BENGALURU: There are many factors that bring about fear. Either we trim the branches of fear - take one branch, one leaf of fear after another, and examine them, or find out the root of it, not merely the branches, the expression, the action of it, but rather examine very closely the beginning of it, the origin from which fear and the consequences of fear arise. If we will, not as a group therapy which is rather unnecessary, but if you will take your own particular fear, whatever it be - death, insecurity, the sense of desperate loneliness, the sense of wanting to fulfil, the feeling of insufficiency in oneself - whatever that fear is, can we first look at it, not run away from it, not substitute it by another thought, or try to avoid it, go beyond it, or try to conquer it.
We are trying this morning to observe the root of it, the cause of it, the origin of it. Most human beings throughout the world - this is one of the factors - get hurt, both physically as well as psychologically, more inwardly than outwardly. This hurt remains for the rest of one’s life unless one completely dissolves it. And that is one of the factors of fear, being hurt from childhood, school, college, university and so on - if you are lucky to go through university, and I don’t know why one goes through university.
But there is this deep wound which may be conscious, or unconscious. And when one is wounded psychologically, inwardly, the consequences of that hurt are building a wall around oneself - I hope we are following all this together, watching your own hurt, if you are at all sensitively aware of that fact. We are all hurt from childhood in one way or another. The consequences of that hurt is to resist, is to avoid, not to be further hurt. And not to be further hurt implies to build a psychological resistance. And the consequences of that is more isolation, greater fear.
That’s one of the factors of fear. The other factor is time. Time being that which has happened, might recur again, and time as future when one has no hope, when one is desperately hopeless. Time plays a great part in our lives. Time as an interval between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’ or ‘what might be’, and time, an interval between now and the ending of life, which is death. So time is a factor of fear. One of the factors. Please, we are not intellectually examining verbally. We are actually seeing ourselves, seeing the nature of our own fear, and the fear of being nobody, because everybody wants to be somebody, the fear of not being able to fulfil, not achieving, not becoming.
The ‘becoming’ implies time. So time is a great factor in the structure of fear. Then there is the factor of great, bottomless loneliness. Are we aware of this loneliness? One may have a lot of friends, a happy family and so on, but everyone knows, when one is alertly watchful, of this loneliness, from which arises depression, anxiety and fear of being lonely, utterly unrelated to anything. One is sure that one has been through all this, through this loneliness, one knows this.
And being aware of this loneliness one tries to escape from it. The escape is the fear. And that escape may be the church, may be god, may be some fantasy, some imagination, some kind of belief, faith and all that, or even intellectual knowledge - to run away from this agonising, destructive loneliness. And this loneliness is the self-centred activity, the tremendous concern about oneself - this concern to be, to become and to achieve, and so on.