secret asian man

i sometimes think that ignorance is the opposite of fear. i'm not speaking of an aggressive ignorance, in which people operate maliciously with a very obvious gap in understanding and with no desire for reconciliation - i mean that without monsters and ghosts, there is no reason why one would fear at night. without the knowledge of murderers, rapists and thieves, there is no reason to clutch your bag in a big city or walk briskly to your car after a late night movie. when you aren't aware of opinion and criticism, you do not fear that you aren't attractive enough or cool enough or smart enough. i realize that this argument breaks down just as swiftly as i've built it up, but i only mean to say that maybe knowledge doesn't always create power and safety like we had hoped. maybe there is a limit to the good that knowing produces. maybe what we ought to be less concerned with the accumulation of facts and more concerned with is how we synthesize the information that we learn - how to take each moment of insight and process it to the depths, to the foundation of our minds, from up to down, from front to back.

let's take the "green movement" for example. people fear the effects of global warming, pesticides and a hyper-industrialized world. so we drive hybrid cars, recycle and buy organic food. but to me, it doesn't cure these fears, it gives a superficial treatment to the issue at hand. and there's obviously a strong tie between this movement and the maniacally consumerist american mindset. we buy and buy and buy to quell the fear of being without, of being out of control, of not feeling satisfied with ourselves. . .after all, if you take away our "stuff", what are we? but we feel justified because we recycle the cardboard packaging and catalogs and plastic casing that our crap comes in and with. but if the purpose of recycling is conservation, what is the point if we, ourselves, don't become more conservative in consuming? we are, in effect, only applying a band aid to the plague of overconsumerism. would recycling have such emphasis if we didn't have so much that we were discarding in the first place? if we needed or ate all of the food that we bought, would farmers have to carry the burden of producing more crop than the soil of their farmland is capable of producing? would we have to be so reliant on gas and cars if we were more conservative in the activities and schedules and mindless errands that fuel our high-maintenance lifestyles? it's almost as if we have decided that self-restraint isn't an option, that we won't stop spending and so we have to build measures that simply mitigate its negative consequences.

the point is that to truly quell the cycle of fear, knowledge must be digested, absorbed, understood and applied fully and comprehensively. knowing facts won't make you less afraid. having stuff won't either. ultimately, i think that self-sufficiency, self-reliance is the only cure for fear. i know this is a big big subject. i am not the expert in theory or practice on self reliance or conservation for that matter. it seems as daunting to think about and explain as a task of explaining the universe or love or God.

an excerpt from "on fear" by j krishnamurti

"one asks why human beings, who have lived on this earth for millions of years, who are technologically intelligent, have not applied their intelligence to be free from this very complex problem of fear, which may be one of the reasons for war, for killing one another. and religions throughout the world have not solved the problem; not the gurus, nor the saviours; nor ideals. so it is very clear that no outside agency-however elevated, however much made popular by propaganda-no outside agency can ever possibly solve this problem of human fear...so what is fear? what are the contributory factors that bring about fear? like many small streams, rivulets that make the tremendous volume of a river; what are the small streams that bring about fear? that have such tremendous vitality of fear. is one of the causes of fear comparison?...obviously it is so...when you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not. it is the desire to fulfill and you may not be able to fulfill. where there is comparison there must be fear...can one live without comparing, imitating or conforming psychologically? of course one can. if those are the contributory factors of fear, and you are concerned with the ending of fear, then inwardly there is no comparison, which means there is no becoming...if there is a physical cause that gives you a stomach ache, there is an ending of that pain by discovering the cause of it. similarly, where there is any cause there is an ending."