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