Exploring Ourselves, February 4, 2024

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Exploring Ourselves

  • With Jackie McInley
  • Sunday, February 4, 2024
  • Zoom Online

Jackie joined us from the UK for this online meeting in which we intended to learn about ourselves within the context of the teachings of J. Krishnamurti. In order to do so, K recommended a certain quality of attentiveness. As Jackie explained, the “old brain” may or may not be capable of such attention. Can we face the fact of our own selfishness? Can we give of ourselves and go beyond the usual focus on ourselves? And what happens when we give attention together, as a cooperative endeavour in which none of us knows any more than anyone else but we each bring our awareness of the moment.

As far as the actual procedure goes, we start with some quiet time then allow some space to see what arises and how we would like to share it. Jackie likes to encourage participants new to the group to share any questions they might have, so she probed a person who had not previously been in dialogue with our group. He did his best to present his question, which was to do with the nature of an individual and the process of “individuation”.

The “new” group member touched on the issue of going beyond the separateness that thought seems to create. If individuation is an illusion then what wakes us up from such an illusion and what keeps the illusion intact? Group members had various contributions to the inquiry, which led to a discussion of “knowing” and “not-knowing”. The experience of entering a state of not-knowing was talked about and the terrifying aspect of such exposure to the “Unknown” was acknowledged by most of the group. It was agreed that there is no ultimate safety in knowing or the known. Can it be seen that trying to find security in the known is a false search and is limited by our conditioning, which gives the known a certain safety value which it in fact does not have. Such orientation can easily cause conflict and must be completely negated, it was suggested.

Jackie suggested that there might be a “communication breakdown” in the group dialogue and some time was spent attempting to see the nature of the problem – with limited success. There was some disagreement about the approach that was being taken to “exploring ourselves” and further investigation appeared to be necessary.

DB

THE MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT AND TIME IN AWARENESS.

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May be an image of 8 people and text that says 'Yesterday is controlling what you are doing today.. The very seeing ot this iS the ending. J. Krishnamurti'
“The brain is the result of time, experience and knowledge. The very activity of the brain is based on past remembrances, whether illusory, actual or accumulated knowledge. […] So the past, the present and the future are a movement in time. The past is the present. […] See this fact, that thought and time together are the actual movement of human existence. The future is tremendously important to us, but the future is the modified past.”

~ J Krishnamurti

*  Indeed, and what one ultimately is – this non-personal fact – is the alert, choiceless awareness of the movement of thought and time. That which is aware is timeless beauty, peace, love, and joy in clearly, obviously, being. Take a quiet walk or have tea by your window and allow all and everything of the body/mind – thoughts, feelings, pains and itches – to appear and gently pass, and the reality of simply being that allowing awareness is invited – given peaceful space to rest, to present, to delight in its self. There’s the wonder, yes. 🙂

AWARE LIVING CAFE, JANUARY 20/24

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There were 12 Aware Living Cafe Zoomers, most were repeated, all were greeted,   🙂 The themes from K’s Book of Life were Authority and Self-Knowledge. Each was presented by a selected full page reading and robustly discussed. The fact that authority prevents learning, that “A mind that is acquiring knowledge is never learning” was deeply explored with its ramifications that, indeed, memory is one’s authority and pattern maker that filters and personalizes experience; that one is burdened by the things learned and stored in memory (habit/conditioning) and never free unless and until one directly sees this limitation.
Regarding self-knowledge, we variously explored and deepened real self-knowing, sans the limitations of supposed conceptual and therefore separative knowledge, and the fact that there can be no self-knowledge  without awareness of one’s being in relationships. Indeed,  in reality, there’s perpetual change  and that is a ‘mirror’ for one to see how one actually is responding moment to moment in a relationship. The session went over time, and it was agreed by all that they wanted to continue with the next one in two weeks.
Regards,
James Waite

Exploring Ourselves, January 21, 2024

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  • Exploring Ourselves
  • With Jackie McKinley
  • Sunday, January 23, 2024
  • Zoom Online

Twelve people in total were present for this Sunday morning dialogue session with Jackie, who joined us via Zoom from the UK. Jackie began with some pointers about how to make use of a dialogue meeting. She said that dialogue is mainly about speaking and listening, both at a depth which is “accessible to everybody”. It is not a search for something we can take away and use in our lives. Rather, it is an ongoing “waking up” or “seeing” which opens up as we go. It can be very helpful if we can express ourselves clearly and slowly enough that we can follow what is being shared.

As is usually the case, we began with some quiet time. This allows space for any questions or observations that may arise and for any significant unresolved problems to reveal themselves. The first issue that arose was a question about how we can approach Krishnamurti without depending on him for answers. Do we repeat K’s words and make them into theories, or is a direct seeing into the issue possible? Is thought looking at thought or is there something beyond thought looking at thought or “aware” of thought? One participant expressed frustration with the seemingly slow process of going around in circles with such questions. Was the frustration a fact to simply “be with” or could we immediately go beyond the frustration? There was a good deal of discussion of such points, which could have been experienced as hard work or creative discovery – or some of each.

Closing remarks emphasised the central importance of the action of “seeing” as we inquire into the structures of our consciousness, either in group inquiry or on our own. We will be meeting on the first and third Sundays of each month until further notice.

DB

AWARE LIVING, OFF-GRID

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“If you eliminate the things that make you look at life fragmentarily, your mind is then not following the rut. Therefore it is free. If you want to see the view of the valley from the hill, you survey the whole thing, don’t you? That means your mind is no longer merely fixed on a particular part; you look at the whole valley.” *
~ J Krishnamurti

 

One way to view the way we live is to see how grided we are in daily living and relationships. At their root, almost all – if not all – our responses are reactions culturally supplied and utilized to give us hope, to help us cope, with insecurity, aka fear.
The grid we depend on is like a ‘power system’ that’s maintained by our respective culture that’s ‘rutted’ in comforting traditions. It’s a webbed network of established habits. We function variously malcontented by the daily grind of living hooked up to a grid with its beliefs that define and separate, apparently. With reactions that prejudge the experience of what’s actually happening today as the same as yesterday.
In off-grid aware living, one is not burdened by yesterdays. Or tomorrows. Indeed, there’s a constantly renewed and spacous view of the whole, from the whole; a moment to moment abiding that’s totally sufficient. There’s delight in simply being, and a fresh, free and friendly reception to what presently is, as it is. Some call it love. 🙂
James Waite
*From Discussion with students 2, Thatcher School, Ojai, 9 November 1966

 

~ You’re invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite and participant JC Tefft; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series exploring K’s Book Of Life, Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) More details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/
Aware Living Café | Krishnamurti Educational Centre

BEYOND MEANING AND MEASURE.

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May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Absent our desires and fears, we see what is, and wonder.'
It’s very rare and important for one to get beyond words, measures and meanings, beyond the totally conditioned mind with its desires and fears, to live and have our being and happiness rooted in what one is that fully satisfies: affectionate awareness: love, peace, beauty and joy in being. 🙂
~ James Waite

 

~ You’re invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite and participant JC Tefft; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series exploring K’s Book Of Life, Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) More details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/

IN BRIEF: Consciousness and awareness.

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May be an image of 3 people
“Experiencing is challenge and response, and this experiencing, together with naming or recording of it, – this total process, at different levels, is consciousness, is it not?
..Thought is always the superficial, the conclusion. Consciousness is the recording of the superficial..[ ] This concluding process is consciousness. The conclusion, the result, is self-consciousness.
..The self is memory, the many conclusions; and thought is the response of memory…Thought is always the superficial, the conclusion. Consciousness is the recording of the superficial.” *
J Krishnamurti

 

~ For decades I confused and conflated the word-pointers ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’, and while there’s more clarity in aware living these days, I’m moved to simply – in a non-scholarly way – explore here how these pointers are sometimes used and confused. 🙂
Of course, “the word is not the thing” as K notes elsewhere, but it seems relevant to those of us who are urged, pushed and variously prodded to directly realize that the word ‘awareness’ points beyond the finite, body/mind consciousness, beyond time and space.
Re awareness, here’s one way to simply suggest (not define) and differentiate for brevity and clarity’s sake: awareness is that ever-fresh, alertly living infinity one is which is aware of all appearing and disappearing body/mind conscious, sentient experience. I’ll leave the topic here with an invitation to you to perhaps share and comment. 🙂
James Waite

 

~ I happened upon this photo of Alan Watts (center, with wife Joan (?) and J Krishnamurti posted by Michael Coffman. I didn’t know they met and am delighted to see their joy in that meeting. 🙂

 

~ You’re invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series (Jan. to April, 2024) exploring K’s Book Of Life, Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) More details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/

 

What makes living and learning mechanical?

