When you say, “I am hurt,” what is this “I” that is hurt? You say, “You have hurt me”—by your word, by a gesture, by discourtesy, and so on and so on—what is hurt? Is it not the image that you have built about yourself? Please, do look at it. That image is one of the factors that society, education, and environment have built in you. “You” are that picture, that image, the name, the form, the characteristics, the idiosyncrasies, and so on. All that is you, the picture, the image which you are. And that image has been hurt. You have a conclusion about yourself, that you are this or that, and when that conclusion is disturbed you are hurt. So can you live without a conclusion, without a picture, without an image about yourself? As long as you have an image about yourself, you are everlastingly hurt. You may resist it, you may build a wall around yourself, but when there is a wall around yourself, when you withdraw, there is a division, and where there is a division there must be conflict—as with the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim, the communist and the noncommunist. Where there is a division, it is the law that there must be conflict.

So is it possible not to be hurt at all? That is, to have an innocent mind, a mind that is incapable of being hurt. It is very important to find out if one can live that in daily life. Not go off to some monastery or some community where you all agree together, becoming mushy and sentimental, but actually in daily life to find out if you can live without an image and, therefore, never be hurt, which means never to have conflict, never to have psychological division. We are going to find out. We are going to examine whether it is possible to live that way.

Total Freedom:
The Essential Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti