Stephen Bodian interviews Jean Klein
Q: What about the whole notion of the spiritual path – the idea that you enter a path, follow a certain prescribed way of practice, and eventually achieve some goal?
Jean Klein: It belongs to psychology, to the realm of the mind. These are sweets for the mind.
Q: What about the argument that if you don’t practice, you can’t attain anything?
Jean Klein: You must first see that in all practice you project a goal, a result. And in projecting a result you remain constantly in the representation of what you project. What you are fundamentally is a natural giving up. When the mind becomes clear, there is a giving up, a stillness, fulfilled with a current of love. As long as there is a meditator, there’s no meditation. When the meditator disappears, there is meditation.
Q: So by practicing some meditation technique, you are somehow interfering with that giving up.
Jean Klein: Absolutely.
Q: How?
Jean Klein: You interfere because you think there is something to attain. But in reality what you are, fundamentally, is nothing to obtain, nothing to achieve. You can only achieve something that remains in the mind, knowledge. You must see the difference. Being yourself has nothing to do with accumulating knowledge.
