Swanwick Star Issue Nr. 16 (2023)
With the Covid-19 pandemic coming to an end, the Centre facility reopened this year for small group meetings and personal study stays. Our online program has continued over these past years and what follows are excerpts from reports by our staff member David Bruneau about some of the Zoom workshops and meetings as well as onsite meetings at the Centre and in Victoria. The names mentioned refer to workshop facilitators.
Special Summer Event – July 2023
As part of our gradual re-opening of the Swanwick Centre following the pandemic, we had a special summer event on the front lawn for staff, personal study facilitators & volunteers. There was food and drink, as everybody re-connected and chatted gaily. The birds added to the enchantment by twittering in the trees and flying overhead joyously as a string quartet played modern esoteric music composed by one of the KECC directors and classical pieces by Bach and Handel. The receptive audience helped forge the marvelous ambience of this afternoon peace concert. Most importantly, everybody seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly!
– It was also a celebration of the fact that, after 3 years of closure due to Covid and with summer arriving, we would be able to hold more events in the lovely outdoor environment at Swanwick with its views of the ocean and snow-covered mountains. After enjoying a generous layout of sandwiches and refreshments with gusto in the sunny weather we had been blessed with for the occasion, we were entertained for about an hour by a classical string quartet. The music was delightful and much appreciated by the audience. It formed a fitting complement to this lovely setting in nature. As the guests lingered on, they enjoyed further interaction with old friends.
- Lovely music and initiative!
- I wanted to express my thanks, whilst it is still fresh, for a lovely afternoon of excellent music in such a beautiful setting and on a perfect summer’s day.
- it was an unexpected pleasure that I really did enjoy her compositions, which fit perfectly into the environment.
Exploring Ourselves
Sunday, March 19, 2023
With Jackie McInley
Zoom online
The experience of shame drew our attention for some time and its validity or
non-validity. Is shame just a result of conditioning? How do we know
what is right and wrong? Is there a sensitivity to right and wrong which
doesn’t need the experience of shame? Can shame be a mechanism of
appropriate correction of behaviour?
Exploring Ourselves
March 12, 2023
With Jackie McInley
Zoom Online
As a group we explored the factor of thinking that is beyond our conscious awareness but at the same time is creating our experience of life or reality. We are mostly unaware of our thinking process while it is inventing a “me” and guiding that “me” in its responses and reactions.
We looked into the issue of “Identification” and the creation of our identity, especially the role of memory as an abstraction which nevertheless determines much of our experience of reality. Jackie felt that the dialogue today was one of a great richness of discovery as we looked at the workings of thought and its creation of images, memories, and interpretations. Our images are mistaken for reality, which is a very serious matter! It is how we can end up killing each other. Krishnamurti and Bohm gave great importance to “thinking together” because it meant penetrating the illusions of thought so they are not believed to be worth going to war over. Does “thinking together” mean questioning our assumptions and finding a quality of freedom in the spaciousness of such inquiry?
Choiceless Awareness
With Cynthia Overweg
Saturday, March 11, 2023
Zoom Online
Cynthia joined us online from Ojai, California, the site of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. She will be presenting a series of four meetings which invite an exploration of the theme of “Choiceless Awareness”, a central element in the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, and what he had to say about it. For this first gathering there were twenty-one participants, including interested seekers, facilitators, and support staff. The format of the sessions will be powerpoint presentations and following discussion periods along with short periods of silence and listening to beautiful music in which participants will be encouraged to be grounded with feet on the floor and to be fully present with whatever is arising in the space of Awareness. The silent breaks offer an opportunity to integrate the words of Krishnamurti that have been shared as well as the words of wisdom that may have been shared by the group members.
The first session was entitled “Approaching Choiceless Awareness”. Cynthia asked “What is awareness without choice?” First there is awareness, a silent observation of “what is”, then there is choice, like and dislike, and interpretation of what is observed, including descriptive words or naming, with their conditioned ideas. Krishnamurti asks if we can be aware without choice, interpretation, and words. He asks us to look into the “mirror of relationship”. Seeing the workings of our minds in relationship, K says that every form of conditioning is dissolved. In the perception of what is there is freedom from what is.
