Self-Inquiry with Eric Hassett, May 21, 2025
Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Eric Hassett
May 21, 2025
On Wednesday, May 21st, from 4:30pm to 6pm, a dialogue with five participants and myself took place in a meeting room at Esquimalt Gorge Park, Victoria. Large windows offered views of the exquisite garden landscape outside.
A Krishnamurti quote from The Book of Life (A Timeless State, Oct. 2nd) was read:
When we are talking about time, we do not mean chronological time, time by the watch. That time exists, must exist. If you want to catch a bus, if you want to get to a train or meet an appointment tomorrow, you must have chronological time. But is there a tomorrow, psychologically, which is the time of the mind? Is there psychologically tomorrow, actually? Or is the tomorrow created by thought because thought sees the impossibility of change, directly, immediately, and invents this process of gradualness? I see for myself, as a human being, that it is terribly important to bring about a radical revolution in my way of life, thinking, feeling, and in my actions, and I say to myself, “I’ll take time over it; I’ll be different tomorrow, or in a month’s time.” That is the time we are talking about: the psychological structure of time, of tomorrow, or the future, and in that time we live. Time is the past, the present, and the future, not by the watch. I was, yesterday; yesterday operates through today and creates the future. That’s a fairly simple thing. I had an experience a year ago that left an imprint on my mind, and the present I translate according to that experience, knowledge, tradition, conditioning, and I create the tomorrow. I’m caught in this circle. This is what we call living; this is what we call time.
Thought, which is you, with all its memories, conditioning, ideas, hopes, despair, the utter loneliness of existence—all that is this time…And to understand a timeless state, when time has come to a stop, one must inquire whether the mind can be free totally of all experience, which is of time.
The group proceeded to discuss awareness, the observer and the observed, psychological time, conditioning, and the ending of the ‘me’. There seemed to be genuine ‘looking’ taking place, along with self-observation.
Eric
