Greetings friends and fellow travelers on the soul’s journey.
For some time, I have felt an urge to offer a retreat on the immortality of the soul. As time passes, we feel the challenges of aging and loss of friends ever more acutely. These natural and inevitable realities bring us face to face with our own fragile hold here in this life. At the same time, a generalized sense of dis-ease permeates our world as the pandemic, global warming, and the breakdown of societal structures press upon our sense of security.
Yet, there is a life greater than our customary life. It is the Great Life, or the One Life. We do not have access to the Great Life when we view and thus experience life and death as eternal opposites. The Great Life is the realm of whole being in which these two complementary states are contained, and our life-in-time opens to its fullest potential. Here we see that it is death that dies, not life, and so our fear of death ends. It is in this realm of life that the soul awakens, freeing us to enjoy a wonderful life now !
“Having raised our consciousness, ordinary life will see to be a life in a narrow small world. It is just like living one’s life in the ocean instead of in a small well”
__Hazrat Inayat Khan
These are the forces that compelled and inspired my wish to offer this retreat where we can explore together the territory of death and deathlessness. The retreat draws on the Sufi teachings and practices that allow us to enter the Great Life through the awakening of the soul. The Sufi cosmology of the soul’s journey offers an invitation to directly experience Self Knowledge, whereby immortality can be known.
More than 100 retreatants, over five days, will explore such themes as:
• Everything changes, nothing is permanent.
• Finding and resting in that in us which does not change.
• Love is stronger than death; in letting go, releasing, parting, and saying goodbye, we don’t lose the essence of connection which is love.
• Finding the beautiful icon of our heart that we can joyfully melt into as we pass from the world of form into the subtle realms.
• Practicing Zikr and meditations that allow us to easefully let go and discover peace, beauty and joy.
• Identifying what wants, needs, and thoughts keep us tethered and enmeshed in our previous and current life “stories.”
We know only that part of our being which is mortal, and we identify with our mortal being. Ignorance of the self gives fear of death. The more one learns of the true self, the less one fears death. – HIK
Listen! Is your soul calling you to this journey? If so, please come! Ours is a caravan of discovery, not one of despair.
Taj
Registration for the Death and Deathlessness retreat will close on Monday, November 1st. To register go to newrain.info and click on the Notice for the retreat. The retreat will be held via zoom.
Dates: November 16-21st
Cost: Sliding scale: $350-$595
Accommodations have been made for those living in the UK and EU time zones.
Attendees must attend all sessions.
For further retreat information contact Khushi at tajretreats@sonic.net
For assistance with registration or technical help contact Gulbadan at accounting@newrain.info