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LO61T9 - Time and death
London - 21 May 1961
Public Talk 9



0:00 This is J Krishnamurti’s ninth public talk in London, 1961.
0:08 Krishnamurti: We have been talking a great many things, and I would like if I may, this morning, talk about time and death.
0:32 And, as it is rather a complex subject, I think it would be worthwhile to understand what is the meaning of learning.
0:54 Life is a vast complex with all its turmoil, suffering, anxieties, love, jealousies, accumulations, and we learn through travail, and this learning is a process of accumulation.
1:31 To us, all learning is an additive process, and when there is an addition, gathering in, is there any learning at all?
1:56 Is accumulation learning, or there is learning only when the mind is totally innocent?
2:25 I think we should inquire into this a little bit because to understand time and death, one has to learn about it, one has to experience it, and experiencing is never the way of adding, it’s never an accumulative process.
3:00 In the same way, love is never accumulation. It is something always new.
3:10 It is not a thing that is born out of remembrance.
3:17 It is totally unrelated to the picture on the mantelpiece.
3:27 So perhaps if we could, hesitantly and rather intelligently, understand what it means to learn, then we can probe into the question of time and death and perhaps also discover what it means to love.
4:09 To me, learning implies a state of mind which is never gathering, which is never accumulating, and can one learn from or with a mind that’s already gathered?
4:49 Then learning is merely a further translation, further acquisition of more knowledge.
5:02 The accumulation of knowledge is not learning. The machines, the electronic machines are doing that; they are acquiring more knowledge, and they are incapable of learning.
5:28 The acquisition of knowledge is a mechanical process, and learning can never be a mechanical thing.
5:42 A mind must always be fresh, young, innocent to learn, and such a mind which is learning surely is always in a state of humility; not the humility of the monk and the saint and the person who is very erudite and pretends to be humble.
6:21 A mind that is learning has its own dignity because it is in a state of humility.
6:38 So perhaps if we could understand that, then we can go on to the problem of time.
7:08 If we could learn about it – I’m using the word ‘learn’ in quite a different sense – not acquire knowledge about it.
7:26 Living with a thing and acquiring knowledge about a thing are two different states.
7:39 To learn about something, you must live with it, and if you have already knowledge about it, you can’t live with it. It is the knowledge that is being translated into living.
8:07 And to find out the extraordinarily complex problem of time and death, one must learn and therefore live with it, which is completely impeded when we approach it with knowledge of which we have already known.
8:48 I will go into it a little bit and perhaps we shall be able to communicate with each other.
9:02 We were talking the other day about desire.
9:18 We went into it fairly sufficiently, but I think we missed something, which was will.
9:35 Desire is intimately connected with will – will in action, will in thought, will to be.
10:00 And will implies, surely, not only desire but also choice, and a mind that is capable of choosing has no humility.
10:19 Choice invariably means the capacity of knowing, and a mind that is... already knows is capable of choosing.
10:48 And where there is choice, there is will and therefore the problem of time arises.
11:08 Please, if I may suggest, listen to the whole thing, to all that is being said right to the end of this morning, and then we will discuss the whole of it.
11:27 Don’t take parts of it with which you agree or disagree, but the totality, the whole content of it.
11:40 Now, if I may add also, it’s not a matter of agreement or disagreement, it’s a matter of perception, seeing something directly, and when you see something very directly, you neither disagree nor agree, it is so.
12:14 So as I was saying, through the conflicts, outward and inward, we develop will.
12:43 Will is a form of resistance, obviously – the will to be, the will to achieve, the capacity to deny and to sustain a certain quality, all these in action implies will.
13:22 Will is the many threads of desire, and with that we live.
13:58 And when we are concerned about time and the inquiry into time, we require a different insight than the insight of a will to understand.
14:20 I don’t know if...
14:39 I will go along, you’ll see. You know, this is an informal talk, exchange of ideas, it’s not a prepared talk; it’s more or less inquiring into oneself, and to go into it publicly is one thing, and to go into it all by oneself is quite another.
15:21 What we are trying to do is to communicate it to each other, this inquiry into time, but the inquiry implies time also, and the putting of words together implies time, and all communication is time.
