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Jiddu Krishnamurti on Old Age, Sorrow
and Death
Jiddu Krishnamurti - There is a creeper - I think, it
is called the morning glory - which has that extraordinary pale blue
color that only flowers have, or a deep purple with a touch of mauve, or
a peculiar white. Only living flowers have those colors. They come, they
bloom in the morning - the trumpet-shaped flowers - and then within a
few hours they die. You must have seen those flowers. In their death
they are almost as beautiful as when they are alive. They bloom for a
few hours and cease to be, and in their death they do not lose the
quality of a flower. And we live for thirty, forty, sixty, eighty years
in great conflict, in misery, in passing pleasures, and we die rather
miserably without delight in our heart, and in death we are as ugly as
in life.
I am going to talk this evening about time, sorrow, and death. We must,
I think, be very clear that we are not talking about ideas, but only
about facts. That flower, blooming, full of beauty, delicate, with
delicate fragrance - that is a fact. And the dying of it after a few
hours when the wind comes and the sun rises, and the beauty of it even
in death - that is also a fact. So we are going to deal with facts and
not with ideas.
You can imagine, if you have got imagination, the color of those
flowers. Have a picture, mentally conjure up an image of that creeper
with its delicate colors, the flowers of delicate colors, the
extraordinary beauty of the flowers. But your image, your idea about the
creeper, your feeling about the creeper, is not the creeper. The creeper
with its flowers is a fact. And your idea about the flowers, though it
is a fact, is not actual.
You are not actually in contact with the
flower through an idea. I think this must be borne in mind throughout
this talk: that we are dealing with facts and not with ideas, and that
you cannot touch intimately, directly, concretely, come into contact
with a fact through an idea. Death cannot be experienced. One cannot
come directly into contact with it through an idea. Most of us live with
ideas, with formulas, with concepts, with memory; and so we never come
into contact with anything. We are mostly in contact with our ideas, but
not with the fact.
And I am going to discuss, rather I am going to talk about, time,
sorrow, and that strange phenomenon called death. One can either
interpret them as ideas, as conclusions, or come directly into contact
with the whole problem of time and the dimension of time. One can come
directly into contact with sorrow - that is, that sense of extraordinary
grief. And also one can come directly into contact with that thing
called death. Either we come directly into contact with time, sorrow,
love, and death, or we treat them as a series of conclusions - the
inevitableness of death or the explanations.
The explanations, the
conclusions, the opinions, the beliefs, the concepts, the symbols have
nothing whatsoever to do with the reality - with the reality of time,
with the reality of sorrow, with the reality of death and love. And if
you are going merely to live or look or come, or hope to come into
contact with the dimension of time, sorrow, or death through your idea,
through your opinion, then what we are going to say will have very
little meaning altogether. In fact, you would not be listening at all,
you would be merely hearing words; and being in contact with your own
ideas, with your own conclusions, opinions, you would not be in direct
contact.
I mean by contact: I can touch this table, I am directly in contact with
the table. But I am not in contact with the table if I have ideas of how
I should touch the table. So the idea prevents me from coming directly,
intimately, forcefully in contact. And during this hour, if you are not
directly in contact with what is being said, then you will continue
living a wasteful life. We have this life to live. We are not discussing
the future life - we will come to that presently. We have this life to
live. We have lived waste-fully, without life itself having any
significance. We live in travail, in misery, in conflict, and so on, and
we have never been in contact with life itself. And it would be a
thousand pities - at least I think so - if you are merely in contact
with ideas and not with facts.
We are going to talk about time, first. I do not know if you have
thought at all about this thing called time - not abstractly, not as an
idea, not as a definition - if you have actually come into contact with
time. When you are hungry, you are in contact directly with hunger. But
what you should eat, how much you should eat, the pleasure you want to
derive from eating, and so on - those are ideas. The fact is one thing
and the idea is another. So to understand this extraordinary question of
time, you must be intimately in contact with it - not through ideas, not
through conclusions, but intimately, directly, with tremendous intimacy
with time. Then you will be able to go into the question of time, and
see whether the mind can be free from time.
There is obviously the question of time by the watch, chronological
time. That, obviously, is necessary. In that is involved the question of
memory, planning, design, and so on. We are not discussing that time,
the chronological time of every day. But we are going to talk about time
which is not by the watch. We do not live only by chronological time; we
live much more by a time which is not by the watch. For us, time which
is not chronological is much more important, has much more significance,
than time by the watch. That is, though chronological time has
importance, what has much more importance, greater significance, greater
validity for most people is psychological time - time as continuity;
time as yesterday, a thousand yesterdays and traditions; and time not
only as the present but as the future.
