Krishnamurti: Are you talking about the beauty of living or the beauty that the eye sees in something, or the beauty of a poem or the beauty of music? Probably all this may sound to you rather sentimental and emotional, but there is beauty in mathematics too, which you know. In that there is supreme order. And isn't the same order in life also beautiful?What is Beauty?Questioner: I don't know what beauty is. I never even thought about it until I heard you talk about it. I'm an engineer and have constructed many buildings, bridges and railways. I've lived a hard life in the open and in countries where there are few trees. On a walk one day you pointed out the beautiful shape of a tree. I looked at it and repeated the words, 'How beautiful,' but deeply inside me I didn't really feel anything at all. I politely agreed with you, but I don't really know what beauty is. Sometimes a straight railway line might seem beautiful to me and sometimes I admire one of those marvelous modern bridges across a great river or across the mouth of a harbour. They are functional and are supposed to be quite beautiful, but I don't really see it. Those modern jet planes are functional machines. When you pointed them out to me and said they were beautiful I somehow felt they were things to be used and wondered why you got so excited about them. That yellow flower on the walk didn't give me at all the same quality of feeling as it gave you. I dare say I am really crude. Your mind is much sharper than mine. I've never bothered to look at my feelings or cultivate them. I've had children and the pleasure of sex, but even that has been rather dull and heavy. And now I wonder if I am not being deprived of something which you call beauty and whether at my age I can ever really feel it, see the world as a marvelous thing, the heavens ,the woods and the rivers. What is beauty?
an extract from
Meeting Life: Writing and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society
by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Questioner: I don't know if it is beautiful, but I do know what I've don with my own life: I've rigorously, almost brutally, disciplined myself, and there is a certain tortured order in that. But probably you would say that this is not order at all. I don't really know what it means to live beautifully. In fact, I really know nothing except a few mechanical things connected with my job; I see by talking to you that my life is pretty dull, or rather my mind is. So how can I wake up to this sensitivity, to this intelligence that makes life extremely beautiful to you?Krishnamurti: First, sir, one has to sharpen the senses by looking, touching, observing, listening not only to the birds, to the rustle of the leaves, but also to the words that you use yourself, the feeling you have - however small and petty - for all the secret intimations of your own mind. Listen to them and don't suppress them, don't control them or try to sublimate them. Just listen to them. The sensitivity to the senses doesn't mean their indulgence, doesn't mean yielding to urges or resisting those urges, but means simply observing so that the mind is always watchful as when you walk on a railway line; you may lose your balance but you immediately get back on to the rail. So the whole organism becomes alive, sensitive, intelligent, balanced, taut.
Probably you consider the body is not at all important. I've seen you eat, and you eat as if you were feeding a furnace... This is comparatively easy. But what is more difficult is to free that mind from the mechanical habits of thought, feeling and action into which it has been driven by circumstances - by one's wife, one's children, one's job. The mind itself has lost its elasticity. The more subtle forms of observation escape it. This means seeing yourself actually as you are without wanting to correct yourself or change what you see or escape from it - just to see yourself actually as you are, so that the mind doesn't fall back into other series of habits. When such a mind looks at a flower or the colour of a dress or a dead leaf falling from a tree, it is now capable of seeing the movement of that leaf as it falls and the colour of that flower vividly. So both outwardly and inwardly the mind becomes highly alive, pliable, alert; there is a sensitivity which makes the mind intelligent. Sensitivity, intelligence and freedom in action are the beauty of living.
Questioner: All right. So one observes, one become very sensitive, very watchful, and then what? Is that all there is, just marvelling forever at perfectly commonplace things? I am sure that everybody does this all the time, at least when they are young, and there is nothing earth-shaking about it. What then? Isn't there some further step than just this observation that you talk about?Krishnamurti: You started this conversation by asking about beauty, by saying that you do not feel it. You also said that in your life there is no beauty and so we are inquiring into this question of what beauty is, not only verbally or intellectually but feeling the very throb of it.
Questioner: Yes, that is so, but when I asked you I wondered i there isn't something beyond just the sensitive looking you describe.Krishnamurti: Of course there is, but unless one has the sensitivity of observation, seeing what is infinitely greater cannot come about.
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