Thought breeds fear

Excerpt from the book
Beyond Violence, By J. Krishnamurti

How are you to look at fear; how are you to bring out all its structure, all its hidden parts? – through dreams? Dreams are the continuation of the activity of waking hours during sleep, are they not? You observe in dreams that there is always action, something or other is happening in dreams as in the waking hours, a continuation which is still part of one whole movement. So dreams have no value. You see what is happening: we are eliminating the things to which you are accustomed, analysis, dreams, will, time; when you eliminate all those, the mind becomes extraordinarily sensitive – not only sensitive but intelligent. Now with that sensitivity and intelligence we are going to look at fear.

What is fear? How does it come? Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself. There is fear of what happened yesterday in relation to the possibility of its repetition tomorrow; there is always a fixed point from which relationship takes place. How does fear come into this? I had pain yesterday; there is the memory of it and I do not want it again tomorrow. Thinking about the pain of yesterday, thinking which involves the memory of yesterday’s pain, projects the fear of having pain again tomorrow. So it is thought that brings about fear. Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure. To understand fear you must also understand pleasure – they are interrelated; without understanding one you cannot understand the other. This means that one cannot say, ‘I must have only pleasure and no fear’ – fear is the other side of the coin which is called pleasure.

Thinking with the images of yesterday’s pleasure, thought imagines that you may not have that pleasure tomorrow – so thought engenders fear. Thought tries to sustain pleasure and thereby nourishes fear.

Thought has separated itself as the analyser and the thing to be analysed – they are both parts of thought playing tricks upon itself. In doing all this it is refusing to examine the unconscious fears; it brings in time as a means of escaping fear and yet at the same time sustains fear.

Can the mind look at fear without the centre? Can you look at that fear without naming it? The moment you name it ‘fear’, it is already in the past. The moment you name something, you divide it off. So, can you observe without that centre, not naming the thing called fear, as it arises? It requires tremendous discipline. Then the mind is looking without the centre to which it has been accustomed and there is the ending of fear, both the hidden and the open.