Jiddu Krishnamurti: Fear - have you ever come into direct contact with fear

Questioner: Will you be precise and explain pleasure and fear - how they are related?

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Fear - have you ever come into direct contact with fear? Have you ever been directly in contact with anything, a tree, with a flower, with a human being - directly, not through the image? You know, when you look at a tree in the park, there is always the observer and the observed - there is you watching the tree - there is a space between the observer and the observed. And to be in direct contact - you can touch the tree but that is not contact, nor is identifying yourself with the tree, I don't mean that, that is another form of mental gymnastics - but to be in direct contact is quite a different thing, it is to have no space at all.

This is what takes place when various forms of drugs are taken - L.S.D. and so on - space disappears; that is quite a different experience. But that space recurs again so they take more drugs and so on, deteriorating, getting more and more weary of the drugs, and less and less result. But when one can observe without the observer - that is, the background, the ideological concepts, the memory - then space disappears altogether between people, and perhaps in that state there is no fear, there is only something called - verbally we can use that word - 'love' , but it is not the thing that is usually called love. We shall have to discuss fear another time.