Self-Inquiry with Joel Kroeker, November 23, 2025

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We began by asking about sorrow and its relationship to love and suffering. Some wondered if life was intrinsically flavoured with suffering or if these were perhaps not intrinsically linked. A differentiation was made between suffering (as unnecessary) and pain (which is inevitable). K’s notion of psychological suffering versus other types was explored. It was stated that “sorrow can come to an end”. But it wasn’t clear if this was temporary or “permanent.”
Some members reported being able to accept “things as they are” without fighting against this in any way. Others felt otherwise stating that perhaps human suffering was not something to attempt to avoid or transcend but rather a part of natural life on the relative level. Meanwhile, from an absolute level, it was imagined that basic acceptance of things as they are would be an ideal attitude, but it was not fully clear why this would be any better than any other attitude in particular. The notion of “determinism” came up in relation to fate and whether humans have any agency or autonomy or influence. A question regarding how to best inhabit this realm of human agency arose, while some in the group felt this question was fraught as it is best to “accept things as they are” without evaluating (or reflecting apres coup in retrospect) as that was seen as futile. 
– Joel Kroeker

Self-Inquiry with Joel Kroeker, November 16, 2025

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We began by discussing the various aspects that reinforce the illusion of our apparent continuation of self in relation to “choiceless awareness”. A question arose about human will and “determination” in regard to the freedom to do or not do something. We explored through personal experience how this creates a resistance or a tension, which we sometimes tend to escape through numbing ourself from a core “urgency”.
We explored a potential differentiation between a sense of self-oriented urgency (to maintain a solid sense of self) versus a kind of core urgency that seems to be Nature itself. We wondered if perhaps we anesthetize ourselves (ie through a distancing numbness) from experiencing this core urgency on an ongoing basis. 
We explored various ways to instead encounter this core urgency directly without escaping from it and what that feels like in daily life. 
– Joel Kroeker

Self-Inquiry with David Stuss, November 9, 2025

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Today’s dialogue was well-attended (with 13 participants) and included both regular and new participants. After introductions around the circle, the dialogue began with the Nov 9 quote from Krishnamurti’s Book of Life. The quotation surrounded the question of what might one do if one learned one had but an hour of life left to live. Several participants found some parts of the quotation quite disagreeable (notably those around forgiveness) and a lively discussion ensued.
Much of the early dialogue focused on questions around how to practice being attentive, and the influence of fear.  In the later parts of the dialogue the meaning of choiceless awareness and its relationship to sensory perception was explored. Some moments of attentive stillness and an expansive spaciousness were shared.
– David Stuss

Self-Inquiry with Joel Kroeker, November 2, 2025

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The discussion began with how we encounter dissolution in various forms. An example was given about the feeling of losing one’s mind or memory and how this triggers fear and resistance. This led to exploring how this can also occur with the inability to sleep, which can be seen as avoiding facing the reality of another mundane day, or as the body itself being driven by the anxious mind that is trying to “do” something even when nothing is needing to be done. The question arose, “how does one stay with the direct experience of dissolution without effort fully ‘doing’ something or without simply creating yet another version of ‘me’?”
The image of The Christ facing the Cross came up as a “helpful metaphor for our own experience of facing ‘what is’ even when one would rather avoid the intensity and suffering of facing this”and all of the myriad distractions that we tend to choose instead of facing “what is.”
The image of a Void inside was explored as an image of “what is”, particularly in relation to the experience of aging and mental decline. 
We realized together that facing the reality of “what is” might be our own version of willingly (and “obediently”) surrendering to our version of the cross to bear. 
We explored various ways of describing this experience in our own individual lives and inner interiority. 
– Joel Kroeker

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 30, 2025

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One of the participants, recalling what had been said at the last dialogue meeting at the Swanwick Centre, brought up the question as to what it might mean to embody the emptiness or nothingness that K considers of such central importance in human transformation and wholeness. This topic was instantly embraced by the group, and we went extensively into it.

