Self-Inquiry with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, October 19, 2025

We began by wondering whether there is a fundamental question that serves as a core issue in our lives. One participant offered that the most fundamental question concerned the meaning of life; another wondered why there is so much cruelty and sorrow in life; a third said that for her it was asking what she was curious about in each encounter or situation of the day; a fourth was concerned with distinguishing between what was a need and what was a want and watching out for wants turning into needs.

Suffering seemed to emerge as the denial of a meaningful life, so we explored it for a while. A distinction was drawn between physical pain and psychological suffering produced by thought. It was proposed that while the first was real, the second was a story and that it was important to distinguish between what comes from the body and what comes from memory. But saying it is a story did not seem to throw light on the intensity of the psychological pain we feel, e.g. deep childhood traumas. While it might be true that fundamentally these things are memories, they have a depth and an emotional intensity that such a description does not account for.

It was then commented that not all suffering is the result of a story. The death of someone we are close to is a painful shock to the system because it means the loss of an integral part of our own being. But our psychological wounds are indeed sustained over time and perhaps beyond their own natural lifespan by becoming an integral part of our psychological identity. They are now me and the me dwells on and finds its nourishment in the ashes of experience, be it painful or pleasurable. So is the self the tragic protagonist of its own fictional story?

The question was then raised as to what K meant by saying that life and death go together. The death K was talking about seemed to refer to the death of the psychological self, which most of us find terrifying. The fear of death might be natural to the organism, as it seeks to protect itself and ensure continuity. But the self has become the focus of our being and has assumed command and ownership of the body. The self takes on the attributes of the body, and seeks to maintain its own continuity, its permanence, at all costs, which sustains the fear of death.

K had said once that there is only one truth, namely impermanence. So by seeking to deny it, the self is already condemning itself to an everlasting battle with that one truth and its resulting fear and suffering. (Maybe the escape from truth is the real nature of fear and the cause of suffering?) That’s why for K staying with fear is so fundamental, for we must go through fear if we are to stop escaping and meet the truth.

The wise insist that the death of the self is fundamental if we are to live fully, if we are to live at all. As long as we keep life and death apart, we exist in the shadow of fear. The self depends on time for its continuity and death means that our time is up. The self is identification with and attachment to things, people, experiences, ideas, etc. It is existentially rooted in the past. The past is already dead, but the self cannot exist without it. So what we fear is to lose these attachments and identifications, the remembrance of things past that nourish our identities.

The self is dependent for its existence on the ownership of things centered on our being something ourselves, on the relationship of the possessor and the possession. It is a relation of interdependent forms: the form of the self-image fulfilling through the possession and becoming of other forms. Its aim is to be something real, to become a reality. Our fear of death is the fear of emptiness, of nothingness in which these forms dissolve, in which there is no becoming, no thing to become.

K’s description of the different layers of consciousness was recalled as a further extension of this relation between consciousness and emptiness, excerpt from Sixth Talk in Poona, 3 October 1948:

“As I said, consciousness has different layers. First, there is the superficial layer, and below that there is memory, because without memory there is no action. Underneath that there is the desire to be, to become, the desire to fulfil. If you go still deeper, you will find a state of complete negation, of uncertainty, of void. This whole totality is consciousness. Now, as long as there is the desire to be, to become, to achieve, to gain, there must be the strengthening of the many layers of consciousness as the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’; and the emptying of those many layers can come about only when one understands the process of becoming. That is, as long as there is the desire to be, to become, to achieve, memory is strengthened, and from that memory there is action, which only further conditions the mind.”

What we normally call consciousness is the first three layers, which are the field of the known driven by the desire to become, which is the consciousness of the me and the mine. This is a movement away from the emptiness, which is part of the totality of consciousness. This movement away from the void is the source of fear. How the will to become arose is something of a mystery but it is the central factor in understanding the nature of consciousness as the field of the known centred on the psychological self. So understanding becoming, which is understanding the self, is the key to psychological transformation, to dying to time inwardly and thus dissolving the fear of death so that to die is to live and to live is to die.

We ended the meeting asking how we might be able to live in this world while embodying this emptiness? How would we function from a sense of being nothing, as enlightened beings?

Javier Gómez Rodríguez