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What do we mean by fear? Fear of what? There are various types of fear and we need not analyse every type. But we can see that fear comes into being when our comprehension of relationship is not complete. Relationship is not only between people but between ourselves and nature, between ourselves and property, between ourselves and ideas; as long as that relationship is not fully understood, there must be fear. Life is relationship. To be is to be related and without relationship there is no life. Nothing can exist in isolation, so long as the mind is seeking isolation, there must be fear. Fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in relation to something.
The question is, how to be rid of fear? First of all, anything that is overcome has to be conquered again and again. No problem can be finally overcome, conquered; it can be understood but not conquered. They are two completely different processes and the conquering process leads to further confusion, further fear. To resist, to dominate, to do battle with a problem or to build a defense against it is only to create further conflict, whereas if we can understand fear, go into it fully step by step, explore the whole content of it, then fear will never return in any form.
As I said, fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in relationship. What do we mean by fear? Ultimately we are afraid, are we not?, of not being, of not becoming. Now, when there is fear of not being, of not advancing, or fear of the unknown, of death, can that fear be overcome by determination, by a conclusion, by any choice? Obviously not. Mere suppression, sublimation, or substitution, creates further resistance, does it not? Therefore fear can never be overcome through any form of discipline, through any form of resistance. That fact must be clearly seen, felt and experienced: fear cannot be overcome through any form of defense or resistance nor can there be freedom from fear through the search for an answer or through mere intellectual or verbal explanation.
Now what are we afraid of? Are we afraid of a fact or of an idea about the fact? Are we afraid of the thing as it is, or are we afraid of what we think it is? Take death, for example. Are we afraid of the fact of death or of the idea of death? The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another. Am I afraid of the word 'death' or of the fact itself? Because I am afraid of the word, of the idea, I never understand the fact, I never look at the fact, I am never in direct relation with the fact. It is only when I am in complete communion with the fact that there is no fear. If I am not in communion with the fact, then there is fear, and there is no communion with the fact so long as I
have an idea, an opinion, a theory, about the fact, so I have to be very clear whether I am afraid of the word, the idea or of the fact. If I am face to face with the fact, there is nothing to understand about it: the fact is there, and I can deal with it. If I am afraid of the word, then I must understand the word, go into the whole process of what the word, the term, implies.
For example, one is afraid of loneliness, afraid of the ache, the pain of loneliness. Surely that fear exists because one has never really looked at loneliness, one has never been in complete communion with it. The moment one is completely open to the fact of loneliness one can understand what it is, but one has an idea, an opinion about it, based on previous knowledge; it is this idea, opinion, this previous knowledge about the fact, that creates fear. Fear is obviously the outcome of naming, of terming, of projecting a symbol to represent the fact; that is fear is not independent of the word, of the term.
I have a reaction, say, to loneliness; that is I say I am afraid of being nothing. Am I afraid of the fact itself or is that fear awakened because I have previous knowledge of the fact, knowledge being the word, the symbol, the image? How can there be fear of a fact? When I, am face to face with a fact, in direct communion with it, I can look at it? observe it; therefore there is no fear of the fact. What causes fear is my apprehension about the fact, what the fact might be or do.
It is my opinion, my idea, my experience, my knowledge about the fact, that creates fear. So long as there is verbalization of the fact, giving the fact a name and therefore identifying or condemning it, so long as thought is judging the fact as an observer, there must be fear. Thought is the product of the past, it can only exist through verbalization, through symbols, through images; so long as thought is regarding or translating the fact, there must be fear.
Thus it is the mind that creates fear, the mind being the process of thinking. Thinking is verbalization. You cannot think without words, without symbols, images; these images, which are the prejudices, the previous knowledge, the apprehensions of the mind, are projected upon the fact, and out of that there arises fear. There is freedom from fear only when the mind is capable of looking at the fact without translating it without giving it a name, a label. This is quite difficult, because the feelings, the reactions, the anxieties that we have, are promptly identified by the mind and given a word. The feeling of jealousy is identified by that word. Is it possible not to identify a feeling, to look at that feeling without naming it? It is the naming of the feeling that gives it continuity that gives it strength. The moment you give a name to that which you call fear, you strengthen it; but if you can look at that feeling without terming it, you will see that it withers away. Therefore if one would be completely free of fear it is essential to understand this whole process of terming, of projecting symbols, images, giving names to facts.
[1] Which statement best expresses the meaning of fear as explained in the passage?
