Krishnamurti Study Group Saturday, May 24, 2014   A small group of four gathered for the study session, which focused on the second half of chapter 11 in Freedom From the Known.   The main topics of the chapter are looking and listening, which Krishnamurti treats as the same.   He also goes into the nature of love and how love and perception are connected.  We generally tend to see the world and other people through our images of them rather than seeing them as they actually are.  As a result there is no real relationship or communion with others or the world of nature.   After reading a segment from the text participants were guided into a meditative exploration where we sat quietly for ten minutes and noticed how we were observing objects and people around us.   Do we see through images?  Is there an observer separate from what is observed?  What happens when we become aware of how we are observing?  It seemed that this experiential exercise was very interesting and useful, and it led to some dialogue which went quite deeply into a few issues such as psychological or “ego” death.   Perhaps the small size of the group allowed for a more profound sharing of ideas, questions, and insights.  The session ended by reading to the end of the chapter.   The topic of observation will be further explored in Chapter 12.

  “Approaches to Meditation” Weekend retreat, May 16 – 18, 2014 Dr. Hilary Rodrigues, Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Lethbridge, has facilitated a weekend retreat once a year for the past six years at the Swanwick Centre/Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada.   This year the title of his workshop was “Approaches to Meditation”.   Hilary has a wide knowledge of the many traditions and practices of meditation as well as of Krishnamurti’s teachings on the subject, and he has a deep personal experience of the spiritual search.   His manner of presentation is at the same time very erudite and humorous,  profound and light.   The attendees expressed how much they enjoyed the weekend spent with Hilary and the other participants and the hope that he will return again. The retreat began on Friday night with a talk by Hilary entitled “Can Anyone Really Ever Meditate?”   Twenty-one people showed up for the event and the comments afterwards were to the effect that the talk was exceptionally clear and informative.  A number of meditative approaches were discussed, ending up with Krishnamurti’s “non-meditation” approach.   A lively discussion followed which went later than expected due to the eager participation of the group. The remainder of the weekend was attended by fifteen people, some from as far away as Hawaii and Texas, and began on Saturday morning with a short talk by Hilary on “Awakening/Transformation”, with a number of quotations from various sources to stimulate inquiry.   The talk was followed by a group dialogue.   After lunch and some time to walk in nature on the beautiful property there was another short talk entitled “Meditative Methods”, again with some quotes and an engaged group dialogue.   After a tea break there was a “Question and Answer” session with a free flowing dialogue.  Saturday evening included a talk on “Mindfulness and Choiceless Awareness of What Is”, followed by a group discussion which again went on rather late because of the high level of interest in the topic and the interchange. On Sunday morning, after more time to be outdoors in the lovely weather, Hilary gave a short talk on the question “Which method is best for transformation?”   The talk again led seamlessly into a group dialogue.   After lunch and free time a half hour video was shown of Krishnamurti speaking on meditation from the Real Revolution series of talks in Ojai, in 1966.   There was then time for a final dialogue and closing sharing.  There was a sense of having covered quite a lot of ground over the weekend and also that there was probably much more to explore and discover.  It was very refreshing for participants to spend time in such a conducive environment and it seemed that most were definitely intending to return.

