Do you want to talk about this seriously—go to the root of it all? Or do you want to be comforted by some explanation, by some reasoned argument, and be distracted from your sorrow by some satisfying words? She replied: “I’d like to go into it deeply, but I don’t know whether I have the capacity or the energy to face what you are going to say. When my husband was alive we used to come to some of your talks; but now I may find it very difficult to go along with you.” Why are you in sorrow? Don’t give an explanation, for that will only be a verbal construction of your feeling, which will not be the actual fact. So, when we ask a question, please don’t answer it. Just listen, and find out for yourself. Why is there this sorrow of death—in every house, rich and poor, from the most powerful in the land to the beggar? Why are you in sorrow? Is it for your husband—or is it for yourself? If you are crying for him, can your tears help him? He has gone irrevocably. Do what you will, you will never have him back. No tears, no belief, no ceremonies or gods can ever bring him back. It is a fact which you have to accept; you can’t do anything about it. But if you are crying for yourself, because of your loneliness, your empty life, because of the sensual pleasures you had and the companionship, then you are crying, aren’t you, out of your own emptiness and out of self-pity? Perhaps for the first time you are aware of your own inward poverty. You have invested in your husband, haven’t you, if we may gently point it out, and it has given you comfort, satisfaction and pleasure? All you are feeling now—the sense of loss, the agony of loneliness and anxiety—is a form of self-pity, isn’t it? Do look at it. Don’t harden your heart against it and say: “I love my husband, and I wasn’t thinking a bit about myself. I wanted to protect him, even though I often tried to dominate him; but it was all for his sake and there was never a thought for myself.” Now that he has gone you are realizing, aren’t you, your own actual state? His death has shaken you and shown you the actual state of your mind and heart. You may not be willing to look at it; you may reject it out of fear, but if you observe a little more you will see that you are crying out of your own loneliness, out of your inward poverty—which is, out of self-pity. “You are rather cruel, aren’t you, sir?” she said. “I have come to you for real comfort, and what are you giving me?” It is one of the illusions most people have—that there is such a thing as inward comfort; that somebody else can give it to you or that you can find it for yourself. I am afraid there is no such thing. If you are seeking comfort you are bound to live in illusion, and when that illusion is broken you become sad because the comfort is taken away from you. So, to understand sorrow or to go beyond it, one must see actually what is inwardly taking place, and not cover it up. To point out all this is not cruelty, is it? It’s not something ugly from which to shy away. When you see all this, very clearly, then you come out of it immediately, without a scratch, unblemished, fresh, untouched by the events of life. Death is inevitable for all of us; one cannot escape from it. We try to find every kind of explanation, cling to every kind of belief in the hope of going beyond it, but do what you will it is always there; tomorrow, or round the corner, or many years away—it is always there. One has to come into touch with this enormous fact of life. “But...” said the uncle, and out came the traditional belief in Atman, the soul, the permanent entity which continues. He was on his own ground now, well-trodden with cunning arguments and quotations. You saw him suddenly sit up straight and the light of battle, the battle of words, came into his eyes. Sympathy, love and understanding were gone. He was on his sacred ground of belief, of tradition, trodden down by the heavy weight of conditioning: “But the Atman is in every one of us! It is reborn and continues until it realizes that it is Brahman. We must go through sorrow to come to that reality. We live in illusion; the world is an illusion. There is only one reality.” And he was off! She looked at me, not paying much attention to him, and a gentle smile began to appear on her face; and we both looked at the dove which had come back, and the bright red bougainvillea. ~ J Krishnamuri, The Second Krishnamurti Reader.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 02:18:08 +0000
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