So we have time as the past - the past being the memory, the knowledge,
the tradition, the experiences, the things remembered - and the present,
which is the passage of yesterday to the time of tomorrow, which is
shaped, controlled by the past through the present. For us that has
tremendous significance, not the time by the watch; and in that
dimension of time we live. We live with the past, in conflict with the
present, which creates the tomorrow. This is an obvious fact. There is
nothing complex about it. So there is time as continuity and there is
time as the future and the past; and the past shapes our thinking, our
activity, our outlook, and so conditions the future.
We use time as a means of evolving, as a means of achieving, as a means
of gradual changing. We use time because we are indolent, lazy. Because
we have not found the way of transforming ourselves immediately, or
because we are frightened of immediate change and the consequences of
the change, we say, ''I will gradually change.'' Therefore we use time
as a means of postponement, time as a means of gradually achieving, and
time as a means of change. We need time by the watch to learn a
technique; to learn a language we need time, a few months. But we use
time - psychological time, not time by the watch - as a means of
changing, and so we introduce the gradual process: ''I will gradually
achieve; I will become; I am this and I will become that, through
time.''
And time is the product of thought. If you did not think about tomorrow
or look back in thought to the past, you would be living in the now;
there would be neither the future nor the past; you would be completely
living for the day, giving to the day your fullest, richest, complete
attention. As we do not know how to live so completely, totally, fully,
with such urgency, in today, bringing about a complete transformation in
today, we have invented the idea of tomorrow: ''I will change tomorrow;
I will; I must conform tomorrow, and so on.'' So, thought creates
psychological time, and thought also brings fear.
Please follow all this. If you do not understand these things of which I
am talking now, you won't understand them at the end. They will be just
words, and you will be left with ashes.
Most of us have fears: fear of the doctor, fear of disease, fear of not
achieving, fear of being left alone, fear of old age, fear of poverty;
these are outward fears. Then there are a thousand and one inward fears:
the fear of public opinion, of death, of being left completely alone so
that you have to face life without a companion, the fear of loneliness,
the fear of not reaching what you call God. So, man has a thousand and
one fears. And being frightened, he either escapes in a vast network,
subtle or crude; or he rationalizes these fears; or he becomes neurotic
because he cannot understand it, he cannot resolve it; or he completely
runs away from fear, from various fears, through identification or
social activities, reformation, joining a political party, and so on.
Please, I am talking not of ideas but of what actually is taking place
in each one of you. So you are not merely listening to my words, but
through the words that are being used, you are looking at yourself. You
are looking at yourself, not through ideas, but by coming directly into
contact with the fact that you are frightened - which is entirely
different from the idea that you are frightened.
So unless you understand the nature of fear and are completely free of
it totally, your gods, your escapes, your doing of all kinds of social
work, and so on, have no meaning because you are then a destructive
human being, exploiting, and you cannot resolve this fear. A neurotic
human being with his innumerable fears, in whatever he does - however
good it may be - is always bringing to his action the seed of
destruction, the seed of deterioration, because his action is an escape
from the fact.
Most of us are frightened, have secret fears; and being afraid, we run
away from them. The running away from the fact implies that the objects
to which you run away become much more important than the fact. You
understand? I am frightened; I have escaped from it through drink,
through going to the temple, God, and all the rest of it; so the god,
the temple, the pub become far more important than the fear. I protect
the god, the temple, the pub much more vigorously because to me, they
have become extraordinarily important, they are the symbols which give
me the assurance that I can escape from fear. The temple, the god,
nationalism, the political commitment, the formulas that one has become
far more important than the resolution of the fear. So unless you
totally resolve fear, you cannot possibly understand what fear is, what
love is, or what sorrow is.
A mind that is really religious, a mind that is really socially minded,
a mind that is creative, has completely, totally, to put away, or
understand, or resolve this problem of fear. If you live with fear of
any kind, you are wasting your life because fear brings darkness. I do
not know if you have noticed what happens to you when you are frightened
of something.
All your nerves, your heart, everything becomes tight,
hard, frightened. Haven't you noticed it? There is not only physical
fear but also psychological fear, which is much more. Physical fear,
which is a self-protective physical response, is natural. When you see a
snake, you run away from it, you jump - that is a natural,
self-protective fear. It is not really fear; it is merely a reaction to
live, which is not fear because you recognize the poison, and you move
away. We are talking not only of physical fear but much more of the fear
that thought has created.
