Weekend Events at the Centre

  Krishnamurti Study Group Saturday, June 6, 2015   Five of us gathered on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to continue with the study of Chapter 5 in the Krishnamurti book The First and Last Freedom.  The chapter explores the subject of Action and Idea and proposes the question of acting without any concepts or thinking, all of which comes from the past and is inadequate as a response to the present moment.  K states in the text that the only true action is that of love, which is not of the past or of thought.   Love cannot be thought about or brought about by the mind.  K’s statements were a catalyst for some meaningful inquiry and direct experience on the part of the participants.  What he was pointing to became more or less self evident as we explored it in our own experience and even looked into that which is beyond experience. Inquiry Sunday Sunday, June 7, 2015 For the morning session on Sunday, a video was shown about Nisargadatta Maharaj and his teachings.  It was produced by Stephen Wolinsky, one of Nisargadatta’s better known Western devotees.  The five participants who met for the session all considered to film to be excellent and very useful.  Many people who had known Nisargadatta and been influenced by him were interviewed and archival clips of N speaking with seekers were interspersed.  His teaching is very uncompromising and demanding, and very similar to Krishnamurti’s in that way.   There was some discussion afterwards about the ideas presented in the video and the implications for our spiritual unfoldment.  Five people were in attendance for this event. In the afternoon we watched part of an Ojai talk by Krishnamurti on fear and read a handout on the same topic from Freedom From the Known.  In these talks K was focusing in particular on how we look at fear.  Do we look as an observer separate from the fear or do we see that we are the fear and not in fact separate from it?  The group inquired into this issue in some depth and shared our understandings and questions regarding the seeing of the fact and the implications of such seeing.  We were able to sit out on the lawn in lovely weather, which always seems to support an expansiveness of perceiving and being.