Comment: We instinctively avoid pain and sorrow.

KRISHNAMURTI: The gentleman says that we instinctively avoid pain and sorrow. When you say you avoid pain and sorrow, then why do you suffer? Such a question has no meaning. If you say, “I instinctively avoid a snake,” then that has an answer; that is a fact. But when you say you instinctively want to avoid pain and suffering, you are living in suffering; you can’t avoid it. You are following all this, sirs? Why do you suffer? Go into it, sirs. That is your challenge. What is your response to that challenge, sirs? Why do you suffer?

Comment: Because we are not full, because our mind is not full. There is the utter emptiness of life.

KRISHNAMURTI: You have given explanations, and at the end of it you suffer—which means that you accept suffering as inevitable. A healthy mind does not accept suffering, sir. Now after explaining, do you want to go into it? How do you go into it so that when you leave this room, you are finished with suffering once and for all, you do not go back to the eternal wheel of sorrow?

Comment: Accept the fact that there is suffering. Attachment is the cause of sorrow.

KRISHNAMURTI: You say that attachment is the cause of sorrow. Therefore, you cultivate detachment, and in the meantime you are agonizing. You are in a state of agony, and you accept the fact that you are suffering. Why do you accept it? You don’t accept sunshine, do you? Suffering is there; you don’t have to accept it. Pain with its burning intensity is agonizing you, and you don’t say, “I must accept it.” It is there. You can explain, you can gradually push it away—that is what you are doing. You might say, “I accept it, I will bear with it,” but you can’t bear with an intense pain more than a few hours or so.

And the mind says sorrow is created by attachment—which means you will be free from sorrow if you are detached. So you begin to cultivate detachment which all the books talk about. Why are you attached first of all? You say that you are inwardly empty, and therefore you are attached to the wife, to the child, to an idea, to power, position, to fill that emptiness. You don’t tackle the emptiness, but you run away from the emptiness. So how do you face this fact of suffering?

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti