Transcription
So we gather together from all corners of the world with some variation in our intentions but certainly a lot of overlap and I think it's safe to say that there's a common intention among all of us that isn't one we can speak about not something we can put into a category, but we feel it. And there's a tremendous power to coming together to explore that place where our intuitions, individual intuitions overlap into this collective.
So there's a collective support in this environment even though we are taking our own individual inward journeys to investigate the nature of experience, the nature of self, the nature of reality, uh the nature of what it is we come into contact with when we somehow move beyond our filters, our preconceptions, our perceptions, our misperceptions and really we enter a mystery or we come into contact with something mysterious.
The beauty of this is that while we do see this occurring as an event, as a gathering, uh, as an unfolding, a mystery that's unfolding itself, revealing itself through our collective intention, our collective willingness to follow our intuition. It's also the mystery right in front of your face right now. You're already looking at it. You're already nose to nose with the unknown whether you know it or not. Which is kind of a funny thing to say because we can think we know the unknown or we can think we don't know the unknown. But that's not really the unknown. But it is staring you right in the face. It is the visual experience, the forms and colors and shapes. It's like what is there when I don't pretend I know what's there? What is there? When I forego even the assumption that there are objects, separation, boundaries, what is it that allows me to know the sensations? The sensations we call the body sensation or felt sense. It's just there. So mysterious the mind will say I reach I I feel into something or I reach out to that sensation or I direct my attention to that sensation. But that's an afterthought. What's there immediately now? That felt experience now. It's faster than now. It's filling up this room, filling up the universe. The intimacy is without end, without magnitude. That sensation, it's the most simple. The sensations in your feet, the sensations in your hands, the sensations in your face, sensations in your heart space. All of these are the gateways, instant gateways to mystery. to the unknowable.
It's not knowable from a distance. It's not knowable through understanding. It's not knowable through constructing a knower. And yet without any of that, it's here clearly. more real than real, closer than close, more intimate than any what we'd typically define as a a human experience of intimacy. So there's a a mysterious nature to all of experience, the sense gates, consciousness. How can we identify with a thought? It's kind of a magic trick and yet it can seem very solid when that's your reality. Can seem very binding, confining. We create a world that doesn't exist out of thoughts. And we think we move through it and navigate it. We create a body out of thought. We create a self out of thought. A world in time with a past and a future. And we're sure that's real. How's that even possible? Because if you look closely enough, there's no way. It's not there. But we believe it somehow. So there's a there's a mystery even to the mechanism of identifying. The mechanism of the sense of identity itself, the sense of selfing is rather mysterious, at least for me. Closer you look, the more you see what's not there.
So that's the mystery we're not only engaging in as we move into this retreat, but the mystery that's, like I said, it's right there. It's in every sound, every sensation. It's here right now. The apprehension of mystery or the confront when we confront mystery. When we engage mystery, we can have a number of responses. Often we have a response which is an experience of awe, profound sense of awe or wonder or even the sense of even rapture or the sense of the sublime tremendous power that's beyond the scale or scope of the human experience or dimension. Those are all on the sort of scale of awe and wonder and those are generally interpreted as enjoyable, desirable. Maybe in the extreme it can it can get a little more fearful. Um, but that's another experience or another response to the experience of mystery that often comes is fear. You will experience well not everyone here but many people here will experience fear during the retreat at some point maybe even moments of uh intense fear. It may come. Many people here have had that during retreat. Like any experience it tends to come and go. Um, but it's not uncommon. And fear is that's the portal emotion to the magician archetype. The magician archetype, the archetype of transformation, mystery, magic. So that's a not an uncommon response to mystery uh to yeah to the experience of mystery.
When I was 24, and I've talked about this many times, but when I was 24, I noticed something about thoughts. Essentially noticing that no thought was defining my experience. I thought they were defining my experience, but I realized one by one that they weren't at all. That every thought that fell, there was less and less structure to my experience of reality, so to speak. Uh, and I moved into this sort of intuitive place that felt boundless, profoundly boundless. And then there was a fear response, very intense fear response. But I knew what it was. There was some intuition that of course because I had been taking myself to be this whole collection of thoughts, beliefs, memories, problems, solutions, more problems. I had taken myself to be all of that. It felt like me, felt like my life. And as they fell away one by one, initially it felt good to let a problem go, to let a future go, to let a past go. It felt good to feel that the freedom of the falling away. But at some point the the collective um accumulated contraction sense that I had to hold a self together, that I had to hold me together, that I had to hold my life together, suddenly felt threatened.