Might the question in part be, what is the response of the mind fearful of death, the mind that knows fear, that may panic, that may be dulled to an extent, and what the response of the mind free of fear, and able to fully meet the fear or the threat manifested by the other, such as to be fully what is needed as a response, such as to totally disarm that other psychologically?
Very, very good question Dominic! You hit the point.
So we have these two “mental organizations” (my definition): one which reacts to fear and gather around itself more and more fear till it explode in violence and another organization which is “able to fully meet the fear or the threat manifested by the other”.
Which kind of “organization” we are supporting?
No, Voyager, I’m not. I have no professional, social, political or religious allegiance or identification. To answer your question clearly, I live in Canada, was born in France, my parents were Jews from Poland. But I truly don’t consider myself Canadian, French, Jewish, Polish or anything else of the kind.
Good! (
Well, I hope I didn’t offend you thinking you were American… I thought it was a chance to have first hand information about the situation there.
Good! (
May I ask you if that caused you some problems or nuisances?
Even if I don’t have that fine and varied “heritage” as you, I’ve alwas felt like a foreigner in my own country. Born in a small island in the south, with different traditions and even language from the rest of Italy I was mocked every time I set my foot in the continent. At the same time I could (or perhaps wanted) never identify myself with the closed and narrow-minded mentality prevalent in the island. So I think I am like the black people in America who cannot identify themselves with a country which ward them off. Many times I felt the burden and disconfort of this situation yet at the same time it gives you a certain form of freedom.
No, of course they have not, Voyager.
Nonetheless, I think that there is a difference between reacting and acting emotionally in the very moment of being persecuted, of being brutalized, tortured, and so on, and reacting “rationally” to persecution and brutality that I see on the news from my comfortable armchair. No?
I can’t know for a fact what I would do “if” I would come face to face with the challenges of persecution and brutality for example but, as for me, I CANNOT exclude the possibility that I would kill someone if I was able to do it to save a child or myself. I’m not a violent person but I really can’t say. And to me, that’s the difference: I think there are certain things one can only know or discover in the moment and it is no good imagining “what I would do IF……”.
Until adulthood, I never identified as Polish because of the stories of anti-semitism I heard as a child. For the same reason, I did identify as Jewish - not because my family observed the Jewish religion, except very superficially. Then when we moved to Canada (not before), I identified as French as well. I think it was perhaps a way for that child to express being homesick for my friends, mountain views and other places I loved.
Much later, I stopped identifying ethnically, nationally or historically. I no longer saw France through the rose-coloured glasses of childhood. I no longer viewed Jewish suffering as something personal to me but rather as part of mankind’s suffering - the Cambodian, African, Armenian, Gypsy, Rohingya and Uyghur genocides, the residential schools in North America and Australia, the Inquisitions, the Communist “re-educations”, the divine rulers, the tortures, and so on. I won’t list all the atrocities. We are all well acquainted with them.
So my memories of ethnic and national affiliation or belonging are intact but they are no longer identified or interpreted as personal to “me”. I did not suffer personally but there used to be self-pity because of the memories/knowledge of my family’s suffering. But there is no longer any self-pity. Those in my family who suffered are long gone and the atrocities continue.
There also used to be attachment to and self-identification with the memories of my childhood in France. Also no longer.
As for what you say about feeling like a stranger in your own country, I understand. But aren’t even those who ARE supposedly “united” by their nationalistic, xenophobic and racist views, ultimately also strangers, isolated from the whole of life? The idea that “their” country is truly theirs, or that “my” country is truly mine, is a misunderstanding of the facts of life, as I see it.
When one actually feels no love, compassion, affection, only hate, anger, anxiety and fear, doesn’t that preclude actual relationship with others, with nature and with the cosmos as a whole? My own country or my own home must be a place where I am at peace, a place I love. Can one feel truly “at home” or at peace anywhere when one is filled with hate, anger, rage, fear, arrogance, and so on? I don’t know if this makes any sense. How do you see it?
(P.S. Voyager, I don’t know if this will post. I have been notified that I have replied to you too many times. So if this does post, I will nonetheless take a break from posting.)
