Death - J Krishnamurti

.....can you look at death without the image of death?
As long as the image exists from which springs thought,
thought must always create fear.  Then you either rationalize
your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable
or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear
of death.  Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of
which you are afraid.  In this time-space interval there must be
conflict which is fear and anxiety...

Thought, which breeds fear of death says, 'Let's postpone it, let's
avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it' -
but you are thinking about it.  When you say, 'I won't think about
it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened
of death because you have postponed it.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the
living and dying is fear.  The interval, that time, is created by fear.
Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with
occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas.  That is 
what we call living, and we are afraid to die,  which is to end this
misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown
- the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our
character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our
gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself
with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is
something that awaits us at a distant time.  But we have never
questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all.
We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof
of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants
and to the conclusions of physical research, but we never ask, never,
how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty
every day.

We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and
have got used to it, and think of death as something to be carefully
avoided.  But death is extraordinarily like the life we know how to
live.  You cannot live without dying.  You cannot live if you
don't die psychologically every minute.  This is not an intellectual
paradox.  To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new
loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise
you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what
love is or what freedom is.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it
means to live.  We don't know how to live, therefore we don't 
know how to die.  As long as we are frightened of life we shall be
frightened of death.  The man who is not frightened of life is not
frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that
inwardly, psychologically, there is no security.  When there is no
security there is an endless movement and then life and death are
the same.  The man who lives without conflict, who lives with
beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to
die.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Freedom from the Known

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Epitome of Truth - Alan Watts

Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are
thrust into the unknown.  Here all clinging to security is
compelled to cease, and whenever the past is dropped away
and safety abandoned, life is renewed.  Death is the unknown
in which all of us lived before birth.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret
of life.  It means that the past must be abandoned, that the 
unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and
that nothing can be ultimately fixed.  When a man knows this,
he lives for the first time in his life.  By holding his breath, he
loses it.  By letting it go he finds it.

Alan Watts
From: The Wisdom of Insecurity:
A Message for an Age of Anxiety

With thanks to Whiskey River

Photo from Beyond the Fields We Know

 

No Such Things as Death - Sadhguru

Most people are investing their whole lifetime
just for their material well-being.
Dying to live, this is called.
When you are constantly in pursuit of security,
you are in pursuit of death.

There is no such thing as death.

There is only life, life and life alone..
moving from one dimension to another,
another and another.

Most people only experience peace and
transcendence when they are dead.
But in the yogic tradition, the word 'samadhi'
is used to describe a state in which one has
transcended the limitations of the body and mind,
in this life.

If you work five to ten years for your security,
that's okay...
But if you are going to work all your life
for your security, you are seeking death
because death is the only secure thing
in existence.

Life is never secure...

Death - An Inside Story
Sadhguru
Feb. 19, 2020

With thanks to Ocean Speak

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Prison of Certainty - John O'Donohue

When we domesticate our minds and hearts, we reduce our lives.
We disinherit ourselves as children of the universe.  Almost
without knowing it, we slip inside ready-made roles and
routines which then set the frames of our possibilities.  We
acquire sets of convictions in relation to politics, religion and
work. We parrot these back and forth to each other, as if they
 were absolute insights.  Yet for the most part these frames of
belief function as self-constructed barriers, fragile cliches pulled
around our lives to keep out the mystery.  The game of society
helps us to forget the unknown...  The control and ordering of
society is amazing: we comply so totally with its unwritten
rules.  In a city at morning, you see the lines of traffic and the
rows of faces all on their way to work.  We show up.  We
behave ourselves.  We obey fashion and taste.

We have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery...
We bind our lives up in solid chains of forced connections
that block and fixate us.  This silences the voices within us
that are always urging us to change and become free.  Our
sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world
down.  We confine mystery within the prison of routine and
repetition.  Your response to the invitation at the edge of your
life becomes reduced to a series of automatic reflexes.  We
live so much of our one life with the same automatic blindness
of adaptation.  After a while, unknown to you, a wall has
grown between you and the native forces of your experiences.
You go through life only half aware...  This subtle conditioning
becomes so effortless that you are only half present in your life.

[But] Everywhere around us mystery never sleeps.  The same
deep nature is within us.  Each person is an incredibly
sophisticated, subtle, and open-ended work of art.  We live at
the heart of our own intimacy, yet we are strangers to its endless
nature.  Each of us needs to travel inwards from the surface
constraints and visit the wild places within us and answer the
question:  Who are you?  Who are you behind your role?  Who
are you behind your words?  Who are you when you are alone
with yourself?  Who are you before you slip back safely behind
the mask and the name by which you are known during the day?

If you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul
you will break through the prison of certainty
and bring light wherever you go.

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes