Something to Do

More on the Radiant Mind retreat with Peter Fenner.

Peter often says that the nine month Radiant Mind program, with its three weekends, and private coaching, exercises, and teleconferences in between, is something to do until you realize there is nothing you need to do.

The mind creates projects. We have projects at work, with our relationships and family, and, perhaps the biggest one of all, the one that Peter calls "the enlightenment project."

But that sense of needing to do, or know, is an obstacle to seeing what is already here.

Each time we create a project, we are thinking about a future result, rather than what is happening in this moment. We are taken into our thought stream, into our own imagined future and recreated past.

Peter's exercises redirect us. They point us to that which is beyond doing and not doing. Which is beyond pleasure and pain. Peter calls this working at the result level--where we reside in this space of not knowing where we are.

There is rest and healing here. Our conceptual maps--the mental structures we have built because we think we need them to live our lives--loosen here. But life mysteriously keeps happening. There is doing without a doer to be found.

We spend a lot of time in this space during the Radiant Mind progam. On the one hand, this is the end of the path that the contemplative traditions all refer to. On the other, though, it is only this moment, and there never was a path.

Jeff