Self-inquiry with Jeff Brown, April 14, 2024

Self-inquiry with Jeff Brown

April 14, 2024

At Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada

Metchosin, BC

 

Ten people were present in total for this Sunday afternoon meeting at the Metchosin location of the Krishnamurti Educational Centre of Canada. It was a sunny afternoon providing an opportunity to sit outside on the front lawn for the first time this year. The weather turned more cold and windy as the afternoon progressed, but most of the participants seemed to be fairly comfortable and able to enjoy the outdoors with the mountains, the ocean, and the trees all providing a lovely natural setting for the discussion of our true identity as human beings and perhaps beyond.

Jeff, our facilitator for the session, introduced a number of ideas about the functioning of the brain which were based on the experience of Jill Bolte Taylor when she had a spontaneous awakening resulting from, as she described it, a stroke in the left side of her brain which revealed to her capacities which had been previously completely unknown. Jeff had spoken previously of the extraordinary shift in Jill’s consciousness produced by this sudden change in the functioning of her brain which she had described as an opening of capacities which Jeff took to be similar in many ways to the mystical aspects of J. Krishnamurti’s experiences which formed much of the essence of his understandings and the teachings which emerged from them.

For both Krishnamurti and Taylor it was clear that thought cannot possibly describe the wholeness of the reality perceived by the right side of the brain, which shows the world in a non-linear and translogical mode that the left side cannot grasp but which can offer a deeper meaning and comprehension of what is possible for a human being to see and feel. Krishnamurti often spoke of the benediction that was available when thought became silent and that which is beyond thought could then reveal itself. We explored at some length the possibilities of entering into the unknown. Can we experience the unknown through our own efforts? Can the separate self that conditions our usual mode of experiencing life ever be vulnerable and sensitive to the truth beyond its own habitual ways of knowing reality? Do we need to cling to our familiar identity, our ideas of who and what we are? Can we move past the stuckness of our assumptions about ourselves and what is possible for us as human beings? Can we experience ourselves beyond our common and known identities? Just bringing up the questions seemed to create more space and openness in the group.

DB