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We are used to accepting authority, not only the outside authority but also our own peculiar authorities, secret authorities. We are apt to follow rather than investigate into the whole question of authority, the authority of the priest and your own authority of experience and knowledge. When you accept authority inwardly, you are merely following, and therefore you become mechanical.*
~ J Krishnamurti.

 

A note exploring the above: Aware living is all about the instant and ongoing abandonment of the mind’s conditioned and mechanical ways of “Looking for something I can believe in.” When all belief – including the believer who needs to believe – falls away, what remains is an empty, open and welcoming mind that functions well and truly as a servant to awareness, to simply being and enjoying life as it presents, here and now, moment to moment. That ’emptiness’ is empty of beliefs that formerly, seemingly, constituted the person – the ‘me’ myth of being a ‘self-centered’ entity.
Sans the stuff of belief, there remains a fullness which may be pointed to in merely symbolic words that vaguely describe this lived recognition of reality as being, as life itself, living freely without knowing. This beingness of emptiness is sugested with words like peaceful, beautiful, easeful, joyful, and wonderful. In fine, one’s common awareness is full of affection; it is an all-embracing love – not these words or feelings or personalized experiences about reality, but the certain knowing that remains when all pretension, all belief, falls away. Some call it love. 🙂
James Waite

 

*From a Public Talk, Rome, 29 October 1972

 

~ You’re invited to Zoom in to the Aware Living Cafe hosted by James Waite and participant JC Tefft; to enjoy and contribute to a six-part series exploring K’s Book Of Life, first and second Saturdays, January to March, 2024 at 10am to 11:30, Victoria, BC (PCT) For more dates and details and to simply register: https://krishnamurti-canada.ca/…/aware-living-cafe-2…/

Aware Living Café, January 6, 2024

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Aware Living Caf’é
January 6, 2024
with James Waite
Zoom online session
There were 12 attendees for the entire 90  min. Zoom. The “Book of Life” themes were Listening and Learning, with full page readings from each. There were two kinds of listening discussed: listening casually, externally, through conditioned mind filters, and listening from aware observation of  this internal traffic, thereby seeing the filters and in so doing, actually hearing the whole of what is being said and perhaps responding appropriately. Learning too, was addressed and discussed as only occurring when one sees the prejudices in ‘already knowing’ and the need to be empty of opinions and conditioning that poses as knowing when in fact one does not know and there is no knower.
The session ended with discussion around the pointing that life is a living, changing, unknown that one may, in awareness,  move with harmoniously, if listened to and understood with an empty, freshened mind from moment to moment.
JW

Exploring Ourselves, January 7, 2024

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Exploring Ourselves
January 7, 2024
With Jackie McInley
Zoom Online

 

Ten people in total were in attendance for this Sunday Morning online meeting. We began with some questioning of what kind of awareness Krishnamurti was talking about for so many years. Was it an awareness without a controller? Was it self-consciousness, or something different? Was it beyond self-consciousness, with a quality of freedom, mystery, or an inexplicability? Can it be “understood”? Is it separate from the body or one with it? Is it separate from thought? Are thought and conditioning the same? If there is no thought can there be conditioning? Is it possible to speak from the depth of consciousness or is thought always creating some element of conflict, usually without realising that it is doing so? And how do we see what thought is doing in us? There is so much projection in our thinking that conflicts are often not seen with any clarity, for example in family dynamics.

There were some questions about our approach to these issues. Are we having some insight or just thinking? Is there partial insight or full insight? Can we slow down the inquiry so we can see the insecurity of our thoughts? What about the uneasy feeling we have as we get closer to the sense of not knowing, of touching the unknown? In the experiential domain, can we stay in our vulnerability and feel the stresses that arise as we explore ourselves? Jackie asked the interesting question “What is the true sense of peace?”

Other participants wondered if we ever truly wake up or are we most often in a dream state. Are we caught habitually in various assumptions? Can we see that we are never really a victim and, if not, how is it missed? Is sadness “mine” or is it a universal phenomenon? If we sense that much of our experience is common and shared, does that bring us closer to other humans?

Sometimes the dialogue seemed to create that sense of shared meaning.

DB