Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti I picked up On Fear. It is his series of discourse on our fear.
These are some of my clipped notes from the book:
- We have so accepted the pattern of fear that we don’t want even to move away from it.
- When you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not.
- Where there is comparison there must be fear.
- Comparison, conformity, and imitation, are contributory causes of fear.
- Where there is any cause there is an ending.
- Society is so constructed that a citizen who has a position of respect is treated with great courtesy, whereas a man who has no position is kicked around.
- Until we are free from fear, we may climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, but we will remain in darkness.
- Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted, and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy.
- The movement from certainty to uncertainty is fear.
- When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
- When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it—that you are fear—then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.
- Success and fame are psychologically the very essence of comparison, through which we constantly breed fear.
- In the action of intelligence there is no fear at all.
- The effects of fear and its actions based on past memories are destructive, contradictory, and paralysing.
- We can see what fear does to each one of us. It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.
- Religions throughout the world have used fear as a means of controlling man.
- Courage is not the opposite of fear.
- A man who is frightened has no love, has no sympathy.
- The greater the fear, the greater the tension, the greater the neuroticism, the greater is the urge to escape.
- We live throughout our lives with fear and die with fear.
- Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself.
- Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure.
- The moment there is no fear, there is no ambition, but there is an action, which is for the love of the thing but not for recognition of the thing that you are doing.
- A mind that is frightened can never see what truth is.
- Thought, thinking about an incident, an experience, a state, in which there has been a disturbance, danger, grief or pain, brings about fear.
- Fear is a movement in time.
- When man is free of all fear he needs no comfort, he needs no reward, he doesn’t seek something that will help him.
- If there were no time and thought there would be no fear.
- thought and time are the central factors of fear.
- Where there is self-interest there must be fear, and all the consequences of fear.
- The true is not the opposite of the false; love is not the opposite of hate.
- Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death.
- Fear arises only in the very act of running away from the fact.
- To live with the ashes of loneliness there must be great energy and this energy comes when there is no longer fear.