Jiddu Krishnamurti Talks : The Beauty of Death as Part of Life

[SunKat]

Now, can one live that way? – not be absorbed by something enormous, something majestic, like a toy with a child… child with a toy, rather. The child is absorbed in the toy and forgotten all his eager mischief. For the moment the toy has taken him over, till he breaks that toy. So he depends on that toy to make him forget. And we depend on some toy also – grown up people. The toy of a symbol, the toy of a word, the toy of a mantra. The word ‘mantra’ in Sanskrit, I believe, means meditate or think over not becoming and absolve all self-centered activity. That is the root meaning of that word – and what we have made of it…

This was the Fourth and Last Public Talk of Jiddu krishnamurti at Brockwood Park in September 1982

Excerpt from this J Krishnamurti talk on Beauty of Death..

“…And we should too consider, before death and meditation, what is beauty. It is important too. Does beauty lie in the eye of the observer? Is beauty a state of mind that has studied all the paintings, the poets and the statuary of the world and come to a certain conclusion….”

“…And so we should together go into this question of death. What is it that dies? And what is it that lives? Both of them go together. When you use the word ‘death’ , dying, it means that you have also lived. The two cannot be separated. That is a basic truth, that it cannot be separated, as you cannot possibly separate relationship as though by itself, like a hurt, like a wound, like a fear. They are all interrelated. There is no one problem. One problem if it is properly understood psychologically, then in that problem all problems are included. But if you separate and say this is one problem I must solve, then you are reducing life into a shoddy little affair. But if one examines one problem completely, and that to understand the nature of that completeness one must understand how one approaches a problem. So we must be very clear that life and death go together. They are not something in the distant. When one is young, full of life, enjoyment and a great deal of energy, one doesn’t ever think about the other end. As one grows a little bit older, watches one’s son die, then you begin to question, then you begin to shed tears and the anxieties of life. Death is there for all of us…”

“… And also we ought to talk over together, not that you are listening to the speaker, copying his words, or his statements or try to understand what he is talking about, but rather together investigate these problems and find out the truth of them. And so please we are talking over together, you are sharing, partaking, co-operating, not just listening and then agreeing or disagreeing and walk off, do your T’ai chi endlessly or your yoga, or some practice of some guru which he thinks will enlighten you, but we are concerned with our daily life, not some exotic, fanciful religious concepts but actual daily life of conflict, the confusion we live in, the uncertainty, the search for security. We have been through all that, it is part of our life. And also death is part of our life…”

About Jiddu Krishnamurti :

J. Krishnamurti is regarded globally as one of the greatest thinkers and religious teachers of all time. He did not expound any philosophy or religion, but rather talked of the things that concern all of us in our everyday lives, of the problems of living in modern society with its violence and corruption, of the individual’s search for security and happiness, and the need for mankind to free itself from inner burdens of fear, anger, hurt, and sorrow. He explained with great precision the subtle workings of the human mind, and pointed to the need for bringing to our daily life a deeply meditative and spiritual quality.

He constantly stressed the need for a revolution in the psyche of every human being and emphasized that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social.

In late 1980, he took the opportunity to reaffirm the basic elements of his message, originally made in 1929, in a written statement that came to be known as the “Core of the Teaching”. An excerpt follows:

” Truth is a pathless land’. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man’s thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship. “