Part of the spiritual life we’re all familiar with:
Honorable aspiration,
unworkable execution.
The Honorable Unworkable
Part of the spiritual life we’re all familiar with:
Honorable aspiration,
unworkable execution.
Love this.
On that path, a yellow leaf fell. It was a single leaf, with not a blemish on it, unspotted, clean. It was the yellow of autumn. Death was there, not in the yellow leaf, but actually there, not an inevitable traditionalized death, but that death which is always there. It is always there round every bend of a road, in every house, with every god. You can’t avoid death. Do what you will, go to any temple or book it is always there, in festival and in health. You must live with it to know it. The knowledge of it isn’t the ending of it. It’s the end of knowledge but not of death. To love it is not to be familiar with it; you can’t be familiar with destruction. You only love that of which you are certain, that which gives comfort, security. You do not love the uncertain, the unknown; you may love danger, give your life for another or kill another for your country, but this is not love. There’s no profit in knowing death but strangely death and love always go together; they never separate. You can’t love without death; you can’t embrace without death being there. Where love is there is also death. They are inseparable. (Love being the affectionate presence of spontaneous creation.)
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
We have made life into a hideous thing. Life has become a battle, which is an obvious fact, constant fight, fight, fight. We have divorced that living from death. We separate death as something horrible, something to be frightened about. And to us this living, which is misery, we accept. If we didn’t accept this existence as misery then life and death are the same movement. Like love, death, and living are one. One must totally die (to memory and conditioning) to know what love is. And to go into this question of what is death, what lies beyond death, whether there is reincarnation, whether there is resurrection; all that, becomes rather meaningless if you do not know how to live. If you, the human being, knows how to live in this world, without conflict, then death has quite a different meaning.
J. Krishnamurti,
Australian Broadcasting Company, 1970
We embody both love and sorrow.
Breaking the heart evermore open, now.
mm