Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
March 1, 2025
We began this session with a question about right or wrong. What does it mean to be right, or to have a sense of being right or good? Is being right a fact, or is it a psychological standard that I must adhere to? Does this standard come with a certain weight or pressure to be right? Is my energy very invested in being right and what is being avoided during this psychological investment?
Does the need to be right create conflict? The more acute the conflict, the less space there is for neutrality and objective fact. The expectation to be right generates a need to hold opinions, which in turn guarantees a position of psychological self righteousness. These opinions seem to turn the neutrality of direct perception into the bias of a particular perspective. Belief overrides actuality: bias justifies lack of restraint and often violates goodness itself. The mind is following ideas rather than seeing clearly. The self identifies itself with what it sees is right and good: when there is an attachment created to being right – attention is fragmented.
Has the self confused right and wrong, preferring to see justice through distorting masks, rather than from an innocent awareness of what is?
Jackie McInley
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
February 15, 2025
Today’s dialogue was about “Choiceless Awareness”. It was pointed out by a participant in the group that choices we make are both conscious and also unconscious. How aware are we of the choices we actually make? Choice also implies a chooser: a “me” that is making decisions. This chooser or observer is separate from the object of its choosing and points to a continuous evaluation of preference. The group then stated that any psychological reaction, such as hurt or offense, often brings up a choosing of what needs to be done to mitigate the pain felt.
The group penetrated further into this question of Choicelessness and reaction. Reactions are triggered and bring the past to life even though the conscious mind is still felt to be operating in the present. The self is felt as an intelligent, protective mechanism that underlines the need for mitigating action. The reaction is in fact a memory and yet appears as immediate: “I am hurt” is seen by the conditioned mind as a fact. However, is hurt actually an idea informed by thought? Can the mind – seeing the reaction as a kind of belief – question the validity or truth of the reaction of hurt?
But hang on, how can one question the pure physical sensation of hurt, one participant pointed out? The sensation is surely real? Perhaps the sensation is real, but is the recognising of that sensation from memory? We call the sensation, pain, because it has become identified and conditioned as pain. Can we question the label, “hurt” yet stay in attention of the immediate sensation that remains unnamed? Here, is the mind in a state of choiceless observation of what is? Is this a new kind of freedom? I am, in effect, happening right now and no longer defined within the movement of a conditioned responding. Can we see this directly in ourselves?
Jackie McInley
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
February 1, 2025
We opened today’s dialogue with the question: How can a perception be totally new and can we explore and discover a very different energy of newness in our dialogue itself?
We first wondered – for our actual approach to be new in nature – whether there is a way of looking that does not have a hidden purpose to it. We then explored what manifests the old way of looking; we discovered motive, conclusions, judgement, image making and control, as factors rendering perception “old”.
Our inquiry brought us to the point where we wondered how a mind so steeped in its recorded content, could possibly ever be new at all. The past is always ready to interpret the present moment though the lenses of what it already knows. How can a past mind so continuously active, be aware without the past operating? Indeed there is nothing one can do about the continuous, mechanical activation of the past. However, the question is: can this past be seen, yet not acted on? One member of the group suggested that we never give ourselves totally to what is taking place; in fact we evaluate how much we give according to the situation.
We discovered that thought itself believes that it is already fully aware of reality, when in fact it is remembering rather than awake to what is. Consequently, attention is never fully engaged, since it is left to thought to engage from the safety and security of the past. Can an intensity of attention – giving everything we have – end this complacency of awareness? Each one of us has find out for ourselves.
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
January 18, 2025
We started our dialogue today with the topic of, observation. Having read Krishnamurti, we are all familiar with the notion that the conditioned mind only observes through the lenses of the past. However do we actually see this as a living fact, or does it remain a mere idea for us?
As we observe, are we being informed by our past experiences and past knowledge, whereas the impression we share, is that this observation is very much in the present moment. The mind is oblivious to this “past”. As we look more closely we see that a simple observation – of a friend for example – may be full of ideas, conclusions and judgments; all of which obscure the actual reality of the person and inform us according to our own recorded impressions. The damage to the quality of love and relationship is clear.
