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...