Victoria Video and Dialogue Meeting

  Victoria Video and Dialogue Sunday, March 8, 2015         On a beautiful Sunday afternoon eight participants showed up for a session held at the Church of Truth in Victoria. These meetings are structured around material from the Krishnamurti book Freedom From the Known and this month we were looking at the topic of “awareness”, a central one in chapter 3 of the text. We watched a short video clip of K speaking on “choiceless awareness” at Saanen in the 1980’s, then read a handout from the book. A very lively discussion followed before a tea break, much of it focused on the subject of attention and what it means to look at ourselves totally. After the break we watched a video clip of Rupert Spira in which he suggested that when we are in the grips of an unpleasant feeling or emotion – and presumably also a pleasant one – we could become more interested in the awareness which knows the experience than in the feeling itself. We can pay attention not just to the feeling but to that which knows it and the feeling will naturally die from lack of energetic input. In the dialogue that followed some participants thought that what Rupert was pointing to was complementary to what K says whereas others felt they were very different. There may have been an issue of only partial information as Rupert’s approach goes on in other presentations a step or two further than he did in this short video, but the discussion showed how we are very different in the way we see and understand things. The thinking mind seems to be inherently fragmentary when it attempts to conceive of reality. The session ended with another video clip wherein Eckhart Tolle answered a question about being aware of a feeling and of the sense of presence or awareness itself at the same time. His words may or may not have resolved the differences in people’s views but rather than talk further at that point the session closed with a short period of silence. Perhaps the main purpose of these meetings is to observe ourselves in interaction with others, so there was plenty of opportunity for such self observation throughout the afternoon.