16:00 And perhaps there is a comprehension of what is time and timelessness not through words, not through verbal or intellectual communication, but perhaps by sidestepping the whole process.
16:36 But, unfortunately, we must first inquire verbally, which is intellectually, into time, and this inquiry is directly related to what I’ve been saying this morning, which is the sense of learning about it; not what you have read, not what I’m going to talk about it, but the perception of it, the seeing directly for yourself.
17:28 And I think that may have immense value because time, which is both chronological as well as psychological, the outward and the inward, and the conflict that arises when time is introduced into life as ‘I will be, I will not be, I must arrive, I must fulfil’.
18:13 If the mind could eliminate all that process, then we may find a mind that is not measurable, which has no frontier, therefore can live in this world totally, completely, with all its senses.
18:51 For most of us, chronological time is essential, and it is necessary – time by the watch, time as today, tomorrow and yesterday, time involved in learning a technique. To earn a livelihood, time is necessary.
19:19 It is there, you can’t avoid it, it is a reality. It took time for you to come here, for us to come here; time to learn a language; time as a means of learning a livelihood; time as growing from youth to old age.
20:04 It is a fact, one cannot possibly deny it and it would be absurd and insane to deny it.
20:17 Time from here to the moon, which involves distance and space – these are all facts. Now, is there any other time at all, as a fact?
20:49 Or the mind has invented a time which is psychological as a means of achievement, as a means of becoming something.
21:07 I am not this, psychologically, but I will be, given time.
21:18 I am envious, acquisitive, brutal, but through time, through gradual process, I will be nonviolent, I will understand what it means not to have envy.
21:44 Is that a reality, a reality as from here to there, as a reality... distance from London to Paris, which is a fact, but is there any other fact as definite, as real as space and distance?
22:21 Which is, is there a psychological time at all? Though we have invented it, though we live with it, though it is fact to us, is there such a thing?
22:53 For us there is only the chronological time and psychological time.
23:06 One can understand the necessity of having time by the watch: yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the memory involved with yesterday, today and tomorrow.
23:45 We accept that, and also we accept psychological time.
23:52 These... the two we say are facts.
24:02 The one, the chronological time, is a fact. I’m questioning whether the other is a fact, because is time necessary to see something clearly, immediately?
24:37 To see acquisitiveness, envy, the things involved in it, the suffering, the...
24:45 all the thing involved in envy, seeing the truth of it immediately, is time necessary, or does the mind invent time, psychological, in order to enjoy the fruits of envy and avoid the pains of it, the suffering of it?
25:17 So time may be a process of an indolent mind, and the lazy mind says, ‘I cannot see the thing immediately, give me time, let me look at it longer, let me do something about it.
25:59 I’m violent, I will gradually, when it pleases me, when it’s no longer profitable, when I’m no longer enjoying it, I will give it up’, therefore the ideal is born, the ideal of what should be from the fact of what is, which is, there is a distance, there is a gap between the fact and what should be.
26:35 Is ‘the should be’ a fact? Is an ideal a fact, or, is it a convenient invention of the mind to carry on with what the pleasures and the pains, and all the rest of it, and eventually come to that state which it calls the ideal?
27:01 And to achieve the ideal, time is necessary.
27:17 And to see something immediately – the absurdity of envy, the competition, the social morality, the whole business of envy, to see the falseness of it immediately, does that require time?
27:59 To transform the mind, to free the mind... for the mind to free itself from its own conditioning, does it require time?
28:26 You see, revolution implies, as is generally understood, carrying out a pattern, economic, social or other patterns which are the reaction to what has been, and reaction is not a revolution.
28:57 And a revolution is instantaneous, must be, unrelated to a reaction.
29:30 The mind is the result of time, time being yesterday, today, tomorrow. The mind is the result of many, many thousand yesterdays, and the mind, being a result, such a mind still thinks in terms of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
30:19 And to find out if there is a timelessness, to really find out, to learn about it, there must be complete revolution in the mind itself, which is psychological revolution, not the factual revolution of today and tomorrow.
