785 The quiet Mind
Krishnamurti is my
guide whenever I deal with the subjects that fill my book en.light.en.ment … he has answered for me the question, “what
is the truth?”
His answer is simple, “the truth can only be observed with a
quiet mind.” His logic is compelling: If the mind is not quiet, it is filled
with opinions, beliefs, biases etc.
All far from the truth.
To Learn, the Mind
Must Be Quiet
To discover anything
new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded,
especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief,
to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection
and therefore utterly unreal, false. If you are to discover for yourself what
is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge
- the knowledge of another, however great. You use knowledge as a means of
self-projection, security, and you want to be quite sure that you have the same
experiences as the Buddha or the Christ or X. But a man who is protecting
himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth-seeker. For the
discovery of truth there is no path. When you want to find something new, when
you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it
not? If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an
impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has
become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes
constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist
simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for
those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is
timeless.
Krishnamurti, The Book
of Life
So there you have it.
And to still the mind, to render it quiet, indeed to set it free, we meditate.