Self-inquiry, October 29, 2023

Self-inquiry

Sunday, October 29, 2023

With Jackie McInley

At KECC, Metchosin, BC

 

Thirteen people, all included, attended this event sponsored by the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada and held at the Centre’s main location at 538 Swanwick Road in Metchosin, BC at 3 pm on a Sunday afternoon. The meeting was facilitated by Jackie McInley from the UK, who seems to attract on a regular basis a good number of serious seekers committed to exploring who or what they truly are in a context of group exploration and investigation. She pointed out right from the beginning that it is not a group with membership, rules, particular loyalties or principles. The group is not focused on the individual but, at the same time, does not ignore him or her. The subject of interest is the human mind or the human being itself and how it creates its experience of life.

Where should we begin such an exploration? Jackie asked. One interesting approach might be to focus on something that is weighing us down, that we would like to address, or anything we felt stuck on in our lives. We may be disturbed by changes in our world, by uncertainty, chaos, or our expectations not being met. What is our relationship with anxiety and insecurity? Jackie asked, and with a sense of instability we may feel in our lives? And what is it that triggers these feelings? These questions stimulated a string of penetrating observations and ideas from the participants which challenged the conventional ways we might inquire into such issues and brought us into ever-deeper insights and perceptions in the realm of understanding the nature of thought and its movements in ourselves. We considered the proposition that observation of thought brings about a silence in the mind and explored the possibility of touching the “Unknown”, which Krishnamurti and others suggest is of utmost importance in our self-exploration. Group members seemed to feel that the dialogue was very worthwhile.

DB