(1) Fear is experienced because we do not form and understand relationships
(2) Fear occurs in the mind and needs to be confronted
(3) Fear is caused when we engage more closely with ideas about a fact, than with trying to understand the fact
(4) Fear is an act of suppression of an understanding of facts[2] Human beings are victims of ............................... because of which they experience fear.
(Choose an option to fill the blank)
(1) Conditioning
(2) Deconditioning
(3) Suppression
(4) Isolation[3] We can eradicate fear if we do any one of the following:
(1) Verbalize and think about the fact that causes fear
(2) Look at the fact that causes fear and experience it fully
(3) Withhold judgments about a fact or situation while experiencing it
(4) Do all of above[4] Which set of key words, when put to practice will help us overcome fear?
(1) Minimise: suppression, sublimation, substitution
(2) Avoid: naming, terming, projecting facts
(3) Build: relationships, understanding, judgment of facts
(4) Engage in: communion, experiencing facts, withholding judgment
[5] Which of the following can be concluded from the passage?
(1) As long as there is any relationship, there must be fear of losing it
(2) As long as our thoughts can identify and judge a fact as an observer, there would be no fear
(3) Previous knowledge about a fact hinders dealing with the fact when it arrives
(4) Fear can be best diminished by fighting it and building a defense against it[6] Which of the following can be concluded from the passage?
(1) If one is in complete communion with a fact, there is little chance of fear
(2) Ideas of a fact aid us in making a communication with the fact.
(3) Fear is a feeling that is independent of the tag or the symbol representing the fact
(4) None of the above[7] Which of the following can be concluded from the passage?
(1) Fear can be overcome by conquering it once and for all
(2) Fear of unknown can be overcome by determined resistance
(3) Freedom of fear can be achieved by a simple intellectual explanation of the phenomenon
(4) None of the aboveasked in FMS
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The importance of finance and of a productive economic base which created revenues for the state was already clear to Renaissance princes. The rise of the ancient regime monarchies of the eighteenth century, with their large military establishments and fleets of warships, simply increased the government's need to nurture the economy and to create financial institutions which could raise and manage the monies concerned. Moreover, like the First World War, conflicts such as the seven major Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815 were struggles of endurance. Victory therefore went to the Power-or better, since both Britain and France usually had allies, to the Great Power coalition with the greater capacity to maintain credit and to keep on raising supplies. The mere fact that these were coalition wars increased their duration, since a belligerent whose resources were fading would look to a more powerful ally for loans and reinforcements in order to keep itself in the fight. Given such expensive and exhausting conflicts, what each side desperately required was-to use the old aphorism-"money, money, and yet more money." It was this need which formed the background to what has-been termed the "financial revolution” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when certain western European states evolved a relatively sophisticated system of banking and credit in, order to pay for their wars.
There was, it is true, a second and nonmilitary reason for the financial changes of this time. That was the chronic shortage of specie, particularly in the years before the gold discoveries in Portuguese Brazil in 1693. The more European commerce with the Orient developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the greater the outflow of silver to cover the trade imbalances, causing merchants and dealers everywhere complain of the scarcity of coin. In addition, the steady increases in European commerce, especially in essential products such as cloth and naval stores, together with the tendency for the seasonal fairs of medieval Europe to be replaced by permanent centers of exchange, led to a growing regularity and predictability of financial settlements and thus to the greater use of bills of exchange and notes of credit. In Amsterdam especially, but also in London. Lyons, Frankfurt, and other cities, there arose a whole cluster of moneylenders, commodity dealers, goldsmiths (who often dealt in loans), bill merchants, and jobbers in the share of the growing number of joint-stock companies. Adopting banking practices which were already in evidence in Renaissance Italy, these individuals and financial houses steadily created. a structure of national and international credit to under-pin the early modern world economy.
Nevertheless, by far the largest and most sustained boost to the "financial revolution" in Europe was given by war. If the difference between the financial burdens of the age of the Philip II and that of Napoleon was one of degree, it still was remarkable enough. The cost of a sixteenthcentury war could be measured in millions of pounds; by the late seventeenth century, it had risen to tens of millions of pounds; and at the close of the Napoleonic War the outgoings of the major combatants occasionally reached a hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Whether these prolonged and frequent clashes between the Great Powers, when translated into economic terms, were more of a benefit to than a brake upon the commercial and industrial rise of the west can be never be satisfactorily resolved. The answer depends, to a great extent, upon whether one is trying to assess the absolute growth of a country as opposed to its relative prosperity-and strength before: and after a lengthy conflict. What is clear is that even the most thriving and "modern" of the eighteenth-century states - could not immediately pay for the wars of this period out of their ordinary revenue. Moreover, vast rises in taxes, even if the machinery existed to collect them, could well provoke domestic unrest, which all regimes feared especially when facing foreign challengers at the same time.
