It is important to meditate, but what is still more important is to understand what meditation is; otherwise, the mind gets caught in mere technique. Learning a new trick of breathing, sitting in a certain posture, holding your back straight, practising one of the various systems for silencing the mind – none of that is important. What is important is for you and me to find out what meditation is. In the very finding out of what meditation is, I am meditating. It is enormously important to meditate. If you do not know what meditation is, it is like having a flower without scent. You may have a marvellous capacity to talk, or to paint, or to enjoy life; you may have encyclopedic information and correlate all knowledge, but those things will have no meaning at all if you do not know what meditation is. Meditation is the perfume of life; it has immense beauty. It opens doors that the mind can never open, it goes to depths that the merely cultured mind can never touch. So meditation is very important, but we always put the wrong question and therefore get a wrong answer. We say, ‘How am I to meditate,’ so we go to some swami, some foolish person, or we pick up a book or follow a system, hoping to learn how to meditate. Now, if we can brush all that aside, the swamis, the yogis, the interpreters, the breathers, the sitting-stillers, and all the rest of it, then we must inevitably come to this question: What is meditation?
From Collected Works, Vol. 9
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