In case I gave that impression, I wasn't knocking Krishnamurti. In fact, I started meditation when someone recommended Krishnamurti to me during my freshman week in college.
Here is my take: A horizon or frontier is not a point, but a wide expanse. Although any path will take you on a road that never ends, not every road approaches the ever expanding horizon in the same way.
Krishnamurti, and many mystics, for example, experience a transcendence of personal identity to the extent that such a concept is meaningless. These mystics, like K, rarely if ever use the personal "I" pronoun to reference themselves. This actually constitutes a neurologic shift that can occur at a certain point in some forms of meditation.
In this deconditioned perspective, there is no more differentiated personal self. And the personal body is really not our body anymore but A body that carries our expanded reference of self. Because of this, we do not identify with desire or even sensation as "our" desire and sensation.
These reorganizations of perception often entail inner upheavals, identified as kundalini awakening experiences. Just what is a kundalini awakening experience, however, varies as much as the concept of meditation. In K's case, I think this was a radical deconditioning that led to a different orientation of awareness.
As Pescado said, observation is one way to stillness. Beyond stillness, furthermore, is the experience of living consciousness that is like a vibrant field transcending concepts of localization in space and/or time. Now when we say BEYOND, what does this mean? Over a circle of possibilites, any direction extended to infinity from the center entails this BEYOND. What I am saying is that every path, however profound, addresses only ONE of the possibilities of BEYOND.
This counters the belief that all roads lead to the same place. Yes, they do, but in that sense we are there already. All IS one, but there are degrees, and transcendent systems of that oneness.
The challenge is that when you take a method to a point that is right for you, will you be willing to shift gears and address things that your first method did not? K's method, of course, is a non-method. Methodology is quite de-emphasized in that understanding. The way is highly unstructured, which is why I was drawn to it, since I have difficulty with following a menu. Yet it is still a WAY.
For example, take a traditional technique such as mantra chanting. This has degenerated into repetitive mechanisms that are useless except to put one to sleep. That is not, however, how they started, and there are hints by sages that indicate there is more to a mantra than just chanting it. A mantra is a vibratory stimulus that requires a certain awareness similar to meditative silence. When you approach the mantra from that perspective the stimulus is channeled through the body and mind as an energy. You enter this energy and become it, and it opens a doorway of being. Simple as that.
The Kahunas in Hawaii experience an energy called Manna. This is highly magnified terrestrial energy, due to the volcanic nature of the islands, and the unique proximity and interaction between magma and ocean. When you sense manna, you sense the sentience of the planet. Mystics do not usually connect or even validate such energies as worthy of connection. Many call the world of such energies an illusion, or a play.
Of course, anything I may say on the matter, another may counter with "well you just haven't experienced it deep enough". Even so, a mystic of consciousness experiencing the Divine within matter has a different experience than a certain type of shaman like the kahuna, who is emersed in the flows of nature.
Another example: Taoist masters will, furthermore, tell you that earth yin is cold energy, and sky yang is hot. When you follow their directions, this is precisely what you feel, and it is not imagination. You can think hot and your feet will still feel cold. Yet manna in the huna sense is warm energy. When the hula is danced in Hawaii it is the manna that dances the women, and in fact only those who are sensitive to it are chosen for the sacred dances.
A friend of mine who lives there met a girl who is considered the most favoured of the hula this year, and she described it like Tai Chi. The wind and the earth meet in your body, and you just let it move you, with the hips as pivot points. And you become one with it, there is no thought, only manna, and this manna is alive and the lifeblood of the earth, very dense and tangible.
Yet, this is not an experience of consciousness, such as what one gains from silence. It is a body-awareness closer to animal sentience, but of a higher level human variety. While consciousness expands into a vast field, sentience or nature flows in a more structured yet fluid manner. And both are part of the same spectrum of yin and yang (where yin is not the nasty "dark" in this case, but the receptivity of nature).
It is hard to describe, and when someone has not tested varied paths (which is not easy to do) there is no common reference frame to base such descriptions. I thought I should mention it so people keep an open mind, that when something is discovered that seems IT, it is best to consider that it is only IT for now, and that the esoteric world has many varieties of what one might consider the ULTIMATE.
You end up with a more balanced perspective when you can balance the wonder with a practical realism that its all really just par for the course.