The context in which this topic appears in the teachings is in the emptying of consciousness of its content, which is how K defines meditation, something he said his teachings are from beginning to end.

First, not all content is meant to be emptied, since knowledge is still necessary, as without memory and knowledge we could not function. So what K means to empty is what he calls psychological memory, which refers to the experiences formed around the psychological entity or self. K wants to empty them because they are factors of fragmentation both outwardly in relationship as well as inwardly. Essentially what he proposes to dissolve is the self, which he considers to be an illusion.

An illusion is something false. As the essence of the psychological self is identification, one way to empty consciousness or dissolve the self would be to see that its identifications are illusory. The perception of the false dissolves the self. Which means that the ‘I am’ has no object. Does that statement of being still support the psychological self? Because the self can also be built on setting itself up against something else, which struggle strengthens its identity.

Linguistically we may need the notion of an ‘I’ to distinguish one agent from another, as action comes from someone and goes to someone or something. But this distinction is purely descriptive and has no further implications. It becomes dangerous when the identifications are taken to be of the essence of being, therefore absolute, which they are not. This assumption of absoluteness or permanence is a major factor of division, conflict and sorrow in the world.

The perception of the limitation of knowledge, and therefore the inherent limitation of all psychological identification, opens a gap between the self-referential movement of identity and the constant flux and renewal of life. It is this gap in the perception of the danger of identity as identification, fragmentation and anachronism – because whatever we identify with is necessarily in the past – that we encounter the needful emptiness, namely the emptiness of self.

This emptiness of self is absolutely necessary if we are to relate without division, if we are to be in contact with what is. So our wholeness does depend, both inwardly and outwardly, on the emptiness or nothingness of the psychological content of consciousness. As St. John of the Cross had said, in order to come to the unknown, we must way by way of not-knowing. That applies not just to the ultimate truth, which is unknown, but to the immediacy of life, which implies that the wholeness of life speaks to the wholeness of being.

K had been clear that emptying consciousness meant both the conscious and the deeper or unconscious layers, which raised serious concerns as to the potential danger of opening that pandora’s box. It seemed clear that this very unconscious had been created by our attempt to banish the undesirable aspects of our personalities from conscious awareness. As long as we do this, the dungeons of consciousness will be full, keeping consciousness perennially busy with itself because it must be on its guard against the repressed content that it fears.

This division, however, has been created by judgement, by calling the shadow side ‘evil’ and then condemning it. This is an essential aspect of our psychological duality which has been encouraged and sustained by religious culture and social morality, which imposes on the self the task of controlling the condemned aspects of itself. So in the name of virtue, goodness and truth, the self becomes its own jailer. And, as the saying goes, a house divided cannot stand.

What would happen if we removed the jailer and the judge? What if we observed emptiness without labeling it as good or bad? What if we approached the whole content of our consciousness with choiceless awareness? Would such clear-sighted and non-dualistic perception liberate us from fear and allow the suppressed content to undergo a profound transformation so that its energy flows as one in the light of intelligence?

In relation to doing this, the question of the difference between intention and intent arose. Intention, it was proposed, is the exercise of will in the search for a preconceived or projected result, which biases observation and perpetuates judgement, as it necessitates measurement. This energy is destructive, for it divides.

Intent arises from the perception of a real question to which we don’t have an answer. Intent is the flame of discontent that opens the way to pure perception and creative discovery. Its energy is not derived from the pursuit of a goal but from the perception of what is out of order. That’s why K’s approach is negative.

We have tried to empty consciousness through suppression of its undesirable content and it’s clear that whatever we suppress does not disappear but is stored away in memory. It only disappears from the immediate purview of the conscious self, but it persists unconsciously. Nothing we suppress is forgotten. It is just kept out of conscious awareness.

