Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

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Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Group Discussion 27th December, 1947 | Madras, India

Can the impermanent find the permanent? If I am blind can I see the light? If I am ignorant can I know enlightenment? There can only be enlightenment when ignorance ceases. The transitory cannot find the permanent; it must cease for the permanent to be. The person who is seeking permanency is obviously impermanent; you cannot say he is permanent. He is the outcome of transitory desire and therefore, in himself, he is transitory - which he does not acknowledge.

Tags: death

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So, can you, while living, vigorous, active, end your attachment, end a particular habit voluntarily, easily, quietly?
What is death? Surely, it is the complete cessation of everything that you have known
Most of us are so weighed down by the known, by the yesterday, by the memories, by the `me', the `self', which is but a bundle of memories accumulated yesterday, having no actual existence in itself.
It requires an intense energy to stand alone.
Except for the human beings, it was a new day; nothing was like yesterday.
When you lose your relationship with nature and the vast heavens, you lose your relationship with man.
We have divided life into dying and living. And this division has brought about great fear. And out of that fear we invent all kinds of theories, very comforting, may be illusory, but it is very comforting, illusions are comfortably neurotic.
We are saying: Be dead to love; it doesn't matter. Live entirely in your intellect and in your verbal manipulations, your cunning arguments.
In Asia they believe in reincarnation; that is, the believer is born over and over again until in time he becomes perfect.
Death isn't some horrific thing, something to be avoided, something to be postponed, but rather something to be with day in and day out.
One has to find out the meaning of living, not merely giving an intellectual significance to it, but looking at what it means to live.
Creativeness is not a process of becoming or achieving, but a state of being in which self-seeking effort is totally absent.
It is one fact in life, we are all going to die. That is an absolute, irrevocable fact.
It is we human beings who are always concerned about death - because we are not living.
Is death merely the ending of the physical organism? Is that what we are afraid of? Is it the body that we want to continue? Or is it some other form of continuance that we crave?
Colour was god and death was beyond the gods.
The Christians have taken comfort in the idea of resurrection, and the Hindus and the Buddhists in a future life. Future life of what?
In what manner should one live one's daily life?"
What is death, what does it mean to die? - and that is an absolute certainty that we are all going to die, and what does that mean?
When you say to somebody `I love you', what does it mean?
It is a stupid person that wants to continue - no man who understood the rich feelings of life would want continuity.
It seems to me that our problems, whatever they are, can be dissolved totally only by burning away the process of will - which may sound completely foreign to a Western mind, and even to the Eastern mind.
That which has continuity cannot possibly be innocent.
We refuse to accept life as it is in fact.
The word 'innocence' means 'incapable of being hurt'.
Thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge, the known, in the known is the 'me', though consciously I may not know the 'me' totally, the 'me' lives in this interval.
Do we know what love is? Never knowing it is the wonder of it, the beauty of it.
Is there time to overcome death; or is death always in harmony with life, with love, with pain; or is death something to be put far away, one day we have to face it but not now?
Can you invite death? Which means to end that which you have experienced, that which you have gathered, psychologically, so that you become totally inwardly anonymous, so that you are inwardly absolutely nothing?
Life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all.
Some people believe that the "I" has had a birth in the distant past and will continue in the future. It is irrelevant to me, it has no significance at all.
Questioner: Will you please talk about death? I do not mean the fear of death but rather the promise and hope which the thought of death must always hold for those who are aware throughout life that they do not belong.
Because we are as the dead we fear death; the living do not.
If death is truly a great problem for you, not merely a verbal or emotional issue nor a matter of curiosity which can be appeased by explanations, then in you there is deep silence.
if we were aware of what is, then the truth of sorrow, of impermanency, of imprisonment would liberate thought from its own ignorance.
We have never understood the significance of Death.
To us, God is the ultimate continuance and Death the ultimate denial of continuance.
I think it is important that we should understand the whole question of death because, in that, there is renewal.
As one cannot think of the unknown, one can only think of the known, the outcome of the thought which is the result of the past.
Continuity implied through a belief or through the soul is the product of thought and therefore it is the result of the known, because thought can only think of something which it knows
In order to bring about a renewal we must die; and that means we must start anew, putting away completely all memories of the past.
We are not concerned with physical continuity. What we are primarily concerned about is whether through things there is psychological continuity;
... to understand the immortal, the imperishable, we have to understand the ending which we call death.
Surely death is as lovely as the real is, because both are the unknown, but a mind that is merely functioning within the known can never understand the unknown.
We do not know what God is, what Death is, and what Love is.
Why does the mind separate itself from the stream of continuity and say 'I remember'?
If we really go into it, if we are aware of its significance, we will find that, that which is spiritual is timeless and therefore beyond our reach and therefore beyond continuity;
When you treat impermanency as impermanent then there is nothing; but when you are seeking permanency as an opposite to transitory, the permanency itself is transitory.
Memory is time, and time is not the door to reality;
A man who has a problem, who is continuously worried for a number of years, is dead, for him there is no renewal; he is of the living dead, he merely continues.
Life and death are one, and the man who knows they are one is he who dies every minute.