You can never set about to meditate: it must happen without your seeking it out. If you seek it, or ask how to meditate, then the method will not only condition you further but also strengthen your own present conditioning. Meditation, really, is the denial of the whole structure of thought. Thought is structural, reasonable or unreasonable, objective or unhealthy, and when it tries to meditate from reason or from a contradictory and neurotic state it will inevitably project that which it is, and will take its own structure as a serious reality. It is like a believer meditating upon his own belief; he strengthens and sanctifies that which he, out of fear, has created. The word is the picture or the image whose idolatry becomes the end.
     Sound makes its own cage, and then the noise of thought is of the cage, and it is this word and its sound which divides the observer and the observed. The word is not only a unit of language, not only a sound, but also a symbol, a recollection of any event which unleashes the movement of memory, of thought. Meditation is the complete absence of this word. The root of fear is the machinery of the word.
     It was early spring and in the Bois it was strangely gentle. There were few new leaves, and the sky was not yet that intense blue that comes with the delight of spring. The chestnuts were not yet out, but the early smell of spring was in the air. In that part of the Bois there was hardly anybody, and you could hear the cars going by in the distance. We were walking in the early morning and there was that gentle sharpness of the early spring. He had been discussing, questioning, and asking what he should do.
     "It seems so endless, this constant analysis, introspective examination, this vigilance. I have tried so many things; the clean-shaven gurus and the bearded gurus, and several systems of meditation - you know the whole bag of tricks - and it leaves one rather dry-mouthed and hollow".
     Why don't you begin from the other end, the end you don't know about - from the other shore which you cannot probably see from this shore? Begin with the unknown rather than with the known, for this constant examination, analysis, only strengthens and further conditions the known. If the mind lives from the other end, then these problems will not exist.
     "But how am I to begin from the other end? I don't know it, I can't see it."
     When you ask: "How am I to begin from the other end?" you are still asking the question from this end. So don't ask it, but start from the other shore, of which you know nothing, from another dimension which cunning thought cannot capture.
     He remained silent for some time, and a cock pheasant flew by. It looked brilliant in the sun, and it disappeared under some bushes. When it reappeared a little later there were four or five hen pheasants almost the colour of the dead leaves, and this big pheasant stood mightily amongst them.
     He was so occupied that he never saw the pheasant, and when we pointed it out to him he said: "How beautiful!" - which were mere words, because his mind was occupied with the problem of how to begin from something he didn't know. An early lizard, long and green, was on a rock, sunning itself.
     "I can't see how I am going to begin from that end. I don't really understand this vague assertion this statement which, at least to me is quite meaningless. I can go only to what I know."
     But what do you know? You know only something which is already finished, which is over. You know only the yesterday, and we are saying: Begin from that which you don't know, and live from there. If you say: "How am I to live from there?" then you are inviting the pattern of yesterday. But if you live with the unknown you are living in freedom, acting from freedom, and, after all, that is love. If you say, "I know what love is", then you don't know what it is. Surely it is not a memory, a remembrance of pleasure. Since it isn't, then live with that which you don't know. "I really don't know what you are talking about. You are making the problem worse."
     l`m asking a very simple thing. I'm saying that the more you dig, the more there is. The very digging is the conditioning, and each shovelful makes steps which lead nowhere. You want new steps made for you, or you want to make your own steps which will lead to a totally different dimension. But if you don't know what that dimension is - actually, not speculatively - then whatever steps you make or tread can lead only to that which is already known. So drop all this and start from the other end. Be silent, and you will find out.
     "But I don't know how to be silent!"
     There you are, back again in the "how", and there is no end to the how. All knowing is on the wrong side. If you know, you are already in your grave. The being is not the knowing.