30:50 Am I conveying anything at all, or not at all?
31:03 Look, you are an Englishman, or Italian, or a Frenchman, or a Hindu, with all his conditioning, and with it goes nationalism and all the separate, divisional attitudes towards life.
31:44 And that has been put together through time, through propaganda, through history – you know? – it has taken time.
31:56 And to break that down – and it must be broken down completely because those are all frontiers of the mind, limitations of the mind, being an Englishman, a German, communist, whatever it is, and it has taken time, education, propaganda, the church’s two thousand years for you to be brainwashed to be a Christian.
32:47 And to break this down immediately, will it require... is the breaking down of it, is it also a matter of time?
33:12 Now, let’s look at it a little differently.
33:22 Where does time exist, not only time by the watch but the inward time, where does it exist?
33:43 Please, this is not a rhetorical question, or an argumentative question, or a question to stimulate your mind – I’m not trying to stimulate you at all, that’s all silly – but I’m asking this because space, time and distance must exist in a state where there is no time at all.
34:25 That must exist first, and everything else comes into that.
34:45 Without timelessness, there is no space and distance.
35:21 We must feel our way into it. Don’t please accept it or deny it.
35:31 I haven’t yet communicated to you the feeling of it, so you can’t accept it or say, ‘Oh, it’s all... you’re talking nonsense’.
35:48 You see, you exist in space.
35:59 Without space you would not be.
36:10 Without space between two words, word has no meaning.
36:19 After all, music is the space in between two notes, and if there was no space, there would be no music.
36:44 The space is the thing unknown in which the known exists, but without the unknown, the known is not. I don’t know if I’m conveying it.
37:04 No, please, this is not just sentimental stuff to be grinned over or agreed with.
37:12 What we are talking about... I’m going to go on into something else.
37:22 You see, what I want to say is without death there is no life.
37:40 But most of us want a life which has continuity, which is time, space, and so to us, death is a horror, to be avoided, and life is something to be prolonged indefinitely through medicine, through doctors, through all kinds of means to prolong it.
38:19 Or, if there is the inevitability of death, at least let’s believe in something, that I will continue and you will continue, always in space.
39:10 So if one can put it this way: in the womb of the unknown, time and space exist, but without feeling one’s way into the unknown, mind becomes a slave to time and space.
40:04 It took us time to get here.
40:12 Does it take time to perceive anything, to see something which is not a matter of time? To see something false, does it take time?
40:36 To see the falseness of nationalism, the falseness of it, the poisonous-ness of it, does it take time? Wait a minute. I mean by seeing... I don’t mean intellectually, verbally, but the seeing of it, the feeling of it, and therefore never touching it, surely that does not take time. And time is necessary when the mind is ineffective, which is indolent.
41:24 It’s time, I must get on – sorry – I must get on.
41:35 We said we’d talk about death.
41:50 Why is there such fear of death, not only for the aged, but for everybody – why?
42:03 And being afraid, we have all the lovely, comforting theories: resurrection, karma, reincarnation...
42:15 the rest of it. It is fear that has to be understood, and we have gone into it sufficiently the other few times and that’s not... don’t let’s go back into fear, but we are trying to understand what it means to die.
42:45 Most of us want the physical continuity, with all its associations, remembrances, symbols, all that, the living on the mantelpiece with the pictures, with the photographs; the remembrance of the things that I’ve been, and the hopes, satisfactions, the fulfilments, and all that may be cut off when the physical body ceases, and that’s a very disturbing thing.
43:49 I’ve lived for so long, fifty years, sixty years, struggled to cultivate certain virtues, to have a certain knowledge, this and that, and to be cut off – what’s the value of life if we just cease on the moment?
44:16 So time, space comes in – you follow? – time as space and distance, so to us, death is a matter of time.
44:53 And what has continuity and which knows no ending can never renew itself, cannot create something new.
45:15 It can never be young, it can never be fresh, innocent. It’s only something that dies that has the possibility of a creation, of a newness, of a freshness.
45:38 So is it possible to die while living, with all the vitality, with all the energy, with all the health, with all the senses fully awake?
