Online Retreat: Our Bodies Break Light
Day 4
Resources for Day 4:
‘Meditation isn’t some kind of magical bullet…..the way you lead your life will profoundly effect your mental, emotional state, the state of your spirit. Meditation alone won’t compensate for the way you live your life.’
Paramananda
Wednesday 8am
Welcome to Day 4
Salute to the Three Jewels
Poem
45 min unled meditation with bells marking 5 stages.
If there is beauty, there must be ugliness;
If there is right, there must be wrong.
Wisdom and ignorance are complementary,
And illusion and enlightenment cannot be separated.
This is an old truth, don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret –
All things are impermanent!
Ryokan
Wednesday 10.30am
Talk by Paramananda
Led meditation
Lying down with drumming and mantra
Just Sitting
VULTURE
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up
in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I
understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the
naked red head between the great wings
Beak downward staring. I said “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” But how beautiful
he’d looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes –
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after
death.
Robinson Jeffers
Wednesday 4 pm
Amitabha mantra led by Bodhilila
Just Sitting
Q & A with Paramananda and Bodhilila
