Exploring Ourselves with Jackie McInley, February 1, 2025

Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
February 1, 2025

We opened today’s dialogue with the question: How can a perception be totally new and can we explore and discover a very different energy of newness in our dialogue itself?

We first wondered – for our actual approach to be new in nature – whether there is a way of looking that does not have a hidden purpose to it. We then explored what manifests the old way of looking; we discovered motive, conclusions, judgement, image making and control, as factors rendering perception “old”.

Our inquiry brought us to the point where we wondered how a mind so steeped in its recorded content, could possibly ever be new at all. The past is always ready to interpret the present moment though the lenses of what it already knows. How can a past mind so continuously active, be aware without the past operating? Indeed there is nothing one can do about the continuous, mechanical activation of the past. However, the question is: can this past be seen, yet not acted on? One member of the group suggested that we never give ourselves totally to what is taking place; in fact we evaluate how much we give according to the situation.

We discovered that thought itself believes that it is already fully aware of reality, when in fact it is remembering rather than awake to what is. Consequently, attention is never fully engaged, since it is left to thought to engage from the safety and security of the past. Can an intensity of attention – giving everything we have – end this complacency of awareness? Each one of us has find out for ourselves.

Jackie McInley