1 Like
Hi Huguette,
That seems to be a robotic device that has happened to many of us when we began posting. Please don’t pay any attention to it.
OK, thanks for the information, Dan.
Yes, not being bound, tied, attached to any idea no matter how enticing, there is a certain freedom.
You are right. We cannot be sure of our reaction sitting in an armchair. Even. K. when someone asked him this question, said that there must be intelleligence in your daily life and then that intelligence will act according to circustances. (My wording). Which in essence means you can never know what will be the right action in advance. But he also said that there must be no violence in us, and when one has lived without violence all his/her life then intelligence will be able to act.
Personally I’m a very emotive person and from my past behaviours I know that I’m apt to react emotionally, so it would be arrogance and hypocrisy on my part if I’d pretend now to face fear without reacting to it. But as we are discussing the possibilities, Dominic’s question remains a very good question.
"As for what you say about feeling like a stranger in your own country, I understand. But aren’t even those who ARE supposedly “united” by their nationalistic, xenophobic and racist views, ultimately also strangers, isolated from the whole of life? The idea that “their” country is truly theirs, or that “my” country is truly mine, is a misunderstanding of the facts of life, as I see it.
Well said. But again here we must deal with our emotional nature which makes us expect love and comprehension from others. Sometimes I feel with one foot in independence and detachment and another foot in self-commiseration.
By the way I made a mistake here translating into English. I said “stranger” but I meant foreigner. And that just to show the similitude with the American black people.
“Can one feel truly “at home” or at peace anywhere when one is filled with hate, anger, rage, fear, arrogance, and so on? I don’t know if this makes any sense. How do you see it?”
To me it makes sense and my answer would be: no. And yet I cannot help but thinking about those huge parades or meetings of the Nazi in Germany, all dressed in the same way, all with the same expression and posture… and the great sense of unity it conveys. It’s only a show of course, but that is the power of shows, of external imagine. A false sense of unity but most of us live on it!
No Voyager, K never said that. He said the ideal (of non-violence or anything else) is not a fact.
Isn’t that what he said and isn’t that what makes sense? If I’m violent, fearful, deceitful, and so on, I must be attentive to THAT and not TRY or pretend to be non-violent, not pretend that the ideal has any effect on the inner violence.
Psychological fear itself IS the reaction of the past which “I” AM. To understand my own fear is to understand the fear of mankind.
Dominic’s question is this: “what is the response of the mind fearful of death, the mind that knows fear, that may panic, that may be dulled to an extent, and what the response of the mind free of fear”.
If I fear, my response comes from that fear, and so my response is the response of the fearful mind. This can be observed. To ask what is the response of the mind free of fear is going off into abstractions and ideation.
1 Like
Fine, so let’s stick with the fearful mind. What is the fear the fearful mind is? Krishnamurti pointed out very usefully that there is no fear in what is actual, fear is only ever in the idea, or image of what is actual. And it may be said the principal fear, is the fear of death, which is the self ending. So that leaves the self with an image of its own end which is fear, which is very real to the self having it. Is this where the human brain is: in being with a self, whose end it fears?
1 Like
May be my memory failed or my wording was imprecise. Anyway I think it was here. Check for yourself.
“To ask what is the response of the mind free of fear is going off into abstractions and ideation.”
I don’t think Dominic was unaware of this possibility. His question was just a way to bring our attention to another way of dealing with fear and consequently with people who are conditioned by fear. If you consider that going off to ideation than most of K’s. questions fall under this cathegory.
I’m pasting the verbatim text. My wording was imprecise but the essence of it more or less is the same.
" If I have lived a violent life all my life - right? - then my response would be naturally violent. But if I have lived as I have without violence, not only physical violence but psychological violence, which is aggression, competition, comparison, imitation, conformity. That is all part of violence. As K has lived that way when my friend, or my sister, or my wife, is attacked - they are all dead anyhow, specially my sisters - so as I have lived I would act. You understand? It depends how I have lived. The art of living, which is the greatest art - not all the paintings, poems, that is part of art. But the greatest art is the art of living. Not according to somebody but to find out for oneself the supreme art. And if I am, if all my life, except once or twice I lost temper, that’s all right, I may - one may get irritated because of noise, and all that. But the actual feeling of violence, if one has lived with violence one will act violently. If one has not lived a life which is not violence, he will meet the circumstances as they arise, and his action will depend how he has lived. A simple answer. Right? You are not puzzled over this, are you? No."
