I’m a prisoner of time
I’m a ticking clock
I’m an inmate trying
To pick the lock
I’m a prisoner of time
I do decree
Until I can’t believe in
What I call “me”
I’m a prisoner of time
I’m thoroughly bound
I’m the business of keeping
I stand my ground
I’m imprisoned by fear.
The shadow’s always there,
Even when I turn out the lights.
Fear is awareness of danger, so it’s a mistake to demonize it. When Krishnamurti talked about living without fear he was referring to the false sense of danger engendered by the false sense of self.
If the brain cares to understand why it puts its false sense of itself first and foremost, it can’t blame anything other than itself. So instead of blaming something particular for its disorderly operation, the brain needs to awaken to what it is actually doing constantly.
The shadow is not a demon, it’s truth we don’t want to see.
Yes, but why call it “the shadow”? Why blame fear?
The conditioned brain decides, chooses what the truth is instead of being choicelessly aware.
For me the word fear points to a type of suffering seemingly inherent in being human. It’s the dread of impermanence, loss, death.
Yes, it’s the reminder of one’s mortality activated by the sense of danger, but it isn’t suffering when it is just the occasional awareness of danger.
The imagined self, however, can “die” any moment, so the conditioned brain suffers the constant fear of psychological death every moment. That’s suffering.
Seems onto me psych fear requires psych time requires identification with psych self.
“I” is the prison of life.
Trying to drink water from oasis mirage?
There is no lock you try to pick on!
K says, “There is no wall… no division. Looook at it!”
Your ego stands firm, to keep and strengthen its space which is strictly within the mirage, as the ego is itself a mirage or a part of it!
My job is to find out when and how it took a hold of and got on a freeride… in my life…
Fear is avoidance or movement away from anything that’s perceived (potentially) painful.
All sensing beings have inherent mechanism to avoid pain, but only cognizant beings move away from the potentiality, which is the root of suffering.
Naming fear a type of suffering is doing yourself a disservice, for fear is merely the process or structure that maintains suffering.
Fear is sustained by our lack of direct observation. We don’t see fear for what it is. Instead, we resist it, justify it or try to escape it. By naming, categorizing, or intellectualizing fear, we separate ourselves from the process of fear, creating division and perpetuating suffering. In this sense, fear can be neither avoided nor conquered but only understood through choiceless awareness.
There is another aspect of fear to keep in mind: neurochemical. This kind of fear (general anxiety, for example) might not arise from resistance to potential suffering rather from the imbalance of neurochemicals swirling through the body-brain. I’d say the two processes (resistance to dukkha, chemical imbalance) are mutually dependent, drive and snowball each other. For the majority of people, resistance probably precedes brain neuro-imbalance.
We are a physical, chemical, biological, cultural, psychological process - I don’t how we can separate those parts, apart from conceptually.
We can consider them as separate for certain purposes - if I work in the pharmaceutical industry maybe - but how does looking at them individually affect our inquiry here?
For example someone once said that the bliss of accepting death was merely due to chemicals flooding the brain - sounds like a reductive and incomplete model to me.
My slimmed-down version:
Fear arises from resistance to the thought of potential suffering.
This version sees fear as arising from rather than being synonymous with resistance (avoiding, moving away). Krishnamurti would probably go for synonymous.
I think the looking from different perspectives enriches the exploration and understanding. There is a body and a mind (and perhaps a spirit) aspect to things. Deep down perhaps there is just _________ (brahman) but it has aspects that matter.
Jein?
Do you mean to say that fear is “resistance to the thought of potential suffering”, or that it’s a reaction to that thought?
I think of fear as alarm in response to what may be harmful or dangerous. Since false alarms are common, the alarm must be taken seriously until it is clearly a false alarm.
I mean the latter, fear arises in reaction (repulsion) to a thought (suffering).
The alarm sensitivity is tricky. Too low and you miss threats, too high and you’re paranoid.
Getting back to the problem of being prisoners of time…
Is our problem that we are stuck in the third dimension because we think time (the forth dimension) is measurable; because we haven’t realized that time is relative?
If time is relative, relative to what? To how fast and continuous one’s stream of consciousness flows? If that’s what determines our sense of time, and we really want to find out what time actually is, then all we have to do is stop our streaming…but we can’t.
All we know about time is that the streaming consciousness of the conditioned brain does not stop for longer than two seconds before it resumes, and it’s those brief gaps that give rise to insight into what time is, and how the conditioned brain deals with it.
That’s the body’s neuro-chemical reaction, physical experience of fear. Psychological fear is the result of thought projecting an imagined future based on past experiences.
Psychological fear is the continuous movement of thought in time (recalling, comparing, projecting). There is no separate psychological entity reacting to this process; it’s all one and the same flow. Body is the one reacting, not fear.
“Time is relative” means that time does not have a fixed, universal flow. It can vary depending on speed, gravity, or even perception. In physics, it is a measurable phenomenon tied to space and motion; in life, it reflects the subjective nature of human experience. In any case time is measurement.
Would you clarify what is the problem?