Recently we had a dialogue at this centre from 2 pm to 4pm. There were 8 of us. We read 2 or 3 pages from Freedom From The Known. It was about the art of looking and listening. How do we look at objects, nature and people around us? Is there clarity, freshness and beauty in our way of looking? Or is it a dull, old habitual way of looking with unconscious thinking? When we were young, before going to schools, we looked at everything with a fresh and curious mind. There were clarity, freshness and beauty in our way of looking. We were fascinated to look at flowers, birds, moon, people, colors and shapes. There was not much knowledge about these things within us. After we went to school, we were encouraged to remember the names of birds, flowers and other objects around us. We were enthusiastic in gathering knowledge about our environment. Learning was fun up to the end of 7th std. There were no examinations at the end of academic year to test our knowledge. When we came to senior school in Std.8, we had to learn too many subjects.  Slowly learning became a burden. We had to memorize too many things in order to pass examinations. We developed fear and other psychological problems like competition, ambition, shyness and guilt about the nature of sexual feelings and insensitivity to nature.  Our mind was occupied with too many thoughts and problems. Now trees, flowers,  birds, colors, shapes did not look strange and beautiful. We looked at all these things with the words and knowledge we had learned. We became intellectual as we grew older. We learned how to solve mathematical problems and apply our knowledge to solve problems in science. We learned how to analyze social, political, economical problems. We became clever in expressing ourselves through words and ideas. But in this process, we paid a heavy price. We lost the ability to look at things, people and nature with the sense of wonder and freshness, the way we looked before we went to school. Is it possible to get back the way of looking at everything with freshness and beauty, without knowledge and images? Is it possible to have a silent and awake mind which can look at all things with innocence, beauty and love? It is possible but for that one must have a passion to look within, to see how thoughts arise and how they move from one thing to another. One can observe in relationship how thoughts create all kind of psychological problems. Without turning our attention within, it is not possible to be free, happy, peaceful and to feel love and beauty. Without this freedom, life can become mechanical and meaningless even if one has money, power and fame in society.    

Recently I had the pleasure of attending a retreat at the Krishnamurti Centre in Metchosin, British Columbia. The centre itself is located on a majestic estate which was a Krishnamurti school from 1977 to 1981, and is currently being used for a variety of spiritual retreats and gatherings. It was certainly refreshing to relax in such a beautiful setting, the property itself flowing down to the ocean and surrounded by the serenity and majesty of the Canadian west coast, but the content of the retreat itself was especially refreshing. In fact, while the word “enlightened” gets thrown around quite a bit these days, I can say with sincerity that I left the retreat a great deal more enlightened than when I had arrived two days earlier. I’ve struggled since I was young with issues surrounding identity and purpose. This is something most people wrestle with at different times in their lives, and to varying degrees, but it was something that I could never reconcile enough to actually feel grounded in my own being. My father introduced me to Buddhism and mysticism when I was a teenager, and I’ve been exploring different philosophies and spiritual practises since then. Beneath that exploration though- and something that was far more pervasive than the outward seeking- was a constant underlying questioning that had permeated every corner of my psyche. “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?” and “What’s the point of all this?” were questions that were really tearing me apart inside. There’s nothing wrong with these questions in and of themselves, but if our sense of self is contingent on finding reasonable answers, than such questioning can easily become a slippery path to confusion, despair and existential crisis. It was a combination of questioning and crisis that led me to pick up Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now last year. For the first time in my life I was reading something that was actually affecting a very real change in the way I related to my thoughts and the world around me, but it only took me so far at the time. While The Power of Now remains my favourite “spiritual” book to date, it ignited a process in my psyche but I would require further wisdom to help me take the next step. This year I started listening to Alan Watts lectures, which ultimately led me to the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. I was quite surprised when my mother informed me that she had seen an advertisement for a Krishnamurti Centre right outside of Victoria, the city I’m grateful to call home. The retreat itself was based on Krishnamurti’s teachings, and it was entitled The Nature of Relationship. It was led by Dr. Harshad Parekh, who was formerly a teacher at a number of Krishnamurti Schools in India, and someone whose life has been deeply impacted by Krishnamurti’s teachings. Dr. Parekh shared an excellent selection of videos and excerpts from books, elaborating and answering questions in ways that helped to clarify the teachings, which can sometimes