Jiddu Krishnamurti On Loneliness

Question: I am beginning to realize that I am very lonely. What am I to do?

Krishnamurti:

Let us approach this problem again to see what is actually taking place, to see what you do when you feel lonely. You try to escape from your feeling of loneliness, you try to get on with a book, you follow some leader, or you go to a cinema, or you become socially very, very active, or you go and worship and pray, or you paint, or you write a poem about loneliness.

That is what is actually taking place. Becoming aware of loneliness, the pain of it, the extraordinary and fathomless fear of it, you seek an escape and that escape becomes more important and therefore your activities, your knowledge, your gods, your radios all become important, don't they? When you give importance to secondary values, they lead you to misery and chaos; the secondary values are inevitably the sensate values; and modern civilization based on these gives you this escape - escape through your job, your family, your name, your studies, through painting etc; all our culture is based on that escape. Our civilization is founded on it and that is a fact.

Can this emptiness, this void, be filled? If not, can we run away from it, escape from it? If we have experienced and found one escape to be of no value, are not all other escapes therefore of no value? It does not matter whether you fill the emptiness with this or with that. So-called meditation is also an escape. It does not matter much that you change your way of escape.

Because we have so many hindrances that are preventing us from seeing, we do not understand what is and therefore we are getting away from reality; all these hindrances have been created by the mind in order not to see what is.To see what is not only requires a great deal of capacity and awareness of action but it also means turning your back on everything that you have built up, your bank account, your name and everything that we call civilization. When you see what is, you will find how loneliness is transformed.

Source: http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/the-first-and-last-freedom/1953-00-00-jiddu-krishnamurti-the-first-and-last-freedom-on-loneliness

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Final Part -- J. KRISHNAMURTI - A Biography by Pupul Jayakar

It is strange how we want freedom and we do everything to enslave ourselves. We lose all our initiative. We look to others to guide us, to help us, to be generous, to be peaceful; we look to the gurus, masters, saviours, meditators.

Someone writes great music, someone plays it, interpreting it in his own way and we listen to it, enjoying it or criticising it. We are the audience watching the actors, football players, or watching the cine-screen. Others write poems and we read; others paint and we gape at them.

We have nothing, so we turn to others to entertain us, to inspire us, to guide or save us. More and more, modern civilisation is destroying us, emptying us of all creativeness. We ourselves are empty inwardly and we look to others to be enriched and so our neighbour takes advantage of this to exploit, or we take advantage of him. (p.271-272)

It is odd how most people want to impress others, by their achievements, by their cleverness, by their books – by any means to assert themselves. (p.272)

What is important is to have the right kind of exercise, good sleep, and a day that has significance. But one slips so easily into a routine, and then one functions in the easy pattern of self-satisfaction, or in the pattern of self-imposed righteousness. All their patterns invariably lead to death – a slow withering away. But to have a rich day, in which there is no compulsion, no fear, no comparison, no conflict, but to be simply aware, is to be creative.

Don’t try to be simple. This trying only breeds complexity and misery. The trying is becoming and the becoming is always desire, with its frustrations.

It is so fatally easy to get used to anything, to any discomfort, to any frustration, to any continued satisfaction. One can adjust oneself to any circumstances, to lunacy or to asceticism. The mind likes to function in grooves, in habits, and this activity is called living.

A quiet mind, but very alert, watchful, is a blessing; it is like the earth, rich with immense possibilities. When there is such a mind, not comparing, not
condemning, then only is it possible for the immeasurable richness to be.

Have done a great deal of meditation and has been good. I hope you are doing it too – begin by being aware of every thought – feeling – all day, the nerves and the brain – then become quiet, still – this is what cannot be done through control – then really begins meditation. Do it with thoroughness.

He said that he had been speaking in India for thirty years and nothing had happened. “There is not one person who is living the teaching”. (p.284)

It is necessary to ask questions. Questions to which there are no answers. So that the question throws man back of himself and the way the structure of thought operates. The hand that seeks to throw away or reject is the same hand that itself holds.

He spoke of the tenacity of the Hindu mind, which despite conquest and repression had kept alive the ancient teachings.

