Swanwick Star Issue No. 14 (2021)

Becoming

 

 

Becoming

Sunday, May 2, 2021

Zoom online

 

Sixteen of us were in attendance for this Sunday morning meeting. Participants had prepared by reading and contemplating the February 1 to 8 entries in The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with J. Krishnamurti. This section of the book was entitled “Becoming”. Amongst other aspects of self-knowledge, the selections look at the falseness of attempting to become something other than what we are (in the psychological sense) and the significance of being aware of what we actually are without moving away from it towards some ideal of behavior or identity.

The meeting began with a guided meditation experimenting with Krishnamurti’s suggestion that we look and listen to ourselves without naming or labelling our experience. This will dismantle the structures of our conditioned selves that are held in place by conceptual thinking. After the meditation participants were invited to share their experience, which opened a space of dialogue which flowed spontaneously for the two hours of the meeting, with occasional references to what had been studied in the text material.

There were occasional bottle-necks where communication was less than completely clear and frustrations arose with the difficulty in understanding what was being shared.  Nevertheless, there seemed to be a worthwhile inquiry into a number of issues, including the possibility of a deeper quality of perceiving and communicating. What does it mean to be fully attentive to the various dimensions  – “outer” and “inner” –  of what is transpiring in a dialogue? Perhaps the measure, if there is any, of such an endeavor is the very attention itself and the learning that results.

DB