The cost for the retreat itself is $200-$150 (as income permits).  There is an additional cost for meals, and (for those coming from out of town) for lodging.  

To register for the retreat (only), contact Jadzia (jadziu@comcast.net).

Information about meals and overnight lodging is here.  Local people commuting to the retreat should sign up for commuter-rate meals.  To sign up for meals and/or lodging, email Sirius.

Regarding payment for the retreat itself, please be in touch if you’d like to come and cost is an issue.  If you are able to give more, please do to help support the attendance of others.

Then there’s the current actual self, which exists in the momentary form of feeling, sensation, and mental/emotional movement.  This is the one that judges itself, that wants to do better.  This self, always dissatisfied with what-is, holds up the desired self as a model, a goal.  There is the attempt, then, to bring the two into alignment — to change the actual self into the desired one, over the long term or in the very next moment (to get rid of an “unspiritual” momentary feeling or thought).

Fundamental change does not occur by the grim, repeated effort to manage your interior.

It’s a total waste of good intention.  This approach to spiritual inquiry is an excellent way to keep going the dissatisfaction, the self-judgment and frustration, the avoidance of what’s felt, inside, to be ugly or uncomfortable.  Fundamental change does not occur by the grim, repeated effort to manage your interior. 

Yet it’s clear that sometimes a person does go from misery to a whole lot more peaceful, more in enjoyment of life than in fear and dissatisfaction and the fruitless ongoing attempt at control.  So how does it happen, if not by trying to change yourself?

Sometimes radical change occurs because of some devastation delivered by life, something that completely undermines the sense of self, making vivid the lack of control that has always been the case.  Depression that tilts toward terrible despair can also bring about radical change.

For someone who has not (yet) been visited by these awful developments, there is another way. 

Three things must come into play.  When these conditions are brought into the picture, the door opens to the possibility of radical change.  The matter of how or when the change occurs is not something you’re in charge of (speaking of the lack of control).  In this business of growing freedom, it’s crucial to sort out what’s yours to focus on, from what is not yours.  What’s not yours is the control (or even understanding) of the mechanism of change.  Mystery attends the breaking of the machinery of suffering:  it happens behind the curtain of awareness. 

What you can do is cultivate the three conditions that make you ripe for that process to unfold as it will.

First is to have attention on the immediate, particularly on your present-moment inner state.  That is the beginning of everything.  Part of what’s meant by being in the now is attunement to your interior.  This includes awareness of feelings and emotions, physical sensation, and the activity of thought (without getting sucked into its content, mistaking it for reality).

If you notice you’ve been lost in thought, rather than paying attention to the present activity or environment, as soon as you become aware of thinking, you’ve landed in the now.  You’re observing something that’s happening right now:  a stream of thoughts.  Thought isn’t contrary to being in the present, unless you’re living inside it — unless you fail to recognize it’s under way.  Likely, as soon as you notice it happening, thought will stop, or at least be seen as the invention it is. 

That’s first:  attention on the now.

The second thing that must be in the picture, if the door to radical change is to open, is that you look away from nothing.  The willingness to see all that’s currently in motion inside yourself must be free of filters.  Allow yourself to feel what you feel, without resistance or mental management.  See how thought has you in its clutches, how it’s determining your current emotional state.  Look unflinchingly at how attached you are to what you want, or fear.  At how you identify with your beliefs, conditioning, painful history, image of yourself.  See what you are unwilling to let go of, and how it defines you.  Do not be timid.  Turn toward the sacred cows and take them in your arms.

How much do you want to stop suffering?  This is what’s at stake.  When you protect yourself by looking away from a force you deeply know to be at play, or you resort to familiar comforting patterns of thought, it’s like shoveling coal into the hopper of misery.  Look at what’s occurring.  Allow it — don’t take it on as an enemy (the way you’ve done in the past) — but do stay alert to its movement, to the perverse “logic” of the ego.

