Continuing on the summarizing through excerpts from “Talks and Dialogues” JD Krishnamurti.
We need to understand freedom. Do we really want to be free? Maybe
we do not want to be free of every burden; we want to keep some of our
pleasures and satisfying complex ideologies and get rid of only those which
cause us pain. So is it really freedom, if we want to be free from pain, from anxiety from anger. Freedom
from something is just a reaction, and hence not freedom at all.
Freedom is entirely different from any reaction, inclination or desire.
One can be free from a dogma, easily, by kicking it out. The motive for that could
be that dogma was no longer convenient, fashionable, reasonable, popular, etc.
These are mere reactions. Like the hippies. Their revolt to the society led to
conformity in another thing – the hippies. It is not real freedom. Real freedom means, that the mind is free from
every dependence, slavery, acceptance, conformity. Do we want such a freedom?
Such freedom means solitude, a mind which is completely alive without any
dependence on stimulation, experience and ideas. Freedom of this kind means aloneness,
solitude. It is only in this solitude that one can be in a real relationship with
another – without any dominance, no friction and dependence. Is this what every
individual demands and insists upon – a freedom in which there is no
leadership, no tradition, no authority?
Similarly when we say we want to be free from fear, it is just a
reaction. Not real freedom. We just want to be free from pain, not the
pleasure. But pain is the shadow of pleasure. Both are not separable.
One of the main features of fear is the non acceptance of what one is
and the inability to face oneself. We as human beings are products of time,
culture, experience, knowledge of a thousand years. Can a mind which is brought
up in this culture ever have this kind of freedom? We are never in solitude as
we mentioned above. We are not alone. We are a bundle of memories, handed down
through centuries. In understanding solitude one will begin to understand the necessity
of living with oneself as one actually is . Not as one thinks how one ought to
be or as one has been. Look at oneself without any false modesty, without any
fear, any condemnation or justification – just live with what one actually is.
Living with oneself doesn’t mean get used to or to accept oneself. In
observing myself I find that I am jealous, anxious or violent, and I live with
it, I observe, because only then can I understand it. But it is not like how we
get used to the sound of river or wind – we don’t realise it after a couple of
days. I cannot accept my violence or get used to it. I have to take care of it
like a newly planted tree – protect it from sun and wind. In the same way I have
to care for my violence or anxiety, and love it and observe it. Not love being
anxious, but rather watch it closely and then I see my relationship with
anxiety or violence and then there is not conflict.
This is not easy, to live with oneself, and observe oneself always
without becoming morbid, depressed or elated. This is one of the major reasons
for fear – we don’t want to live with what we are.
Should fear be divided into the conscious and unconscious fears? Or is
there just fear, which we translate into different forms. Like Desire is always
the same – only objects of desire change. Similarly maybe be fear is same, but
it translates into different fears. How can one look at fear which is
indivisible and not fragmentary, without the fragmentation which the mind has
cultivated. How to look at fear as a whole with a fragmented mind? Thought –
the whole process of machinery of thinking- is fragmentation, it breaks up everything.
Thought also, is always old and never free. Thought is the reaction of memory
and memory is old. Hence when our mind uses thought to look at fear as a whole,
it cant. Thought reduces fear into fragments.
Mind can only look at total fear when there is no movement of thought.
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