Meditation, love and being

The following are few excerpts from Krishnamurti's notebook:

On meditation:

"It was a lovely evening, the sky was clear and in spite of city light, the stars were brilliant; though the tower was flooded with light from all sides, one could see the distant horizon, and down below patches of light were on the river; though there was the everlasting roar of traffic, it was a peaceful evening. Meditation crept on one like a wave covering the sands. It was not a meditation which the brain could capture in its net of memory; it was something to which the total brain yielded without any resistance. It was a meditatior that went far beyond any formula, method; method and formula and repetition destroy meditation. In its movement it took everything in: the stars, the noise, the quiet and the stretch of water. But there was no meditator; the meditator, the observer must cease for meditation to be. The breaking up of the meditator is also meditation; but when the meditator ceases then there's an altogether different meditation."

On love

"Where love is there is also death; they are inseparable. 

But do we know what love is? You know sensation, emotion, desire, feeling and the mechanism of thought but none of these is love. You love your husband, your children; you hate war but you practise war. Your love knows hate, envy, ambition, fear; the smoke of these is not love. Power and prestige you love but power and prestige are evil, corrupting. Do we know what love is? Never knowing it is the wonder of it, the beauty of it. Never knowing, which does not mean remaining in doubt nor does it mean despair; it's the death of yesterday and so the complete uncertainty of tomorrow. Love has no continuity, nor has death. Only memory and the picture in the frame have continuity but these are mechanical and even machines wear out, yielding place to new pictures, new memories. What has continuity is ever decaying and what decays isn't death. Love and death are inseparable and where they are there's always destruction."

On Being

"Being is infinitely more significant than becoming. Being is not the opposite of becoming; if it's the opposite or in opposition, then there is no being. When becoming dies completely, then there's being. But this being is not static; it's not acceptance nor is it mere denial; becoming involves time and space. All striving must cease; then only there is being. Being is not within the field of social virtue and morality. It shatters the social formula of life. This being is life, not the pattern of life. Where life is there's no perfection; perfection is an idea, a word; life, the being, is beyond any formula of thought. It is there when the word, the example, the pattern are destroyed."

While reading the notebook, I realized the profoundness of the realizations of Krishnamurti. The realizations are so profound that even after so many years, it is quite difficult for society to understand these realizations. 

We have commercialized the concepts of both love and meditation in present-day society. Both have become "becoming" rather than "being". We want to meditate and love without asking a question to ourselves whether anybody could ever meditate or love. So long as there is a meditator, there is no meditation. So long as there is a lover, there is no love. That is probably why Krishnamurty has compared love with death. Love begins with the death of the lover and meditation begins with the death of the meditator. Both love and meditation can not happen so long as one clings to the identity of the lover or meditator.

That's what Krishnamurty probably refers to as the death of becoming. When becoming dies completely, then there's being. What a profound statement. Probably all becomings are to die to just be. We keep getting trapped in the cycles of becoming from one to the other. From becoming a good student to a good son or daughter to a successful entrepreneur to a rich person to a good husband or wife to a good parent to a famous person, the cycle of becoming is endless. Becoming does not spare even love and we wish to become a lover. Even if one is able to drop the worldly becoming, one wants to become a meditator. 

Krishnamurti explains it beautifully:

"Life in totality gives attention to the fragment but the fragment can never understand the totality. Yet this is what we are always attempting to do; hold on to the little and yet try to grasp the whole. The known is always the little, the fragment, and with the small we seek the unknown. We never let the little go; of the little we are certain, in it we are secure, at least we think we are. But actually we can never be certain about anything, except probably about superficial and mechanical things and even they fail. More or less, we can rely on outward things, like trains, to operate and be certain of them. Psychologically, inwardly, however much we may crave it, there's no certainty, no permanency; neither in our relationships, in our beliefs, in the gods of our brain. The intense longing for certainty, for some kind of permanency and the fact that there is no permanency whatsoever is the essence of conflict, illusion and reality. The power to create illusion is vastly more significant to understand than to understand reality. The power to breed illusion must cease completely, not to gain reality; there's no bargaining with fact. Reality is not a reward; the false must go, not to gain what's true but because it's false."