To ‘Die’ Freely is to Live Fully

Have you found out what you are? What are you? You are the property, the bank account, the furniture, the carpet, ideas, quarrels, pleasures, despairs, the agony of one’s own life, the contradiction, revolt, discontent, longing for something beautiful to happen. It is a life so lonely, isolated, in which there is no relationship at all, in which there is no love, no beauty, no vastness, no space. That is what you are, and you want that to go on, and you will go on if you think it is worthwhile. What is immortality then, and what is innocence? Can the mind that goes on in routine, weariness, despair, loneliness, with all the misery and confusion, be innocent? Can such a mind be immortal? Is mortality only in the field of memory? The immortal is a state in which time is not. But we are of time – all the pleasures and the pains of youth, the memories of middle age and old age, and the agony of disease and pain. All that is you, and you want that to go on and be made immortal. See the sorrow of it, a mind that is wanting to go on. Only when there is an ending is there a new beginning. Die every day to everything – and we mean to everything, to every pleasure and pain, to all the bitterness and cynicism – to die freely, happily to the past every day, which means never to accumulate. Then the mind is free. Such a mind then is aware of the immortal. From Public Talk 5 in Amsterdam, 14 May 1969 J.Krishnamurti