Consequently, the only way a government could finance a war adequately was by borrowing: by selling bonds and offices, or better, negotiable long-term stock paying interest to all who advanced monies to the state: Assured of an inflow of funds, officials could then authorize payments to army contractors, provision merchants, shipbuilders, and the armed services themselves. In many respects, this two-way system of raising and simultaneously spending vast sums of money acted like a bellows, fanning the development of western capitalism and of the nation-state itself.
Yet however natural all this may appear to later eyes, it is important to stress that the success of such a system depended an two critical factors reasonably efficient machinery far raising loans, and the maintenance of a government's “credit" in the financial market. In both provinces led the way not surprisingly, since the merchants there were part of the government and desired to see the affairs of state managed according to the same principles of financial rectitude as applied in, say, a joint-stock company. It was therefore appropriate that the States General of the Netherlands, which efficiently and regularly raised the taxes to cover governmental expenditures, was able to set interest rates very law, thus keeping dawn debt repayments. This system, superbly reinforced by the many financial activities of the city of Amsterdam, soon gave the United Provinces an international reputation far clearing bills, exchanging currency, and providing credit, which naturally created a structure and an atmosphere within which long-"term funded state debt could be regarded as perfectly normal. So successfully did Amsterdam became a center of Dutch "surplus capital" that it soon was able to invest in stock of foreign companies and, most important of all, to subscribe to a whole variety of loans floated by foreign governments, especially in wartime.
[1] During the three decades from sixteenth century to eighteenth century war expenditure increased:
(1) Hundredfold
(2) Tenfold
(3) Twofold
(4) Exponentially[2] Which geographical regions are referred to by “United Provinces” in the passage:
(1) Spain, Netherland and Italy
(2) Prussia, England and France
(3) Seven provinces which united in 1579 and formed the basis of Republic of Netherland
(4) The treaty of Baltimore united England with Spain and Netherland in 1579[3] Which statement is true with regard to the background to the Financial Revolution in Europe:
(1) To mitigate public unrest caused by excessive expenditure on war, the governments in various European countries invented the financial system
(2) The need for more and more money to wage enduring, expensive and exhausting wars in Europe gave rise to the financial revolution
(3) Borrowing money from the public became an attractive measure for appeasing people and getting money for wars in the governments coffers
(4) All the statements are correct[4] Which set of countries formed the “Great Powers” in Europe during the period from sixteenth century till late eighteenth century:
(1) Spain, Netherland, Germany
(2) France, Britain, Spain, Germany
(3) France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia
(4) Britain, France, Prussia and Russia[5] What is the key reason for the growth of Western Capitalism during the reference period in the passage:
(1) Expensive wars gave rise to entrepreneurship in Europe that paved way for the industrial revolution
(2) Paying large interest on money borrowed from the public fuelled the capitalist revolution in Europe
(3) The reasonably efficient machinery for raising loans and maintenance of government‟s “credit” in the financial market fuelled growth
(4) The two-way systems of raising and simultaneously spending vast sums of money fanned the development of Western Capitalism[6] Why was Amsterdam successful in investing in foreign companies during the period when all of Europe was weighed down by excessive expenditure in war?
(1) The United Provinces was efficient in dealing with public and government transactions and this created an atmosphere where long term investments were considered normal
(2) Amsterdam per se was never involved in any of the wars the European nations were engaged in, and therefore had surplus capital to invest
(3) The merchants in Amsterdam were also government officials and they ensured that all transactions between people and government were mutually beneficial, as is the case in a joint-venture.
(4) All statements are correct[7] What is the opinion of experts regarding Europe‟s economic health during the period of reference in the passage:
(1) Experts are still not sure whether the economic health was good or bad in Europe during the period
(2) In absolute terms there was definitely a lot of economic loss, but in relative terms there was a gain
(3) Keeping a long term perspective, the period of reference let to good economic health in Europe, even though the state did spend a lot on wars
(4) None of the statements is trueasked in FMS
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