Life Is Impermanent
Questioner: Doesn’t the knowledge that life is impermanent bring suffering?
Krishnamurti: Right, sir. But it is a fact that life is impermanent, isn’t it? Your relations are impermanent, your thoughts are impermanent, your self-fulfillment, your ambitious drive, and achievements are impermanent, because there is death. And why should one suffer because of impermanency? The fact is that there is impermanency. It is so. But you don’t want to accept that fact, you say, “There must be something permanent”. You have a picture of what permanency is, and therefore, when you are faced with impermanency, there is a feeling of despair. You put death, which is the essence of impermanency, in the distance, so there is an interval, a gap between you and that which you call death. Here you are, living every day, carrying on with your routine, your worries, your frustrations, your ambitions, and there is death in the distance; and you think about that. You have seen death, and you know that you also will die one day, and you think about it. It is the thought of the future as impermanent that breeds fear.
Please listen to this. But if you bring death – which you have put in the future – into the present while you are active, vital, strong, not diseased, then you are living with death; you are dying every minute to everything you know. After all, only that which ends can have a new beginning. Look at the spring. When the spring comes after the long winter, there are new leaves, there is something fresh, tender, young, innocent. But we are afraid to end; and ending, after all, is death. Take just one thing, something that gives you great pleasure, or great pain; take a memory that you have of somebody, a memory which causes you pain or pleasure, and end it, die to it, not tomorrow, but instantly. When you do that you will find a new thing is happening, a new state of mind is coming into being.
J. Krishnamurti
Paris, France, 1965
I enjoyed hearing the video on death!
last month, time came to let my beloved companion go. he was so human like, i called him the professor. all he lacked was a monocle. two weeks ago, i
stood by helplessly as my partner of fifteen years was admitted into a memory care, assisted living center. last week, my closest friend, eva, was found dead in her bathroom, hours after we’d spent the afternoon together at her apartment. to say that i am feeling bereft would be an understatement, yet that is what i am feeling. as though i am walking through the valley of the shadow of death. mentally, i know this is part of life. my dog ollie was 13 and starting to have seizures, my partner’s maternal grandmother had endured ten years of alzheimers before succumbing, my dear friend, eva would have been 89 in july. i will be 76 in august. i get it. you do this and that while waiting for that big red london bus to stop, pick you up and drive you elsewhere. notwithstanding, i am heavy with grief and longing for what i previously had. in my twenties, i read krishnamurti constantly. in part, because of his teachings, i went on to acquaint myself with ramana maharshi and other sacred indian mystics. i am ever proud of my own birth in calcutta of an anglo indian mother. i suppose what i have written is a preamble to thank you for your article, Life Is Impermanent.
Attachment to life is fear of death. Life is property, spouse, children, position of power ,memories of things past, books, music, movies, trees, moonshine, water, sky, earth, mountains, snow, mango juice, roses, morning coffee, sense of health, sense of knowledge, improvement etc, etc.when we die to all these and such other things, then we are living with death.
The contradiction is a waste of energy. But we are always reacting against something. We react against nature, against the couple, against work, against neighbors. And in that way, the problems continue. Can we live without contradiction, if we react, without conflict? For that, we must know how to die every moment, which becomes the past. But, we don’t want to die, nothing gives no fright. But, to die, to yield, to release, is necessary, precise.
I have experience with the universal law of impermance in my life,. When I was in retreat in the Utter Kashi kfi centre.