We are going into this question of fear. Unless you follow it step by
step, you won't be able to resolve it. We are going to come into contact
directly with fear - not what you are frightened about. What you are
frightened about is an idea, but fear itself is not an idea. Suppose one
is frightened - as most people, the young and the old, are - of public
opinion, of death. It does not matter what they are frightened of; take
your own example. I will take death. I am frightened of death. Fear
exists only in relationship with something. Fear does not exist by
itself but only in relation to something. I am frightened of public
opinion. I am frightened of death, I am frightened of darkness, I am
frightened of losing a job. So fear arises in connection with something.
Let us say I am frightened of death. I have seen death. I have seen
bodies being burned. I have seen a dead leaf falling to the ground. I
have seen so many dead things. And I am frightened of dying, coming to
an end. Now there is this fear in relation to death, loneliness, a dozen
things. How do I look at, or come into contact with, fear as I come into
contact with this table? Am I making myself clear? To come directly into
contact with fear - I hope you are doing it, not merely listening - to
come directly into contact with that emotion, with that feeling called
fear, the word, the thought, the idea must not come in at all. Right?
That is, to come into contact with a person, I must touch his hand, I
must hold his hand. But I do not come into contact with that person,
though I may hold his hand, if I have ideas about him, if I have
prejudices, if I like or dislike.
So, in spite of my holding his hand,
the image, the idea, the thought, prevents me from coming into contact
directly with that man. So, in the same way, to come directly into
contact with your fear - with your particular fear, conscious or
unconscious fear - you must come into contact with it, not through your
idea. So one must first see how the idea interferes with coming into
contact. When you understand that the idea interferes with coming into
contact, you no longer fight the idea.
When you understand the idea -
the idea being the opinion, the formula, and so on - you are then
directly in contact with your fear, and there is no escape, either
verbal or through a conclusion, or through an opinion, or through any
form of escape. When you are in contact with fear, in that sense, then
you will find - as you are finding when we are discussing what we are
talking about - that fear altogether disappears. And the mind must be
free of all fears, not only the secret fears, but the open fears, the
fears of which you are conscious. Then only can you look at the thing
called sorrow.
You know, man has lived with sorrow for millennia, many thousands,
millions of years. You have lived with sorrow, you have not resolved it.
Either you worship sorrow as a means to enlightenment or you escape from
sorrow. You put sorrow on a pedestal, symbolically identified with a
person, or you rationalize it, or you escape from it. But sorrow is
there.
I mean by sorrow the loss of someone, the sorrow of failure, the sorrow
that comes upon you when you see that you are inefficient, incapable,
the sorrow that you find when you have no love in your heart, that you
live entirely by your ugly little mind; there is the sorrow of losing
someone whom you think you love. We live with this sorrow night and day,
never going beyond it, never ending it. Again, a mind burdened with
sorrow becomes insensitive, becomes enclosed; it has no affection, it
has no sympathy; it may show words of sympathy, but in itself, in its
heart, it has no sympathy, no affection, no love. And sorrow breeds
self-pity.
Most of us carry this burden all through life, and we do not
seem to be able to end it. And there is the sorrow of time. You
understand? We carry this sorrow to the end of our life, not being able
to resolve it. There is a much greater sorrow: to live with something
which you cannot understand, which is eating your heart and mind,
darkening your life. There is also the sorrow of loneliness, being
completely alone, lonely, companionless, cut off from all contacts,
ultimately leading to a neurotic state and mental illness and
psychosomatic diseases.
So, there is vast sorrow, not only of a human being, but also the sorrow
of the race. How do you resolve sorrow? You have to resolve it, just as
you resolve fear. There is no future - you can invent a future. There is
no future for a man who is living with intelligence, who is sensitive,
alive, young, fresh, innocent. Therefore you must resolve fear, you must
end sorrow.
Again, to end sorrow is to come into contact with that extraordinary
feeling, without self-pity, without opinion, without formulas, without
explanation - just to come directly into contact with it, as one would
come into contact with a table. And that is one of the most difficult
things for people to do: to put away ideas and to come into direct
contact.
Then, there is the problem of death - and with the problem of death, the
problem of old age. You all know that death is inevitable - inevitable
through senility, through old age, through disease, through accident.
Though scientists are trying to prolong life by another fifty years or
more, death is inevitable. Why they want to prolong this agonizing
existence, God only knows! But that is what we want. And to understand
death, we must come into contact with death; it demands a mind that is
not afraid, that is not thinking in terms of time, that is not living in
the dimension of time - which I have explained. To live with death - I
am going to go into it.
