WE ARE INVESTIGATING fear. To go into the root of fear we must understand why the brain, thought, lives in images. Why do you create and live with images, pictures, about the future, about your wife, your husband, about the speaker, and so on? Why do you create pictures? If you don’t create pictures and images, is there fear? We must first go into the question of why thought breeds these complicated pictures, images, in which we live. We must ask what thought is. We are investigating into fear and to go into that very deeply you must inquire into why thought creates the picture of the future or of the past, which breeds fear, and into what thought is. Unless you understand this you will not come face to face with fear. You will avoid it. You will run away from it. Because fear is a living thing. You can’t control it, you can’t put a lid on it.
IF YOU ACT through fear you are lost. Fear and love cannot exist together. In this country there is no love. There is devotion, reverence, but no love. Devotion to your guru, to your gods, to your ideals, is self-worship. It is self-worship because you have created your guru, your ideals, your gods; you have created them, thought has created them, your grandfather has, and you accept this because it satisfies you, it gives you comfort. So what you are devoted to is yourself. Swallow that pill and live with it! So we are saying that, as love cannot exist with fear, and we live in fear, the other thing is not. And when you have the other thing you have all life, and then, do what you will, it will be right action. But fear can never bring about right action, as desire or conflict can never bring about right action. So when you understand fear, the root of fear, go down to the very depths of fear, then the pressure on the brain doesn’t exist. Therefore, the brain again becomes fresh, innocent, not something jaded, moulded, shaped, made ugly, as it is now.
So please, if you have not understood this now, spend an hour with yourself, quietly, to find out. You may cry, you may sigh, you may shed tears, but find out how to live without a shadow of fear. Then you will know what love is.