Online series The Urgency of Change with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, March 1, 2026
The presenter began the meeting by reviewing the series of The Urgency of Change and the unfolding of the universal human challenge of how to live in this world. He emphasized the central importance of awareness in meeting that challenge, as it is the factor that makes for right perception and the ending of conflict, meditation being the culmination of awareness as the ground of goodness. He touched on the related questions of stopping thought, thought’s relationship to language, and the subjects of beauty, art and expression. He concluded his introduction by mentioning the chapter entitled ‘What Is’, which he had previously overlooked but which drives home the need to face things as they are if we are to live without illusion.
He pointed out that for Krishnamurti meditation is not measurement, method or a means to an end but opening a space for the emergence of wholeness, beauty and truth. It begins with the observation of what is in choiceless awareness, i.e. without judgment or division. He recalled that K had given practical indications for the active exploration of meditation and the need for persistence. One new aspect was K’s statement that meditation is the essence of energy, perhaps meaning the summation of it by reducing wasteful activity and conflict, introducing clarity and a non-frictional quality into relationship. The stopping of thought is fundamental in this, because the predominance of thought in our existence is equivalent to living in the past, which is not living at all. The past is the observer, which is the factor that destroys relationships through division and conflict. So stopping this movement is a life-or-death issue. But thought cannot be stopped by effort or will, which are part of thought. It stops when we perceive its destructive impact in relationship. Thought is language, a symbolic system whose re-presentations introduce the past into observation, giving rise to the duality of the observer and the observed, the dreamer and the dream. K had suggested that without this duality there would be no need for dreaming, thus extending the wakefulness of awareness to the deepest states of meditation in sleep. The mind would thus be always awake, which is the heightened sensitivity of the greatest art of all, the art of living. This art involves the absence of self, which is the essence of skill in action in the whole of life, which is living beauty and living love.
The discussion began with the theme of art as the absence of self and creative skill in action. This led into an exploration of wakefulness as a causeless state and K’s view of cause as motive, desire and will, which are all structures of thought, of the past, whose endless chain of cause and effect is the definition of karma. The breaking of this chain of psychological causation is freedom. It was remarked that the Buddhist approach is very similar. This chain was illustrated by the example of past conditioning shaping our lives and creating the feedback loop of self-recognition that is the principle of psychological isolation and conflict. The question was raised about how seeing ends the past or reduces its power to dominate the present. It was suggested that the very act of seeing naturally puts the past in its place by revealing its constructive or destructive nature in relationship. So seeing is the greatest skill. The conversation concluded with a reflection on the brain’s creation of symbolic structures to protect itself from the full impact of direct experience. This led back to the theme of meditation and energy, which the presenter related to K’s ‘process’ and its challenge to the brain, which may have developed the self to keep that overwhelming flow at bay. The notions of analytic idealism and Donald Hoffman’s conscious agents theory were mentioned as suggesting the necessity of such protective boundaries, but there was no time left for the group to go into this.
- Javier Gómez Rodríguez