You know, we have put death at the end of life - it is somewhere there,
in the distance. And we are trying to put it as far away as possible, as
long away as possible. We know there is death. And so we invent the
hereafter. We say, ''I have lived, I have built a character, I have done
things. Will all things end in death? There must be a future.'' The
future, the afterlife, reincarnation - all that is an escape from the
fact of today, from the fact of coming into contact with death.
Think of your life, what is it? Actually look at your life which you
want to prolong! What is your life? A constant battle, a constant
confusion, an occasional flash of pleasure, boredom, sorrow, fear,
agony, despair, jealousy, envy, ambition - that is your life actually,
with diseases, with pettiness. And you want to prolong that life after
death!
And if you believe in reincarnation - as you are supposed to believe, as
your scriptures talk about it - then what matters is what you are now.
Because what you are now is going to condition your future. So what you
are, what you do, what you think, what you feel, how you live - all this
matters infinitely. If you do not even believe in reincarnation, then
there is only this life; then it matters tremendously what you do, what
you think, what you feel, whether you exploit or whether you do not
exploit, whether you love, whether you have feeling, whether you are
sensitive, whether there is beauty. But to live like that, you have to
understand death and not put it far away at the end of your life - which
is a life of sorrow, a life of fear, a life of despair, a life of
uncertainty. So you have to bring death close; that is, you have to die.
Do you know what it is to die? You have seen death enough. You have seen
a man being carried to the burning place where he will be destroyed. You
have seen death. Most people are frightened of that. Death is as that
flower dies, as that creeper dies with all the morning glories. With
that beauty, with that delicacy, it dies without regret, without
argument; it comes to an end. But we escape from death through time -
which is, it is over there. We say, ''I have a few more years to live,
and I shall be born next life''; or, ''This is the only life, and
therefore let me make the best of it; let me have all the greatest fun,
let me make it the greatest show.'' And so, we never come into contact
with that extraordinary thing called death. Death is to die to
everything of the past, to die to your pleasure.
Have you ever tried without argument, without persuasion, without
compulsion, without necessity, to die to a pleasure? You are going to
die inevitably. But have you tried to die today, easily, happily, to
your pleasure, to your remembrances, to your hates, to your ambitions,
to your urgency to gather money? All that you want of life is money,
position, power, and the envy of another. Can you die to them, can you
die to the things that you know, easily, without any argument, without
any explanation?
Please bear in mind that you are not hearing a few
words and ideas, but you are actually coming into contact with a
pleasure - your sexual pleasure, for example - and dying to it. That is
what you are going to do anyhow. You are going to die - that is, die to
everything you know, your body, your mind, the things that you have
built up. So, you say, ''Is that all? Is all my life to end in death? ''
All the things you have done - the service, the books, the knowledge,
the experiences, the pleasures, the affection, the family - all end in
death; that is facing you. Either you die to them now or you die
inevitably when the time comes. Only an intelligent man who understands
the whole process is a religious man.
The man who takes the sannyasi's robes, grows a beard, goes to the
temple and runs away from life - he is not a religious man. The
religious man is one who dies every day and is reborn every day. That
is, his mind is young, innocent, fresh. To die to your sorrow, die to
your pleasure, die to the things that you hold secretly in your heart -
do it; thus you will see you will not waste your life; then you will
find something that is incredible, that no man has ever perceived. This
is not a reward. There is no reward either. You die willingly, or you
die inevitably. You have to die naturally, every day, as the flower
dies, blooming, rich, full, and then to die to that beauty, to that
richness, to that love, experience, and knowledge - to die so that,
every day, you are reborn, so that you have a fresh mind.
You need a fresh mind; otherwise, you do not know what love is. If you
do not die, your love is merely memory; your love is then caught in
envy, jealousy. You have to die, every day, to everything you know - to
your hatred, to your insults, to flatteries. Die to them; then you will
see that time has no meaning; there is no tomorrow then, there is only
the now that is beyond the yesterday and the today and the tomorrow. And
it is only in the now that there is love.
A human being that has no love cannot approach truth. Without love, do
what you will - do all your sacrifices, your vows of celibacy, your
social work, your exploitations - nothing has any value. And you cannot
love without dying every day to your memory. For love is not of memory;
it is a living thing. A living thing is a movement, and that movement
cannot be caged in words, or in thought, or in a mind that is merely
self-seeking. Only the mind that has understood time, that has ended
sorrow, that has no fear - only such a mind knows what death is, and
therefore for such a mind there is life.
Source: Jiddu Krishnamurti Fifth Talk in Bombay, 1965
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