Exploring Ourselves, March 12, 2023

Exploring Ourselves

March 12, 2023

With Jackie McInley

Zoom Online

 

Jackie joined us via Zoom from Ojai, California. At the beginning of the session there were 13 participants in total but a couple more arrived as the meeting got going. In her introductory talk, Jackie mentioned the value of David Bohm’s work on dialogue wherein he shared richly with Krishnamurti and others. In particular she found it interesting how he explored the quality of attention necessary to function in a manner that went beyond thought. What was the space of “not knowing” that Bohm liked to look into and which provided a sense of “shared meaning” in his dialogue meetings. How do we get into that space of “beyond thought” or attention? She suggested that a good beginning was the act of “listening”. Then there seemed to be an inevitable arising of an image or images and a giving of more importance to some images than to others. As a group we explored the factor of thinking that is beyond our conscious awareness but at the same time is creating our experience of life or reality. We are mostly unaware of our thinking process while it is inventing a “me” and guiding that “me” in its responses and reactions.

We looked into the issue of “Identification” and the creation of our identity, especially the role of memory as an abstraction which nevertheless determines much of our experience of reality. Jackie felt that the dialogue today was one of a great richness of discovery as we looked at the workings of thought and its creation of images, memories, and interpretations. Our images are mistaken for reality, which is a very serious matter! It is how we can end up killing each other. Krishnamurti and Bohm gave great importance to “thinking together” because it meant penetrating the illusions of thought so they are not believed to be worth going to war over. Does “thinking together” mean questioning our assumptions and finding a quality of freedom in the spaciousness of such inquiry?