Martin Buber’s book ‘I and Thou’ is a book about relationship.

It speaks of relationships of deep presence, and relationships of use.

Relationships of use are those where we seek something from the other – support, care, pleasure, money. Relationships of presence are those which form when we fully experience what is between ourselves and the other, as it emerges and changes, every moment. The emotion I feel as I meet you, the thoughts that run through your mind as you meet me, the ache in the back that might lie underneath these thoughts and emotions in our stream of experience, the sound of the bird chirping in the background.

Relationships of use help us construct a world around us – a world of goodwill and care, or a world of indifference and mechanisation of life.

Relationships of presence are the ground on which our experience of this world emerges – they are how we first experience life, every day, every moment, before we choose to sustain or move away from what we experience into building our world.

Relationships of presence are what allow care to remain care and not become mere performance of care, what allow deep listening to remain deep listening rather than a hearing and reacting from our set patterns.

Buber never ceases to emphasise that the relationships he speaks of are between us and other human beings, but also between us and nature, as between us and the industrial, internetted civilisation we live in.

This reading group is a place for a small group of 4 or 5 people to read a few passages from Buber and pause, and speak about our own personal experience of the world – our emotions, bodily experiences – in ways that they are illuminated by what the book expresses.

It is a place to form a community rooted in relationships of presence, anchored in these words as a stirring point but not entangled with them.

It is not a place for scholarly conversations, for debates, for difficult language or abstract philosophisations, even though at times the nature of the book and the nature of reading itself might lean us in those directions.

It is open to anyone willing to read a paragraph or two together, and spend the next hour and a half or so sharing their experience in that light.

We need not read full pages, we need not finish the book, but we try to breathe in its essential spirit.

One doesn’t need to have read this book or any book beforehand.

If interested, please send me a message on (+91) 9810932253