45:55 So what does that death mean? Not the death of old age, disease and accident, but the death of a mind that is fully active, death of a mind that has tasted, experienced, that knows, which means death of yesterday.
46:36 You understand, sir? To die to yesterday; I don’t know if you ever tried it, for the fun of it, to die to everything that you have known.
47:07 Then you’ll say, ‘What is left? If I die to all my remembrances, to my experiences, to my photographs, symbols and attachments, and to my ambitions, what is left?’ Nothing.
47:33 But you must... the mind must be in a state of nothingness to find out, to learn, surely, about death.
47:45 No?
47:52 Let’s take one thing. Have you ever tried to die to something, not only to suffering, but to pleasure?
48:05 Have you tried it? We want to die to suffering, unpleasant memories, pains, but to die also to pleasure, to joys, to things that give you enormous sense of vitality.
48:33 If you have tried, you will see that you can die to yesterday, to die to everything, so that when you go to the office, your mind is new.
49:00 Surely, that is love, isn’t it?
49:10 Not the remembered things, not the photographs on the mantelpiece.
49:27 So can the mind which has been put together through time and which is time – mind is time; every thought shapes the mind in time.
50:03 And not to be shaped by time, by thought, thought must completely come to an end – not the ending... mechanical ending, not shutting it off but seeing the truth that it must end.
51:07 So if one is to learn about death, one must live with death.
51:23 If you would learn about a child, you must live with the child and not be frightened of the child. But most of us die a thousand deaths before real death.
51:42 But to live with something, with death, that is, to die to yesterday so that the yesterday doesn’t leave an imprint on today.
52:03 You try it.
52:14 When this perception of what is true about this is there, then death and life, living has quite a different meaning.
52:32 There is not the division between living and death.
52:40 Because we are frightened of living, we are frightened of dying...
52:48 living... for us living is a... – you know what it is – it’s a nightmare.
52:58 Naturally, one is frightened, and one is also frightened of death, and so we neither understand living nor death.
53:23 And to live with something, one must love it.
53:31 And to love is the dying to yesterday, then you can live. Living is not the continuity of memory, or going back, saying, ‘What a marvellous time I had when I was a boy’.
54:00 You laugh it away; you’re not really going into it yourself; you’re not putting your teeth into it.
54:23 You don’t know death, nor do you know life. We know the turmoils, the anxieties, the guilt, the fears, the appalling contradictions and conflicts, but we don’t know what living is.
54:43 And, we only know death as something to be dreaded, afraid, put away, don’t talk about it, or escape to some form of belief, flying saucers, or reincarnation or something else.
55:11 So there is a dying and therefore a living when time as space and distance are understood in terms of the unknown.
55:48 You see, our mind works always in terms of the known, and we move from known to the known, and we don’t know anything else. And when you’re cut off by death, the continuity of known to known to known, one is frightened, and there is no comfort. What we want is comfort, not the understanding, the living with something we don’t know.
57:00 So the known is yesterday. That’s all I know. I don’t know what tomorrow is.
57:15 I project through the present, the past into the future and thereby hope and despair are born.
57:40 But to really live with the thing called death, which must be something extraordinary, something unknowable, unimaginable, one must learn about it, one must live with it, one must come to it without any knowledge or fear.
58:13 And that’s a very... it is possible that one can die to the many yesterdays.
58:29 After all, the many yesterdays are pleasure and pain.
58:39 To die to a pleasure.
58:49 And when you die to yesterday, the mind is empty, and the mind is frightened of that emptiness, and so it builds again, so it again...
59:11 goes from one thing known to another.
59:19 But if one can die to a pleasure, to a pain, which means to pleasure and pain – not to a particular pleasure or to a particular pain – then the mind is without time and space, and such a mind then has time and space without the conflict of time and space. I don’t know if... Ah?
1:00:03 I’m afraid language is very limited, but it doesn’t matter...
1:00:17 Now perhaps we can discuss.
1:01:16 Questioner: Sir, I always felt that where there is space there must be time, and you rather seem to make it sound differently from that, if I understand you rightly, that where there is space, that space and time are different.
1:01:32 K: Yes, sir. I’m using the word ‘space’ with a different meaning.
1:01:38 Q: With a different meaning?