seem quite esoteric. Ralph Tiller, who hosted the retreat, also provided valuable insight and helped to engage the conversation in meaningful ways. The nature of relationship is truly at the core of Krishnamurti’s teachings, and so this retreat was not merely about “relationship” as many might presume. When most of us think of relationship, we tend to default to the realm of interpersonal relationships, such as those we have with our friends, family and coworkers. But the relationship Krishnamurti refers to is much more all-encompassing than that. In fact, he is referring to something that encompasses the totality of our experience. We relate to the world by attaching meaning to our experiences, and by mentally labelling objects within the field of those experiences. In other words, we relate to the world through our thoughts. While thinking certainly serves its purposes, Krishnamurti asserts that our thinking has become a terrible barrier where our relationship to reality is concerned. Our thoughts are based on our past experiences, and in relating to the present by way of our thoughts we are relating to reality as a construct of the past, reducing it into a series of “likes and dislikes”. Instead of experiencing and engaging in life in a natural and dynamic way, our relationship to our experience is based purely on the images we have formed about ourselves, each other and the world. Krishnamurti explains how this incongruent relationship is at the root of suffering, at the heart of the conflict and dysfunction that has troubled humankind since time immemorial. He explains that society is simply an extension of the individual, and that as long as individuals continue to perceive reality by way of the past, then their actions will be out of step with reality and society will continue to be a destructive affair. This deep conflict manifests at every level of society, in such sad and tragic affairs as broken marriages, suicide, and war. One of Krishnamurti’s most powerful and challenging assertions is that to correct these problems is not simply a matter of correcting negative or hateful thinking, but that the entirety of our normal process of thinking is at the root of all this suffering. And because the very basis for the way we think and relate is a product of social and cultural conditioning, the process of freeing ourselves from that conditioning is not a matter of using thought, because that simply limits the outcome to the realm of that conditioning and always essentially leads us right back to where we started. For that reason, the process of undoing this conditioning cannot directly involve any teaching, system, or tradition. The path to freedom is pathless, as Krishnamurti says, and involves embracing what he calls choiceless awareness. This is a state of consciousness that is free from judgement and condemnation, of likes and dislikes, and one that is not constantly defining experience- because every act of such definition is a distortion of the present into a construct of the past. Now this may all seem like intellectual abstraction that has very little value in terms of real world application, but I believe that it is actually a deep understanding of human psychology and the roots of personal and social conflict. I’m just becoming acquainted with Krishnamurti, and even if my knowledge were greater, I certainly couldn’t explain the intricacies or implications of his teachings in such a space. Personally though, I have already started integrating his teachings into my awareness, and I can attest that they are indeed very powerful. I’ve become aware of how I’m constantly defining elements of my experience and how that causes a great deal of inner conflict for me. Practising “just watching” (as Dr. Parekh often says) as a means of nurturing choiceless awareness, I find my awareness is increasingly stepping in when I would otherwise be caught up in thinking, and that interruption can lead me to a place of true mental stillness. It’s a huge relief from the incessant mind that has been burdening me for so long. Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts paved the way for my understanding of Krishnamurti’s teachings, and my retreat at the Krishnamurti Centre seems to have ignited an ongoing process that continues to unfold on a daily basis. Just as I could only explain so much about Krishnamurti’s teachings, I have only explained just a bit about how these teachings are playing out in my daily life. I’m treating this as an ongoing experiment. As for my big questions about life, thanks in large part to Tolle, Watts, and Krishnamurti, I’m developing an understanding of “self”, “other” and “society” that is helping me make sense of many things. I’m seeing more clearly just who I really am (by a process of understanding who I “really am not”), and also coming to understand some of the major underlying reasons for the suffering and chaos that have been humanity’s close companions for such a terribly long time. Once we begin to shed those layers of self that are merely conceptual, it might seem like there is a great emptiness at the heart of all this, and at the core of our very being. In a sense, I think that’s correct. But I don’t believe this is a cold emptiness- quite the opposite in fact. I believe it’s something divine, and as we let go of the concepts that rule our perception, there is a real opportunity to enjoy a relationship with this underlying stillness that can enrich our lives in ways most of us can barely imagine, deepening our relationships and helping us to live our lives in ways that are truly serving both ourselves and others. This is a new path- a path to real freedom.