Without understanding the structure and nature of thought you will not come upon this silence naturally. (p.305-306)

Do you see that doubt in religious enquiry is one of the most extraordinary things that existed in India ? Christianity was based on faith; doubt,scepticism, questioning were denied. They were regarded as heresy. In India and in the Asiatic world doubt was one of the principles of religious investigation. (p.399-400)

Because it is only through doubt that you come to the Brahman, not through acceptance of authority. (p.400)

I want to find out if in India the mind is being caught and carried away by the materialistic wave. That wave is threatening the Western world, expressing itself through technology, materialism, nationalism. The Western mind is moving in the direction of the outer, and it dominates the world.

India moved from a center and that center spread all over the Asiatic world through inner search, dance, music, and cultural expression. The Western world was centered in belief, which is so superficial. That superficiality , that materialism, is that conquering this ?

Can one see the outer manifestation of this in India, through its bureaucracy, technology, science, nuclear energy; following the ways of the West; and so is
the pristine, original core of this country gradually withering away ? India was centered on one thing. And therefore she had a fire which spread throughout
the world. Now what is happening to the Indian core ?

I want India to be that. So I say I hope she is not going to lose it. If it is lost, it is lost. I don’t want her to lose it, because then it is the end of everything. (p.401)

I am talking about the Indian mind that has produced the Upanishads, the Buddha. India has been the storehouse of something very very great. The West, with its emphasis on faith and its materialism, is destroying that greatness.

The whole world believes in God. In Ceylon they were very upset when I said the word God is put together by thought.

The whole world believes in God. Unfortunately, I don’t know what God is. Probably I can never find out.

And I am not interested in finding out. But what I am concerned with is whether the mind, the brain, can be totally free from all accumulated knowledge,experience ? Because if it is not, it will function always within its field, expanding – contracting – vertically, horizontally – but always within that area. It does not matter how much one accumulates, it will still be within that area. And if the mind moves from that area and says, ‘I must find out’, then it is still carrying the movement, the mind, with it. (p.420)

A cup holds water. A pond is a receptacle that holds water, a holding without any wave, without any motive or movement, without any sense of trying to find
an answer. (p.422)

A meditation in which there is no state of achievement, there is nothing. That may be the ground, the origin of all things, a state in which the meditator is not. (p.423)

In India the concern with religion has been deep. Indian tradition has maintained that the understanding of the Self, of the Universe, of the Highest Principle, is the most significant pursuit. (p.444)

Are we aware that we are prisoners of our own fantasies ?

If we are aware – they are burnt out. (p.451)

Just be aware, not hold it. It is like a perfume – it is there. You don’t hold it. That is why I think one has to understand the whole conditioning of our consciousness. I think that is the real enquiry. The real exploration is into consciousness, which is the common ground of all humanity. And we never enquire into it. We never say, ‘I am going to study this consciousness that is “me”.’

Time and thought have divided the world. (p.456)

We offer a hundred commentaries, but the actual fact is, we are ‘nothing’ except a lot of words. Can one grasp that the zero contains all the numbers ? So in
‘nothing’ all the world exists. (p.459)

If you want to end sorrow there has to be an ending of the ‘me’. (p.460)

Do you see that you are a human being related to all human beings ? the body does not divide. It never says, ‘I am’. It is thought that separates.

Look what religions have done: concentrated on the teacher and forgotten the teaching. Why do we give such importance to the person of the teacher ? The teacher may be necessary to manifest the teaching, but beyond that, what ? The vase contains water: you have to drink the water, not worship the vase.Humanity worships the vase, forgets the water. (p.488)

The human tendency is to center everything around the person of the teacher – not on the essence of what he says, but the person. That is the great corruption. Look at the great teachers of the world – Mohammed, Christ, and the Buddha too. Look what their followers have made of it ? Buddhists monks are violent, they kill. Contrary to all that the Buddha had said. (p.488-489)


Source: http://www.celextel.org/jkbooks/biographyofjk.html

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Part 1 -- J. KRISHNAMURTI - A Biography by Pupul Jayakar

Krishnaji refused to move from “what is”, the actual. He refused to discuss abstracts like God or eternity while the mind was a whirlpool of lust, hatred,and jealousy.

Thought can only come to an end when the thinker understands himself, when he sees that the thinker and the thought are not two separate processes.