Cynthia suggested that awareness and attention are synonymous. They both point to an observing of the “me” which spontaneously brings about a capacity for stillness and silence in the mind. In such stillness the “Immeasurable” can reveal itself and the human being can experience “bliss”. Other ideas shared by Cynthia were as follows:
- There is a relationship between relaxation and attention
- The mind cannot understand if it looks only at its judgements and opinions
- “Only when the mind is not self-concerned is there a possibility of bliss”. (K)
- “When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love” (Cynthia)
Self-Inquiry with Mukesh #1
The inquiry turned to the fact that we often turn away from the sense of
nothingness or emptiness in life and in ourselves. This creates a great
deal of noise in our minds. Can there be another sense of ourselves
beyond the noise of thought? Can we make a quantum leap into a space
of peacefulness? It may begin with a noticing of the movements of
thought and then a “staying with” this questioning observation. “What is
the capacity to be simply and consistently aware?” it was asked. And
can we keep asking such questions?
Self-Inquiry Sunday with Mukesh #2
We went slowly and carefully into the nature of thinking and what it is like
to move without a method into a state of seeing and listening which is
beyond the definitions and descriptions that thought draws on to label
such subtle realities. Every participant found his or her own inner
insights and conceptual terms which added to the group process of
discovery, producing a creative flow of fresh and lively perceptions. It
was an unfolding, largely beyond thought, which brought a sense of
timelessness in the slow and gentle unravelling of the nature of thought
and awareness. The insights were sometimes difficult to describe but
were very interesting to the contemplative minds that all participated with
deep perception and intelligence, seemingly with minimal effort, in the
creation of a rich experience of “meditative self-inquiry”.
Self-Inquiry Sunday with Mukesh #3
First, we looked into the challenge of calming the nervous system as a
ground for self-understanding and realization of a deep peace within. We
then moved into an examination of the concept of “innocence” and what it
might really mean. This opened into some dialogue about fear, greed, and
war in the world. Related to these explorations, the issue of our
conditioning as human beings in our current society was raised and a good
deal of time spent in looking at different aspects of our conditioning, for
example the need to be competitive and to compare ourselves with others.
Right education is needed to move beyond this quality of conflict.
Self-inquiry
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada
With Mukesh Gupta
Eleven people were present for Mukesh Gupta’s last meeting before his departure from Canada. He began the session in his usual manner with a short guided meditation and an introduction to what takes place in a self-inquiry meeting, the main intention of which is to understand ourselves. Mukesh pointed out that if self-understanding is not present the implications are immense. Self-understanding brings love, beauty, and a freshness into our lives and without it there is a gap in our experience of ourselves. These qualities must be rediscovered every day, beginning with simple sensations and exploring the deeper aspects of living a “conscious” life. Right understanding is when all faculties are in harmony. This involves a “dying” to the false ideas of ourselves, which must be seen by observation. The seeing is the transformation, the falling away of the false self. It is a life-long process which involves insight each day, each moment, as one opens to the exploration of the challenges and obstacles involved.
Mukesh encouraged participants to share some of the obstacles they had come upon. The first to speak suggested that his greatest obstacle has been “unconsciousness” in himself and others. In delving more deeply into the question, issues of emptiness and manifestation were looked at with a careful curiosity about the sense of separation and isolation that many feel and the illusion of such a deeply held belief. On the other hand, it was shared by some that coming together in a group such as this in order to witness the workings of our own minds and “hearts” was in this very moment producing an experience of Being which contains love and a sense of communion. People may speak as if they hold a kind of knowing about what they are speaking of but there seems to be more profundity and fullness to the truth of “not-knowing”!
In conclusion, Mukesh encouraged us to keep on learning and opening our hearts, awakening from moment to moment to the truth that Life is being in Love. He suggested we pay attention to whatever is taking us away from love and unity.
Self-inquiry
Sunday, October 29, 2023
With Jackie McInley
At KECC Metchosin, BC
Thirteen people, all included, attended this event sponsored by the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada and held at the Centre’s main location at 538 Swanwick Road in Metchosin, BC at 3 pm on a Sunday afternoon. The meeting was facilitated by Jackie McInley from the UK, who seems to attract on a regular basis a good number of serious seekers committed to exploring who or what they truly are in a context of group exploration and investigation. She pointed out right from the beginning that it is not a group with membership, rules, particular loyalties or principles. The group is not focused on the individual but, at the same time, does not ignore him or her. The subject of interest is the human mind or the human being itself and how it creates its experience of life.
