On Fear By Jiddu Krishnamurti is truly a munificent gift for anyone anywhere who fears anything.

For a brief overview on Krishnamurti's On Fear, which features a collection of his talks about fear throughout his entire life, Krishnamurti bridges all his thoughts on fear into a realization of how we have conformed into being secondhand human beings with dull, miserable minds that haplessly want to escape, compare, intellectualize, judge, and sub-vocalize all our experiences that, at the time of death, we realize that we had never even lived (I must stress the fact that this was not out of some sort of spiritual one-upmanship or highfalutin ego games but out of Krishnamurti's true humanistic concern and compassion.) Literally, thinking over life to find out you've never really experienced fully, forever chasing the a better future, optimizing your present moment, and clinging to the past that you miss life entirely, as if it can be contained in our symbols and limited lights of perception (which nowadays Quantum Physics begs us to realize.) He knows exactly the right questions for self-inquiry to dig to the root of all fear, not the branches, not the leaves, not the trunk, nor all our other creations made out of our plight from fear; right to its hollow core and who we truly are.

I must recognize that Krishnamurti was a spiritual enigma: he lays out the often sobering facts, prescribes a medicine, explains how to take such medicine, and what exactly the medicine will do for you so cogently that it is so hard to be missed. Even if one emphatically believes that they do not understand, one day his straight-shooting arrow will find its place in the back of your heart. It is as if he holds you compassionately and carefully guides you to the exact door in which wisdom knocks but knows that you must open the door yourself (or maybe it could be said that the door opens you). One cannot even say that he even interposes or has anything to do with the fateful knock at the proverbial door because it truly comes from a world beyond such conditions and linearities of the English language with the separation between doer and doing, the knower and the known, the I and the me, or, for that matter, a you and a me.

I would like to say that he truly is an exemplar of someone who understands the meaning of what it means to be a full, complete human in spite of all of our phony psychological fears, anxieties, dis-ease, and sorrows that may not have as much reality as one may firmly believe. I feel as if the true beauty of his talks shines out when you realize that Krishnamurti knows that all the answers are to be found within you, not through him as some 'guru', God, or teacher (though I digress as this is just another rehash of same dualistic paradigm of a teacher outside of which you must go to and through, often through big bucks nowadays, in order to gain some Truth), and as he outright exclaims he is simply a lifelong brother or sister that is walking down the same path as you and wants to tell you that the pavement is no different from the grass, that there is no wrong way of walking, that walking does not have to be for any sake outside of just walking, and that those who walk down only the paved road or only the grass are inevitably acting on the same modes of fear under different descriptors and lexical possessions.

A quote that I found that so accurately describes on how On Fear and Krishnamurti's talks go about the ring around the rosy:
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only the kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
— Marcel Proust