If you have never heard of Jiddu or heard him speak- let me offer this video as a sample of his depth and power. Here he speaks about the root cause of fear and and on how to end it.
This is my tribute to his contemplations and a practical tool that aims to dissolve fear.
He famously said,
Either we deal with the root of fear or trim the branches of fear. Jiddu Krishnamurti
Here he asks us to self investigate these 6 radical suggestions…
What is the root cause of fear?
1. The cause of Fear is our Attachment to Thought and Time.
2. We are attached to our thoughts through their feelings and underlying emotions. We are attached to our thoughts by the sense that we are the authors of these thoughts in past, present and future tense.
3. And the author of these thoughts is our sense of egoic self.
3. We have to discover that Thought and Time are necessary in the physical world but unnecessary in the psyche.
4. This realisation in the brain requires great attention/awareness.
5. We have to get to a level of attention where the brain is actively watching itself to make sure that thought and time do not enter into its realm.
6. So that the brain that has accumulated fear for centuries can separate where it’s necessary and where it is not necessary to allow thought and time to enter the process of living.
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The practical tool that I have found useful in the dissolution of my fears is Self-Observation which is something Jiddu insists we practice as a lifelong discipline of self-discovery.
Self-observation is a practice I use to disarm the emotion and feelings that come attached to the thought.
You might have noticed that we have no power over our thoughts. They rise and fall at their own will. Each thought comes with a corresponding feeling and emotion that settles; leaving us at the mercy of their unpredictable effect. Self-observation can help us be free of their effect on us.
Self-observation is an attention exercise where you lovingly and silently observe yourself by turning your attention inward, and nonjudgmentally watch your thoughts as they rise and fall in your mind.
It’s like a film of protective oil that coats our minds and does not allow the muddy thought splashes to leave their mark.
If you have never tried this. Try this small self-observation experiment today. You might be surprised by what you find.
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Just sit quietly in your room without any stimulation to distract you. Close your eyes. Focus on your breath. Watch it a few times. Now you are ready.
Wait for the next thought to cross your mind. It will arise on its own like a bubble of air from the depth of your mind. It might be a memory from the past or a wish from the future or a sensation from the present.
I want you to slowly observe three things about the thought.
- The description of the thought.
- The feeling attached to it.
- The emotion underlying it.
For example, I just tried this on myself…
I had a thought come up of being in the sunny, backyard of my holiday home. I was staring at the garden trees and the passing clouds over a beautiful blue sky. It was a bright morning. I was alone.
Next, observe something deeper.
What is the feeling of that thought?
I was feeling peaceful, relaxed, and extremely content.
Next, go deeper and observe the emotion behind the feeling.
I was experiencing a sense of Awe and Joy.
Notice here I am intentionally separating the feeling from the emotion. We often lump them together as synonyms. They are not.
I found this great distinction on laughteronlineuniversity.com
Emotions: Essentially emotions are physical and instinctive. They have been programmed into our genes over many, many years of evolution and are hard-wired. While they are complex and involve a variety of physical and cognitive responses (many of which are not well understood), their general purpose is to produce a specific response to a stimulus. For example, You are on your own and foot in the savanna wilderness, you see a lion, and you instantly get scared. Emotions can be measured objectively by blood flow, brain activity, facial expressions, and body stance. Important note: Emotions are carried out by the limbic system, our emotional processing center. This means that they are illogical, irrational, and unreasonable because the limbic system is separate from — sitting literally behind — the neocortex, the part of our brain that deals with conscious thoughts, reasoning, and decision making.
Feelings on the other hand play out in our heads. They are mental associations and reactions to an emotion that are personal and acquired through experience. There are over 4,000 feelings listed in the English language. Most people can easily recognize at least 500 of those, but when asked to list emotions they can only list five to ten. (Most recently, an academic study was done at the University of California, Berkeley using self-reporting of subjects distinguished 27 discrete emotions.)
The emotion comes first and is universal. What kind of feeling(s) it will then become varies enormously from person to person and from situation to situation because feelings are shaped by individual temperament and experience. Two people can feel the same emotion but label it under different names. For example, You are in a zoo on your own and you see a lion behind bars, and your feelings may range from curiosity to admiration or bitterness if you believe lions should never be caged.
Now let me share a different thought that crossed my mind to illustrate a potential disturbance:
I had a passing thought of being attracted by the perfume of a stranger on a train. I looked up to see a young blonde girl sitting a few seats away from me putting on her lipstick. It was a dark shade of red. The train was relatively empty and she glanced at me a few times as she slowly turned her lips red.
The feeling of this thought was of awkward arousal and excitement.
The underlying emotion was a mix of shame, guilt, and a little self-disgust for feeling aroused by a stranger.
This thought now has the power to disturb. Because the underlying emotion is at odds with our sense of self that is not supposed to feel aroused. Now if you start to believe that this thought is who you are then you have a problem to solve. To either try to eliminate this feeling or to enjoy it. You have just allowed a Thought takeover.
But instead, as Jiddu suggests, what if we allow the brain to observe itself.
To allow the thought to arrive and display its feelings and underlying emotions and your brain simply observes this as a thought and not as a definition of self.
It observes the feeling that thought creates and how it contradicts with the underlying emotion. You let the brain watch itself feel. You become the observer of the mind.
You become the You that is behind the thought.
You start to stop taking yourself so seriously, As the author. As the Judge. As the center of the universe. You start to see that your thoughts are not you.
In that instant you become free.
Even if …for just an instant.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Julia Caesar on Unsplash