“But what is beauty? Must it be expressed? That’s one question. Does it need the word, the stone, the colour, the paint? Or it is something that cannot possibly be expressed in words, in a building, in a statue? So if we could go into this question of what is beauty. I feel to really go into it very deeply one must know what is suffering. Or understand what is suffering, because without passion you can’t have beauty - passion in the sense, not lust, not the passion that comes when there is immense suffering. And the remaining with that suffering, not escaping from it, brings this passion. Passion means the abandonment, the complete abandonment of the ‘me’, of the self, the ego. And therefore a great austerity, not the austerity of - the word means ash, severe, dry which the religious people have made it into - but rather the austerity of great beauty.”
https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/sorrow-passion-and-beauty/
Really been enjoying going through the talks with Dr. Allan W. Anderson again. You can see something coming out of the dialogues, the way Anderson and K stay with points, bring them back around, really tries to get to the bottom. The openness and seriousness is wonderful if you’d ever been annoyed with some of the flippant responses K’s dialogues sometimes produced from people digging into their dogma.
Clearly K hasn’t made a cult of suffering, glamorizing it or trying to find some way to “fix” it, as the self help authors push today. Suffering by itself also seems useless, man has suffered how many wars and other absurdities and still we haven’t changed. But suffering and not seeking pacifing escapes brings passion, this passion brings beauty into life? Makes sense to me, if I’m just escaping from the ways I make the world ugly it seems like it could only grow those problems exponentially. Haven’t we all done that?
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Hi Mark. Do you have a question to go with this?
Mahesh
I suppose the question could be : what is beauty?
The simple idea I’m getting from the quote provided is that there is immense beauty in recoiling without resistance from the horror of selfishness.
We’re familiar with what Krishnamurti said about how not seeking escape from psychological suffering, but can one actually do it when we are so profoundly habituated to escape this kind of pain that we can’t help but do it reflexively?
It must be possible or K wouldn’t have talked about it. But I wonder if this action of not reacting is possible only when one is so acutely aware of suffering as a constant, on going condition, and not just the occasional reminder that one is suffering.
We know that people commit suicide when their sense of self, their grief, sorrow, disappointment, despair is unbearable, so why wouldn’t the imagined self “die” when its misery is unsustainable?
Interesting! Is it that the things we’d given great inertia energy into would require a large amount of energy in the challenge, in the form of seriousness. A seriousness we human beings seem to be utterly lacking. Not that we couldn’t be, but just that we aren’t. We spend decades building what is likely a lie and can give but a few moments, if anything, to this. Could not a proper seriousness change all that immediately. What else could meet what we have spent decades buying into.
But, we often want to be entertained and just feel good. So I don’t want to change myself I just want to shield myself from the worst of it while I have fun. Then I don’t look and it really must be impossible.
I think what you are saying about knowing its a constant, and not just when the sad commerical or thought reminds me there is suffering, that goes towards that type of seriousness. Not to tell myself every moment that people are living terrible hells, because that would be obsessive and redundent, but not supporting a mechanism of turning away from it? Especially from my own
Whatever the case the suffering itself hasn’t done it (apart from maybe parts of psychotic breaks, but obviously not what we are talking about).