Audio: Richard Witteman 2006
The following talks by Richard Witteman are available on both CD and audio tape.
September 2006 Retreat
| Day 6 |
- This interest is so interesting, so alive!
- So present, somehow emerging from silence and slowing.
- The absorption of interest in what's here. Anxiety and ambition subsiding.
- When anxious, thought stories shimmer, seem to offer relief - it never works.
- They lead to fear, either building the story or seeking to escape it. (30 mins)
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September-October 2006 Retreat
| Day 1 |
- Talks aim not to add information or convey understanding - a continuation of silence.
- Suffering: wanting other than what is.
- Like this morning, for example, feeling quiet but due to give a talk.
- This presence, space, beingness - amazing how little the words touch it. (25 mins)
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| Day 2 |
- How amazing to grow interested and be in touch with the things of everyday life.
- All so rich, and the more you stay with it the richer it gets.
- Thought: whole universes created that fill up everything, or appear to.
- When you take interest in thought activity itself, you find its charge and import gone.
- They can come and go like weather, like swirls of wind through leaves.
- Turn on the light: it's only in the dark these things drive us.
- What sees? Does it have a beginning, end, location? Ever change? (26 mins)
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| Day 3 |
- The arising of thought within the field of being like a construction project, unfinished.
- Buddha: "O house builder, you have been seen! You shall build your house no longer."
- Relinquishing house-building.
- Shift of identity, from locked inside thought, trying to escape, into simple being.
- Letting that shadow play recede into the largeness of being. (26 mins)
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| Day 5 |
- Affection for human silliness.
- Clarity is in the simple honesty of not having to hide anything.
- In the effort to transcend our foibles, the edges get sharp, we bang into things.
- With the willingness to be in touch with them, their domination ceases.
- An easy undividedness. Not seeking to transcend, but relaxing into how it is.
- "Reaching the far shore" - pushing off from the shore of identification with thought.
- But there's no other shore to go to. It's all in the pushing off into the waters. (26 mins)
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| Day 6 |
- Meeting old torments freshly.
- Bringing that interest and honesty to what we've habitually turned away from.
- On the phone with a friend while people were arriving.
- An urge to go meet them, a fear of being forgotten.
- Friend said, "It's a little like dying, isn't it? Let it die."
- Practicing on small losses. (31 mins)
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