Note 79

When death comes, it does not ask your permission; it comes and takes you, it destroys vou on the spot. In the same way, can you totally drop hate, envy, pride of possession, attachment to beliefs, to opinions, to ideas, to a particular way of thinking?

Can you drop all that in an instant? There is no 'how to drop it' because that is only another form of continuity. To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, envy, is to die - to die every day, every moment. If there is the coming to an end of all ambition from moment to moment, then you will know the extraordinary state of being nothing, of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement, as it were, and dropping over the edge - which is death.

I want to know all about death, because death may be reality, it may be what we call God, that most extraordinary something that lives and moves, yet has no beginning and no end. So I want to know all about death - and for that I must die to everything I already know. The mind can be aware of the unknown only when it dies to the known dies without any motive, without the hope of reward or the fear of punishment.

Then I can find out what death is while I am living - and in that very discovery there is freedom from fear.

Krishnamurti in Madras 1959, Talk 6