reach the goal of enlightenment or transformation or whatever you want to call it. Even the techniques of meditation are self-centered activities. They are all self-perpetuating mechanisms which you use. So the object of your search for ultimate reality is defeated by all these techniques because these techniques are self-perpetuating instruments. You will suddenly realize, or it will dawn on you, that the very search for ultimate reality is also a self-perpetuating mechanism. There is nothing to reach, nothing to gain, nothing to attain.
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Do all the meditations. Do everything you want. You will have lots of them. It's a lot easier to experience those things by taking drugs. I am not recommending drugs but they are the same. Doctors say that drugs will damage the brain but meditation will also damage the brain if it is done very seriously. They have gone crazy, jumped into rivers and killed themselves. They did all kinds of things, locked themselves up in caves because they couldn't face it.
You see, it is not possible for you to watch your thoughts. It is not possible for you to watch every step you take, it will drive you crazy.
You can't walk. That's not what is meant by this idea that you should be aware of everything, watch every thought. How is it possible for you to watch every thought of yours, and for what do you want to watch your thoughts? What for, control? It's not possible for you to control. It is a tremendous momentum.
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There is no inner and outer. What I am trying to say is that there is a feeling, there is a demand, that there is something more interesting that you can do with yourself, more meaningful, more purposeful, than your existence is today. That is the demand, you see. That is why there is this restlessness. You become restless because of this drive in you which is put in there by the society or culture that makes you feel that there is something more interesting, more meaningful, more purposeful, that your life can be than what it is today. Your naturalness is destroyed by that demand which is put in there by the culture. So then, your life looks meaningless to you if that is all that you can do. You have tried to fill in that boredom with everything possible. You have all these gimmicks—yoga, meditation and all the psychology.
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Your naturalness is something that you don't have to know. You just have to let that function in its own way. Your wanting to know that demands some know-how which you want from somebody. The functioning of the heart is a natural thing. The functioning of all the organs in your body is very natural. They are not for one moment asking themselves the question, “How am I functioning?” The whole living organism has this tremendous intelligence which makes it function in a very natural way.
You are not acting in a natural way because the ideal that has been placed before you by the culture has falsified the natural actions here. You are frightened of acting in a natural way because you have been told the way you should act. The things that are there are running very smoothly and mechanically. You don't have to do a thing about them. The more you try the more resistance you create.
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It is society that has placed before us the desire for freedom, the desire for liberation, the desire for God, the desire for self-realization.
That is the desire you must be free from. Then all these other desires fall into their own natural rhythm. You suppress these desires only because you are afraid society will punish you if you act on them or because you see them as obstacles to your main desire, freedom.
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If this kind of thing should happen to you, you will find yourself back in a primeval state, without primitivity and without any volition on your part. It just happens. Such a free man is not in conflict with society any more. He is not antisocial, not at war with the world. He sees that it can't be any the different. He doesn't want to change society at all. The demand for change has ceased. Any doing in any direction is violence. Any effort is violence. Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force and so is violent. Such an approach is absurd. You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Meditation is violent. The living organism is very peaceful. You don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't give a damn for your ecstasies or blissful states. People have abandoned the natural intelligence of the body.
All I am saying is that the peace you are seeking is already inside you in the harmonious functioning of the body. Anything you do to free yourself from anything, for whatever reason, is destroying the sensitivity, clarity and freedom that is already there.
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Every thought that is born has to die. If a thought does not die it cannot be reborn. It has to die and with it you die. But instead of dying with each thought and breath, you hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem.
Your insecurity springs from your refusal to face the temporary nature of thought. It is a little easier to talk to those who have meditated because they experience the futility of it and can see where they are hung up.
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So, your breathing exercises, your yoga exercises, your meditations, are disturbing the chemistry of the body, and the natural rhythm of the body in exactly the same way that all these drugs which people take disturb the chemistry of the body. So, you say that they are damaging, but actually these are far more damaging than those things [drugs].
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The body is not interested in your techniques of meditation which actually are destroying the peace that is already there. It is an extraordinarily peaceful organism. It does not have to do anything to be in a peaceful state. By introducing this idea of a peaceful mind we set in motion a sort of battle that goes on and on. What you regard as peaceful is in actuality nothing more than a war-weary state of mind.