I was introduced to this quote by a friend of mine, about a month ago...I was so taken by it...it made so much sense to me. I post it wherever I can...If I have a friend that's a little down or feeling lost, this is what I will e-mail to them. I have this quote framed in my room and on my fridge. I live by this...this alone has changed a part of me and has made me come to so many realizations that I was blind to see before. I just happen to be in a time in my life where things seem a little 'out of place.' So, I read this, and realized that, when I do, it's like the first time over again.
"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 psychical reasearch, but we never ask, NEVER, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty everyday. We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have grown 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 do not 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 of everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and mechanical mind can never know that 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 becuase to love is to die."
Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known, 1969.
