Living a life is like walking on a tight rope above Niagara Falls. If you slip, you may survive the fall into Niagara, but there are no survivors in life. Everyone eventually slips and falls into the oblivion of death.
'Caught in a strange land in a net with other butterflies, I'm a caterpillar yet undecided to remain a caterpillar and perish or turn into a beautiful butterfly and live a life full of joy.' Readers don't laugh. But I came up with this one night recently when I was travelling in a train. I tossed and turned, not being able to sleep, upset over unexplainable things and frustrated over events not in my control. Then it occurred to me that our life and its usefulness depends on our decisions -- whether to remain a crawling caterpillar whose existence otherwise is either ignored by all and sundry or who is cursed for just being there and thrown out with a stick, or to develop wings of life and metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly whom everybody adores for its beauty and colour, for its flitting liveliness, for its service to the flower's pollination... I thought that I should be a butterfly, of service to others, but then again I thought, anyway, who really cares?
Like love, hate, pain, sorrow and fear, death is part of our life. You may postpone it, you may say I have ten years more to live, but at the end of it there is death waiting. All humanity fears death or rationalizes it away saying that death is inevitable. To understand the depth and the full significance of that extraordinary incident which we call death, you must understand the nature of our own consciousness, the nature of what you are. If you do not understand what you are actually, not descriptively, then death becomes a dreadful thing.
ReplyDeleteDeath is the ending of everything: My pleasures, my memories, my experiences, my attachments, ideals, beliefs - all that end. But we do not like the ending; to us ending is pain. So we begin to invent, search for comfort in reincarnation. Don't you? You never ask what is it that reincarnates in the next life. What is it that reincarnates - your memories, your experiences, your hopes, a better life, better house? This is what you are now. You are going to incarnate in the next life. If you really, actually, deeply believe, feel that next life you are going to be born, then what you are doing now is all important. What you are doing now, what you think, what you feel, how you react matters enormously because that is going to shape your next life. But you don't believe. The actuality is your life now and you are not willing to face it. Death is something to be avoided. You always ask what happens after death. But you have never asked what happens before death, what happens now in your life. What is your life? - working, office, money, pain, striving, climbing the ladder of success. That is your life. And death puts an end to all that. So, is it possible, while living, to end - end your attachment end your belief? To end, the beauty of ending something voluntarily without motive, without pleasure - can you do it? - JK
ReplyDeleteIn ending, there is a new beginning. If you end, there is something, the doors are opened, but you want to be sure before you end that the door will open. So you never end, never end your motive. The understanding of death is to live a life, inwardly ending. - JK
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=37&chid=355&w=death