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Rohit Kaliyar

Why Are We Frightened To Be Nothing? - Krishnamurti's Teachings

krishnamurti-teachings.info

Existential Inquiry

All one’s education, all one’s past experience and knowledge, is a movement in becoming—both inwardly and outwardly. Becoming is the accumulation of memory—more and more and more memories which constitute knowledge. Now, as long as that movement exists, there is fear of being nothing. But when one has an insight that there is nothing, when one really sees the fallacy, the illusion of becoming—which is endless time-thought and conflict—then there is an ending of that. That is, the ending of the movement which is the psyche, which is time-thought. The ending of that is to be nothing. Nothing then contains the whole universe—not my petty little fears, petty little anxieties and problems, and my sorrow with regard to, you know, a dozen things. After all, ‘nothing’ means the entire world of compassion. Compassion is nothing. And, therefore, that nothingness is supreme intelligence. 

So, why are human beings—just ordinary, intelligent human beings— frightened of being nothing, frightened to see that they really are verbal illusions, that they are nothing but dead memories? That’s a fact. I don’t like to think I’m just nothing but memories, but the truth is that I am memories. If I have no memory, either I’m in a state of amnesia or I understand the whole movement of memory, which is time-thought, and see the fact that as long as there is this movement, there must be endless conflict, struggle, pain. And when there is an insight into that, nothing means something entirely different. That ‘nothing’ is the present, and it’s not a ‘varying’ present. It isn’t that one day it’s this, and the next day it is different. That nothing is no time. Therefore it’s not ending one day, and being another day. You see, if one goes into this problem, not theoretically—as the astrophysicists are doing, namely trying to understand the universe in terms of gases—but actually—here, as part of the human being, and not out there—there must be no shadow of time and thought. You see, Pupul, that after all is real meditation. That’s what śūnya means in Sanskrit. But we’ve interpreted it in a hundred different ways; we have commentaries about this and that. But the actual fact is that we are ‘nothing’ except words and options and judgements. I mean, all that is a petty affair, and we’ve made our lives petty. 

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