Continuing on the summarizing through excerpts from “Talks and Dialogues” JD Krishnamurti.
We are serious about things which give us pleasure and satisfaction. But
very few are serious in seeing the whole problem of existence, conflicts and suffering.
To be serious about these issues means continual attention to these matters,
not just sporadic interest, according to our requirement or convenience. If we
are not serious about these issues, then we fritter away our life discussing
endlessly things that really don’t matter, which is a waste of energy. The more
one is serious inwardly, the more they are mature. Maturity is not a matter of
age, or great experiences, or knowledge. This maturity comes only when there is
wider and deeper knowing of oneself.
As discussed in the previous posts, in order to resolve fear, we have to
look at fear completely, without any fragmentation. We are so afraid of so many
things, and we may wish that we could solve each fear by itself, one by one.
But that is immature, because there is only fear. But can we look at fear? Most
of us run away from it or suppress it or control it or look at other forms of
escape. We do not know how to live
with the fear. Can we look at it without looking for escape, justification or
suppression?
So what does this looking mean? I can only look at fear without doing
anything to that fear, when I have a quite mind, when my mind is not chattering
to itself, carrying a dialogue with itself. Only then can we look at fear
completely. One can observe a tree or cloud with a fairly quite mind because it
is something not very important to us. But when we have to look at fear,
despair, when we are directly in contact with loneliness, with jealousy, with
such ugly state of mind, can we still do it?
It is only with a quite mind, we can look at fear completely, observe
it, know and understand it, its movement, everything. This is what JD means by
living with fear. Have we every tried living with something or someone like
that? Observing everything. It is possible only when our mind is free from all
opinions, judgements and values, conclusions or formula. For that the mind
needs to be so alive and subtle.
So once we observe fear and live with it, we will ask – who is that
entity who is living with the fear. Who is observing? Is it a dead entity ? (a
static being who has accumulated a lot of knowledge and information about
himself, but all this experience and knowledge is the past, and the past is a
dead thing) Is the observer a static dead past or a living thing? Are we a dead
thing watching a living thing (fear) or a living thing watching a living thing?
In the observer the two states exists – when we observe a tree closely,
everything about the tree, how it lives, moves, feels – it is a living thing.
But when we look at it with accumulated knowledge about that tree, and the
knowledge is a dead thing. But when we look at it without any accumulated
knowledge, then we (a living thing) is looking at a living thing (the tree).
Another example – When I look at my friend, am I observing with the
memories of yesterday? Are you aware that yesterday is contaminating the
present? OR are you observing as though there was no yesterday at all? The past
is always overshadowing the present. The pleasures, flatteries, insults,
memories of yesterday touches the present and give it a twist. The observer is
both the past and the present. Anything of past is already dead. So the
observer is both alive and dead and this is how he looks.
When the observer can go beyond, so that he is neither the past nor the present.
Then the observer is the observed which
is a living thing. This is real meditation. It is because the observer lives in
the past and the present which is touched by the past, that there is division
between the observer and the observed.
Observer being the observed doesn’t mean identification with the observed.
For example, a painter could sit in front of a tree for days, months or years,
until he was the tree. He did not actually become the tree, or identified with
it, but he was the tree. There was no space between the painter and the tree,
no space between the observer and observed. He was totally the tree, and only
in that state could he paint. If we can understand this, we would forever be
free from fear and only then we will know what love is.
We must understand the observer and not the observed, because it is of
little value. Fear itself is of little value. What is of value is how we look
at it, what we do or do not do with fear. As we watch the observer, which is
ourself, we see that we are made of the past. Memories, hopes, guilt, knowledge
are all of the past. When we say ‘we know’ it means what we knew yesterday, not
right now. We are the past, living in the present which is overshadowed by the
past.
When the state of mind is such, the observer has no space between
himself and the thing observed, in which the past is no longer interfering at
any time, only then the observer is the observed, and only then that fear comes
totally to an end.
As long as there is fear, there is no love. What is love? Sex, belonging
to somebody, being nourished? But in these there is always anxiety, fear,
jealousy, guilt. There is so much conflict, there cannot be love. Love has
nothing to do with pleasure or desire. Pleasure goes with fear, and a mind which
lives in fear seeks pleasure. Pleasure increases fear, so one is caught in a
vicious circle. By being aware of the circle, by watching it, living with it,
never trying to find a way out of it (the cycle is broken not because you are
doing something about it), you will break that cycle.
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