Saanen, 2nd Q.&A. meeting, 1985
I was thinking about my first post in this thread and your first reply and I wondered what prompted your reaction.
If we reduce the whole matter to the essential, the casus belli was: I was blaming the B.L.M, you resented it because you actually supported it, justified it. Right?
Now sometimes I may appear to be too severe and too judging, and judging the other is not considered a decent behaviour… I don’t want to defend myself here, but just to state simple facts. But sincerely, if we put aside principles, your position is not morally better than mine.
My blaming comes from seeing with my own eyes the fallacy and the evil of all the so called right causes. And that has nothing to do with K.
When I was young I sympathized with the left party. The battle of the oppressed against the oppressors. When we put it like this there are little doubts which side is the right one, especially in a country which had 20 years of fascism. All my friends were of the left, we felt we were the best part of society, we even felt unconsciuosly we were better uman beings than the fascists. It’s difficult not to believe it. But along the years I discovered that under the surface the left moviments were not better than the right, and that they contained a lot of falseness and superficiality just lke the right side. And this was prior I discovered K. No, we were not better then them, and once they have won their battle the oppressed become the oppressed. So it had no sense to take sides.
(Having said that I have to add that, if fascism returned in Italy, I will oppose to it).
So, not only I don’t believe anymore in the battle of the opressed against the oppressors but also I see that it’s evil. I avoid to tell that to my friends of the left, but I think that in a forum like this one we can run the risk of being “politically uncorrect.” One can always find another interlocutor - like you - who can ever dismantle ones views. (:- 
I don’t agree (that most of K’s questions fall into this category).
1 Like
Voyager, to me this is a far far cry from saying “you/we/I must be non-violent”.
2 Likes
On the matter of fear, Krishnamurti gave the wellknown example of the snake and one’s behaviour: if one sees a snake and runs away, this running away is intelligence acting rather than fear. Now, we may think of a situation in which when there is the perception of that snake there is nowhere to run away from it or no time to run away. One has to get rid of the snake and most probably the only way to do it is to kill it. In any case there is fear of the snake but intelligence acts according to the situation. Another example Krishnamurti gives is that of fire, you take your hand away in order not to burn your hand, of course, and that is intelligence too. There is no violence in any case, but if in the presence of a snake you just kill it when you could have run away, it shows violence on your part. About the relationship between human beings, it may be different. When Krishnamurti was once confronted with a Sri Lanka communist’s contention that violence is right when you have suffered oppression , he wouldn’t agree somehow and there are the sentences:‘Iam that man’ and ‘you have made a martyr of me’, meaning that more people would just add to war because the blood of a martyr had been shed. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening now.
Ha! That’s N.Y. city for you Voyager. I can assure you that if you travel to any rural area of the U.S. and ask for directions, the average person on the street would be more than happy to help you. In some parts of the U.S. they would go out of their way to help. Yes, most Americans are no different than Italians, or French, or Indians, or Japanese, etc. N.Y. City is like another planet however, haha. I laugh because it’s an exaggeration, and there are many decent New Yorkers too. But out on the street in mid town Manhattan people are so frightened…of crime, mostly…that they resist talking to a stranger…or stopping to listen. It’s self preservation. I live about 55 miles from NY City and haven’t been there in over 40 years. I detest going there for the reason we’re discussing. It’s just an incredibly fearful, violent, rushed, mad, place. Obviously not everyone feels the same. I’m super sensitive to violence, having known it first hand, so I avoid such places if at all possible. My friends and myself were physically attacked back many years ago…walking out in Manhattan after dark. It was the most traumatic experience. There was no reason for the attack that I could see…other than pure hatred and violence in the hearts of those attacking. Well, there was bigotry involved but I won’t go into that. Its not relevant to the topic at hand I don’t think.