ashram – Robert Rabbin

Posts Tagged ‘ashram’

09
Feb
2016

I know how to heal the world. I’ve known for 40 years.

categories: Social Transformation, Society & Culture, Spirituality & Religion

I know how to heal the world. I’ve known for 40 years. It’s simple but I don’t know if we’ll do it. I don’t know if it’s possible since it seems we prefer being sick, wounded, hungry and angry. I’m not giving up though.

Here’s a bit of backstory.

Forty years ago, I was living in an ashram in India. One morning around 5:30, I walked out of the kitchen where I had been cleaning and cutting fruits and vegetables for the communal lunch. The sun was just rising above mountain ridge across the valley. Entering the main courtyard, I decided to sit for a while on a concrete planter that enclosed several coconut trees. I fell very silent.

We might normally associate silence with not talking, or the absence of noise or the atmosphere in a forest. It’s all these but it’s also more. Silence is a syrup—a very delicate syrup—that mysteriously yet palpably flows through all living things everywhere, through all of existence. It’s a quantum level sap that gives life to all things everywhere. We might call it prana (breath) or shakti (primordial life force). (more…)

09
Jun
2015

PAY ATTENTION: My Early Teachers

categories: Authentic Living, Education, Spirituality & Religion

I recently posted a meme-art about the second principle of authentic living, Pay Attention, on my Facebook page. Someone left a comment saying it was the hardest of the five principles. I said I’d post an article about my early training in “paying attention” — and here it is. It is excerpted from The 5 Principles of Authentic Living.

My first training in Paying Attention came during high school. My best friend at the time was Mike Buchanan. We were on the wrestling team together, and we’d sometimes double date. His father, Ken, owned a butcher shop, and Mike and I worked there for a couple of years after school, and on some weekends. We’d serve people at the counter, we’d cut chickens and roasts, we’d sometimes bone out a hind quarter. It was a dangerous place, with knives and saws and hooks everywhere. Mike’s dad had been in the business for 30 years, and he had the confident manner of someone is who damned good at what they do. Still, he was missing two fingers on one hand, and one on the other.

(more…)

26
May
2015

Asking Permission to Leave

categories: Authentic Living, Silence, Spirituality & Religion

This is the story of how a single, simple sentence changed my life.

In 1969, I lived in a wood shack near the village of Trinidad, about thirty miles north of Arcata, California. I was supposed to be studying Eastern philosophy at Humboldt State College but spent hardly any time in class. Instead, I sampled a variety of hallucinogens, sat zazen and practiced Aikido, followed the saga of Carlos Castaneda, and read haiku poetry — tiny bridges of words that are connected to the immense emptiness behind conventional thinking and meaning. During this time, I encountered the world of silence and in that silence I first experienced that the physical world perceived by the senses was a mere tissue hiding something vast.

Rugged living

It was in search of that vastness that I traveled to India. In 1973, I set off with a friend whom I had met the year before in Israel. Eric and I had decided to go overland from Europe. We set off from Paris, hitchhiking to Brindisi, Italy, intending to take the ferry to Greece, and then trains and buses through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into India. (more…)