Unless you discover for yourself the deep source of your fear

So what is it that most of us are afraid of? There are superficial fears, such as the fear of losing a job,

and so on, but to those fears we can generally adjust ourselves. If you lose your job, you will find

some other way of making a living. The great fear is not for one`s social security: it lies much deeper

than that. And I do not know if the mind is willing to look at itself so profoundly as to be able to find out

for itself what it is intrinsically frightened of. Unless you discover for yourself the deep source of your

fear, all efforts to escape from fear, all cultivation of virtue, and so on is of no avail because fear is

at the root of most of our anxious urges. So can we find out what it is we are afraid of, each one of us?

Is the cause of fear common to us all, like death? Or is it something that each one of us has to

discover, look at, go into for himself?

 

- Hamburg 1956, Talk 5