Puja/ honouring the sacred creates conditions for awakening. The group effort adds enormously, focusing on values and liberation, offering the opportunity to share an ongoing and ancient transmission.

A retreat is a training for life. It’s simple but hinges on careful sustained attention on useful frames of reference. What is worth giving prolonged attention to?

Dhamma teaching is never completed because it has to be right at the right time. It points to something; it never describes or defines. This allows the mind to decompress and get free from the conditioning forces of data and the pressure to make things happen.

When the citta is out of touch with Dhamma, reactive tendencies arise and we start responding to the designating and naming that the mind creates, thereby destroying the freshness of our experience.

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On retreat we can develop a frame of reference which becomes a reliable way of filtering – not controlling – experience. Retreat structure, silence and participation are key ingredients.

Steady the citta by replenishing it with good food. These include the fruits of friendliness, goodwill, ethical sensitivity, stability, and a steady resolve. These become a drip feed.

Signs / nimittas are significant. Ajahn examines what is meant by these words.

With integrity as a basis for mindfulness, we can go beyond calming down in sports, the office or even the army. Through meditation we see there is something deeper in the heart that needs to be unpacked.

Effort: taking an overview, we can recognize the first effort is to generate right view, to note the conditionalities in which we find ourselves. We see which ones lead to stress, and which allow it to cease.

We use retreat to learn how to soften and loosen the worldly ways of stimulation and action, and to enter the space and silence of our temple.

Teachings from the last week of the vassa. Description pending.

Finding a place to begin can’t come from history. Intuitive faith / saddha is useful to distinguish the mundane from the place where truth, the unconditioned, can be revealed.

Participant questions are précised and read into the file. The reading does not communicate the emotion that was frequently beautifully present: 00:08 Q1: I started listening to your recordings maybe in 2020 and it just really resonates with me the way you explain the citta. I just have never heard it described in quite the way you do, it all makes sense. So just to say thank you for this. 01:11 Q2: Could you speak about the bowing - what you are doing and how to do it. 05:56 Q3: I don’t have words to express my heart but thanks. The silence this morning … there’s something about it … The process is so intriguing, so beautiful, so thank you all everybody. 06:22 Q4 I so appreciate your clarity. You have helped me to understand things that I touched into years ago. And I went down cul-de-sacs not understanding. I am so grateful to have come into contact with you. 08:32 Q5 It’s been a difficult year for me and with your teaching I feel like an instrument that has been retuned. I feel I can play now or sing. 08:49 Q6 I want to say I am very grateful to be here and it seems that I have probably done some wholesome actions along the way. Sometimes when I look at my life I look at the difficult things that have happened to me and now I see I need to also look at the beautiful things. 09:21 Q7 For the last 10 years I have been struggling with daily practice and now I see better that practice is not just for half an hour but it’s 24/7 and I have to do my best. 11:15 Q8 You’ve talked about practicing with the paramis. I don’t know what they are. Is there a text you could recommend on this? 11:59 Q9 I just wanted to thank you and everyone for the silent presence and especially to thank you for how you led us into silence. 12:17 Q10 I just want to add that the QiGong was really special and added a lot. Thank you for that. 12:35 Q11 Who is your teacher in QiGong?

A Dhamma session is special, a form that is unlike the form in which most people live. But as we return to the helter-skelter of city life, it offers certain things to bear in mind.

Meditation is part of the eight-fold path. We see there are no such things as objects just many, many subjects – and they all experience themselves as subjects.

An examination of the operating system that gets set up with life and the program “I am a separate being.”

Dependent arising is accompanied by dependent ceasing. Is mindfulness enough? The dhammas involved are potent and need persistent attention to a multiplicity of factors.

The temple is built through contemplating, understanding and clearing the ground. The construction is through a process called recollection: to bring up a topic, linger on it and see what the resonances are.

Questions are précised and read into the file: 00:10 Q1 Is there a Buddhist perspective on the soul and how that might relate to citta. 09:08 Q2 I am wondering about the teachings of the trikayas in terms of the territory of the soul or the devas. 11:38 Q3 You were saying there is no me and no not me; there is no soul. But then, what gets passed on? 20:42 Q4 When I think about what gets passed on I tend to think more of the role of genetics. To me, Buddhism doesn’t seem to give enough weight to the social or family element in our development. 22:39 Q5 Regarding the concept of qi (chi), does that life force come with intelligence imbued in it? 23:02 Q6 I so appreciated your comments about the beauty of freedom the Buddha had was to choose to teach out of compassion. So his enlightenment was not the end point but it was the responsive space that resulted that was so beautiful. 33:01 Q7 Can you elaborate please? Is the most basic link in the dependent origination is the I am singularity? Is there an asava independent of the I am?34:26 Q8 Earlier you talked about the four areas of crystallization of clinging: sense pleasures, becoming and principles / ethics. What was the fourth?

Guided meditation