To be free from aggression is not to become weak or humble. (p.11)

“If religion perish here, it will perish everywhere and in India’s hand is laid the sacred charge of keeping alight the torch of spirit amid the fogs and storms of increasing materialism. If that torch drops from her hands, its flame will be trampled out by the feet of hurrying multitudes, eager for worldly goods; and India, bereft of spirituality, will have no future, but will pass on into the darkness, as Greece and Rome have passed.” (Annie Besant) (P.23)

You have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity.

Right action is only possible when the mind is silent and there is a seeing of ‘what is’. Action that arises from this seeing is free of motive, of the past,free of thought and cause. (p.128)

To love is to be chaste, pure, incorruptible. (p.142)

We feel that the ‘I’ is permanent, because all other thoughts come and go. If the thinker is permanent, then thought can be changed, controlled, transformed
by the thinker. But is not the ‘I’ the result of thought ? Your mind separates the ‘I’ from thought because it cannot bear impermanency. Thought cannot move from the known to the unknown. To free the mind from the known is all the mind can do. To find out what lies beyond words, words must cease. I can only use words to get to the door. (p.146-147)

Anandamai Ma, the most famous of the then-living deified “Mothers”, with a very large following in North India, came to meet Krishnaji. They met in the garden, as the Mother never entered the home of a householder. She did not speak English, and spoke through a translator. She had a radiant, smiling presence. She said that she had seen a photograph of Krishnaji many years before and knew that he was very great. She asked him, “Why do you deny gurus ? You who are the Guru of Gurus”.

He (Krishnaji) replied, “People use the guru as a crutch”.

The mind is cause and effect, it is caught in time, it has a beginning and an end. Mind can never experience that which is without cause, the timeless, that which has no beginning and no end.

Religion comes when the mind has understood the working of itself. When the mind is quiet, very still - the stillness is not the peace of death; this stillness is very active, very alert, watchful. To find out what God - Truth is, one has to understand sorrow, and the struggle of human existence. To go beyond the mind there must be a cessation of the self, the ‘me’. It is only then, that which we all worship, seek, comes into being.

The straight line being the ‘I’ and the horizontal bar, the negation of the ‘I’. (regarding the sign of the cross) (p.214)

God is a phrase. To realize God, you must have a free mind, a good mind that does not follow anybody. A mind that has no guru, no system.

I think in one way, you think in another. We mislead a whole generation. One has to be free, man has to be free to speak of God. The Communists say there is no God, you say God is. You are both conditioned. You are both saying the same thing. That is the calamity. There is no your or my way of meditation. There is only meditation.

People take politics very seriously in India. Politics is most destructive. When people say they are working for peace, for reform, it is always the ‘I’ that
is important. People who touch politics cannot have a fresh mind. The world needs fresh minds, clear minds, not minds that are conditioned by being Hindus or Muslims.

The mind has become so mechanical. It needs and seeks a goal in life. We follow paths to a goal. We never question. We are too respectable. But one must have a free mind, not a mind burdened with tradition, with the past. Extreme freedom is needed. But the moment you think you are free, you are not free. One has to unearth oneself, unravel oneself, delve into the corners of one’s mind - ignite the mind. (p.222-225 -- talks with Vinobaji)

Can the mind, without motive, let go ? That is real renunciation. Keep the mind clean, alert, watchful, observe every thought, see its significance without motive, urge, or compulsion, then there comes an energy that is not your own, which descends upon you. There is a limitless being, and in that energy is reality. (p.236)

Life is short and there is so much to discover not outwardly but within. There are vast unexplored regions within and don’t let a day go by without discovering something. Be explosive inwardly and then the outer things will take care of themselves.

Fear really destroys and perverts all seeing. It breeds illusion; it dulls the mind, it destroys dignity. Search it out - be open to it. Don’t find excuses for it. Go into it ruthlessly. Be aware of every form of fear and wash it away. Don’t let it remain with you for a single minute. There is no innocency where there is fear, jealousy, attachment. Be burningly aware of it. (p.247)

When you see fear, enquire into it, face it, then it goes away.

