Question: Can the religious mind be acquired through meditation?

Krishnamurti: The first thing to understand is that you cannot acquire it, you cannot get it, it is not to be brought about through meditation. No virtue, no sacrifice, no meditation - nothing on earth can buy this. This sense of attaining, achieving, gaining, buying must totally cease for that to be. You cannot use meditation. What I have been talking about is meditation. Meditation is not a way to something. To discover in every moment of daily life what is true and what is false is meditation. Meditation is nor something to which you escape, something in which you get visions and all kinds of thrills - that is self-hypnosis, which is, immature, childish. But to watch every moment of the day, to see how your thought is operating, to see the machinery of defence at work, to see the fears, ambitions, greeds and envies - to watch it all, enquire into it all the time, that is meditation, or a part of meditation. Without laying the right foundation there is no meditation, and the laying of the right foundation is to be free of ambition, greed, envy and all the things that we have created for our self-defence. You do not have to go to anybody to be told what meditation is or to be given a method. I can find out very simply by watching myself, how ambitious I am or not. I do not have to be told by another; I know. To eradicate the root, the trunk, the fruit of ambition, to see it and totally destroy it is absolutely necessary. You see, we want to go very far without taking the first step. And you will find if you take the first step that it is the last step, there is no other step.