Basically, it is best not to get lost in one method or one teacher, but test opposite ends of the spectrum (which is what most teachers advise against, so I am a bit heretical there). And by opposite ends I do not mean good and evil polarities, but earth and sky, spirit and nature, sight and touch.
Stillness is a first step actually. The point of it is to experience the Presence of being through your mind, feeling and senses. Again, there is stillness of mind, stillness of feeling energy, and stillness of body-awareness. All three provide different acesses to stillness, and open different worlds of Beyondness. Ideally they must merge, and if this was easily done or easily "taught" the world would have changed already.
Tschai said:
You state that you have reached this point-the stillness-and have gone beyond. What did you experience, when this happened? I realize the experience will be different for everyone-but it is intriguing to learn about another's experience-have you ever met your "other" persona? Have you ever encountered "other" conciousness in such journies?
Jeez, I hope I didn't sound pretentious when I said that. Reading it now makes it seem like I made a big claim. You know we live in times when what formerly took ages to accomplish comes through quite quickly. Part of that is because we are used to "miracles" of science and technology that would have blown away ancient peoples (with the acception of those who had their own "miraculous" expressions).
Similarly, opening to certain states is best approached from the standpoint that all is natural. There is in fact a mystical experience where one becomes GOD. In this state one merges with the infinite, but does not loose personal reference. I playfully call it sitting on the throne. STS has wet dreams over this state. They think it is the pinnacle. There is no pinnacle, however. Most magician types manage to tweak their cortex a bit, make a few stories around the tweaks, and call it a divine experience. So the only throne they end up on is the one where you read the newspaper in the morning.
I've seen others touch upon the experience, and for ever after think they are Christ or the chosen one of our ET bretheren. You know this is all bull because both the Christ representation and the ET one, as with any god or near-god concept, are all
within the box. They all reference Matrix program.
That is why describing these things is really futile. This is not evasiveness on my part. The reason for this futility is that such descriptions are meaningless unless you can imagine a world without a Matrix. Meditation helps in this, but when you follow one method and teaching you open only one window of the world outside the matrix, and although the view is infinite in extent, it is still a different view than if you open a window at another point in the Matrix.
So you approach a sense of what a world would be like with no matrix, by accessing different windows. With a few references you can get a sense of expanding your circle of being unilaterally instead of at one point. Desribing all this is kinda like having a baby predict life outside the womb from all the sounds and vibrations it might pick up there.
As far as meeting "others" is concerned, it depends. Stories of beings passing each other by on the grand heavenly freeways are pretty much that. I'll try to give you one experience that might be relatable. Upon meditating once I wanted to go to the heights, I craved for them. I felt a disorientation and felt like I was rising, although I was aware of my body.
After this sense of rising leveled off what opened up to me was an expanse of what you might call living luminous geomentries. These formed flows and groupings that defied three dimensions, but trying to even remember this again is like remembering a forgotten dream, in the sense that my waking awareness cannot relate HOW they defied three dimensions, just that they seems to be flowing into each other.
What was amazing was that vision was only one sense of experience. The reality was one of living vibratory patterning. You might call it a musical choral presence, where the "songs" were full of meaning and purpose, and where the colors were just another version of the song. You could extend this to all senses, but it was more difficult to approach this vibrational domain from a tactile perspective, where it would be as tangible as the nose in front of your face.
I felt a tug, and "saw" behind me what amounted to a loooong slide or ladder or something like a double helix like DNA. And faaaar below I saw a tiny earth, that lay within this ladder or slide, and at that point the ladder was chipped. There was a triangular chip taken out, and because of that the experience of this realm was incomplete. In fact its like cutting a wire in a circuit. One cut and the current goes out.
Here the cut wasn't final, but (in the analogy) created much heat at the point of the chip. I gather the ladder was a representation of the continuity of existence, and that there is a partial break here, and this break did not allow the song to be heard or felt at this level.
When I returned from the experience I was not disoriented, and did not feel like it was any big deal. Just: "Oh, things aren't as simple as I thought". Just another piece of the puzzle. The problem is, those poor STS folks would be mightily dissapointed if they realized that self-importance is not wrong, just meaningless, from any non-matrix perspective. When you realize just how meaningless it is, you tend to laugh at the whole concept as a waste of energy and existence.
It doesn't make you better than anyone else, just privy to a certain well-known fact outside of the STS way of thinking. You know, kinda like someone from another planet wondering why everybody flips out about gold here when it happens to be common as dust elsewhere.