The awareness of the inherent limitation, fragmentation and divisiveness of self-centered thought is the factor that suspends the censor responsible for the conscious/unconscious, me/not me duality. This suspension is itself the factor of emptying. The perception of the falseness of control allows the content of consciousness to be revealed and emptied. This is essential if there is to be the quality of inward freedom, with its intelligence and compassion.

This, K might say, is the way of learning, the way to live.

This was a fitting note on which to end the facilitator’s residency at Swanwick Centre. He thanked everyone for their kindness and said he might see them again next year.

Javier Gómez Rodríguez

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 26, 2025

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We began by reading the entry in The Book of Life for July 26, entitled “Follow the Movement of Suffering”. This text had been excerpted from Chapter 7: On Suffering, in the Questions and Answers section of The First and Last Freedom, pp. 168-171.

The longer excerpt referred to the case of someone suffering because they lost their son or daughter in whom they had placed all their hopes. This sudden loss is felt as an acute disturbance at the physical and psychological levels, and this is what we call suffering, which we try to avoid by resorting to various escapes like work, drink and belief.

This sense of the shock of death hitting close to home was recognized by everyone. K would normally associate it with psychological attachment and identification, which implied self-interest, which meant that the resulting suffering was a form of self-pity, for it was on account of our loss and not because of the other person that we were pained. But K had also acknowledged on occasion that the shock of death was not all due to such psychological attachments but to the very organic sense of the close involvement of the people concerned in each other’s lives. This added a layer of subtlety to the question of suffering because we were now required to distinguish between these two elements in the pain of separation and death.

In his investigation, K was not interested in finding the reason or cause of suffering but in following its movement. According to K, only when there is no separate observer can we follow the movement of suffering, which following reveals that we projected on the other person the hope of succeeding where we had failed. Or we depended on him or her to cover up our misery and loneliness. What we are sorry about is not the other but that we are left empty and alone.

Again, this kind of description was easily recognized, but it did raise a number of questions, as the real shock of loss is easily confused with the selfish motivations behind our self-pity. To see that we are being self-centered in such a situation might not be so easily perceived through the emotional fog. That we project our fulfilment on others or that we use them to escape from ourselves might not be that easy to see either, but it is essential that we see it if we are to understand the true meaning of sorrow and pain.

We say we suffer on account of something external, such as losing someone, not having money, etc. But the suffering comes from our personal investment in these things, not from the things themselves. What we suffer from is the loss of our attachment to these things, which attachment is indeed our own self-projection.  If this is correct, we suffer as long as this false separation between the observer and the observed exists. This very separation is the nature of the self, I or me. When that separation ends, the me also ends and then there is no-one who suffers. This is K’s basic approach, which would indicate that suffering is the nature of the self as attachment and duality. When duality and attachment go, the word sorrow has no meaning.

But for that we have to dare to remain with sorrow without moving an inch from it. Have we ever tried it? Are we even willing to contemplate such a thing?

This subject proved to be so interesting that the meeting went on for a bit longer than usual.

Javier Gómez Rodríguez

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 23, 2025

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The facilitator was asked to make an introduction about K and the teachings, as there were two new people, a young couple, in attendance. This brief introduction was much appreciated.

The facilitator then explained that normally such meetings would begin with a reading of one of the daily K quotes from The Book of Life, but that no such text had been selected this time, so it was up to the participants to come up with questions we could inquire into together.

One of the issues that came up was the question as to how we deal with pain, physical and psychological. It was said that physically pain is part of the body’s intelligence. It functions as an alarm signal that something is wrong. Psychologically pain functions differently. Psychological pain is produced by thought through the reproduction or projection of images of pain. K attributes psychological hurt to the self-image.

One of the participants happened to suffer from chronic pain caused by a dental condition. Ironically, this dental problem had been caused by a dentist, so she was now looking into what to do about it, as she hesitated to go back to the dentist. Such chronic pain is not easy to live with, and it can affect the brain. It was indicated that there are psychological techniques to handle such pain without having to resort to pharmaceutical solutions.

