Our daily life – going to work, coming back home, sex, quarrels, anxiety, competition – is rather superficial and empty. We are discontented, and out of this discontent we escape or do things to become contented. So our life is a very superficial, light affair. We can carry on like this until we die, and most people do, accumulating a little property, a car or two, and so on. When you see that, you say, ‘It’s all right, but it isn’t good enough.’ There is music, paintings, the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the squalor, the splendour of the sky and so on, and we say, ‘Yes, it’s all right, up to a certain point.’ Don’t you feel that you want to open a door that will give a new freshness, a new vitality, a new energy, a new beauty, a tremendous view to the whole of existence?
From Public Discussion 6, Saanen, 9 August 1964
Jiddu Krishnamurti
