Retreat announcement: Exploring Excellence, July 11-14, 2013
KFI Study
Exploring Excellence July 11-14, 2013
Human beings have strived for excellence in various fields – science, technology, sports, music, architecture, and so on. The achievement or excellence comes about through effort, repetition, and will.
What does it mean to have excellence inwardly? Excellence will be the subject for our exploration in the upcoming retreat starting on July 11. Excellence implies living a life of goodness, creativity, and harmony in relationship. We will examine the role of effort to bring about any inner change? Does the making of effort bring about resistance within oneself? The resistance is the dissipation of energy.
We will also examine together the issue of right livelihood in a society that is based on division, ambition, and self-security. One can find a right means to livelihood when one has examined one’s own struggles, ambition, and envy. Only through individual change a profound change can come in society and not the other way round. The change may not be a gradual. We will discover together a factor that is not bound by time. One can start experimenting in one’s daily life and live an inwardly rich life starting NOW.
“To live in goodness means living excellently. And to live excellently does not mean to live in excellent houses, and to eat excellent food; all that comes second. To live excellently or, in other words, in excellence is to live with the highest capacity of your affection. It is to live and function to the highest capacity of your seeing things as they are. To live in excellence and to be excellent is not to be selfish.” From booklet RV 80 years
“What is the relationship between discontent and meditation? What do you think? As we said, discontent most of us have. Either it becomes an all consuming flame or it is soon satisfied, smothered, by getting married, by having a job, by having children, or by joining some society, community, or becoming some ideologist. That flame which should be burning is gradually smothered. That is a fact. One is totally discontented with society, with the establishment, with short hair, grows long hair, you know the whole thing that goes on. So can discontent never be smothered? Never. Though one may have children, wife, never that flame wither away, die, become ashes…whether it is possible to keep this discontent at its highest excellence. Excellence means to reach the top of the mountain. Mediocrity means to go half way. “
Third Public Dialogue in Saanen, July 1977.
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