The thing about meditation that we don’t see at first – if indeed we ever do – is that it is not procedural in nature. We are not following some protocol or procedure in other words, even though it very much seems as if we are. We’re actually doing something entirely different.

 

‘Observing our thoughts’ isn’t a procedure, for example – if it was then we would be using a framework created by thought in order to observe thought and this just isn’t going to work! All that is going happen in this case is that we going to tie ourselves up very complicated knots. It’s going to tie us up in very complicated knots every time…

 

A ‘procedure’ is a process that the thinking mind is in charge of and whilst this is perfectly fine and unproblematic in very many cases, it’s not fine when it comes to meditation.  Procedures don’t work in the case of meditation because meditation is essentially about becoming free from the framework of thought. If meditation didn’t free us from our thoughts then it wouldn’t be meditation, it would be just like any other purposeful activity that we might engage in.

 

‘Purposeful activity’ and ‘meditation’ are two very different things – they are worlds apart. We can visualise purposeful activity as being that situation where the everyday thinking mind is sitting in the driving seat and is busy ‘driving the car’. Our ideas (or models of reality) dictate everything in this case. Our ideas are behind everything we do and so clearly we can never go beyond them! If we have an idea about meditation and we try to accord with this idea then we simply getting tangled up with our thoughts even more. We are worse off, not better off as a result!

 

As Krishnamurti says, meditation is ‘a movement into the unknown’. That’s what makes it meditation – we can’t have any ideas about how we are to do what we’re doing, or what should happen when we ‘do it right’ because then we will be jinxing ourselves right from the start. We would be ‘coming back to square one’ every single time in this case; we would be coming back to our thoughts about ourselves and the world every single time, and that’s exactly where we started off from. We’re always stuck to our thoughts about ourselves and the world!

 

So although we start off practising meditation by following some sort of ‘basic recipe’ (i.e. ‘paying attention to the breath’ or ‘observing our thoughts’) this is only the ‘diving board’ from which we are to launch ourselves into the unknown. If we cling tightly to that diving board then we will never launch ourselves anywhere! In this case we are ‘attached to the procedure’, which is the same thing as being attached to anything else when it comes down to it. We’re just ‘attached’ and that’s it. We’re stuck to our thoughts. We have to somehow let go of our automatic attempt to ‘stay in control’ of the process. If we can’t do this then how will we ever be free? If we can’t do this then we will always be ‘stuck to ideas about ourselves and the world’. If we can’t do this then we’ll always be ‘stuck to the known’, one way or another.

 

The process of becoming unstuck from our thoughts isn’t something that we can be control of, therefore. It’s not something we can regulate, or achieve by the simple precedent of ‘following rules’ in the same way that we can do so many other things in life. If I follow the recipe for scones accurately enough then I can be sure of getting the result I want, I can be sure of ending up with a batch of perfectly edible scones. Not so with meditation, however – meditation can never be the result of ‘following the recipe accurately’ (for the simple reason that all recipes are provided by the thinking mind). Thought cannot free us from thought, as we have already said.

 

Even with scones (or with any other type of cooking) there has to be some kind of ‘letting go’, some kind of ‘free-flow’, if what we end up with is not to be mediocre, indifferent, or average. When we get really good at what we are doing then we don’t have to hold onto the recipe so obsessively and as a result what we doing becomes more of an art than a science or technology. What we’re baking or cooking then goes beyond the mediocre, beyond the average, and we can’t say how this has happened. We can’t tell anyone else ‘what we did’ anymore than we can tell ourselves ‘what we did’ and this is precisely because what we are doing is an art, and not some mere technological procedure that we’re running through.

 

Bruce Lee said the same thing towards the end of his life – when asked by a student if he would teach his particular form of martial arts to him Bruce Lee replied that he couldn’t because it wasn’t a system and if there is no system then there can be no way to teach it. Only systems can be taught and Bruce Lee no longer adhered to any system.  The same is true for everything when we persist with it – if we keep at what we’re doing then we eventually go beyond the recipe, and we can’t for the life of us say how we do it!

 

With relation to meditation, this is very much the case – in meditation we are learning to go beyond the limitations and restrictions of the thinking mind and – in one way – this is the biggest challenge that we could ever possibly face in life. This is the ‘ultimate challenge’. In another way however we could equally well say that this process is perfectly natural – it is most natural thing in the world, which is of course why it doesn’t need to be controlled…