This requires real courage and steadiness.  Not something that flowers when you seek comfort in some imagined future self.

There is more to see than whatever you’ve already seen.  If this weren’t the case, suffering would already be a thing of the past.

Here’s the third:  judge nothing that you see within yourself.  Make no attempt to change anything.  Don’t make reference to that standard in your head (or if you do, realize you’re doing that).  Don’t make an intention to do better.  Don’t remember how it’s been sometimes and then wish it could be that way now (or if you do, see that you’re doing that).  What you’re doing is simply, cleanly, scientifically observing your interior, as if it were a species unlike you, something interesting to learn about. 

This non-judgment is not about “self love” or forgiving yourself your imperfection (though God knows you’d do well to stop trying to perfect the ego).

You’re simply seeing how your ego constructs and maintains itself (ceaselessly), how it manages to keep convincing you that it is what you are.  This is what must be learned, without judging or attempting to change anything.  When you judge or seek to change what you see, you do not clearly see.  Your ego will want you to look away (which happens when it’s at risk).  You don’t have to cooperate with your ego.  If you notice judgment occurring, realize the ego has taken the reins back into its manipulative little hands.

When you do anything with your real present-moment state besides acknowledge it as it is, you are not living in the now.  You’re “living” in your image of the next moment, the one where you hope you’ll have changed to something better.  Living in the now is the key to everything.  Align your unresisting awareness with momentary reality, in its fullness, and nature will take its course.

All the while, the familiar stuff is still happening:  anger, dread, attachment, hope, identification, dissatisfaction, discomfort.  Yet you’re looking wide-eyed, in a curious way, as it plays itself out in this moment, almost as if it were somebody else being observed.

Because, in fact, it is “somebody else.”  The “you” that’s doing the looking is not caught up in it. 

Judging is done by the ego/mind.  When you judge yourself for being as you are, the judge is part of the very mechanism, the familiar self, that you aspire to improve.  The ego, however well “improved,” will never attain freedom.   

Ask yourself this:  What intelligent awareness in you is able to observe that you are thinking?  That you’re fighting surrendering to something painful?  What is it that’s able to sense directly — without resorting to thought — that you exist?

Something in us is able to merely be aware.  No agenda, no assessment or wish to manipulate, no discomfort.  This “looker” is what comes alive, what is felt to be here, in a moment when those three things are in the picture:  attention to the inner now, willingness to see whatever is there, and the absence of judgment or the wish to change.

The ordinary mind, which serves at the pleasure of the ego, is not equipped for any of this.  It cannot attend the now.  It can only think about the now, processing it in some way.  Decide what it means, what is to be done about it, what it has to do with your ego.

The mind, because it’s in bed with the ego, is not willing to see whatever is there, because it’s enlisted by the ego to keep the egoic self seeming real and worthy of maintenance and protection.  The egoic mind sees what it’s predisposed to see, what will benefit the ego in some way, what matches its ideas of reality, of (the ego’s) safety. 

The mind is built to judge — to distinguish good from bad, fun from boring, dangerous from safe.  Its function is to drop things into slots, patterns, labels.  It thrives on preconceived notions.  So when judgment occurs — when you look at how you are now and then say you want to change into something better — nothing useful is occurring.  It’s the mind (enslaved by the ego) that’s generating the picture of the preferred self.  You can decline to invest in it.

Off to the side of the thinking mind, outside its convincing portrait of reality, is this other knower, this one that merely sees.  It does not judge.  It does not suffer.  But its capacity to see is radically liberating.

What happens next — how the actual change will occur — is not your business.  You may not even notice anything happening as the suffering machinery is falling apart.  Later, though, you may look back, reflecting over the recent stretch of time, and realize that something has changed.  Maybe radically.

The self that’s capable of suffering, of judging, is not fixable.  Any apparent improvements to it are relative only.  No matter how genuine and dogged the effort, it will never transform into the radically peaceful self.  That still and peaceful presence that you deeply are — already — is the one that is able to neutrally observe.  Live there, and let nature take its course.

