"What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it"
About this Quote
Krishnamurti doesn’t offer comfort here; he offers a trapdoor. The list of common reflexes - “running away or controlling or suppressing” - is delivered like an inventory of polite self-deceptions, the routines we dress up as maturity. By calling them “resistance,” he reframes what we usually praise as strength into a form of cowardice with better PR. The intent isn’t to help you manage fear but to remove the managerial fantasy altogether.
The pivot is “understanding fear,” a phrase that sounds gentle until you notice his method: “watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.” That’s not therapy-speak; it’s a demand for attention so unmediated it borders on aggression. The subtext is that fear feeds on narration - the mental story about what might happen, what it means about you, how you’ll look. “Watch it” implies dropping the story and meeting the sensation before thought turns it into a personal identity project.
Context matters: Krishnamurti spent decades attacking systems - gurus, religions, ideologies - that promise liberation through technique. This quote is a miniature of that entire campaign. “Not how to escape from it” lands as an anti-market statement in a world that sells escapes as products and calls them wellness. He’s insisting that freedom isn’t a future state achieved by self-improvement; it’s the clarity that arrives when the mind stops negotiating with discomfort and sees fear without flinching.
The pivot is “understanding fear,” a phrase that sounds gentle until you notice his method: “watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.” That’s not therapy-speak; it’s a demand for attention so unmediated it borders on aggression. The subtext is that fear feeds on narration - the mental story about what might happen, what it means about you, how you’ll look. “Watch it” implies dropping the story and meeting the sensation before thought turns it into a personal identity project.
Context matters: Krishnamurti spent decades attacking systems - gurus, religions, ideologies - that promise liberation through technique. This quote is a miniature of that entire campaign. “Not how to escape from it” lands as an anti-market statement in a world that sells escapes as products and calls them wellness. He’s insisting that freedom isn’t a future state achieved by self-improvement; it’s the clarity that arrives when the mind stops negotiating with discomfort and sees fear without flinching.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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