Krishnamurti & the Art of Awakening

Krishnamurti Quote of the Day

Think on These Things | Chapter 17

Do you think a leaf that falls to the ground is afraid of death? Do you think a bird lives in fear of dying? It meets death when death comes; but it is not concerned about death, it is much too occupied with living, with catching insects, building a nest, singing a song, flying for the very joy of flying. Have you ever watched birds soaring high up in the air without a beat of their wings, being carried along by the wind? How endlessly they seem to enjoy themselves! They are not concerned about death. If death comes, it is all right, they are finished. There is no concern about what is going to happen; they are living from moment to moment, are they not? It is we human beings who are always concerned about death - because we are not living. That is the trouble: we are dying, we are not living.

Tags: death, time

Related Quotes
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.
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.
Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality
The moment you divide up life and think of its goal as something to be attained eventually in some distant future, the sweet purpose of this realisation is lost -
If you and the speaker are the result of forty thousand years or more, and we have come to this peculiar state that we are in, will we, give me another forty thousand years, change?
Breaking through is not a matter of time.
Except for the human beings, it was a new day; nothing was like yesterday.
A mind that is capable of measuring is capable also of illusion
It would be foolish - would it not? - to deny evolution.
Why have we created psychological time?
Personally, to the speaker, there is no psychological evolution;
What is the relationship of attention to inattention, and to awareness?
Meditation is seeing the constant touching the ever-changing movement of life.
Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.
Can thought be aware of its own movement? Can thought see itself, see what it is doing, both in the outer and the inner?
You cannot brush the past aside. It is there.
Will you please explain what you mean by awareness?
The religious mind does not depend on time for its development.
As long as you think time and thought are necessary, in the psychological world, in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin, then you will be perpetually in fear.
Conflict at any level, at any depth, indicates immaturity.
There is no essential difference between the old and the young, for both are slaves to their own desires and gratifications.
Any change within the field of time is the same movement modified and continued.
Creative emptiness is not possible so long as there is the thinker who is waiting, watching, observing in order to gather experience, in order to strengthen himself.
The thinker is a fictitious entity, an unreal state. There is only thought; and the bundle of thoughts creates the 'I', the thinker.
To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.
Patience is not time. Impatience is time. Patience has no time.
I feel that a radical change can come only when there is no effort, when the mind is not trying to become something, not trying to be virtuous - which does not mean that the mind must be nonvirtuous.
Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect and space is divided for him into dimensions, time into past, present and future.
You see, death is destruction, it is final; you can't argue with it, you can't say, 'Nay, wait a few days more.'
If action is conditioned by an idea, by a formula, by a concept, action then is not important, but the idea is important, and therefore, there is a conflict between action and idea.
Time is merely the outcome of our not meeting the fact without knowledge.
As long as the mind is a slave to time, there must be the fear of death, the fear and the hope of a future life, and a constant inquiry into that question.
A fundamental question cannot be answered by somebody else.
A constant battle is going on within us, wearing us out in the process.
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?
Time is a movement invented by thought.
Life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all.
What I have to say concerns the hindrances which prevent in you the instantaneous recognition of truth.
Consider the working of your own mind and heart and you will see that in the pursuit of achievement and progress you are living in the past and in the future and never fully in the present.
You must realize with your heart as well as with your mind that the cause of emptiness is craving.
Man in general sees life only through the tradition of time which he bears in his mind and his heart; whereas to me life is fresh, renewing, moving, never static.
If you perceive and live completely in the very thing that you are experiencing, then this idea of change from the unessential to the essential disappears
I say that time does not bring you understanding; when you look to time as a gradual process of unfoldment you are creating a hindrance.
The very inquiry into the future shows that you are already dying.
What is living fully in the present?
The future is nothing but an escape from actuality, through an ideal to which we try to adjust the present, the immediate action.