Self-Inquiry with Henry Fischer, April 20, 2025

Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Henry Fischer
April 20, 2025

On Sunday six participants gathered for a KECC dialogue at Swanwick.

After a period of silence, newcomers were introduced to dialogue as an exploration into what we don’t know rather than an intellectual conversation between individuals.

The following Krishnamurti quote was read from the Book of Life (April 20) with the most essential excerpts being included here to highlight what the group considered:

…The thing called passion has to be understood and not suppressed or sublimated, and it is no good finding a substitute for it.

Truth is not to be conquered; you cannot storm it; it will slip through your hands if you try to grasp it. Truth comes silently, without your knowing. What you know is not truth, it is only an idea, a symbol. The shadow is not the real.

The group began by looking at what Krishnamurti meant by “the shadow is not the real” by considering the sentence before it which pointed to “the known” as this shadow. But what qualities could then be unknown which might relate to some sense of this word passion? The group picked up on several qualities perhaps playfulness, being surprised, having some sense of freedom, going beyond the self or identity. There seemed to be an energy that was hard to put into the words but the group became alive with enthusiasm as if it were encountering something new that didn’t fit into the known but which seemed very active in life itself. Perhaps as life itself.

The group continued to explore this energy as passion and whether Krishnamurti was pointing to a kind of potential energy which is cut off once knowledge is believed to be its source. The group also considered the way images themselves might limit this potential by wrongfully fixing a kind of openness to all possibility into a limited frame and then living from that image.

Henry Fischer