There are two kinds of death. Bodily death and death of thought. We are not afraid of that (bodily death). We are afraid that thought as the ‘me’, which has lived, acquired money, family, the ‘me’ that wants to become important, will end. (p.250)

You have finished looking at things outside, and now with your eyes closed, look at what is happening inside. Watch what is happening inside you. Do not think, but just watch. Do not move your eyeballs, just keep them very very quiet. There is nothing to see now, you have seen all the things around you, now you are seeing what is happening inside your mind. And to see what is happening inside your mind, you have to be very quiet inside. And when you are quiet,do you know what happens to you ? You become very sensitive, you become very alert to things outside and inside. Then you find that the outside is the inside. Then you find out that the observer is the observed.

Love is a dangerous thing, it brings the only revolution that gives complete happiness. So few of us are capable of love, so few want love. We love on our
own terms, making of love a marketable thing. We have the market mentality and love is not marketable, a give-and-take affair. It is a state of being in which all man’s problems are resolved. We go to the well with a thimble and so life becomes a tawdry affair, puny and small.

Be alert to all your thoughts and feelings, don’t let one feeling or thought slip by without being aware of it and absorbing all its content. Absorbing is not the word, but seeing the whole content of the thought-feeling. It is like entering a room and seeing the whole content of the room at once, its atmosphere and its spaces. To see and be aware of one’s thoughts makes one intensively sensitive, pliable, and alert. Don’t condemn or judge, but be very alert.

Experiences are inevitable, perhaps necessary; life is a series of experiences, but the mind need not be burdened with its own accumulative demands. It can wipe off each experience and keep itself innocent - unburdened. This is important, otherwise the mind can never be fresh, alert and pliable.

To bring up children without comparison is true education. (p.259)

Thoughts may not be easy but the more one asks of life, the more fearful and painful it becomes. To live simply, uninfluenced, though everything and everyone is trying to influence, to be without varying moods and demands is not easy, but without a deep quiet life, all things are futile.

The opposite of pride is not humility - it is still pride, only it is called humility; the consciousness of being humble is a form of pride.

What is important is not to prove or disprove a point, but to find out the truth.

The ‘what is’ is not different from the thinker. The thinker is that ‘what is’, the thinker is not separate from that ‘which is’. (p.263)

To allow the free flow of life, without any residue being left, is real awareness.

Not to retain, but to have the freedom of life to flow without restraint, without choice, is complete awareness.

Money does spoil people. There is a peculiar arrogance of the rich. With very few exceptions, in every country, the rich have that peculiar atmosphere of being able to twist anything, even the Gods, and they can buy their Gods.

Happy is the man who is nothing. (p.267)

Choice is conflict and the mind is back again to its own entanglements.The stillness of the mind is the freedom from duality.

There is a life without will, without choice. This life comes into being when the life of will comes to an end. (p.271)

Source: http://www.celextel.org/jkbooks/biographyofjk.html

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COMMENTARIES ON LIVING Second Series by J. Krishnamurti

Creative happiness is for all and not for the few alone. You may express it in one way and I in another, but it is for all. Creative happiness has no value on the market; it is not a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, but it is the one thing that can be for all. (p.2)

After all, to be open to the source of all happiness is the highest religion; but to realize this happiness, you must give right attention to it, as you do to business. The teacher’s profession is not a mere routine job, but the expression of beauty and joy, which cannot be measured in terms of achievement and success.

Conflict exists when there is no integration between challenge and response. This conflict is the result of our conditioning. Conditioning is attachment: attachment to work, to tradition, to property, to people, to ideas, and so on. If there were no attachment, would there be conditioning? Of course not. So why are we attached? I am attached to my country because through identification with it I become somebody. I identify myself with my work, and the work becomes important. I am my family, my property; I am attached to them. The object of attachment offers me the means of escape from my own emptiness. Attachment is escape, and it is escape that strengthens conditioning. If I am attached to you, it is because you have become the means of escape from myself; therefore you are very important to me and I must possess you, hold on to you. You become the conditioning factor, and escape is the conditioning. If we can be aware of our escapes, we can then perceive the factors, the influences that make for conditioning. (p.5)

There are escapes at all the levels of our being. You escape through work, another through drink, another through religious ceremonies, another through knowledge, another through God, and still another is addicted to amusement. All escapes are the same, there is no superior or inferior escape. God and drink are on the same level as long as they are escapes from what we are. When we are aware of our escapes, only then can we know of our conditioning. (p.5-6)

To cultivate detachment is another form of escape, of isolation; it is attachment to an abstraction, to an ideal called detachment.

