Moving into the unknown – reflections on emptiness.

Our October meditation retreat is an invitation to understand the relationship between Mind and No Mind through meditation, inquiry and ceremony. Meditation is moving from Mind to No Mind. Simple and yet so hard – the arduous journey of all seekers in this human body/mind.  Our intention during our time together, is for you to have an opportunity to have some experience of this and more understanding. We are inviting you to move into the unknown, into emptiness. From Osho:

Buddha says if you can die without passion you have broken the circle. You may never be born again. Or even if you are born it is going to be only once. Maybe a little karma is left, accounts have to be closed, things finished, but basically you are free.

When the mind is free of passion, the mind is free. Freedom means freedom from passion. And only a free mind can see what is real. Only a free mind, free from passions, can see what is here.

Those who have passions are never able to perceive the way, for it is like stirring up clear water with hands. Have you watched sometimes, on a full moon night you go to the lake – everything is silent, not even a ripple on the surface of the lake and the moon is reflected so beautifully. Shake the water, create a few ripples in the water with your hands and the moon is divided into fragments, the reflection disappears. You may see silver all over the lake, but you cannot see the moon. Fragments and fragments, the totality is broken, the integration gone.

Human consciousness also can be in two states. One state is the state of passion: when there are many ripples and waves hankering for some shore somewhere in the future, or still clinging from some shore in the past. But the lake is disturbed, the surface is not calm, quiet and tranquil. The surface cannot reflect the reality, it distorts. A mind full of passion is a mechanism for distortion. Whatsoever you see, you see through distortion.

Go to a lake on a full moon night and watch these two things in the lake. First see everything quiet, calm, the moon reflected, a tremendous beauty, and everything so still as if time has stopped. And everything so present, as if only present is. In a moonlit, full moon night, being on a faraway lake, just sitting there, you are going a little out of time and space. Then create ripples, or wait for a wind to come and distort. Then all reflection is gone or distorted. Then you go on looking – you cannot find the moon, you cannot figure out what the moon is like. You cannot make it out from the reflection.

These are the two states of the mind also. A mind without any thought, desire, passion, is quiet – quiet like a lake. Then everything as it is, is reflected. And to know that which is, is to know God, is to know truth. It is all around you, you are just not in a state to reflect it.

When your passions drop, by and by things start falling in line, they become integrated. And when the reflection is perfectly clear, you are liberated. Truth liberates; nothing else liberates. To know that which is, is to be free, is to be absolute freedom.

Dogmas cannot liberate you, creeds cannot liberate you, churches cannot liberate you. Only truth liberates. And there is no way to find the truth unless you have come to create a situation in yourself where that which is, is mirrored.

For more information or to register please email arani@devaarani.com