Peace is a state of mind; it is the freedom from all desire to be secure. The mind-heart that seeks security must always be in the shadow of fear. Our desire is not only for material security, but much more for inner, psychological security, and it is this desire to be inwardly secure through virtue, through belief, through a nation, that creates limiting and conflicting groups and ideas.
This desire to be secure, to reach a coveted end, breeds the acceptance of direction, the following of example, the worship of success, the authority of leaders, saviours, and gurus, all of which is called positive teaching; but it is really thoughtlessness and imitation. ‘Is it not possible to direct or be directed without making oneself or another into an authority, a saviour?’ We are trying to understand the urge to be directed. What is this urge? Is it not the outcome of fear? Being insecure, seeing impermanency, there is the urge to find something secure, permanent; but this urge is the impulse of fear.
Instead of understanding fear, we run away from it, and the very running away is fear. One takes flight into the known, the known being beliefs, rituals, patriotism, the formulas of teachers, the reassurances of priests, and so on. These in turn bring conflict between man and man, so the problem keeps going from one generation to another. If one would solve the problem, one must explore and understand the root of it. This so-called positive teaching, the what-to-think of religions, including communism, gives continuity to fear; so positive teaching is destructive. There is no personal approach to truth, any more than there is to scientific discoveries. The idea that there are separate paths to truth which has different aspects is unreal; it is the speculative thought of the intolerant trying to be tolerant.