Part 1 of a 3-day online workshop entitled “The Power of Loving Awareness” by GP Walsh and hosted by the Krishnamurti Education Centre of Canada in March 2023.

GP Walsh has joined us for a number of years now either in person or online from Seattle to facilitate weekend retreats to which participants are welcome from anywhere in the world. Most join us online from Canada or the US. In this case there were a total of seventeen attendees for the three session workshop entitled “The Power of Loving Awareness”.

Each meeting began with a short guided meditation led by GP and focusing on some aspects of our true nature as pure awareness. The basic question being explored was “Who am I?” GP asked a number of questions which might stimulate insights about our true identity (or lack of it) and which often drew from the world of Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Is Awareness without an agenda our true nature? Are we the self-aware space in which all experience happens? Is there a sense of gratitude for being here? Can anything be experienced outside of awareness? These and many other questions were shared by GP in order to encourage a kind of looking which was beyond opposites and essentially indescribable. Nothing is rejected in this kind of inquiry and we embrace both the “nothingness” and the “somethingness” of life. In practical terms, to ask what we are not is sufficient to end human suffering.

Over the three days GP explored a good number of the teachings of Buddhism, including those about dealing with fear and anger. In Buddhism and other similar teachings, including those of J. Krishnamurti, inquiry into the workings of the mind and heart brings about happiness. In Buddhism, right practice is necessary and brings us to Being (which is still perceived by something which has no attributes). The mind is not an enemy but, rather, just a bunch of thoughts made of an awareness which could be called “loving awareness”. Freedom is to be okay with whatever is present. Can my sorrows be allowed to be present? Can my humanness be allowed? It is all impermanent and there is nothing we can do to make things perfect. This is It!

GP’s discourses were both profound and yet beyond explanation and “knowing”. Truth is full of paradoxes and yet can be a beautiful Mystery. The answers to the questions and the Zen koans are found in BEING the answer and in the opening of “the Heart”, not in intellectual concepts. GPs pointings and the group discussions explored the broad and challenging territory of non-dual self-inquiry and the insubstantiality of any position being taken about the nature of things. Is there anything “out there”? We were challenged to examine our processes of projection and belief in the existence of a separate self. GP pointed us to the experience of delight in the loving engagement with the nature of life, with the impersonal and the personal dimensions, with being fully present with “what is” right now. This is the “Buddha mind”. No path was being prescribed. We are our own true path if we are genuinely looking and inquiring into our experience, whether it is “positive” or “negative”. Belief in any story creates suffering and the need to choose eventually falls away (or not). Some quotes from Krishnamurti and others highlighted what GP was speaking of, including his statement that “relationship is a mirror in which we discover ourselves.”

The third meeting ended with time for personal questions from the participants, who asked about the nature of faith, ritual, and the tendency towards self-abuse and self-hatred, and not doing what we know is right. GP emphasised compassion for oneself and others and curiosity about what is happening and how “danger” is perceived.

We can also ask “What is the most loving thing to do in this moment?”