Exploring Ourselves, January 7, 2024

Exploring Ourselves
January 7, 2024
With Jackie McInley
Zoom Online

 

Ten people in total were in attendance for this Sunday Morning online meeting. We began with some questioning of what kind of awareness Krishnamurti was talking about for so many years. Was it an awareness without a controller? Was it self-consciousness, or something different? Was it beyond self-consciousness, with a quality of freedom, mystery, or an inexplicability? Can it be “understood”? Is it separate from the body or one with it? Is it separate from thought? Are thought and conditioning the same? If there is no thought can there be conditioning? Is it possible to speak from the depth of consciousness or is thought always creating some element of conflict, usually without realising that it is doing so? And how do we see what thought is doing in us? There is so much projection in our thinking that conflicts are often not seen with any clarity, for example in family dynamics.

There were some questions about our approach to these issues. Are we having some insight or just thinking? Is there partial insight or full insight? Can we slow down the inquiry so we can see the insecurity of our thoughts? What about the uneasy feeling we have as we get closer to the sense of not knowing, of touching the unknown? In the experiential domain, can we stay in our vulnerability and feel the stresses that arise as we explore ourselves? Jackie asked the interesting question “What is the true sense of peace?”

Other participants wondered if we ever truly wake up or are we most often in a dream state. Are we caught habitually in various assumptions? Can we see that we are never really a victim and, if not, how is it missed? Is sadness “mine” or is it a universal phenomenon? If we sense that much of our experience is common and shared, does that bring us closer to other humans?

Sometimes the dialogue seemed to create that sense of shared meaning.

DB