A New Mind and Heart: The Ultimate Relationship

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A New Mind and Heart: The Ultimate Relationship

With Cynthia Overweg online

Saturday, September 18, 2021

 

Cynthia joined us from Ojai once again on a Saturday morning to continue the series entitled “A New Mind and Heart,” an exploration of J. Krishnamurti’s teachings. There were seventeen of us in attendance, all included. Cynthia began with the statement that the ultimate relationship is a unity in silence. “The mind and the heart are one,” Krishnamurti says, and “to live in this world sanely there must be a radical change of mind and heart.”

“What is relationship?” Cynthia asked. Krishnamurti taught that “relationship is a process of self-revelation in which one discovers the hidden causes of sorrow. This self-revelation is only possible in relationship… to live is to be related, and it is only in the mirror of relationship that I understand myself.” K kept turning the attention back to ourselves.

Cynthia interspersed the talking with periods of silence and full presence while listening to meditative music such as Tibetan bowls. She quoted Krishnamurti extensively along with her own understanding of the teachings. Points she made included his saying that the world is you and you are the world. Our problems are global problems and conflicts exist in all our relationships. Self-understanding requires earnestness and persistence. There is no guide – only you and your relationships. We are responsible for our experience, an assertion that often brings up some questions in people’s minds. In what sense is the statement true?

Cynthia guided the group in looking at and discussing together a number of issues. If relationship is tethered to the past, to memory, its movement is limited and brings suffering. The fog of conditioning distorts our perceptions. We explored the mind’s creation of images, with the division and conflict involved. The seeing of the “me” as it arises in thought, without praise or blame, makes a discovery out of every encounter and is the door to love and the “Immeasurable”.

Krishnamurti gives great importance to our relationship with the natural world and we were invited to be aware of this in ourselves and perhaps thus diminish the widespread human destruction of nature. The silent mind has a different quality of energy which can wipe away the past, and this matters in our world. Cynthia ended with her favourite quote from K: “When I understand myself I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.” The presentation was much enjoyed and appreciated by the participants.