Thinking about the problem is escape from the problem; for thinking is the problem, and the only problem. The mind, unwilling to be what it is, fearful of what it is, seeks these various escapes, and the way of escape is thought. As long as there is thinking, there must be escapes, attachments, which only strengthen conditioning. (p.6-7)

Freedom from conditioning comes with the freedom from thinking. When the mind is utterly still, only then is there freedom for the real to be.

Love is a strange thing; as long as thought is woven through it, it is not love. When you think of someone you love, that person becomes the symbol of pleasant sensations, memories, images; but that is not love. Thought is sensation, and sensation is not love. The very process of thinking is the denial of love. Love is the flame without the smoke of thought, of jealousy, of antagonism, of usage, which are things of the mind.

We move from one substitution to another, but essentially, all substitutions are the same, though verbally they may appear to be dissimilar. So you are caught in the net of your own thought.

Revolution based an idea, however logical and in accordance with historical evidence, cannot bring about equality. The very function of idea is to separate people. Belief, religious or political, sets man against man. So-called religions have divided people, and still do. Organized belief, which is called religion, is, like any other ideology, a thing of the mind and therefore separative. (p.16-17)

Actually, there is inequality at all the levels of existence. One has capacity, and another has not; one leads, and another follows; one is dull, and another is sensitive, alert , adaptable; one paints or writes, and another digs; one is a scientist, and another a sweeper. Inequality is a fact, and no revolution can do away with it. (p.17)

How necessary it is for the mind to purge itself of all thought, to be constantly empty, not made empty, but simply empty; to die to all thought, to all of yesterday’s memories, and to the coming hour! It is simple to die, and it is hard to continue; for continuity is effort to be or not to be. Effort is desire, and desire can die only when the mind ceases to acquire. How simple it is just to live! But it is not stagnation. There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere. When the mind purges itself of all thought, only then is there the silence of creation.

You have tried to gain satisfaction from everything you have come in contact with; and when you have thoroughly used it, naturally you get bored with it. Every acquisition is a form of boredom, weariness. We want a change of toys; as soon as we lose interest in one, we turn to another, and there is always a new toy to turn to. We turn to something in order to acquire; there is acquisition in pleasure, in knowledge, in fame, in power, in efficiency, in having a family, and so on. When there is nothing further to acquire in one religion, in one saviour, we lose interest and turn to another. Some go to sleep in an organization and never wake up, and those who do wake up put themselves to sleep again by joining another. This acquisitive movement is called expansion of thought, progress!

The nature of the mind is to acquire, to absorb, is it not? Or rather, the pattern it has created for itself is one of gathering in; and in that very activity the mind is preparing its own weariness, boredom. Interest, curiosity, is the beginning of acquisition, which soon becomes boredom; and the urge to be free from boredom is another form of possession. So the mind goes from boredom to interest to boredom again, till it is utterly weary; and these successive waves of interest and weariness are regarded as existence. (p.22)

To find God, you try to subdue the mind. But is calmness of mind a way to God? Is calmness the coin which will open the gates of heaven? You want to buy your way to God, to truth, or what name you will. Can you buy the eternal through virtue, through renunciation, through mortification? We think that if we do certain things, practise virtue, pursue chastity, withdraw from the world, we shall be able to measure the measureless; so it’s just a bargain, isn’t it? Your ‘virtue’ is a means to an end. (p.24)

Understanding comes with the ending of the thought-process, in the interval between two thoughts. You say the mind must be still, and yet you desire it to function. If we can be simple in watchfulness, we shall understand; but our approach is so complex that it prevents understanding. Surely we are not concerned with discipline, control, suppression, resistance, but with the process and the ending of thought itself. What do we mean when we say that the mind wanders? Simply that thought is everlastingly enticed from one attraction to another, from one association to another, and is in constant agitation. Is it possible for thought to come to an end? (p.25-26)

The mind is not quiet when it is disciplined, controlled and checked; such a mind is a dead mind, it is isolating itself through various forms of resistance, and so it inevitably creates misery for itself and for others. (p.31-32)

Our acquisitions are a means of covering up our own emptiness; our minds are like hollow drums, beaten upon by every passing hand and making a lot of noise. This is our life, the conflict of never-satisfying escapes and mounting misery. It is strange how we are never alone, never strictly alone. We are always with something, with a problem, with a book, with a person; and when we are alone, our thoughts are with us. To be alone, naked, is essential. All escapes, all gatherings, all effort to be or not to be, must cease; and then only is there the aloneness that can receive the alone, the measureless.

