Online series The Urgency of Change with Javier Gómez Rodríguez, February 15, 2026
The presenter began the session by citing Krishnamurti’s description of the layers of consciousness, with a first superficial level, below which is memory, under which is the will to become and, surrounding it all, a vast emptiness. The driving force is the will to become, which is an escape from the ocean of nothingness enveloping what is essentially a bubble of memory, thought, self and time. He suggested that the fear of nothingness may have its roots in the fact that thought can only deal with things and cannot grasp nothingness. This fear is focused on the psychological entity or self because the emptiness threatens its existence and continuity. So the whole investigation of self-knowledge at the core of K’s teachings concerns the understanding of this movement and the merging of consciousness with its original nothingness. K places the focus of conditioning in the self, which is the essence of fragmentation, conflict, and suffering. This conditioned identity is the product of tradition and the interconnection of thought and feeling, which is the content and movement of consciousness. A conditioned consciousness is dangerous because it relates to its own past, isolating it from the actuality and creating a division with what is. This conditioning is shared by all humanity, thus what unites us and should be our first priority in resolving our problems.
The presenter finished by sharing a curious aspect of the readings for this chapter, namely that the sense of nothingness results from comparing ourselves with others, creating a feeling of inferiority and self-pity. This that traps us in a vicious circle in which we are constantly running away from the false emptiness we ourselves create with our comparative measurements. Transformation therefore requires stopping this cycle and embracing what is. He quoted K saying that nothingness is not real, i.e. not a thing, but it is the truth. So living in truth may involve stepping outside reality, the field of thought, a rather challenging proposal for mankind.
In the discussion that followed, one of the participants had a list of questions. She began by asking whether we can ever see the truth, given that the movement of conditioned experience prevents it. In response, the presenter mentioned K’s statement that freedom is in the first step of our existence, i.e. in the now, which is beyond time and thought. He emphasized that perceiving the danger of thought or when thought reaches its limit and stops, the energy of silence breaks the momentum of the past and makes for insight, i.e. the perception of truth without a shadow of doubt. The second question concerned the possibility of awakening for people requiring a psychological centre or structure for existential security. Awakening means not being asleep, which humanity is on account of living in the past, the essence of which is the ‘me’. Awakening means becoming aware of and dissolving this self-identity. The third question concerned the nature of death as K understands it, which involves the ending of the illusory ‘me’, so it is at the heart of awakening. But if the self is illusory, what is it that dies? We are creatures of thought, of memory and time, of the past that overshadows our being. What dies is that structure of thought that runs our lives and in that dying we are reborn to being, which is in emptiness – not the fake emptiness of self-pity or self-denial but the actual one.
It was commented that it is not only a question of thought but of the body, which as a living organism is naturally afraid of death. The question was raised about ‘intelligence’. It was explained that in the context of this inquiry it means reading between the lines, i.e. the truth or falseness of thinking and, still deeper, having an insight into the nature of thought itself.
- Javier Gómez Rodríguez
