Know Thyself, February 10 – 12, 2023

Know Thyself

February 10 – 12, 2023

With Kathryn Jeffries, Ph.D

Zoom Online

 

Kathryn joined us from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Education. She is the author of a number of publications including Awake: Education for Enlightenment and Wide Awake: Anatomy of Awakening. She is a certified facilitator of “The Work of Byron Katie” and has studied the teachings of J. Krishnamurti in great depth. While introducing herself to the workshop participants and staff, Kathryn mentioned that conducting a workshop online was a new experience for her. There were twelve people present in total for this event.

Kathryn spoke about her vision of self-inquiry, which for her is a movement beyond abstraction to a way of knowing beyond thought. There are two aspects to it: 1) identifying what we are thinking and believing in a given moment, and 2) questioning the beliefs and conclusions that thought has produced. Rather than attempting to solve problems, it is more a question of seeing how the problem is created by our thinking and thereby accessing a different state of mind. In order to demonstrate the process of questioning our thoughts, Kathryn made use of the methods developed and taught by Bryon Katie. These essentially involve writing down our concepts and then investigating them in an organised manner which often leads to profound insights about ourselves and meaningful shifts in how we are seeing the world and other people. Over the three days of the workshop, we experimented with Katie’s mode of inquiry and dealt with the queries about the process which naturally arose as we engaged with our own minds and our desires for understanding of others, ourselves, and the inquiry process itself. There was a good deal of discussion about the similarities and differences between Krishnamurti’s approach to self-knowledge and that of Bryon Katie. We engaged with processes of self-inquiry which offered opportunities to see ourselves freshly and in revealing ways in the “mirror of relationship” provided by the questions and also central to the “meditation” recommended by Krishnamurti. Both K and Katie assert that self-inquiry is all we need in order to come upon a meaningful sense of who or what we truly are and to live from that realisation of our nature.

Kathryn’s presentations were very useful in showing us an effective way to combine the perspectives of Krishnamurti and those of Byron Katie in deepening our understanding and “skill” in looking at ourselves.

DB