Quotes by Krishnamurti

You can also observe that where there is pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure, there is also the nourishing of fear. Haven’t you noticed it? Fear of the thing I have done yesterday, fear of the physical pain which I had a week ago; thinking about it sustains the fear. There is no ending of that pain when it’s over. It is finished, but I carry it over by thinking about it.

So thought sustains and gives nourishment to pleasure as well as to fear. Thought is responsible for this. There is fear of the present, of the future, fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of not fulfilling, fear of not being loved, wanting to be loved—there are so many fears, all created by the machinery of thought. So there is the rationality of thought and the irrationality of thought.

There is a deeper meaning to death than merely the physical organism coming to an end; that is, psychologically coming to an end – the ‘me’, the ‘you’, coming abruptly to an end. The ‘me’, the ‘you’, that has accumulated knowledge, suffered, lived with memories pleasurable and aching, with all the travail of the known, with the psychological conflicts, the things that one has not understood, the things that one wanted to do and has not done. The psychological struggle, the memories, the pleasure, the pains – all that comes to an end. That is actually what one is afraid of, not what lies beyond death. One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end. The known being your house, your family, your wife, your children, your ideas, your furniture, your books, the things with which you have identified yourself. When that is gone you feel completely isolated, lonely, that is what you are afraid of. That is a form of death and that is the only death.

Fear can exist only in relationship; fear cannot exist by itself, in isolation. There is no such thing as abstract fear; there is fear of the known or the unknown, fear of what one has done or what one may do; fear of the past or of the future. The relationship between what one is and what one desires to be causes fear. Fear arises when one interprets the fact of what one is in terms of reward and punishment. Fear comes with responsibility and the desire to be free from it. There is fear in the contrast between pain and pleasure. Fear exists in the conflict of the opposites. The worship of success brings the fear of failure. In becoming good, there is the fear of evil; in becoming complete, there is the fear of loneliness; in becoming great, there is the fear of being small. Comparison is not understanding; it is prompted by fear of the unknown in relation to the known. Fear is uncertainty in search of security.

The effort to become is the beginning of fear, the fear of being or not being. The mind, the residue of experience, is always in fear of the unnamed, the challenge. The mind, which is name, word, memory, can function only within the field of the known; and the unknown, which is challenge from moment to moment, is resisted or translated by the mind in terms of the known. This resistance or translation of the challenge is fear; for the mind can have no communion with the unknown. The known cannot commune with the unknown; the known must cease for the unknown to be.

Fear does extraordinary things to most of us. It creates all kinds of illusions and problems. Until we go into it very deeply and really understand it, fear will always distort our actions. Fear twists our ideas and makes crooked the ways of our life; it creates barriers between people, and it certainly destroys love. So the more we go into fear, the more we understand and are really free of it, the greater will be our contact with all that is around us. At present our vital contacts with life are very few, are they not? But if we can free ourselves of fear we shall have wide contacts, deep understanding, real sympathy, loving consideration, and great will be the extension of our horizon.

Watch pain carefully, not rushing to the dentist immediately, when you watch it, stay with it, not morbidly but see all that is happening. How you react to it and so on, so on. If you do that the pain lessens, naturally. In the same way if you hold this jewel. Fear is an extraordinary jewel, extraordinary something which has dominated human beings for forty thousand years and more. And if you can hold it and look at it, then one begins to see the ending of it. Not the gradually, the ending of it completely. Which means fear is part of our self-centred, egotistic activity. Fear is, when the ego, the ‘me’, is isolated, when the ‘me’, the self, this self-centred movement, because it is separative, because it is the very essence of conflict and all the rest of it, that is the root of fear.