On Fear by Krishnamurti

Author:Krishnamurti [Krishnamurti]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Brockwood Park, 26 August 1984

HAVE YOU EVER held fear? Do you hold it, not move away from it; not try to suppress or transcend it, or do all kinds of things with it, but just see the depth of fear, and its extraordinary subtleties? And you can only be aware of all that when you are looking at fear without any motive, without trying to do a thing about it, just watching it.

From The Flight of the Eagle London, 16 March 1969

FOR MOST OF us, freedom is an idea and not an actuality. When we talk about freedom, we want to be free outwardly, to do what we like, to travel, to be free to express ourselves in different ways, free to think what we like. The outward expression of freedom seems to be extraordinarily important, especially in countries where there is tyranny, dictatorship; and in those countries where outward freedom is possible one seeks more and more pleasure, more and more possessions.

If we are to inquire deeply into what freedom implies, to be inwardly, completely, and totally free—which then expresses itself outwardly in society, in relationship—then we must ask, it seems to me, whether the human mind, heavily conditioned as it is, can ever be free at all. Must it always live and function within the frontiers of its own conditioning, so that there is no possibility of freedom at all? One sees that the mind, verbally understanding that there is no freedom here on this earth, inwardly or outwardly, then begins to invent freedom in another world, a future liberation, heaven, and so on.

Put aside all theoretical, ideological, concepts of freedom so that we can inquire whether our minds, yours and mine, can ever be actually free, free from dependence, free from fear, anxiety, and free from the innumerable problems, both the conscious as well as those at the deeper layers of the unconscious. Can there be complete psychological freedom, so that the human mind can come upon something that is not of time, that is not put together by thought, yet which is not an escape from the actual realities of daily existence?

Unless the human mind is inwardly, psychologically, totally free it is not possible to see what is true, to see if there is a reality not invented by fear, not shaped by the society or the culture in which we live, and which is not an escape from the daily monotony, with its boredom, loneliness, despair, and anxiety. To find out if there is actually such freedom one must be aware of one’s own conditioning, of the problems, of the monotonous shallowness, emptiness, insufficiency of one’s daily life, and above all one must be aware of fear. One must be aware of oneself neither intro-spectively nor analytically, but actually be aware of oneself as one is and see if it is at all possible to be entirely free of all those issues that seem to clog the mind.

To explore, as we are going to do, there must be freedom, not at the end, but right at the beginning.

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