Question: Can continued effort in meditation lead to full awareness?

KRISHNAMURTI: Without true discernment mere concentration on an idea, image, or virtue leads to barrenness of thought and to the destruction of love. Discernment comes through constant awareness of our daily thought, speech, and action; without this true corrective element, meditation becomes an escape, a source of delusion. Without understanding and love, any form of meditation must lead to illusion; without true awareness, any form of meditation is an escape from reality.

When there is awareness we observe that thought is ever approximating itself to a pattern, to a memory, to a past experience; it is measuring itself against an opinion or a standard. Though mind may reject outward patterns, standards, values, yet it may cling to its own so-called experience; this experience without true discernment may be the continuation of narrow and prejudiced thought and unless mind frees itself from its bondages, meditation only strengthens its own limitation. So through alert awareness of daily thought, speech, and action, thought must free itself from its fetters; this freedom is the true beginning of meditation.

When thought is occupied with approximation, then it is concerned with achievement, with success, and so it is no longer capable of true discernment, for the desire to gain, to attain, springs from fear which prevents true perception. Fear cannot yield understanding, but in becoming intensely aware of the causes of fear in our daily life, interest and discernment are born. Interest is natural concentration without the conflict of opposing desires. We force ourselves to concentrate without this interest, and so it becomes artificial, painful, and has no deep significance. Understanding does not come through compulsion or through mere control but through constant and earnest awareness of our daily thoughts and activities, of our speech and work. Meditation must spring from this awareness. The cultivation of so-called occult powers, trances, and so forth is of very little importance. Without true discernment mere concentration on images, standards, and ideals does not lead to comprehension. Creative stillness of the mind is necessary for the understanding of reality.

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti – Volume III 1936-1944: The Mirror of Relationship
Jiddu Krishnamurti