Self Awareness Through Meditation

Author(s): Ranjitsingh Kumat
Publisher: Ranjitsingh Kumat

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SELF AWARENESS-MODERN THINKERS VIS-A-VIS ANCIENT TEACHERS
says, "If you have not read Imany books and have very little information that is not ignorance. Real ignorance is having no knowledge of yourself, no perception of how your mind works, of what your motives, your responses are. Conflict and suffering will exist as long as I do not understand myself. Therefore, understanding myself is much more important than knowing how to overcome sorrow and conflict. Surely my search is utterly futile. My action has no meaning. However, Krishnamurti says, “That is the last thing we want, to know ourselves. Yet that is the only foundation on which we can build. Most of us are totally unaware of ourselves. We do not observe, very few of us do, our own thoughts and feelings. The fact is we must begin to see clearly the process of our thinking, feeling and acting. The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-Knowledge has no end. It is an endless river."5
Krishnamurti relates the whole issue of self-knowledge with élan and cheer in life. Where self-knowledge is, the power to create illusions retreats. Without self-knowledge, we live in illusion. "If we can understand ourselves as we are, then we shall see how we attain tranquility and only in that state of tranquility can there be creativeness. The two things are interdependent. So long as that state of tranquility does not arise there can be no self-knowledge. Most of us are far away from that. The reason is that we always look at things partially with a mind which is inattentive, stored with prejudices and psychological images. When you observe the actual with total attention without these images, without the interference of our likes and dislikes, our passions and dispositions then we begin to discover the silence of the mind. Silence of the mind then comes naturally and without any external discipline. Silence dawns when there is profound attention. We fail to achieve or experience the state of silence because we pay only partial attention to happenings in and around us." "Self-knowledge is at work through the observation and understanding of everyday incidents in human relationship. And it is this observation-based self knowledge which blesses us with wisdom. One must be ever watchful of one's relationship with people, with things, ideas and nature. It is the beginning of the understanding of the total process of existence. It alone brings tranquility and happiness"
What is required is to understand the “actual, the immediate, the given." We set up ideals for life and pursue these in vain. Krishnamurti says, "The ideal does not help in the understanding of the actual which is the most essential thing to do. The pursuit of the ideal is utterly futile; it is a vain struggle, a gratifying self-deception". The ideal is to be rejected because it is the opposite of what has been or what is. "The actual is the actual life