Is there no good and bad?

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Questioner: Then how do you know what is good and what is bad? Or is there no good and bad? What is to prevent me from crime or even murder? If I have no standards what is to prevent me from God knows what aberrations?

Krishnamurti: To deny all this is to deny oneself, and oneself is the conditioned entity who continually pursues a conditioned good. To most of us negation appears as a vacuum because we know activity only in the prison of our conditioning, fear and misery. From that we look at negation and imagine it to be some terrible state of oblivion or emptiness. To the man who has negated all the assertions of society, religion, culture and morality, the man who is still in the prison of social conformity is a man of sorrow. Negation is the state of enlightenment which functions in all the activities of a man who is free of the past. It is the past, with its tradition and its authority, that has to be negated. Negation is freedom, and it is the free man who lives, loves, and knows what it means to die.

J. Krishnamurti/Eight Conversations ,7

Vincent Carriuolo

Interests: breathing, music, literature, golf, art, snowshoeing, writing, kayaking, meditation, skiing, walking/hiking, theatre (preferably drama), comedy clubs, concerts, art museums, poetry readings, working out and elephant polo at tiger tops, nepal (just seeing if you're still reading). some favorite films: the bicycle thief, dr. strangelove, 81/2, the diving bell and the butterfly, babette's feast, being there, city lights, everything is illuminated and life is beautiful. favorite reads: 100 years of solitude; the short stories of raymond carver; the divine comedy; the power of now; j. krishnamurti's the book of life; the short stories of eudora welty and ethan canin; the poetry of t.s. eliot; matsuo basho and robert frost; the odyssey; the secret language of symbols; a path with heart; zen flesh, zen bones; gift from the sea; siddhartha and anything by: j. krishnamurti; eckhart tolle; jack kornfield; anthony demello s.j.; thich nhat hahn; thomas merton; shunryu suzuki, : meister eckhart; emmett fox and ram dass. play blues harmonica. like color: cobalt blue. like flower: paper white narcissus. last read: one hundred years of solitude (again), quotes: just this. --anon. we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. --anais inn, a friend of bill w.