Is devotion the worship of an image, of a person, of a symbol? Has reality any symbol? Can a symbol ever represent truth? Is not the symbol static, and can a static thing ever represent that which is living? Is your picture you?

Let us see what we mean by devotion. You spend several hours a day in what you call the love, the contemplation of God. Is that devotion? The man who gives his life to social betterment is devoted to his work; and the general, whose job is to plan destruction, is also devoted to his work. Is that devotion? If I may say so, you spend your time being intoxicated by the image or idea of God, and others do the same thing in a different way. Is there a fundamental distinction between the two? Is it devotion that has an object?

The worshipper is the worshipped. To worship another is to worship oneself; the images, the symbol, is a projection of oneself. After all, your idol, your book, your prayer, is the reflection of your background; it is your creation, though it be made by another. You choose according to your gratification; your choice is your prejudice. Your image is your intoxicant, and it is carved out of your own memory; you are worshipping yourself through the image created by your own thought. Your devotion is the love of yourself, it is the reflection of your mind. Such devotion is a form of self-deception that only leads to sorrow and to isolation, which is death.

The understanding of ‘what is’ does not depend upon thought, for thought itself is an escape. To think about the problem is not to understand it. It is only when the mind is silent that the truth of ‘what is’ unfolds.

Awareness of the ways of desire is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation. (p.66-67)

Every individual and group is after power: power for oneself, for the party, or the ideology. The party and the ideology are an extension of oneself. The ascetic seeks power through abnegation, and so does the mother through her child. There is the power of efficiency with its ruthlessness, and the power of the machine in the hands of a few; there is the domination of one individual by another, the exploitation of the stupid by the clever, the power of money, the power of name and word, and the power of mind over matter. We all want some kind of power, whether over ourselves or over others. This urge to power brings a kind of happiness, a gratification that is not too transient. The power of renunciation is as the power of wealth. It is the craving for gratification, for happiness, that drives us to seek power. And how easily we are satisfied! The ease of achieving some form of satisfaction blinds us. All gratification is blinding. (p.68)

The world is the projection of yourself. The world cannot be transformed till you are. Happiness is in transformation and not in acquisition.

Only a happy man can bring about a new social order; but he is not happy who is identified with an ideology or a belief, or who is lost in any social or individual activity. Happiness is not an end in itself. It comes with the understanding of ‘what is’. Only when the mind is free from its own projections can there be happiness. Happiness that is bought is merely gratification; happiness through action, through power, is only sensation; and as sensation soon withers, there is craving for more and more. As long as the more is a means to happiness, the end is always dissatisfaction, conflict and misery. Happiness is not a remembrance; it is that state which comes into being with truth, ever new, never continuous. (p.71)

Even in complete isolation you are in contact with your thoughts, with yourself. (p.75)

Silence comes with the absence of desire. Desire is swift, cunning and deep. Remembrance shuts off the sweep of silence, and a mind that is caught in experience cannot be silent. Time, the movement of yesterday flowing into to-day and to-morrow, is not silence. With the cessation of this movement there is silence, and only then can that which is unnamable come into being. (p.77)

Stillness of the mind cannot be induced, it cannot be brought about through any practice or discipline. If the mind is made still, then whatever comes into it is only a self-projection, the response of memory. With the understanding of its conditioning, with the choiceless awareness of its own responses as thought and feeling, tranquillity comes to the mind. This breaking of the chain of karma is not a matter of time; for through time, the timeless is not. (p.80-81)

To understand the mind is to be aware of desire and fear. (p.84)

Without understanding yourself, whatever you do will inevitably bring about confusion and sorrow.

Only by understanding the false as the false is there freedom from it. Be passively watchful of your habitual responses; simply be aware of them without resistance; passively watch them as you would watch a child, without the pleasure or distance of identification. Passive watchfulness itself is freedom from defence, from closing the door. To be vulnerable is to live, and to withdraw is to die. (p.90)

Source: http://www.celextel.org/jkbooks/commentariesonliving.html

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