Inquiry with Lee Tuley, October 1, 2026
We met at the Pavilion, where Lee opened the dialogue with a reading from The Book of Life from the April 1st entry:
“The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it. He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself. He is his loneliness, his emptiness, and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion, and endless conflict. When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear.”
Lee shared a medical emergency story to illustrate the difference between what actually happens and the psychological suffering we can add to it. This opened a sharing on how we perceived the passage. One participant described an image that arose while listening: a small dot trying to run away from loneliness, only to discover that “it is it.” It was pointed out that thought can create a sense of separation, turning what is being experienced into something that seems to exist outside ourselves.
Much of the discussion focused on anxiety and fear. Are we resisting the feeling itself, or the stories and meanings we attach to it? “What you resist, persists,” Lee suggested the possibility of experiencing anxiety simply as sensations in the body, without all the stories built around it.
The dialogue also explored the difference between reaction and response. Can we meet a situation without adding our past conditioning and ideas about how things “should” be? The phrase “I don’t mind” became a point of inquiry. One participant was concerned about the possibility of passivity or accepting everything without action, while others pointed to the possibility of meeting a challenge without an internal struggle against it. Could there be a kind of freedom in not fighting what is? As one participant suggested, when we stop resisting what is already happening, there is no longer a waste of energy in fighting reality, allowing us to see the situation more clearly and respond with what it actually requires.
The discussion then turned to the idea of “trying.” Does the effort to become free reinforce the very sense of incompleteness we are trying to move away from? As one participant put it, “The more I try, the stronger the sense of self that’s trying to get rid of itself.” This brought the inquiry back to the original passage: if the one trying to escape is not separate from what it is trying to escape, what does freedom actually mean? We finished with a moment of integration and gratitude.
- Anastasia Shtamina
