Ravi Ravindra Weekend Retreat
Daily Dying and Living Well Retreat with Ravi Ravindra For the third year in a row Ravi Ravindra, a PhD and former university professor of physics and philosophy, visited from Halifax to lead a weekend retreat at the Krishnamurti Educational Center of Canada in Metchosin, BC. The subject of the weekend was death, including the universally recommended “practice” of dying daily in order to fully live, or “dying before we die”. Ravi gave an introductory presentation on Friday evening at the Centre, attended by 22 people in all. He asked the audience what questions we have about death and gave an interesting talk on religious and scientific views about death and the possibility of survival beyond the death of the body. He emphasized that each of us must look into the issue for ourselves rather than accepting any outside authority. An interesting distinction was the difference between looking into death with a motivation of fear and looking from a sense of wonder. If we are perceiving from a sense of wonder fear does not exist. Ravi spoke of the importance of the question “Who am I?” Who is it that dies, and who is it that lives? To fully investigate the questions of life and death we must look into the real nature of the “I”. Sixteen people returned on Saturday for the full weekend retreat. It consisted of a variety of activities, including guided meditations, exploring Krishnamurti quotations, “observing” without commentary while outdoors in nature, and a good deal of discussion about the central topics of the retreat both in the full group and in smaller groups. Ravi shared a number of stories relevant to the topics at hand about his meetings and conversations with Krishnamurti. He also prescribed some writing exercises in which a certain question was asked and the participants were given time of consider it and write their responses. What would we do if we only had two weeks to live? What is our expectation about death? What insight(s) have we had about death over the weekend? On Saturday evening an audio recording was played of a conversation between Ravi and Krishnamurti on the subject of death. Many interesting questions and gems of wisdom were presented over the weekend for our contemplation and discussion. Perhaps one of the most significant focuses for many was the issue of what assists the surrender of the self or ego and what prevents it. Throughout the retreat Ravi demonstrated a skillful way of inquiring into what is really meant by any statement or so-called authoritative idea, encouraging us to break down unquestioned acceptance and absolutist positions regarding “truth”. We thus come upon a more open and flexible mode of viewing reality.