For more information, contact Garth at (902) 964-3342.

The impression of a stable self, a given persona that sustains over time, occurs when a person thinks.  It is never directly experienced in a moment of life.

A moment of lived life is the only environment in which you can sense a self existing.

It’s one thing to think about self, to revisit beliefs and knowledge, to reflect on a prior time or a projected future, visualizing the influences of experience on the self.  It’s another thing altogether to experience momentary life.  The direct sensation of whatever life du jour is dishing up — this thing that’s happening right now, when you’re tuned in, really doing it, feeling, engaged, alert — that is the only mode in which a person directly senses that there’s someone here.  A moment of lived life is the only environment in which you can sense a self existing.

It’s only when the mind gets hold of life, either during or in the aftermath, that the other thing happens — the appearance of there being an ongoing self that moves through time (as if time were a real thing).

The past and the future cannot be experienced.  They can only be mentally processed.  Past and future exist only in the form of thought.  Time literally has no existence independent of our thinking about something “in” time.  Understanding about a person’s conditioning, belief systems, values — these can “come to life” only as mental activity. 

When attention is on the immediate (whatever the particular “content” may be), when there is no resistance in the picture, the experience is that you are the moment.  You don’t notice this consciously, maybe, but something in your vital self feels it.  There is not a “you” having an experience.  Nothing of you exists apart from the unfolding moment that you are “in” — that you literally are.

The mind (having no reference points outside mental activity) cannot possibly understand this.  Deeply invested in the mind’s busily-constructing image of a self, the ego balks at the suggestion that the self has no existence in reality.  A person would do well to rest from the effort to convince the ego-mind of the fact of the matter.

The self each of us appears to be — the mind-generated picture — is not something that’s ever directly experienced.  It is not experience-able, because who we think of ourselves as being exists only as a fabulously complicated thought, a hodgepodge of memory and belief and angst and desire.

We can’t stop ourselves from thinking, from reflecting on what just happened, from looking back over life and seeing what’s taken place over the years.  It’s natural to observe trends, to notice change, to learn from experience, to wonder what’s ahead.  This is not an argument for trying to stop any of that normal (and sometimes useful) human tendency.

But seeing that mental content has no independent existence in reality does help restore attention and vitality to what’s here right now, to what’s happening in the immediate scene — which is where life occurs.  However true or valid or useful any stream of thoughts may appear to be, anything that’s produced by the mind is at a remove from life itself.  This is very useful to see.

This, here, is where we exist.  Momentary experience is an order of reality apart from anything the mind can come up with, including its effort to define you.  However astute or compassionate the observations of the mind, they are at a necessary distance, at a discerning remove, from life itself.  When you feel yourself be, because you are laughing with a friend, or feeling really sick, or engaged with a little child who’s telling you a story, or you’re running full tilt, or sitting in the sun, or painting a wall, or digging in the earth, or singing a song that is breaking your heart — when you are, in short, really alive, feeling that you are here, this moment, having this very experience, this form that life is taking right now — that is reality, your reality, all you have (or ever will have) of life itself.  Whatever else there is — all the rest of it, every scrap of remembered or anticipated life — is of a different order of things.  It does not exist except when you think it into being.  However much pleasure it may bring, or however much worry it has the power to generate, it remains the case that it has no independent existence outside the mind.

You (as you are used to thinking of yourself) do not exist except when you think yourself into being.

A person’s only true existence is here and now, in actual encounter with what-is.  We are radically transient, constantly in flux.  We only appear otherwise when we think about ourselves.  When the impression of being a stable entity is allowed to dissolve, when the mind-made image of self ceases to be a point of reference, then life is lived.  Life is ever new, as we ourselves are.

Suddenly, as if you were picked up by a crane, lifted up and out, and set back down again in a whole new place, you are looking from an angle you haven’t seen from before. 

