BENGALURU: What is fear? We are trying to go into this question of fear so completely that your mind is never afraid, therefore you are free of all dependence on another, inwardly, psychologically. So we are taking a journey together, not being led, someone ahead of you and you following in his footsteps. The beauty of freedom is that you don’t leave a mark. The eagle in its flight does not leave a mark, only the scientist does. And in enquiring into this question of freedom there must be not only the scientific observation, but also the flight of the eagle that doesn’t leave a mark at all; both are required; which is, both the verbal explanation and the non-verbal perception, bearing in mind that the description is never the described, the explanation is never that thing which is explained, that is, the word is never the thing.
So if all this is very clear then we can proceed to find out for ourselves – not through the speaker, not through his words, not through his ideas or thoughts – to find out for ourselves whether the mind can be completely free from fear. All right? Shall we go on from there? Please, this is not an introduction; if you haven’t heard the first part clearly and understood it, you can’t go on to the next.
To enquire there must be freedom, as we said, to look, freedom from prejudice, conclusions, concepts, ideals, prejudices, so that you can observe actually for yourself what is fear. And when you observe very closely, intimately, is there fear at all? That is: you can only observe very, very, closely, intimately what is fear, when the observer is the observed.
We are going to go into that. So what is fear? How does it come about? The obvious physical fears can be understood, like the dangers, physical dangers, in which there is instant response; that’s fairly easy to understand, into which we need not go too much. But we are talking about psychological fears; how do these psychological fears arise? What is their origin? And whether they can end? That’s the issue. What is fear, fear of something that happened yesterday; the fear of something that might happen later on today or tomorrow. Fear of the known and fear of the unknown, which is tomorrow – the unknown being death and all the rest of it, we won’t go into that question this morning.