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

Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with James Tousignant
May 7, 2025

The meeting began with the Book of Life reading from May 7, 2025 titled, “One Must Have Great Feeling.” We quickly moved into an exploration of the Krishnamurti’s use of the word “feeling” as his statement:

because it is only the feelings that make the mind highly sensitive

This would have been interesting in and of itself, however the reading on the opposite page, described:

there is no feeling without thought

And feelings, thoughts, etc dissipate the energy needed to observe… to inquire. A seeming contradiction on the level of the ordinary meaning of the word is where we began. As we moved through our inquiry it became clear that an experience of ‘great feeling’, (brief moments where aliveness and clarity arise) and ‘observation without thought’ (where in the moment of observing our minds are stilled) provided the ground to embrace the apparent contradiction and move into a more expansive understanding of ‘feeling’.

James

Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Henry Fischer
April 30, 2025

On Wednesday six participants gathered for a KECC sponsored dialogue at the Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion in Victoria.

After a period of silence, it was suggested that dialogue may not be about our experience or our expertise but might require one to look at oneself as one has never looked before— not as an idea but as a fact (actuality).

It was suggested that absolutely everything we know or experience might not be love whatsoever. It may be only a memory already conditioned and judged by its utility to this self which is often describes as “me”. Is there a “me”? Why would one ask such a question like this? Does it have something to do with suffering and conflict? Surely in suffering and conflict me is always there. But the suffering is desired to end, and one doesn’t consider instead that perhaps the me could end. Is the “me” the root of this suffering? Does one need this “me” even though of course it continues to produce images and tell a story of what it thinks? Could this bring one to the precipice of being a true revolutionary…

The following Krishnamurti quote is a shortened excerpt from the August 6 entry in Book of Life by J. Krishnamurti:

The true revolutionary
Truth is not for those who are respectable, nor for those who desire self-extension, self- fulfillment. Truth is not for those who are seeking security, permanency; for the permanency they seek is merely the opposite of impermanency. Truth comes to him who is free of time, who is not using time as a means of self-extension. Time means memory of yesterday, memory of your family, of your race, of your particular

As the dialogue began to conclude the group asked questions about fear and attachment. There was a suggestion to bring this forward in May when the dialogues continues with a new facilitator.

Henry Fischer

 

Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Henry Fischer
April 23, 2025

On Wednesday seven participants gathered for a KECC sponsored dialogue at the Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion in Victoria.

After a period of silence, the group was asked to bring forth any “burning” questions, life experiences or readings from Krishnamurti which the group could examine together. It was asked to further define “what is burning” but the definition was left with the group to determine this meaning. It began with a question about innocence and images (“the idea of ourselves or each other”) to see if innocence and images are mutually exclusive.

Quite appropriately, the group described that they do, in fact, have images of themselves and one another, and that these images sometimes seem to come from a kind of fear or defensiveness, but other times seem to offer value and insight into the nature of another.

Although these images seem to offer insight into the nature of another person, the actuality seems quite the opposite, as these images come from the one who is seeing and not from what is seen? Therefore if these images don’t have an accuracy about what is out there what does that say about the image-maker? Does the image-maker use these images to avoid something? If so what is being avoided? It was suggested that there might be something which doesn’t have a label at all but is somewhat exciting and unsettling, a kind of unknown and unresolved energetic state which is avoided. In lieu of closing comments and because a reading wasn’t offered to begin the inquiry, instead, a reading was brought in to address the kind of unresolved nature beneath images which may not have an object or “known” experience or even permanent state to it.

The following is an excerpt from The Book of Life, J. Krishnamurti (July 5):

We seek happiness through things, through relationship, through thoughts, ideas. So things, relationship, and ideas become all-important and not happiness… Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency… To find out the true meaning of happiness, we must explore the river of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not an end in itself. Is there a source to a stream? Every drop of water from the beginning to the end makes the river. To imagine that we will find happiness at the source is to be mistaken. It is to be found where you are on the river of self- knowledge.

Henry Fischer

Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Henry Fischer
April 16, 2025

On Wednesday nine participants gathered for a KECC sponsored dialogue at the Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion in Victoria.

After a period of silence, it was suggested that dialogue might be a journey in the unknown as a field of shared listening instead of a conversation between separate identities governed by what we already know. The group listened to this comment. From this the group explored interest and passion questioning whether interests were particular and whether passion might be something different. Perhaps some kind of energy that doesn’t have an object.

The following Krishnamurti quote was read from the Book of Life (April 27):

A passionate mind is inquiring

Obviously there must be passion, and the question is how to revive that passion. Do not let us misunderstand each other. I mean passion in every sense, not merely sexual passion which is a very small thing. And most of us are satisfied with that because every other passion has been destroyed—in the office, in the factory, through following a certain job, routine, learning techniques—so there is no passion left; there is no creative sense of urgency and release. Therefore sex becomes important to us, and there we get lost in petty passion which becomes an enormous problem to the narrow, virtuous mind, or else it soon becomes a habit and dies. I am using the word passion as a total thing. A passionate man who feels strongly is not satisfied merely with some little job—whether it be the job of a prime minister, or of a cook, or what you will. A mind that is passionate is inquiring, searching, looking, asking, demanding, not merely trying to find for its discontent some object in which it can fulfill itself and go to sleep. A passionate mind is groping, seeking, breaking through, not accepting any tradition; it is not a decided mind, not a mind that has arrived, but it is a young mind that is ever arriving.

The group explored passion as energy and looked for what might limit this passion. Was the self ( what “I know” about “myself”) a kind of lack of energy and enthusiasm for life.

The following excerpt from the Book of Life was read to continue exploration of this topic (April 28):

Now, how is such a mind to come into being? It must happen. Obviously, a petty mind cannot work at it. A petty mind trying to become passionate will merely reduce everything to its own pettiness. It must happen, and it can only happen when the mind sees its own pettiness and yet does not try to do anything about it.

The group explored what kind of action Krishnamurti was getting at here. What does it mean to do nothing about a reaction? What is faced by not going along with the current of what the brain says is the right image to produce to manage a situation.

Could passion be something beyond our comprehension?

At the end of the dialogue it was suggested that perhaps this was all in the field of self-consciousness or limitation and was it possible for the group to explore love or presence or something which was not this limited offering from thought? Could this be another trap of thought? It was suggested that the group might consider this next time.

Henry Fischer