Weekend Events at the Centre
Krishnamurti Study Group Saturday, January 3, 2015. The group began its study of a second book by J. Krishnamurti entitled “The First and Last Freedom”. Seven people attended the meeting which began with some reading from the first chapter. The focus was on the difficulty of communicating and of meeting on the same level at the same time. K emphasizes the importance of listening without prejudice or pre-formulations so that one is open to what is being said and may be able to see the truth or falseness of it in the moment. We must be aware of ourselves as we actually are and not as we would like to be. Group members were free in interject at any time and a good deal of discussion was triggered by the reading. It was suggested that if judgements do arise, which will usually happen, then one can simply notice them and thereby neutralize their power to distort the inquiry. The discussion naturally flowed from one subject to related ones and participants were very much engaged in the exploration. The meetings on the first and third Saturdays of the month will continue to focus on the same book. Inquiry Sunday January 4, 2015 Nine people were in attendance for the morning session in which the inquiry approach of Rupert Spira was presented via an excellent video interview of Rupert in conversation with Chris Hebard. The two explored the book “The Transparency of Things”, Chris asking pointed questions about what Rupert is pointing to. It was an excellent experiential journey, a looking at the nature of our present moment experience and questioning many of our assumptions about the reality of separateness. Rupert is masterful at guiding people to an experience and understanding which undermines the assumption of duality. We will be continuing to explore this DVD in future Inquiry Sunday meetings. The afternoon session began with a half hour video from the “Beyond Myth and Tradition” series produced by Evelyn Blau in which excerpts of talks by Krishnamurti are presented on a particular subject, in this case “Change”. Krishnamurti himself is usually very passionate in these clips and urges us to be equally passionate ourselves in looking into the issue of what he says is a necessary change in the structure of society which can only come about when we ourselves transform our own consciousness through insight or direct seeing of our ways of thinking and behaviour. These challenging talks by K always seem to stimulate lively discussion following the video presentation. We will continue with further episodes from the same series in the coming months.
