"Death is inevitable. All organisms must come to an end. But we are afraid to let the past go. We are the past. We are time, sorrow, and despair, with an occasional perception of beauty, a flowering of goodness, or deep tenderness, as a passing, not an abiding thing.
And being afraid of death, we say, "Shall I live again?"- which is to continue the battle, the conflict, the misery, owning things, the accumulated experience. The whole of the East believes in reincarnation. That which you are you would like to see reincarnated. But you are all this: this mess, this confusion, this disorder. Also, reincarnation implies that we shall be born into another life; therefore what you do now, today, matters, not how you are going to live when you are born into your next life- if there is such a thing. If you are going to be born again, what matters is how you live today, because today is going to sow the seed of beauty or the seed of sorrow. But those who believe so fervently in reincarnation do not know how to behave; if they were concerned with behavior, then they would not be concerned with tomorrow, for goodness is in the attention of today.
Dying is part of living. You cannot love without dying, dying to everything that is not love, dying to all ideals that are the projection of your own demands, dying to the past, to the experience, so that you know what love means and therefore what living means. So living, loving, and dying are the same thing, which consists in living wholly, completely now. Then there is action, which is not contradictory, bringing with it pain and sorrow; there is living, loving, and dying, in which there is action. That action is order. And if one lives that way- and one must, not in occasional moments but every day, every minute- then we shall have order; then there will be unity of man, and governments will be run by computers, not by politicians with their personal ambitions and conditioning. So to live is to love and to die."
-J. Krishnamurti, On Living and Dying (1972)
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"Contemplation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should think upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs...And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead."
ReplyDelete-Hagakure “The Book of the Samurai”, Yamamoto Tsunetomo