Psychological pain occurs mostly in relationship. We all want relationship and love, and we all experience heartbreak and loneliness. One participant shared that he felt that he had never had a real relationship. He did feel lonely and dreamed of having a relationship, but his past experiences made him wary of it. Besides, he was now old and very aware of his own weaknesses and shortcomings, so who could possibly be interested in a relationship with him?

It was pointed out that relationship is a mirror in which we can see ourselves. Relationship offers an external reflection of what we are. The question is whether we can be honest with each other and with ourselves regarding what the mirror reveals and whether we are willing to face it and go deeper into it. This is the way of self-knowledge.

It was then pointed out that relationship is not the only mirror, for consciousness is constantly revealing itself to itself. So self-knowledge implies the self-awareness of consciousness as it projects its own content inwardly. This is one aspect of what might be called ‘meditation’.

We all take love to be the essence of relationship. K approaches it negatively, namely by discarding its false aspects. For him the negation of the false is the birth of the true. He says that love is not attachment, desire, pleasure, dependence, possessiveness, jealousy or even thought, for thought is behind all these false aspects of love. The quintessence of this negative approach is the statement that love is when the self is not.

The self is the movement of becoming and in its ending there is being. This being is not yours or mine, so there is no separation, division and conflict, which deny love. Then the wheel of misfortune generated by our false assumptions of what love is stops spinning and we can relate differently with each other and bring about a new culture and a peaceful world.

Javier Gómez Rodríguez

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 19, 2025

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We began by wondering whether there is a fundamental question that serves as a core issue in our lives. One participant offered that the most fundamental question concerned the meaning of life; another wondered why there is so much cruelty and sorrow in life; a third said that for her it was asking what she was curious about in each encounter or situation of the day; a fourth was concerned with distinguishing between what was a need and what was a want and watching out for wants turning into needs.

Suffering seemed to emerge as the denial of a meaningful life, so we explored it for a while. A distinction was drawn between physical pain and psychological suffering produced by thought. It was proposed that while the first was real, the second was a story and that it was important to distinguish between what comes from the body and what comes from memory. But saying it is a story did not seem to throw light on the intensity of the psychological pain we feel, e.g. deep childhood traumas. While it might be true that fundamentally these things are memories, they have a depth and an emotional intensity that such a description does not account for.

It was then commented that not all suffering is the result of a story. The death of someone we are close to is a painful shock to the system because it means the loss of an integral part of our own being. But our psychological wounds are indeed sustained over time and perhaps beyond their own natural lifespan by becoming an integral part of our psychological identity. They are now me and the me dwells on and finds its nourishment in the ashes of experience, be it painful or pleasurable. So is the self the tragic protagonist of its own fictional story?

The question was then raised as to what K meant by saying that life and death go together. The death K was talking about seemed to refer to the death of the psychological self, which most of us find terrifying. The fear of death might be natural to the organism, as it seeks to protect itself and ensure continuity. But the self has become the focus of our being and has assumed command and ownership of the body. The self takes on the attributes of the body, and seeks to maintain its own continuity, its permanence, at all costs, which sustains the fear of death.

K had said once that there is only one truth, namely impermanence. So by seeking to deny it, the self is already condemning itself to an everlasting battle with that one truth and its resulting fear and suffering. (Maybe the escape from truth is the real nature of fear and the cause of suffering?) That’s why for K staying with fear is so fundamental, for we must go through fear if we are to stop escaping and meet the truth.

The wise insist that the death of the self is fundamental if we are to live fully, if we are to live at all. As long as we keep life and death apart, we exist in the shadow of fear. The self depends on time for its continuity and death means that our time is up. The self is identification with and attachment to things, people, experiences, ideas, etc. It is existentially rooted in the past. The past is already dead, but the self cannot exist without it. So what we fear is to lose these attachments and identifications, the remembrance of things past that nourish our identities.

