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Jiddu Krishnamurti - To find out what
is Death demands a mind that has no fear
Jiddu Krishnamurti - Now, to find out what is death
demands a mind that has no fear. I do not know if you have observed the
pilots - the persons who fly those extraordinary airplanes that go two
thousand miles and more an hour - how they are trained more than all the
yogis put together. They have to face death, and therefore their
response must be immediate, unconscious. They are trained for years to
face death - to survive they must respond immediately to all the
instruments, to all the orders. That is one way of not being afraid of
death - that is, to train yourself so completely, so involuntarily that
you die at the orders of another for your country and all the rest of
that nonsense.
Then there is death by suicide: that is, you face life
and life has no meaning; you have come to the end of things, and you
jump over the bridge or you take pills. Then there is the other way, the
so-called religious way: you have extraordinary beliefs in
reincarnation, in resurrection; and death you rationalize because you
are going to live the same kind of hideous life in the next life with
torture, agony, despair, with lies, with hypocrisy; and you are
satisfied by these beliefs because temporarily they give you comfort,
they hide your fear.
Now all those ways of dying are very ordinary, unreal, and undependable.
We are talking of dying of a different kind, which is to live with
death. You understand? To live with death, not to have this time
interval between you and the eventual end. The eventual end may be fifty
years or a hundred years hence; or the doctors or the scientists may add
another fifty years to it; but the inevitable end is always there. We
are talking of a voluntary living with death. I am going into that
because that is the only way to resolve the whole question of death, not
through beliefs, not through ideals, not through the structure of fear,
and all the rest of the paraphernalia.
And to find out what is death, there must be no distance between death
and you who are living with your troubles and all the rest of it; you
must understand the significance of death and live with it while you are
fairly alert, not completely dead, not quite dead yet. That thing called
death is the end of everything that you know. Your body, your mind, your
work, your ambitions, the things that you have built up, the things that
you want to do, the things that you have not finished, the things that
you have been trying to finish - there is an end of all these when death
comes. That is the fact - the end. What happens afterwards is quite
another matter; that is not important because you will not inquire what
happens afterwards if there is no fear. Then death becomes something
extraordinary - not sadistically, not abnormally, unhealthily - because
death then is something unknown, and there is immense beauty in that
which is unknown. These aren't just words.
So to find out the whole significance of death, what it means, to see
the immensity of it - not just the stupid, symbolic image of death -
this fear of living and the fear of dying must completely cease, not
only consciously, but also deep down. Most of us want to die, wish to
die, because our lives are so shallow, so empty. And our life being
empty, we try to give significance to life, meaning to life; we ask,
''What is the purpose of living?''
Because our own lives are so empty,
shallow, worthless, we think we must have an ideal to live by. It is all
nonsense. So fear is the origin of the separation between that fact
which you call death and that fact which you call living. What does it
mean actually, not theoretically? We are not discussing theoretically;
we are not discussing merely to formulate an idea, a concept; we are
not. We are talking of facts, and if you reduce a fact merely into a
theory, it is your own misfortune. You will live with your own shadow of
fear, and your life will end miserably as it has begun miserably.
So you have to find out how to live with death - not a method. You
cannot have a method to live with something you don't know. You cannot
have that idea and say, ''You tell me the method, and I will practice
it, and I will live with death' ' - that has no meaning. You have to
find out what it means to live with something that must be an
astonishing thing, actually to see it, actually to feel it - to be aware
of this thing called death and of which you are so terribly frightened.
What does it mean to live with something which you
don't know? I don't know if you have ever thought about it at all in
that way; probably you have not. All that you have done is, being
frightened of it, you try to avoid it, you do not look at it; or you
jump to some hopeful ideal, belief, and thereby avoid it. But you have
really to ask the fundamental question, which is to find out what death
means, and if you can live with it as you would live with your wife,
with your children, with your job, with your anxiety. You live with all
these, don't you? You live with your boredom, your fears. Can you live
in the same way with something that you don't know?
To find out what it means to live, not only with the thing called life,
but also with death, which is the unknown, to go into it very deeply, we
must die to the things that we know. I am talking about psychological
knowledge, not of things like your home, your office: if you don't have
them, you won't get your money tomorrow, or you lose your job, or you
have no food. We are talking about dying to the things that your mind
clings to. You know, we want to die to the things which give us pain; we
want to die to the insults, but we cling to the flattery.
We want to die to the pain, but we hold on like grim
death to the pleasure. Please observe your own mind. Can you die to that
pleasure, not eventually, but now? Because you do not reason with death,
you cannot have a prolonged argument with death. You have to die
voluntarily to your pleasure which does not mean that you become harsh,
brutal, ugly, like one of these saints; on the contrary, you become
highly sensitive - sensitive to beauty, to dirt, to squalor - and being
sensitive, you care infinitely.
Now, is it possible to die to things, to that which you know about
yourself? To die - I am taking a very, very superficial example - to a
habit, to put away a particular habit either of drinking or smoking,
having a particular kind of food, or the habit of sex, completely to
withdraw from it without an effort, without a struggle, without a
conflict, without saying, ''I must give it up.'' Then you will see that
you have left behind the knowledge, the experience, the memories of all
the things that you have known and learned and lived by. And therefore
you are no longer afraid, and your mind is astonishingly clear to
observe what this extraordinary phenomenon is of which man has been
frightened through millennia, to observe something which you are
confronted with, which is of no time, and which in its entirety is the
unknown.
Only that mind can so observe which is not afraid and
which is therefore free from the known - the known of your anger, of
your ambitions, your greeds, your petty little pursuits. All these are
the known. You have to die to them, to let them go voluntarily, to drop
them easily, without any conflict. And it is possible - this is not a
theory. Then the mind is rejuvenated, young, innocent, fresh; and
therefore it can live with that thing called death.
Then you will see that life has an entirely different substance. Then
life and death are not divided; they are one because you are dying every
minute of the day in order to live. And you must die every day to live;
otherwise, you merely carry along the repetition like a gramophone
record, repeating, repeating, repeating.
So when you really have the perfume of this thing - not in somebody
else's nostrils, but in your nostrils, in your breath, in your being;
not on some rare occasions, but every day, waking and sleeping - then
you will see for yourself, without somebody telling you, what an
extraordinary thing it is to live, to live with actuality, not with
words and symbols, to live with death and therefore to live every minute
in a world in which there is not the known, but there is always the
freedom from the known. It is only such a mind that can see what is
truth, what is beauty, and that which is from the everlasting to the
everlasting.
Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti Fifth Talk in New Delhi,
1963
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