The art of Living and dying

 And death of course is the final sorrow. But if you are living, death and life together, then there is no change. You are incarnating every day as fresh, not you, a new thing is incarnating every day afresh. And in that there is great beauty. That is creation. Not merely painting a picture, building a house and architecture, but living with this death and life. And that gives you - in that there is tremendous freedom. And freedom implies also, the root meaning of that word 'freedom' is also love. Living, the art of living and the art of dying, together. That brings about great love. And love has its own intelligence, not the intelligence of a cunning mind. Intelligence is something outside of the brain. We will talk about that tomorrow.

https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/art-living-and-dying

To ask such a question may seem quite incredible because our life from the moment we are born till we die is a series of conflicts, struggles, ambition trying to fulfil itself, and all the pain of existence, with sorrow, pleasure and so on. So if we could go into this question: the art of living daily life. We have many arts: the art of painting, the art of making a marvellous shoe, first-class shoe, and the art of painting, the art of engineering, the art of communication - there are many, many arts.

    But for most of us, and probably for the rest of the world too, we have never asked this question: the art of living. To find that out - this is a terrible...

    Bombay is rather dirty country, it makes ones eyes water, I am not crying - requires investigation, how to live. Because the art of living is the greatest art, and the most important art, greater than any other, greater than the art of governments, the art of communication, in spite of all that we have never enquired very deeply what is the art of living our daily life, which requires such subtlety, sensitivity, and a great deal of freedom.

     Because without freedom you cannot find out what is the art of living. The art of living isn't a method, a system, or ask another how to find the art of living, but requires considerable intellectual activity, and also a deep abiding honesty.

Very few of us are honest. It is getting worse and worse in the world. We are not honest people. We say one thing, do another, we talk about philosophy, god, all the theories that the ancient Indians have invented, and we are rather good at all that kind of stuff, but the word, the description, the explanation, is not the deed, the action. And that's why there is a great deal of dishonesty.

And to enquire into the art of living there must be a fundamental, unshakeable, immutable honesty. Honesty which is not corruptible, which doesn't adjust itself to environment, to demands, to various forms of challenges. It requires a great integrity to find out because we are dealing with a very, very complex problem. It isn't just easy to live a life which is perfectly orderly, without dissipating energy, without living in any kind of illusion or tradition. Tradition, however old, however modern, is merely carrying on the old pattern. And the old pattern cannot possibly adjust itself to the new.

https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/beauty-and-artist

Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no "me; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action. Skill in action is the absence of the "me". Art is the absence of the "me". But when you neglect the whole field of life and concentrate only on a little part - however much the "me" may then be absent, you are still living unskilfully and therefore you are not an artist of life. The absence of "me" in living is love and beauty, which brings its own skill.

This is the greatest art: living skilfully in the whole field of Life.

Questioner: Oh Lord! How am I to do that? I see it and feel it in my heart but how can I maintain it?

Krishnamurti: There is no way to maintain it, there is no way to nourish it, there is no practising of it; there is only the seeing of it. Seeing is the greatest of all skills.