Mary Zimbalist: There is a subject you have talked about so many times, but it keeps coming back in people’s questions and preoccupations, and that is the subject of fear. Do you want to talk about that?
Krishnamurti: It is a rather complicated subject. It really requires a great deal of inquiry because it is so subtle and so varied. And it is actual too, though we make it into an abstraction. There is the actuality of fear and the idea of fear. So we must be very clear what we are talking about. You and I sitting here, at this present moment, are not afraid. There is no sense of apprehension, or danger. At this instant there is no fear.
So fear is both an abstraction—as an idea, as a word—and a fact. First of all let’s deal with these two. Why do we generally make an abstraction of things? Why do we see something actual and then turn it into an idea? Is it because the idea is easier to pursue? Or the ideal is our conditioning? Or we are educated to ideas, and not educated to deal with facts? Why is this? Why is it that human beings throughout the world deal with abstractions, with what should be, what must be, what will happen, and so on? There is the whole world of ideation and the ideologies, whether it be the communist ideology based on Marx and Lenin, or the capitalists’ ideas of so-called free enterprise, or the whole world of religious concepts, beliefs, ideas, and the theologians working those out. Why is it that ideas, ideals, have become so extraordinarily important? From the ancient Greeks, and even before the Greeks, ideas prevailed. And still ideas, ideals, separate man and bring wars of all kinds. Why do the brains of human beings operate in this way? Is it because they cannot deal with facts directly and so escape subtly into ideations? Ideas are really very divisive factors, they bring friction, they divide communities, nations, sects, religions, and so on. Ideas, beliefs, faith—are all based on thought. And what exactly is a fact, not an opinion about a fact, or opinion made into facts.
MZ: What is the fact of fear?
K: The actual fear is the fact, not the abstraction of it. If one can move away from the abstraction then we can deal with fact. But if they are both running parallel all the time, then there is a conflict between the two. That is, between the idea, the ideology, dominating the fact, and the fact sometimes dominating the idea.
MZ: Most people would say that the fact of fear is the very painful emotion of fear.
K: Now let us look at that, not the idea of fear. Let us look at the actual fact of fear, and remain with that fact, which requires a great deal of inward discipline.
MZ: Can you describe what remaining with the fact of fear actually is?
K: It is like holding a jewel, an intricate pattern by an artist, who has brought this extraordinary jewel. You look at it, you don’t condemn it, you don’t say, ‘How beautiful’ and run away with words, but you are looking at this extraordinary thing put together by hand, by cunning fingers and the brain. You are watching it, you are looking at it. You turn it round, look at the various sides, the back and the front and the side, and you never let it go.
MZ: Do you mean that you just feel it very acutely, very sensitively, with great care.
K: With care, that is what happens.
MZ: But you feel it because it is an emotion.
K: Of course. You have the feeling of beauty, the feeling of the intricate pattern, and the sparkle, the brightness of the jewels, and so on. So can we deal with the fact of fear and look at it that way, and not escape, not say, ‘Well, I don’t like fear’, get nervous, apprehensive, and suppress or control or deny it, nor move it into another field? We can do all that; just remain with that fear. So fear then becomes an actual fact, which is there, whether you are conscious of it or not. If you have hidden it very, very deeply, it is still there.
So then we can ask, very carefully and hesitantly, what is this fear? Why do human beings, after this tremendous evolution, still live with fear? Is it something that can be operated upon and removed, like a disease, like cancer? Is it something that can be operated upon? Which means there is an entity who can operate upon it. But that very entity is an abstraction of trying to do something about fear. That entity is unreal. What is factual is fear. And it requires very careful attention not to be caught in the abstraction of one who says, ‘I am observing fear’, or one who says, ‘I must put away or control fear’, and so on.
So we look at that fear, and in the very act of looking, of watching fear, one begins to discover the origin of fear, and what the causation of fear is. Because the very fact of looking at it is to see how it came about. Not to analyse or dissect. That very close, delicate watching reveals the content of fear, the content being the origin, the beginning, the causation—because where there is a cause there is an end. The cause can never be different from the result. So in the observation, in the watching, the causation is revealed.