K: Yes.

Q: The space between two words, you said.

K: Yes.

Q: Isn’t that time?
1:01:46 K: No. Ah, wait, sir.
1:02:11 Sir, we know time by watch, psychological as well as outward time.
1:02:23 And how is a mind which is bound to these two times, in which is involved space and distance, how is it to find out if there is a time without space and distance?
1:02:39 You follow? I want to find out if there is a timelessness in which no measurement exists as time and space. Is it possible, first of all, to find out such a thing?
1:02:55 It may not be. If it is not possible, then mind is a slave to time and space, always; finished.
1:03:09 Then it’s a matter of adjustment, little more suffering, little less suffering, and all the rest of it.
1:03:20 Now, understanding all that, can the mind find out if there is a timelessness, a mind without authority? You follow?
1:03:37 Now, how is it to find out? It can only find out by psychologically escaping from time – escaping, you know, I’m using the word, not run away – abandoning, and it can abandon... the psychological time, when it sees something immediately.
1:04:10 Right, sir?

Q: Yes.
1:04:22 K: Which means, when the mind has freed itself from the centre of all its movement, centre round which it moves, which means, really, dying to the centre of pleasure which I have accumulated and the things which I have avoided, pushed away in order not to suffer.
1:04:59 And I think that has direct relationship with our living, daily.
1:05:06 Q: Yes.

Q: Surely, sir, the clock is not the time.
1:05:14 Time... of looking back at it. You can’t experience more than one second at a time, chronological time.

K: I thought we went through that.
1:05:32 I don’t quite understand what you mean.

Q: Well, is there even a chronological time? There is day and night, and the seasons, but you can’t... they’re only gone... they’re only there when you can say they are finished.
1:05:46 You can’t go into the future, and then really they’re not there because there is only the moment.
1:05:52 K: But it took you and me time to come here.
1:05:58 Q: But you didn’t experience all that time together.

K: What do you mean? I don’t quite...
1:06:03 Q:...the time is there and it’s gone.

K: Beg your pardon?

Q: The time it is there it has gone.
1:06:10 K: Time is there and gone, is that it? I don’t quite understand.
1:06:15 Q: The time is not there until it’s gone, that’s what the lady means.

Q: We don’t think that the time is there until it’s gone.
1:06:24 K: I don’t quite follow this, sorry.

Q: What she means is that you can only experience one moment at a time.
1:06:33 K: You can only experience one...

Q: You can’t experience half an hour together.
1:06:40 K: You can’t experience...?

Q: Half an hour together. You can only... though you live twenty years, thirty or forty, you can only live one moment at the time so...

K: No... Wait, wait, wait; please; I understand.
1:06:54 You mean, you’re saying you cannot live with an experience for half an hour.
1:07:01 Is that what you’re saying?

Q: No. The experience through half an hour is not the half an hour, and the time is not the clock, the seconds
1:07:09 you know the clock is seconds but...

K: I’m afraid I’m not... You haven’t conveyed to me what you want to say. Sorry.
1:07:17 I may be dense, but I don’t quite get what you’re driving at.
1:07:22 Q: Man invented the clock. The seasons are there, which are different in different parts of the world.

K: Yes.
1:07:27 Q: But the clock is not the time. The clock is only our measurement of time.

K: Surely, surely. Agreed.
1:07:35 Q: And the... say, it took half an hour to come here; you can’t take half an hour and say, ‘That is my time in coming’, because each part...
1:07:47 K: Surely; surely.

Q: To say that that facet of time is half an hour...
1:07:56 K: And then what? And then what...? I understand so far.

Q: Then... I can’t explain.
1:08:06 Q: Is the lady trying to say that chronological time is the same as psychological time?

K: What, sir?

Q: That chronological time is the same to her as the psychological time that you’re talking about.

K: I see. In a way, yes, if that’s what the lady means.
1:08:20 Surely, chronological time is the psychological time; they are both the same in a certain sense.
1:08:34 You see, it may be that I’m not answering the question or the point.
1:08:51 Isn’t there an urge for the mind to be in a state of certain experience, or a state of something which... permanently?
1:09:04 To us permanency is very important, isn’t it, permanency as continuity, but if there is no such thing as permanency – and there isn’t.
1:09:22 There is war, there is death, there is... my wife runs away with somebody, and so on and so on. There is nothing permanent.
1:09:36 If we could really grasp that there is nothing permanent. God is not permanent – good God – I mean, good...
1:10:00 If we wanted one experience to remain permanently, then we are dead to every other experience.
1:10:11 But the urge to have permanency is the desire to be secure because inwardly, psychologically, and outwardly, there is nothing permanent; everything is changing at such a rapid rate, and the mind objects to this, so it invents, hopes, has an idea of God who is permanent – permanent comfort.
1:10:54 And a God who is made permanent in time and space can’t be God.
1:11:07 So if the mind could see the truth immediately, the fact that there is nothing permanent, then I think time, death, and the so-called, what we call love, which is not love at all, will have a totally different meaning.
1:11:50 Q: Now, if you say, sir, that it’s possible to experience death while living, but I should have thought that you’d have to make a distinction here between the death as you know it and the death state, if there is such a state, after the heart has stopped beating because, after all, you’re still having consciousness, and you don’t know the death which is there after the heart stops beating and you can’t know...
1:12:19 K: I understand, sir, I understand. With the cessation of the body, is there the mind working?
1:12:29 Q: Yes, is there any kind of personal awareness?

