Archive for category: Event Summaries

Krishnamurti Study Group Saturday, September 20, 2014 Six participants came together to sit outside on a lovely afternoon and continue the study of chapter 15 in Freedom From the Known.   The chapter deals with the topics of experience, satisfaction, duality, and meditation.  Krishnamurti speaks of what is not meditation in the first place and then explores the kind of attention and awareness in one’s daily life that he calls real meditation:  “Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it.  In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling.  And out of this awareness comes silence.”    Meditation is a state of complete attention, which cannot be taught by anyone but is perhaps the greatest art in life.  It can be going on at any time or place and it opens the possibility of knowing love. A group discussion was interspersed with the reading of the text, with some exploration of quite subtle aspects of how thought creates the duality of observer and observed, subject and object.  Other subjects of investigation were brought up by participants and, as often happens, the group was fully immersed in the discussion when the session was brought to a close.  There remains one chapter to be studied in this book and then we will move on to examine the text The First and Last Freedom.

Krishnamurti Study Group Saturday, September 6, 2014 Five of us showed up to read and discuss Chapter 15 in Freedom From the Known in which Krishnamurti discusses experience, satisfaction, duality, and meditation. He begins by inquiring into the demand to experience and questioning what is driving this demand: the fact that we are discontented with what is. This implies a basic duality involving resisting what is and seeking some other experience. He goes into the whole nature of experience and its grounding in the known in some detail. The group took some silent time to look into the issue of discontent with the present moment and the subsequent discussion took us into issues of fear, suffering, and the belief in a separate “me”. Can fear and suffering actually be seen to be unreal as some say, or is that merely a concept or ideal without substance? What seems to be necessary is to go into and through the ego to a state of mind that is more real and true. This includes the exploration of how we can be with, or be open to, the unknown, as K seems to suggest is a key. The dialogue was very lively and perhaps somewhat challenging to some of the assumptions held by the thinking mind.

What we learn by reading or listening to the teachings of spiritual teachers, depends very much on how we read or listen. Some people feel that they did not change much by reading Krishnamurti’s books for many years. That may be because they tried to understand Krishnamurti’s teachings instead of looking within to see how their own mind worked in the daily activities and in their relationship with human beings, nature and things around. It seems to me that if Krishnamurti’s books or talks did not make an immediate impact on your life, then it is most likely that you were not interested in learning about yourself. You were interested in collecting knowledge or ideas about Krishnamurti and his teachings just like scholars and professors. One professor told Krishnamurti-“Sir, I have studied your teachings for 30 years but I have not moved at all (I have not changed).” Krishnamurti said-“You have not moved because you have not stopped!” To stop means to stop reading and looking within in daily activities of relationship. By looking within in awareness, we learn directly. This direct learning by looking within begins to change the quality of our life and relationship. Then we do not repeat Krishnamurti’s ideas. We become more authentic in our observation and expression.

Over the last six months I’ve been deeply intrigued by the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was not at all the type of spiritual guru many people might assume. He firmly rejected any efforts to paint him as such (he rejected the notion of being a guru, and also of having followers). In actuality, his teachings were rooted in an almost supernatural understanding of human psychology, and he explored the nature of self and thought in a way that is stunningly intelligent and lucid. On the surface, his observations can come across as very intellectual, and yet what he was doing is pointing us beyond the realm of words and thought to a place of true freedom. Many of his concepts are actually quite simple, such as his explanations of the relationship between self and society. Those concepts that are more complicated are revealed as being quite sublime once they have begun to find their way into the deeper layers of the psyche. One of Krishnamurti’s key observations is that “the observer is the observed”. This can also be interpreted as “the thinker is the thought”. He asserted that thinking and the entity perceived as thethinker are in actuality a unitary process. And this makes perfect sense to me, although my understanding is still limited to the realm of intellectual thought. Really, there is only thought occurring in the field of awareness, and the entity we understand as being the thinker- the self- is no more than a defined sense we develop as a result of conscious and subconscious processes that draw on the accumulated knowledge of our past experiences. Even as we project this self onto our experience as it is unfolding in the present, we are simply making sense of the present by juxtaposing it with knowledge from the past. That knowledge that we are using to interpret the present is always extremely limited, even being rooted in a deep form of existential ignorance, and so we are perceiving our experience in a very limited and disconnected way. In other words, we are living in our limited understanding of the past as it relates to the present, and that includes the way we perceive ourselves. This would be fine if it did not also lead to so much conflict in our personal lives, and also on a global societal level. It can be argued that all conflict, as it manifests both personally and socially, is the result of this fragmented way of existing. We may sometimes break through this barrier to the present moment, in moments when our egos aren’t being triggered by external objects or events. Perhaps in those moments when we truly feel we are one with nature then we may be achieving a less distorted way of being. Personally, I have a great deal of affinity for the ocean and the forest, and when I’m in nature I notice that I’m not necessarily relating to my surroundings through the lens of the “I”. I have often felt that the sights and sounds of the ocean inhabit my being in a way that frees me from the burdens of my self, of my ego. I think that might be a glimpse of a different way of being. It’s much harder to achieve and maintain this state in a world of other “I’s”, subconsciously working at substantiating and perpetuating themselves as individuals in ways that are often competitive, superficial and passively aggressive. With the right understanding, with the right insight, I wonder if it might be possible to live without always relating to our experiences with the “I” at the centre, possibly freeing ourselves from the tension and anxiety of the constant state of inner reaction that now dominates most of our lives. If only we could truly see that this transient “I” that we are always defending and striving to nurture and reinforce is not at all what we think it is- that we are infinitely more sublime and essential than that- I wonder if we might wake up and sigh a sigh of relief that could be felt by all humankind.