different kind of education; you wouldn’t offer them what you are offering now.
What are you offering the young generation; what have you to offer them? Have
you ever considered it? What have you, the older generation, to offer to the
younger? Your beliefs? They watch you and say how hypocritical you are. Is the
routine of going to your office day after day what you are offering to the younger
generation? Business, politics, the army, your social morality (which is utterly
immoral), is that what you are offering to them? Any intelligent student watching
all this would say, “I won’t touch it.”
So what you are frightened of is the ending of your memories, words. God,
the Atman are words, the reality of which you know absolutely nothing, because
you merely repeat what somebody has written in some book. You think the book
is sacred because people have said it is sacred. But if you say, “I will never say a
word that I do not know; I will never repeat something that I have not lived,” it
means the ending of everything that you know. Death is that: the ending. When
you end, there can be a new thing. When there is a continuity of time as the
“me,” as my habits, my agonies, my despairs, which I call living and which I
want to continue, then there is fear of death. There is no “how,” but if the mind is
aware that it can end the anxiety, if it knows what it means to die every day so
that every day is a new day, then the mind is completely fresh.
So love has no time. It is not to be cultivated. Pleasure can be cultivated, and
that’s what you are doing. You fear the ending of pleasure, and therefore your
highest form of pleasure is not sexual but to imagine that there is something,
“God,” to which you are devoted. To find out the beauty of love and death, you
have to die every day to every memory that you have. Try it—do it, not try it.
Take one pleasure that you have had and drop it instantly. That’s what death is
going to do. You are not going to argue with death. You can’t say, “Well, leave
me some few remembrances, please.” So if you can die every day, you will know
what the beauty of that is, because out of that ending there is a newness,
something entirely different. But that cannot possibly be come upon unless you
know what it means to live without a breath of effort.
QUESTIONER: How should we understand talent and ability?
KRISHNAMURTI: If you have a talent, beware of it, because it gives you an
opportunity to develop your own desire for power, position, prestige. You have
noticed it, haven’t you? A man who has a talent, a gift, whether on the piano, or
with words, or in politics, or whatever it is, uses that talent to become somebody.
Haven’t you noticed all these things? If a man is tremendously well-known
because he is a violinist, and you remove that violin, he is nobody. So a person
who would find what truth is must be very aware of his talent and not misuse it.
He must use that talent with great humility. Humility is never to climb the ladder
of success, never to be “somebody” in this world. When you have that humility,
then talent is not a danger.