Written and produced
by Peter Stephens, 2006.

The focus and quality of discussion depends simply on the members, and this can be quite varied. There is often a lot of personal and inter-personal commentary. The style and structure of communication is not set nor standard. Some people take what someone says as a prescription for them to give their feedback. Others append their own thoughts to the flow of comments going at the time.

I myself read the latest listed contributions and from an overview took my own inner responses as a meditation. To understand the images and thoughts occupying my mind I looked at them as facts in a broader, larger, world view. Without judging the thoughts, listening, watching, letting them flow, they fully exposed what they were about, and then there was a sense of clarity, of insight, which I would post.

This undertaking was my own contemplation. It did not explain or interpret what someone else had said, although apparently I was participating in a group communication which was centered to some degree, around a famous philosopher and religious man. My contribution to the group did not anticipate replies in the ordinary sense of having conversations. As I say, they were free insights, but this understanding proved to be not at all clear to others.

Perhaps the habit of endlessly adding comments in a discussion is considered normal, but then you are continually discussing and not finding any resolution, even though you might be happy with some further knowledge you gain. Contributors would make responses that were new comments and there might be a chain of replies which led to different points and topics, different from the original points in any chain. Here though, the comments and questions people put required a deeper understanding, one that could not rely on standard responses. It was the language of the discussion which became the investigation, and to do that we needed to think about the origin of thought. In the end standard modes of ideas, common assumptions, conventional belief, and so on, were just repetitious, and the thinker could not look any deeper. The endless development of thought is not providing any insight.

When I was in my mid twenties, returned from my escapades traveling around the world as a backpacker, and then after two years back in my home town, dropping out of University, I again needed to escape and went to Tasmania. There I began an intensive period of solitude and deep meditation in the countryside. During one weekend when visiting an acquaintance, we had been talking, about philosophy and so on, and my friend said that when I spoke, I sounded like this famous philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti. He handed me a book by that author which I flicked through. It was a strange experience reading what had been up till then, what I thought were my own thoughts, my own inner voice, troubled and reflective. This was the first time I had encountered that philosophers writings. Really though, this just shows you, that what we think, is a universality, and it should be quite common to look at a fact, clearly, and use the same language to talk about it. As he always points out, it is the individuality which is a distraction from seeing clearly.