Then something happens to cause the looking to occur from a different place.  Not inside the framework, which has come to feel like the whole world, like reality itself.  You didn’t even know there was a place outside it.  You couldn’t have imagined having a view of the outside of the walls, because in fact you didn’t realize there were walls (let alone that you had put them there, having constructed the whole thing with all the hammers and saws inside your head).  Until the sudden new view, you thought where you were, in the center of the world you occupied, was the only place to be.  That everything in sight, as far as you could see with your mind’s lenses, was the extent of reality.

But suddenly, as if you were picked up by a crane, lifted up and out, and set back down again in a whole new place, you are looking from an angle you haven’t seen from before.  Vaguely the situation looks familiar, you recognize it, only it doesn’t look the same because you aren’t where you were.  You aren’t in it.

It hasn’t changed.  You haven’t changed, not really.  It’s just that you’ve relocated.

You realize, to your stunned amazement, that this perspective always was a possibility.  That right along you’ve been equipped to see this thing in this way — this problem that has so gripped you, this real-life difficulty — which is why you haven’t really changed.  You could have seen it this way right along.  But you didn’t, until now.

You look at the thing and you see you don’t, after all, have to fix anything — at least, not in order to be okay.  You’re standing here, looking, and realizing you actually feel quite fine, even as you are in unresisting acknowledgment of the situation.  Even though your issue is ongoing.  Inside the structure you are now looking at, the furnace of angst continues its bright glow, but here you are, standing out in the dark, utterly unencumbered, having no idea who you are. 

Now that you aren’t your problem anymore.

Cherishing doesn’t amount to a desperate effort to hold on to.  Whatever happens is just what happens.

This has been enabled by a disappearing act.  You (who you thought you were) have become see-through.  The muscles have untwisted; the grudges can’t hold together any longer.  The air moves right through you.

At night, I’m out there in the cold, black, still world with the old dog, who is melting a yellow pool of snow, and my eyes are drawn up.  Oh, hi!  Like I’d almost forgotten.  The greeting to the firmament doesn’t feel like it’s reaching across vast distance.  The stars seem to be saying hello to one another.

The strangeness is that although the cherishing has heat and vitality to it (being experienced in a living body), because there is no sense of a particular location or form of what is being cherished, it doesn’t matter if dying occurs, or damage, or pain.

In ordinary commerce, if something is cherished, it’s considered valuable.  It’s cared for, protected.  The attachment is ferocious.  But here, it’s of no consequence if a piece of it goes away, because it’s everywhere, always.

Because a human being has a mind, and is able to be self-reflective, we wonder at this odd coincidence of things.  There is this cherishing going on — you could say, this self-cherishing — yet the prospect of demise is not distressing.  Cherishing doesn’t amount to a desperate effort to hold on to.  Whatever happens is just what happens.

There is no more idea of that thing known as “my life.”  All there is is this, this that’s happening now.  It’s all we ever know of life, of ourselves.  Directly know, I mean.  Feel, see, taste.  All the rest — what constitutes “my life” — requires reference to the contents of the mind.  It isn’t real.  It’s a garbage can.  Refuse, leftovers, anticipations.  Stories.  Oh, so many stories.

When subject and object lose their boundaries, when it’s all one thing, one moment, that’s life.  And you are nowhere in it — not the you with stories and beliefs and fears — but the whole thing is what “you” sense yourself to be.  It’s all you know of life.  Of course there is cherishing.  Of course it is beloved.  Even if it involves nausea and overdue bills.  The whole measuring thing, the good versus the bad, has ceased to function.  It doesn’t occur to you to like or dislike.  To like or dislike, it’s necessary to first imagine that things could be other than they are, or to remember how they were before.  It’s necessary to experience self as separate from what-is.  That function has been turned off.  The mind is full of space.  The reference points are gone.

The fact that we’re not in charge of the mechanism or the timing of the paradigm shift needs to be a minor point.

