BENGALURU: Most of us have grooves of habit, conscious or unconscious, habits that we think are right and wrong; the good and the bad habits, the behaviour habits and the habits which are not respectable, which are considered by society immoral. But the immorality of society is in itself immoral. You can see that’s fairly simple, because society is based on aggression, on acquisitiveness, and on the sense of one dominating the other, and so on – the whole cultural system. And we have accepted such morality and we live in that frame of morality, and we accept it naturally, and inevitably, and it has become a habit.
To change that habit, to see how extraordinarily immoral it is – though that immorality has become highly respectable – to see it, and to act not with a mind that is caught in habits. To act in a wholly different way is only possible when we understand the nature of fear. We would change very easily any habit, break through any entrenched, deep-rooted habit, if there was no fear that in the very breaking of it we might suffer more, be uncertain, be unclear. Please, watch yourselves. Watch your own state of mind – that most of us would easily, happily break a habit if there was not on the other side, fear, uncertainty. So what makes most of us hold on to our habits, to our traditions, as a nationality, belief in God – you know all this, all that idiocy of ideology is because there is fear.
So if we could go into this question of fear, not intellectually, not verbally, but being aware of one’s own psychological fears, examine them. That is, give fear space so that it can flower, and in the very flowering of it, watch it. You know, fear is a very strange phenomena, both biologically, physically, and psychologically. If we could understand the psychological fears, then biological, physiological fears can be easily remedied, can be easily understood.
But unfortunately, we start with physical fears as a beginning and neglect the psychological fears. Such as disease, we are very frightened of disease, pain and so our whole mind is concerned with it, and we do not know how to come to grips with that pain without bringing about a series of conflicts within the psyche, within oneself. Whereas if one could begin with the psychological fears, the fears that one has within the skin, as it were, then perhaps the physical fears can be understood and be dealt with, with sanity.