MZ: The causation that you are speaking of is presumably not an individual fear, a particular fear? You are speaking of the causation of fear itself.
K: Fear itself, not the various forms of fear. See how we break up fear. That’s part of our tradition, to bring about a fragmentation of fear, and therefore be concerned with only one type of fear. Not with the whole tree of fear, but a particular branch, or a particular leaf of it. The whole nature, the structure, the quality of fear—in observing that very closely, in the very watching there is the revelation of the causation—not you analysing to find out the cause but the very watching showing the causation, which is time and thought. It is simple when you put it that way. Everybody would accept that it is time and thought. If there were no time and thought there would be no fear.
MZ: Could you enlarge a little bit on that because most people think that there is something—how can I put it—they don’t see that there is no future, they think ‘I am afraid now’ from a cause, they don’t see the factor of time involved.
K: I think it is fairly simple. There is time when I say, ‘I am afraid because I have done something in the past’, or I have had pain in the past, or somebody has hurt me, and I don’t want to be hurt anymore. All that is the past, the background, which is time. And there is the future; that is, I am this now, but I will die. Or I might lose my job, or my wife will be angry with me, and so on. So there is this past and the future, and we are caught in between the two. The past has its relationship with the future; the future is not something separate from the past; there is a movement of modification from the past to the future, to tomorrow. So that is time: this movement, which is the past as I have been, and the future as I will be, which is this constant becoming. And that too is another complex problem that may be the causation of fear.
So time is a basic factor of fear. There is no question about it. I have a job now, I have money now, I have a shelter over my head, but tomorrow or many hundred tomorrows might deprive me of all that—some accident, some fire, some lack of insurance. All that is a time factor. And also, thought is a factor of fear. Thought: I have been, I am, but I may not be. Thought is limited because it is based on knowledge. Knowledge is always accumulative and that which is being added to is always limited, so knowledge is limited, so thought is limited; because thought is based on knowledge, memory, and so on.
So thought and time are the central factors of fear. Thought is not separate from time. They are one. These are the facts. This is the causation of fear. It is a fact—not an idea, not an abstraction—that thought and time is the cause of fear. It is singular.
So a man then asks: How do I stop time and thought? Because his intention, his desire, his longing, is to be free from fear. And so he is caught in his own desire to be free but he is not watching the causation, watching very carefully, without any movement. Watching implies a state of the brain in which there is no movement; it is like watching a bird very closely, as we watched a dove this morning on the window sill, all the feathers, the red eyes, the sparkle in the eyes, the beak, the shape of its head, the wings. That which you watch very carefully reveals not only the causation but the ending of the thing that you are watching. So this watching is really most extraordinarily important, not asking how to end thought, or be free from fear, or what is meant by time, and all the complications. We are watching fear without any abstraction, which is the actual now. The now contains all time, which means the present holds the past, the future, and the present. So we can listen to this very carefully, not only with the hearing of the ear, but listen to the word and go beyond the word, see the actual nature of fear, and not just read about fear. Watching becomes so tremendously beautiful, sensitive, alive.
All this requires an extraordinary quality of attention, because in attention there is no activity of the self. The self-interest in our life is the cause of fear. This sense of me and my concern, my happiness, my success, my failure, my achievement, I am this, I am not; this whole self-centred observation, with all its expressions of fear, agony, depression, pain, anxiety, aspiration, and sorrow, all that is self-interest, whether in the name of God, in the name of prayer, or in the name of faith. It is self-interest. Where there is self-interest there must be fear, and all the consequences of fear. Then one asks again: Is it possible to live in this world where self-interest is predominant? In the totalitarian world and the capitalist world self-interest is dominant. In the hierarchical Catholic world and in every religious world, self-interest is dominant. They are perpetuating fear. Though they talk about living with peace on earth, they really don’t mean it because self-interest, with the desire for power, position, for fulfilment, and so on, is the factor that is destroying not only the world but the extraordinary capacity of our own brain. The brain has remarkable capacity, as is shown in the extraordinary things they are doing in technology. And we never apply that same immense capacity inwardly, to be free of fear, to end sorrow, to know what is love and compassion, with its intelligence. We never search, explore that field; we are caught by the world with all its misery.