Self-Inquiry with Henry Fischer, April 23, 2025
Self-Inquiry Meeting
On-site Dialogue with Henry Fischer
April 23, 2025
On Wednesday seven participants gathered for a KECC sponsored dialogue at the Esquimalt Gorge Park Pavilion in Victoria.
After a period of silence, the group was asked to bring forth any “burning” questions, life experiences or readings from Krishnamurti which the group could examine together. It was asked to further define “what is burning” but the definition was left with the group to determine this meaning. It began with a question about innocence and images (“the idea of ourselves or each other”) to see if innocence and images are mutually exclusive.
Quite appropriately, the group described that they do, in fact, have images of themselves and one another, and that these images sometimes seem to come from a kind of fear or defensiveness, but other times seem to offer value and insight into the nature of another.
Although these images seem to offer insight into the nature of another person, the actuality seems quite the opposite, as these images come from the one who is seeing and not from what is seen? Therefore if these images don’t have an accuracy about what is out there what does that say about the image-maker? Does the image-maker use these images to avoid something? If so what is being avoided? It was suggested that there might be something which doesn’t have a label at all but is somewhat exciting and unsettling, a kind of unknown and unresolved energetic state which is avoided. In lieu of closing comments and because a reading wasn’t offered to begin the inquiry, instead, a reading was brought in to address the kind of unresolved nature beneath images which may not have an object or “known” experience or even permanent state to it.
The following is an excerpt from The Book of Life, J. Krishnamurti (July 5):
We seek happiness through things, through relationship, through thoughts, ideas. So things, relationship, and ideas become all-important and not happiness… Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency… To find out the true meaning of happiness, we must explore the river of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not an end in itself. Is there a source to a stream? Every drop of water from the beginning to the end makes the river. To imagine that we will find happiness at the source is to be mistaken. It is to be found where you are on the river of self- knowledge.
Henry Fischer