Where should we begin such an exploration? Jackie asked. One interesting approach might be to focus on something that is weighing us down, that we would like to address, or anything we felt stuck on in our lives. We may be disturbed by changes in our world, by uncertainty, chaos, or our expectations not being met. What is our relationship with anxiety and insecurity? Jackie asked, and with a sense of instability we may feel in our lives? And what is it that triggers these feelings? These questions stimulated a string of penetrating observations and ideas from the participants which challenged the conventional ways we might inquire into such issues and brought us into ever-deeper insights and perceptions in the realm of understanding the nature of thought and its movements in ourselves. We considered the proposition that observation of thought brings about a silence in the mind and explored the possibility of touching the “Unknown”, which Krishnamurti and others suggest is of utmost importance in our self-exploration. Group members seemed to feel that the dialogue was very worthwhile.
Self-inquiry, November 29, 2023
With Jackie McInley
Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion (Victoria, BC)
Ten people were present for the penultimate session of this visit to Canada by Jackie. She will be missed. Her skill in reflecting back to the group what its members have expressed and suggesting directions we could move to deepen our inquiry has made her facilitation extremely effective and valuable. To begin this session, Jackie brought forth the phenomena of the “lone wolf” and that of The Hundredth Monkey in the behaviour of certain animals in nature. She mentioned that human beings display similar patterns, which have been taken by scientists such as David Bohm to offer “hope” that we could find ways to cooperate and live in a greater state of harmony than we have up until now. One group member asked at this point if there was fear in the group and a self-protectiveness which might prevent a working together on the part of humanity.
Another participant asked if we have an understanding of how to deal with fear when it arises. How can we transcend fear when it appears? Can fear sometimes be an impetus for a healthy response to life situations? Can we “go through” our fear, and do we in fact actually have any choice in the matter? Is there a fear that actually is us, without separation, and without it being “my” fear?
We asked whether the source of fear is thinking, especially the generation of the “I” or “me” thoughts which form our identity. Is there a “me” which is creating the fear? And along with that, is there a motive for getting rid of fear, which keeps us caught in fear? Can there be a “seeing” of what is going on without a drive to find a resolution? Can there be a seeing with our whole being? These and other questions kept our attention for the full time of the meeting and then we had to draw it to a close.
It seems that our dialogue meetings have progressively taken on a sense of cooperative harmony and exploration that brings us together in a real search for truth and, perhaps, even love.
Self-inquiry
December 3, 2023
With Jackie McInley
At 538 Swanwick Rd. in Metchosin
(the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada)
Thirteen people in total were present for this, the last meeting with Jackie on her present trip to Canada. She picked up on a subject that had been looked into during the previous meeting in Victoria: the idea of the “mask” and if we are functioning with or without one. How authentic are we in our moment-to-moment interactions with each other?
Once the idea of the mask had been re-introduced we sat for five minutes or so in silence. There was a comment that it was nice to have such a quiet beginning. Then Jackie gave her usual short introduction to the dialogue and responded to a few inquiries about what is allowed in it. Anything is allowed, she explained. We can talk about and explore anything we wish to, but it usually is more meaningful when we focus on some issue that has some weight for us. A spontaneous silence came upon the group for some minutes, at which point one participant took the risk to expose his mask by sharing some of the insecurities and anxieties that were commonplace for him in his daily life and the self-definitions that went along with those feelings. He ended by summarising his ideas about himself with the words “I am a loser.”
Another participant challenged the first by asking “Why, then, does the mask continue to exist?” Various members of the group contributed ideas about the dynamics of group interaction. “Is it common to project a mask in such a situation? Does everyone feel insecure when speaking out in front of a group? It was suggested that Krishnamurti is offering an alternative experience in that he is speaking of a process of self-observation that can be applied to any life situation. Such a close watching of one’s responses can bring in a fresh perception of oneself which involves a continuous learning about oneself and a questioning of the habits of thinking that are determining one’s experience. Such observation can create a space in oneself where a kind of freedom is revealed. The session concluded with what seemed like a satisfactory feeling of peacefulness and harmony.
Goodbye Tsuki!
Tsuki was a very special soul, beloved by all, especially everyone at Swanwick.
He brought so much joy to every life he touched.
We wish him peace, love, and light on his onward journey.
