to meet it

Do you know what it means to come into contact with death,
 to die without argument? Because death, when it comes, 
does not argue with you. To meet it, you have to die every day to everything: 
to your agony, to your loneliness, to the relationship you cling to; 
you have to die to your thought, to die to your habit, 
to die to your wife so that you can look at your wife anew; 
you have to die to your society so that you, as a human being, are new, 
fresh, young, and you can look at it. But you cannot meet death
 if you don't die every day. It is only when you die that there is love. 
A mind that is frightened has no love, it has habits, it has sympathy, 
it can force itself to be kind and superficially considerate.
 But fear breeds sorrow, and sorrow is time as thought.

So to end sorrow is to come into contact with death while living,
 by dying to your name, to your house, to your property, to your cause, 
so that you are fresh, young, clear, and you can see things as they are without any distortion.
 That is what is going to take place when you die.
 But we have a limited death to the physical. We know very well logically, 
sanely, that the organism is going to come to an end. So we invent a life 
which we have lived of daily agony, daily insensitivity, the increase of problems,
 and its stupidity; that life we want to carry over, which we call the "soul,"
 which we say is the most sacred thing, a part of the divine, 
but it is still part of your thoughtand therefore it has nothing to do with divinity.
 It is your life!

So one has to live every day dying, 
dying because you are then in contact with life.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life

photo by Kathleen Connally