We, as human beings separated, isolated, have not been able to solve
our problems; although highly educated, cunning, self-centered, capable of extraordinary
things outwardly, yet inwardly, we are more or less what we have been for thousands of
years. We hate, we compete, we destroy each other; which is what is actually going on at
the present time. You have heard the experts talking about some recent war; they are not
talking about human beings being killed, but about destroying airfields, blowing up this
or that. There is this total confusion in the world, of which one is quite sure we are all
aware; so what shall we do? As a friend some time ago told the speaker: "You cannot
do anything; you are beating your head against a wall. Things will go on like this
indefinitely; fighting, destroying each other, competing and being caught in various forms
of illusion. This will go on. Do not waste your life and time." Aware of the tragedy
of the world, the terrifying events that may happen should some crazy person press a
button; the computer taking over man’s capacities, thinking much quicker and more
accurately — what is going to happen to the human being? This is the vast problem we
are facing.
There is an element of violence in most of us that has never been
resolved, never been wiped away, so that we can live totally without violence. Not being
able to be free of violence we have created the idea of its opposite, non-violence.
Non-violence is non-fact. Violence is a fact. Non-violence does not exist, except as an
idea. What exists, "what is," is violence. It is like those people in India who
say they worship the idea of non-violence, they preach about it, talk about it, copy it
— they are dealing with a non-fact, non-reality, with an illusion. What is a fact is
violence, major or minor, but violence. When you pursue non-violence, which is an
illusion, which is not an actuality, you are cultivating time. That is, "I am
violent, but I will be non-violent." The "I will be" is time, which is the
future, a future that has no reality; it is invented by thought as an opposite of
violence. It is the postponement of violence that creates time. If there is an
understanding and so the ending of violence, there is no psychological time.
Do not ask me what psychological time is. Ask that question of
yourself. Perhaps the speaker may prompt you, put it into words, but it is your own
question. One has had a son, a brother, a wife, father. They are gone. They can never
return. They are wiped away from the face of the earth. Of course, one can invent a belief
that they are living on other planes. But one has lost them; there is a photograph on the
piano or the mantelpiece. One’s remembrance of them is in psychological time. How one
had lived, how they loved me; what help they were; they helped to cover up one’s
loneliness. The remembrance of them is a movement in time. They were there yesterday and
gone today. That is, a record has been formed in the brain. That remembrance is a
recording on the tape of the brain; and that tape is playing all the time. How one walked
with them in the woods, one’s sexual remembrances, their companionship, the comfort
one derived from them. All that is gone, and the tape is playing on. This tape is memory
and memory is time. If you are interested, go into it very deeply.
Most of us are afraid of something or of many things; you may be afraid
of your wife, of your husband, afraid of losing a job; afraid of not having security in
old age, afraid of public opinion — which is the most silly form of fear —
afraid of so many things — darkness, death and so on. Now we are going to examine
together, not what we are afraid of, but what fear is in itself. We are not talking about
the object of fear, but about the nature of fear, how fear arises, how you approach it. Is
there a motive behind one’s approach to the problem of fear? Obviously one usually
has a motive; the motive to go beyond it, to suppress it, to avoid it, to neglect it; and
one has been used to fear for the greater part of one’s life, so one puts up with it.
If there is any kind of motive, one cannot see it clearly, cannot come near it. And when
one looks at fear, does one consider that fear is separate from oneself, as if one was an
outsider, looking inside, or an insider looking out? But is fear different from oneself?
Obviously not, nor is anger. But through education, through religion, one is made to feel
separate from it, so that one must fight it, must get over it. One never asks if that
thing called fear is actually separate from oneself. It is not, and in understanding that,
one understands that the observer is the observed.