Something happens to cause the surrounding something to become palpable, and for the moments that awareness sustains, the things that ordinarily matter so much lose solidity. There is a reversal of the real, the impression of what constitutes reality shifting from the usual to this other. Only, during the period of directly sensing this, it doesn’t feel “other.” It feels like home. You are home — not as in, you are located at home, but you are the nature of home itself. You and home are an identity. This that feels like home is your very self, and it is able to be self-aware, which is why you can sense it happening. It isn’t a place that “you” are briefly occupying. The place (if it can be said to be a place) is what you are.

But then you apparently leave. Or it leaves you. Or so it seems.

All that’s really happened is that you’ve gone back to identifying with your regular self, as if that’s what you really are, and now it feels like home is ‘way over there. A “place” to get back to. An experience to try to repeat. A mere memory.

At some point it becomes the norm to sense your self being that spacious intelligence. You no longer feel like the regular-person self is what you are. What causes this paradigm shift to occur, we don’t know.

Darn.

The important thing isn’t the missing or mysterious link. What matters is that it does exist. It does happen. You are spacious intelligence. The fact that we’re not in charge of the mechanism or the timing of the paradigm shift needs to be a minor point.

If this frustrates, just realize that it’s in the nature of the regular self to get frustrated. Don’t indulge it. When you indulge it, it becomes more solid.

Less porous.

Put these two things together — the certainty of an end and the radical uncertainty of all else — and what conclusion can you come to but going along for the ride (which will end when it will end, and in the way that it will)?

What happens when you relax into the brevity of life and the fact of not being in control?

But we tend to go at life as if we could make it in our own image, or at least wishing we could.  While the image-projecting may succeed in fits and starts, we are surprised again and again (not to mention dismayed) when something comes out of left field, when things don’t go the planned or desired way.

Meanwhile, death is coming at you like a head-on truck, and nothing to do about that.

How does any of this add up to anything but bleak?

But it does.  It’s not about the setup of things — the collision course with the truck, the radical unpredictability of the rest.  It’s about what happens when you relax into those truths:  the brevity of life and the fact of not being in control.  It’s about what happens when you relax into each development as it occurs.  It’s about what life feels like when you stop fighting it.  Then, life is a trip.  A carnival ride.  It’s only when you make an attempt to steer life a certain way that there’s unnecessary pain.

Just keep saying Well, would you look at this.  Do what the situation seems to ask, and then wait to see what’s next.  Stuff will just keep happening.  Balls will continue to be pitched.  Don’t bother trying to dodge the badly pitched ones.  Just keep saying I’ll be darned and swing.

Then the truck comes.  Or whatever; one way or the other, the heart squeezes up.  If you have a moment or two to reflect, you’ll say What a time I’ve had.

Don’t make yourself miserable, when it could be otherwise.  Bless us, every one of us:  let it be otherwise.

We will be at the Grafton Inn, at 92 Main Street, Grafton, in the Homestead Room. The telephone there is (802) 843-2231. All are welcome. The suggested donation is $5.

We will be in the building across from the main building of the inn. There is a large parking area on the right next to the White Church. Park there and enter the handicapped-accessible door. Go straight ahead to the end of the hall. The room is on the left.

For more information, contact Sally Warren at swarl@vermontel.net.

The cost for Friday evening is $10 if you register before March 15, or $15 at the door.  For Saturday, if you register before March 15, the cost is $65; after that, it’s $80.  No one will be turned away for inability to pay the full amount, but please pay in full if you are able.  These teachings are meant to be available to all.

Both events will take place at All Souls Interfaith Gathering, 291 Bostwick Farm Road, Shelburne, VT.  We will be gathering in a beautiful circular sanctuary with panoramic views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, set on conserved land with abundant natural beauty.

To register, send a check payable to Zac Ispa-Landa to 2 Grove Street, #2, Burlington, VT 05401.  For more information, contact Zac at ispalanda@gmail.com or call (828) 712-3124.