リトリート

ハードコアなレポートと裏腹な、ボーのアセンションスタイル。日差しを避けるために帽子を目深にかぶってたようなのですが、珍光景を誰かがしっかり画像に収めたようです(^^)。

原文はこちら

I recently spent seven days at an Ascension retreat in North Carolina, spending most of the day with my eyes closed, using the precious little prayers we call Ascension Attitudes. Today I recognized this retreat as the real Sabbath.

For those of you unfamiliar with Sabbath, in the Jewish and Christian tradition there is a Sabbath on Sunday or Saturday where followers are commanded to not have an effect on the world and thus not allowed to go to work and in some cases not even cook. We are commanded to rest.

In retreat, we put aside purposeful activity and through repeated use of the attitudes, we continuously return our gaze to the truth of our nature....for a long time, with our eyes closed.

Of course, our gaze finds nothing, and not a conceptual nothing, but an alive, vibrant emptiness of pure potential. Just as importantly, we don't find our self, we don't find the independent person we've imagined since a young age. We see that what we imagined as our self is simply nothingness emerging as creation, one thought, one feeling, one sensation, one breath at a time. There is no person coordinating this emergence. The recognition of the emergence itself is emergence. There was never independent personal volition, a decider, a thinker, a doer. We imagined our own personhood.

And therein lies the ego-shattering truth...and it also reveals the real meaning of Sabbath.

Sabbath was never about practicing not having an effect on the world but was rather about realizing that we never did. The body-world is God's creation, and only God's creation. We're God's emergence.

＊＊＊＊＊＊＊＊

私自身も１１月に、日本から参加して下さる方々と一緒に、アリゾナ州でリトリートに参加します。久しぶりのすべてを捨てられる時間、今からとても楽しみです。