A necessary loss

This follows on from the Krishnamurti stuff, taking a long view on loss. Just about to do a counselling unit on Loss and Grief so maybe that is why it came to me whilst walking on the mountain nearby:

A necessary loss

I no longer believe in our tales of consuming love.

Being devoured does not enrich me,

And in making you mine

I subsume your otherness; acid-etch the ground of you

as well as your relief.

And yet.

In having been absorbed

I understand

that that death was a rehearsal,

My nothingness

a stripping bare to the essence.

Only in dark absence

would I allow my flesh to be reknitted

and another breath inspire.

Only in dissolution

Can the fracture be reset.

The running away is what you know

Sorrow is not to be ended by the action of will. Do please understand this. You cannot get rid of it. Sorrow is something that has to be embraced, lived with, understood; one has to become intimate with sorrow. But you are not intimate with sorrow, are you? You may say, "I know sorrow", but do you? Have you lived with it? Or, having felt sorrow, have you run away from it? Actually, you don't know sorrow. The running away is what you know. You know only the escape from sorrow.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay, 10 January 1960, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p. 88. 

Krishnamurti is extraordinarily ruthless. He won't have excuses, fantasies, wishful thinking. He doesn't want you to follow him -- he wants you to wake up and see, take up your bed and walk, "go into" the heart of the matter and understand with your own heart and mind what it is to live, to die, to love, to be alone, to be in communion. That requires ruthlessness. What he is asking us to consider here is properly a liminal experience, something terribly revolting to the common sense -- everyone knows that we must avoid pain by all means, it is unhealthy not to… But I am thinking of Liz's St Francis facing the wolf, and of the Greek word metanoia, usually translated as "conversion", and which literally means "turning around" -- turning on your heels, going in the opposite direction.  

Yes. Going there is an ambitious plan. Just to stop and meet what we are fleeing would be enough. 

A door into the unknown

Sir, have you ever died to your pleasure -- just died to it, without arguing, without reacting, without trying to create special conditions, without asking how you are to give it up, or why you should give it up? Have you ever done that? You will have to do that when you die physically, won't you? One can't argue with death. One can't say to death, "Give me a few more days to live". There is no effort of will in dying -- one just dies. Or have you ever died to any of your despairs, your ambitions -- just given it up, put it aside, as a leaf that dies in the autumn, without any battle of will, without anxiety as to what will happen to you if you do? Have you? I am afraid you have not. When you leave here now, die to something that you cling to -- your habit of smoking, your sexual demand, your urge to be famous as an artist, as a poet, as this or that. Just give it up, just brush it aside as you would some stupid thing, without effort, without choice, without decision. If your dying to it is total -- and not just the giving up of cigarettes or of drinking, which you make into a tremendous issue -- you will know what it means to live in the moment supremely, effortlessly, with all your being. And then, perhaps, a door may open into the unknown. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Saanen, 21 July 1963, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p.54. 

In this extraordinary series of talks Krishnamurti is concerned with the problem of death. He discusses the fear of death, the desire for continuity, the way our mind is dealing with both death and life. His approach is not speculative at all: he wants his audience to see, to approach the mystery of death -- not merely to have an idea or a theory about it. In this passage, I am reminded of Jesus's words that so many Christians would like to take out of the Gospel: that whoever desires life shall take up his cross, deny himself, and follow Him. The Gospel would be so much more acceptable, agreeable, understandable without these words... But there they are, and (worse!!) there will be St Paul with his "dying to sin", where the only word we can possibly utter without resistance is "to". But when the resistance is gone, when words are seen without the burden of the associations, thoughts, traditions  conditioning what we call "thinking" -- then it just makes sense...