Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

There is sorrow when someone dies whom you “love.” You feel utterly lonely when you have lost someone upon whom you have depended. When you feel that you cannot climb the ladder of success, when someone whom you think you love does not return it, when your beliefs, in which you have false security, are shattered; when your mother or father dies, or son or brother dies, there is sorrow. What actually takes place when you suffer? Not biologically, physiologically, but psychologically, which is much more penetrating, much deeper, much more excruciating. You may shed tears, escape from it, never look at it, but it is always there. Sorrow is the lot of human beings, everyone knows it. We escape from it, rationalize it, justify it, or say that every human being suffers so I must suffer. Or if you are prejudiced religiously, you say it is the work of God. Now all those are ways and means of escaping from the fact of what is. which is sorrow. Now if you don’t escape, that is, if there is no rationalizing, no avoiding, no justifying, just remaining with that totality of suffering, without the movement of thought, then you have all that energy to comprehend the thing that you call sorrow. If you remain without a single movement of thought, with that which you have called sorrow, there comes a transformation in that which you have called sorrow. That becomes passion. The root meaning of sorrow is passion. When you escape from it, you lose that quality which comes from sorrow, which i...