Virtue Is Effortless

At a public talk given in London (England) in March (1931), a subtle development in K's teaching can be noticed and a change in his style:

"In everything, in all men, there is the totality, the completeness of life...By completeness I mean freedom of consciousness, freedom from individuality. That completeness which exists in everything cannot progress: it is absolute. The effort to acquire is futile, but if you can realize that Truth, happiness, exists in all things and that the realisation of that Truth lies only through elimination, then there is a timeless understanding. This is not a negative. Most people are afraid to be nothing. They call it being positive when they are making an effort, and call that effort virtue. Where there is effort it is not virtue. Virtue is effortless. When you are as nothing, you are all things, not by aggrandisement, not by laying emphasis on the "I", on the personality, but by the continual dissipation of that consciousness which creates power, greed, envy, possessive care, vanity, fear and passion. By continually being self-recollected you become fully conscious, and then you liberate the mind and heart and know harmony, which is completeness."