The self is dependent for its existence on the ownership of things centered on our being something ourselves, on the relationship of the possessor and the possession. It is a relation of interdependent forms: the form of the self-image fulfilling through the possession and becoming of other forms. Its aim is to be something real, to become a reality. Our fear of death is the fear of emptiness, of nothingness in which these forms dissolve, in which there is no becoming, no thing to become.

K’s description of the different layers of consciousness was recalled as a further extension of this relation between consciousness and emptiness, excerpt from Sixth Talk in Poona, 3 October 1948:

“As I said, consciousness has different layers. First, there is the superficial layer, and below that there is memory, because without memory there is no action. Underneath that there is the desire to be, to become, the desire to fulfil. If you go still deeper, you will find a state of complete negation, of uncertainty, of void. This whole totality is consciousness. Now, as long as there is the desire to be, to become, to achieve, to gain, there must be the strengthening of the many layers of consciousness as the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’; and the emptying of those many layers can come about only when one understands the process of becoming. That is, as long as there is the desire to be, to become, to achieve, memory is strengthened, and from that memory there is action, which only further conditions the mind.”

What we normally call consciousness is the first three layers, which are the field of the known driven by the desire to become, which is the consciousness of the me and the mine. This is a movement away from the emptiness, which is part of the totality of consciousness. This movement away from the void is the source of fear. How the will to become arose is something of a mystery but it is the central factor in understanding the nature of consciousness as the field of the known centred on the psychological self. So understanding becoming, which is understanding the self, is the key to psychological transformation, to dying to time inwardly and thus dissolving the fear of death so that to die is to live and to live is to die.

We ended the meeting asking how we might be able to live in this world while embodying this emptiness? How would we function from a sense of being nothing, as enlightened beings?

Javier Gómez Rodríguez

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 16, 2025

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We meandered about for a while until we somehow came up with the subject of nostalgia which, according to its etymology, from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’, which was used to translate the German Heimweh, means acute homesickness. (I am afraid I may have confused this meaning by translating nostos as ‘old’, meaning that nostalgia was necessarily for something in the past, which it is.) This sense of nostalgia, of looking back with longing to a past whose remembrance represents a happier time, seems to be a universal phenomenon. Ultimately, it gets translated as the longing for lost paradise, a time of innoncence and untroubled existence. In most of us it takes the form of a nostalgia of childhood, even when that childhood was not, on the face of it, a happy one.

Since we touched on the idea of paradise, the sense of shame came up. One of the participants shared with the group the enduring sense of shame that had pervaded his life. According to the Genesis story, shame was the first reaction of Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. After eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they felt ashamed of their nakedness, so they proceeded to hide it and to hide themselves from god. This gave them away, since they could not have known about their nakedness nor felt shame without eating of the fruit of that fateful tree. So one of the implications of shame is that we are afraid or embarrassed to be naked before another or even in our own eyes.

Shame and guilt are also used by society to control its members. It has to do with the set of standard values of the culture against which our thoughts, feelings and actions are measured as virtuous or reprobate. The whole system of reward and punishment serves the same purpose. Naming and shaming are collective disciplinary tactics. What is shamed is the self-image as disapproved of in the eyes of others. And that same system is internalised and becomes the source of continuous self-censure.

What if we were to stand totally naked before our own eyes and the eyes of others? What would happen if that kind of total honesty were possible? That would not be the same as the shameless vulgarity of washing one’s dirty linen in public, preferably for a profit. We are talking about dissolving the dualistic struggle within ourselves and with others regarding the traditional division between what is and what should be which is the very source of shame.

No masks, no fig leaves, no nostalgic escape into the past, no utopian flight into the future. Just facing the mirror and observing ourselves unflinchingly as we are, warts and all. That might be part of innocence, to stay with what is for, as K said, there is no contradiction in facts and it is contradiction that makes for conflict and hurt. Would that be a step in regaining our paradise lost?

And, if we looked outside through the large windows, we could see that we were not far from the garden.

