Program Description:
Conflict seems to reign supreme for the human condition right now. It vividly plays out in the sectarianism and destruction of human lives that is so immediate. We treat each other as being separate, not “us”, leading to “Us” against “Us” without an ability to see this basic fact. No words or pointing to make a difference. A change in heart somehow seems necessary.

This separating also occurs in our inner world as a series of distinct problems, one replaced by another. Our very selves seem to be a problem: how we are living, not measuring up to what we should be, not getting what we want, etc. This conflict happens between our very thoughts and feelings, dividing ourselves from ourselves. We end up having conflict over our very conflict. Inner conflict is now its own problem, and our minds struggle to be free of it. Even ‘awareness’ can become a means to an end for us, a way out. It is as if our lives are a pattern of problem-making that has no lasting solution.

Is our difficulty that inner conflict needs to be avoided at all costs, that it shouldn’t happen and is automatically moved away from? In this moving away there seems to lie an assuming that conflict is already known and is separate from ourselves. Otherwise, how could anything be avoided? Is this assuming true? Is anything being avoided at all?

Is this assuming itself the nature of avoiding and conflict, which creates the illusion of being separate from what is happening? Can avoiding anything possibly lead to its actual understanding? Maybe we’re misled as to the nature of our problems, and don’t truly understand our inner conflict.

Instead of being driven by our avoiding and effort to change, is it possible to live directly with inner conflict in our daily lives? To not move away from our deeper motives to be other than what we are. This may flow naturally from truly realizing that struggling to change ourselves leads nowhere, that we don’t understand what is going on. Is this already change?

Krishnamurti spoke of direct or complete contact, in which lies the possibility of real action or change. Might this point to the immediacy of what is happening in us in this moment; in which there is just our inner conflict moving, the wordless fact of it, without a demand to do something about it? An intimacy with what is happening in us, in which we are not separate from it. Perhaps this immediacy is its own action unasked for, in which inward conflict/resisting reveals its true nature. Is this revealing the real source of understanding?

Can we find out for ourselves firsthand what all this refers to, experiment with it? Maybe it doesn’t involve any time at all.

Daily online sessions:  10:00am-12:15pm PACIFIC TIME

These sessions will be recorded and made available to the participants only for further personal study for 2 weeks after the last session.

Dan Kilpatrick is a retired Associate Professor of the Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems, and the Program in Neuroscience, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has had a long-time interest in our shared, underlying nature and inquiry into how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. The insights of J. Krishnamurti and others have been an invaluable part of this journey, helping to reveal that the opportunity for self-discovery is present in each and every moment and does not depend on circumstance. Coming to see that our sense of self is something in which we all share, not as a conclusion, but as an immediate and living fact, is also perhaps our greatest challenge.

Dan received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego in chemistry and his doctorate degree in biochemistry from Duke University. His research focused on how self-organizing gene networks controlling development and its timing give rise to emergent properties of the nervous system.