So why do we hold on to this knowledge stored in our minds as the past? It would seem that the mind automatically processes perception in this way so as to “know” and feel secure, protected. We questioned together what happens if the past knowledge is not committed to, or adhered to as fact; can a reaction be questioned and admitted as memory from the past, unfolding in the present? If this break in process occurs, a strong sense of vulnerability is felt, one of the group brought out. The habitual safety of the known is no longer available as the mind opens itself to “not knowing” and not “managing” as per usual.
We asked, can we live like this? Can we “test it out” as Krishnamurti suggests?
Jackie McInley
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
January 4, 2025
Today one of us asked: is it clear to us when we are talking out of memory or knowledge, or, if we are experiencing something directly?
We are aware that we consciously use knowledge and memory of experience, to guide our decision making in everyday life. It is however less obvious that knowledge is involved in emotional reaction. The example of anger, indignation or hurt was pointed out to illustrate how these reactions seem to be happening in the present, alongside physiological manifestations such as the quickening of the heart beat. The group assumed that the beating heart was in the present, but that its cause was either from an outside agency or from within ones own past experience being triggered.
It was then asked whether there was a root (or background) to these perceived and apparently spontaneous reactions? Is it assumed that we know for sure where danger lies when our fear reaction is triggered? Is knowledge involved in the very “reading” of our emotional reactions? Is a past memory of fear or pain reactivated and projected, thereby warning us to act in a conditioned way to avoid further disturbance? Is any direct awareness involved in this process of experience and knowledge based reaction?
Can a reaction be looked at without the assumption that it is already identified and known? Can sensitivity meet the reaction as a response taking place in real time? We also noticed that all negative emotional reactions seem to be happening to us as a disturbance to our apparently harmonious selves. Is the sense of self, separate from the content of the reaction?
Our dialogue extrapolated into questioning the nature of learning and inquiry itself. Is inquiry possible without knowledge? Is there a new kind of learning that none of us have been schooled in, but which may lie in the unnamed, direct perception of whatever is?
Jackie McInley
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
December 21, 2024
For our last session of 2024, one of the group asked a question that was immediately adopted as this dialogue’s theme : “Why is it I take things so personally and often feel hurt ?” The group agreed on the very habitual reaction of being offended and how inevitable this feels. Despite this apparent unavoidable reaction, it was also felt that somehow there must be another way. Soon it became clear that we often have a hidden motive when we ask how to be free of hurt; we wish to find a solution to our problem and our deeper intention is to get rid of the hurt not to understand it more deeply.
We wondered as a group what the personal actually was? We also wondered if hurt was a movement of conditioning or whether this disturbance is part of human nature. It was pointed out that we are in conflict with this hurt and that it is seen as separate from us. We see being hurt as something that befalls us, rather than part of our conditioned make up that is being triggered. The hurt, we discovered together, seems to highlight the “me” since it is the sense of self that is affected directly.
Finally we asked, what is the relationship between personal hurt and self image. Do we need a self image in order to be hurt? Is the self image itself inevitably at the root of all psychological wounding and the sustained memory of it? This is a question for each one of us to discover carefully for ourselves.
Jackie McInley
Exploring Ourselves
Online dialogue with Jackie McInley
December 7, 2024
Once again we welcomed a new participant to our dialogue. It made sense to shed light on our intentions, since the deep art of dialogue inquiry is a process of discovery and essentially a work in progress for us all. The group highlighted one major aspect as the crux of dialogue: listening.
At the heart of the word itself is a sense of to obey – an obligation to listen – as a test or goal to be achieved especially in traditional education. We went into how the collective meaning we attribute to a word can deeply condition our listening; this process of sense-making strongly guides us and can stay undetected in the process. Do words speak and listen for us and do they hold a set of individual and collective expectations? If language is using me what is that “me” being used? Does this sense of me create an added impression of separation in listening to another? Does conditioned listening, the group inquired, imply an already concluded view of what it hears? Does it construct a version of what is being listened to – and by extension a version of the world around – according to its own content? Does this conditioned sense-making lie at the root of our problem?
Is there another kind of listening that doesn’t come to a conclusion as its process? Is there a listening with no past?
Jackie McInley
