You must really understand very deeply that you as a human being are
violent, aggressive. That’s a fact. It is a fact that people are violent and have had
the ideal of nonviolence. So what has happened? You are pursuing the ideal and
in the meantime you are sowing the seeds of violence. You say, “I am trying to
be nonviolent; I will one day achieve a state in which there is nonviolence,” and
therefore you become a hypocrite. All idealists are essentially hypocrites. Right?
Swallow that pill and observe it. So we are not dealing with the ideal of courage
or how to get rid of fear or how to suppress it; we want to understand it, for the
moment you understand something, you are free of it. And freedom does not
come through ideals. Freedom and the beauty of freedom come when you
understand what actually is, when you really understand your own confusion,
your own callousness, your own brutality. Out of that observation, out of that
awareness with care, with real attention, comes the beauty of freedom.
We are going to observe and learn. Observe your own fear. Now, sitting
there, you may not be aware of your fear. You are only aware when it comes. So
perhaps we can take a thing like attachment. You are all attached to your
families, to your jobs, to your opinions, to your conclusions, to what you think.
Aren’t you? Now watch what you are attached to—it may be your wife, your
children, the things you have invented as gods, or karma, reincarnation. Just
observe that you are attached. Now, when you are attached to something, there is
the desire to dominate it, to hold it, to possess it, either the wife, the husband, the
children, or an opinion, or a judgment. When you dominate something and hold
on, what takes place in your mind? There is always uncertainty about its
permanence. Right? Where there is attachment, there must be the uncertainty that
the attachment may die, or that the person to whom you are attached may turn to
another, and out of that comes jealousy. So where there is attachment, there must
be fear. And being attached, you say, “I must get detached,” and you pursue
detachment. Then you ask yourself how you are to be detached. Then that
becomes a problem. Then people will tell you to do this, not to do that, to
meditate, to gradually detach yourself, become a monk, become a saint, become
a holy idiot. Whereas if you understood, observed the implications of attachment,
you would see that there is fear. But instead of understanding fear, you cultivate
detachment, which is most deadly, because when you cultivate detachment you
become callous, you become indifferent, you withdraw, you resist, you never
look at the beauty of a tree or the sky or the lovely sunset, because all that means
attachment. So by a philosophy of detachment you become a terribly ugly human
being. Therefore find out that where there is attachment there must be fear.
Now, we are going to understand what fear is, understand nonverbally, which
means you have to look at your fear yourself, learn about it. So there is fear.
What is fear—the fact, not the cause, of fear? One is afraid of death. Let’s take
that as an instance. What is that fear of suddenly coming to an end, suddenly
getting detached from your moorings, suddenly getting detached from your
family, from all your knowledge, from your position, prestige, from your beastly
little houses and cars? What causes fear? What is the process of fear? Please
investigate with the speaker the way of fear. You have had physical pain a week
ago or last year. You think about that pain, hoping that it won’t come back again.
michael s
(Michael S)
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