K: Yes, personal awareness. You see, now it’s a quarter past twelve.
1:12:37 Time.
1:12:51 With the stopping of the heart, is there thought as the person?
1:12:59 Q: Yes.

K: That’s it.
1:13:07 Oh... Oh, we’re all eager to find this out, aren’t we?
1:13:18 We sit up and take notice, ah?
1:13:26 All right, sir, let’s go into it.
1:13:34 What is thinking? Either personal or collective, what is collective thinking?
1:13:43 Now, is there a personal thinking and a collective thinking, or is all thinking collective, only we personalize it?
1:14:03 You’re all British – ah? – it’s collective thinking. You’re all Christians, believers in God, or communism, or what... is collective thinking.
1:14:22 And there is only an individual thinking when you break away from the collective, when you cease to be a British citizen... – I mean, passport, I mean, you know, all the rest of it – when you’re no longer confined, limited, conditioned.
1:14:47 So the idea that we are individuals, except in body, as organ separate from your organ, one organ is different from another organ in the sense there is space between the two and a distance between the two.
1:15:06 Is not all our thinking collective?
1:15:15 Which is rather horrible idea, but isn’t it so?
1:15:20 Q: May I put it this way, sir? Supposing you were to be told, that you knew for certain that you were going to die tomorrow.
1:15:27 Would that have any effect on you personally, whatsoever?

K: None whatever; I’d carry on. But that’s...
1:15:35 Leave that for the moment. But do, please, let’s see this for a moment: Is there an individual thinking apart from the collective thinking?
1:15:49 Q: There is a separation, isn’t there? I don’t know how you reached this hall today. The framework may be the same, but actually there is a separation in thought, otherwise we’d be aware of each other’s thought.
1:16:02 K: Aren’t we?

Q: No. I don’t know what you had for breakfast...

K: Wait a minute, sir. Aren’t we? A very sensitive person is aware of... my... if I live with my wife and husband, they are very close together, isn’t there communication non-verbally?

Q: There is communication, but not completely.

K: No, of course not. No, what I am trying to say...
1:16:25 Sir, I’m brought up as a Hindu, suppose I’m brought up as a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Buddhist, whatever it is, believing in all the things that society believes in, and being part of it, is there thought separate from that?
1:16:50 The thought that is separate from that can only be a reaction, isn’t it?
1:17:03 Q: My thought is determined by my circumstances, and they differ with individuals.

K: Yes, but it’s still within the framework of the collective.
1:17:14 I can break away in the framework and say I’m separate, which is a reaction. You follow what I mean?

Q: Oh, yes; yes.

K: But I’m talking of the total rejection of the framework.
1:17:28 Is it possible? If it is possible, then there is an individual which is not a reaction to the collective.
1:17:47 You see, that’s why... Now, I must go back.
1:17:58 After all, death is this breaking away from the collective.
1:18:06 Death is the breaking away from the framework in which there is the collective and the reaction to the collective as individual thinking, which is still part of the collective in the framework.
1:18:29 And dying to that may not be what we call... may not be at all something called individual; it may be something completely different; must be; something which cannot be measured in terms of the collective or the individual; something unknowable, unknown.
1:19:11 And I say if the unknown doesn’t exist, and if the known doesn’t exist within the unknown, then we are merely slaves to the known – I don’t know if...
1:19:29 and there is no way out.
1:19:36 And the unknowable is only possible when one dies to the known – dying.
1:20:01 Perhaps we’ll continue with this in a different way the day after tomorrow evening.