UVic Stillness Within – Exploring the ‘I’ With Direct Inquiry
With the fall return of UVic’s Stillness Within Meetup, eight of us met in September to look at direct inquiry approaches and considerations. Five of the group were existing members and three were new.
The content and discussion took many turns, looking at advaita teachings such as Richard Sylvester (“I Hope You Die Soon” is one of his recent writings). He suggests that the sense of ‘I’ is constantly being created and recreated by every one phenomenon, every thought, sensation and feeling. Yet, he offers little in the way of practices or strategies for inquiring into the nature of the ‘I’, suggesting that the act of looking can only strengthen the ‘I’ sense.
Krishnamurti isn’t that far off from Sylvester in some ways…. In “Freedom From the Known” he even states that:
“To find out what takes place when you die, you must die before you die… not physically but psychologically, inwardly, die to the things you have cherished and to the things you are bitter about. If you have died to one of your pleasures, the smallest or the greatest, naturally without any force or argument, then you will know what it means to die. To die is to have a mind that is completely free of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies. Death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death, there is something new. Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living”.
We tried out a couple of practical applications of direct inquiry, first using dyads to explore the question “Who am I” in a facilitated way, and then the group also explored a guided self inquiry provided by Peter Dziuban excerpted from his book “Simply Notice”.
It was a great group with many insights,…. as well as stretching moments where everything ‘worldly’ simply faded out, replaced only with a ‘still silent truth’.
Thanks all for your contributions to this month’s meetup and for the KECC for their support for the event.
