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.