To understand this immensity, the timeless quality of life, surely you must approach it through negation. It is because you are committed to a particular course of action, to a certain pattern of existence, that you find it difficult to free yourself from all that and face a new way, a new approach. After all, death is the ultimate negation. It is only when one dies now, while living, which means the constant breaking up of all the habit patterns, the various attitudes, conclusions, ideas, beliefs that one has—it is only then that one can find out what life is. But most of us say, “I cannot break up the pattern, it is impossible; therefore, I must learn a way of breaking it; I must practice a certain system, a method of breaking it up” so we become slaves to the new pattern which we establish through practice. We have not broken the pattern but have only substituted a new pattern for the old.

Sirs, you nod your heads, you say this is so true, logical, clear—and you go right on with the pattern, old or new. It seems to me that the real problem is the sluggishness of the mind. Any fairly intelligent mind can see that inwardly we want security, a haven, a refuge where we shall not be disturbed, and that this urge to be secure creates a pattern of life which becomes a habit. But to break up that pattern requires a great deal of energy, thought, inquiry, and the mind refuses because it says, “If I break up my pattern of life, what will become of me? What will this school be if the old pattern is broken? It will be chaos”—as if it were not chaos now!

You see, we are always living in a state of contradiction from which we act, and therefore we create still more contradiction, more misery. We have made living a process of action versus being. The man who is very clever, who convinces others through his gift of the gab or his way of life, who puts on a loincloth and outwardly becomes a saint, may inwardly be acting from a state of contradiction; he may be a most disastrously torn entity, but because he has the outward paraphernalia of a saintly life, we all follow him blindly. Whereas, if we really go into and understand this problem of contradiction within and without, then I think we shall come upon an action which is not away from life. It is part of our daily existence. Such action does not spring from idea but from being. It is the comprehension of the whole of life.

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti – Volume XI 1958-1960: Crisis in Consciousness
Jiddu Krishnamurti