 

 Javier Gómez Rodríguez

Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 12, 2025

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The conversation began with a consideration of K’s notion of consciousness as the repository of the universal history of humanity. This modulated into a general consideration of the attempt by humanity to cultivate a set of values as a way to transform itself. One of the participants, who seemed to be something of a religious believer, seemed to disagree with the notion that whatever religion and philosophy had tried as a way to transform humanity had not worked and therefore such beliefs and ideals needed to be abandoned. This gentleman, whose background was a mixture of Mennonite Christianity, Buddhism and Jungian psychology, seemed to be at ease with the corridor of the opposites, saying that everything that manifested in us did so for a reason. He felt that the search for wholeness and transformation did not necessitate abandoning one’s religion. He asserted that K had had a great capacity to hold the opposites together. It was then pointed out that K’s approach to the opposites could be illustrated with his typical example of the opposition between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’. For him the latter, which is usually the opposite of the former, was unreal and therefore it must be dropped. When it is dropped, there is no opposite, only what is. As he said, facts have no opposites. But the gentleman seemed to hold to the view of the complementary of the opposites, saying, for example, that patriarchy was just fine. This found an extension in the later theme of the nature of patriarchy as reflected in our relationships with our own fathers.

The conversation then shifted to the question of the importance of memory in our lives arising from the common phenomenon of dementia and senility. One of the cases mentioned involved a valued acquaintance who had lost his short-term memory and, as a result, though otherwise perfectly lucid, had to be kept a virtual prisoner in the hospital because he simply could not manage his affairs or look after himself. A second case concerned the improved relationship between a son and his father when the latter lost his long-term memory. Their relationship had not been of the best, but with the loss of the past, the son felt he could be closer to his father. This then led to a conversation about our relationships with our fathers. Four of us reported that we had had difficult relationships with our fathers on account of the latter’s aggressive characters.

When the facilitator asked the fifth participant about his father, whether he had been also violent and aggressive, he seemed to find it difficult to answer. As the facilitator kept pushing, the gentleman in question felt he was being placed in rather a vulnerable position and eventually went on the defensive, at which point the facilitator took a step back. Then the participant began to talk about having met his father recently and how his father had, uncharacteristically, not been that aggressive. But even after it was pointed out that he had now answered the question, he seemed not to realize it and kept sidestepping the issue, which made the facilitator wonder what the reason for this avoidance of a direct answer might be.

This exchange between the participant and the facilitator made two of the other participants feel a bit left out of the conversation and even somewhat uncomfortable, as they felt there had been something of a tension, even attack and defense, between them. A third participant did not feel this way at all. She found that the exchange had been significant and had brought out new things for her. The facilitator explained that he had just been trying to establish objectively in the group what the reality of our respective relationships with our fathers had been and how that had conditioned us. That was part of the topic of memory, of how our past remains such a powerful influence in our lives, shaping and often breaking down our relationships. And he added that his intent had been to connect our own shared experiences with the larger theme of consciousness as the stream of suffering and its relationship to memory, leading ultimately to the question as to whether it was possible to empty the psychological content of consciousness.

Unfortunately, this incident happened at the end of the meeting, so we could not round it off properly. Part of the question that was left pending was whether we should question each other in this way or whether we should aim for a less intense atmosphere. The conversation continued in the kitchen over tea, cookies and fresh grapes, which were delicious. The facilitator and the fifth participant resumed their conversation after everyone else left and they carried on for another couple of hours probing together into their lives. It seemed that the afternoon dialogue had raised a number of questions for them. In particular, the facilitator wanted to know more about the fifth participant, who is currently a guest at the Centre. They had had a first meeting yesterday and they agreed to have another one tomorrow afternoon.

Today’s dialogue proved somewhat challenging. Part of the challenge was due to the semantic differences arising from contrasting convictions and points of view. Part was due to the more direct approach to the inquiry taken by the facilitator.

Dialogue is a great and delicate art.

Javier Gómez Rodríguez