Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

What is the cause of suffering in this case? And what is it that we call suffering? Isn’t suffering merely a shock to the mind to awaken it to its own insufficiency? The recognition of that insufficiency creates what we call sorrow. Suppose that you have been relying on your son or your husband or your wife to satisfy that insufficiency, that incompleteness; by the loss of that person whom you love, there is created the full consciousness of that emptiness, of that void, and out of that consciousness comes sorrow, and you say, “I have lost somebody.” So through death there is, first of all, the full consciousness of emptiness, which you have been carefully evading. Hence, where there is dependence there must be emptiness, shallowness, insufficiency and, therefore, sorrow and pain. We don’t want to recognize that; we don’t see that that is the fundamental cause. So we begin to say, “I miss my friend, my husband, my wife, my child. How am I to overcome this loss? How am I to overcome this sorrow?”