Silent Retreat Vol. 74 ~ Talks

This 6-download set contains all of the Talks from the August 2019 Woldingham silent retreat in Surrey, U.K. including the first evening talk and the morning talks. (This set includes the last morning talk of the retreat, which contained no dialogues).

Please Note: The Q&A Sessions and Guided Meditations from this retreat must be purchased separately. 

Talk Topics Include:

• Spiritual Yearning Is about Rediscovery 
• The Heart’s Longing for Deeper Connection 
• A Different Way to Listen 
• Retreating from Our Mental or Emotional Obsessions 
• The Key to Living an Awakened Life 
• Balancing a Commitment and Relaxedness 
• Leaving the Home of the Known  
• How Source Uses Consciousness for Self-Awareness 
• The Different Qualities of Presence 
• Spiritual Teachings Are Not the Truth 
• The Multifaceted Diamond of True Nature 
• The Silence within Words 
• The Paradoxical Experience of True Nature 
• Real Trust 
• The Two Instincts of Spirituality 
• Who We Are Counts 
• Embodying Self-Transcending Values 

Quotes:

“Are you ready to see what exists beyond your ideas and the associated feelings that they continually create?” 

“There’s no such thing as a permanent experience, no matter how much we want a particular experience to always be there.” 

“The commitment isn’t to a teaching. It’s not to a teacher. It’s not to a tradition. It’s to something inside of each of us.”

“Presence is a doorway. It is the visceral experience of various facets of our true nature.” 

“Whatever it is at any given moment—positive, negative, wonderful, difficult—your experience is not a mistake.” 

“Whenever you touch upon any facet of reality, it feels like it’s the whole of it. It’s like facets on a diamond. And if you touch upon one of those little cut facets, in one sense, you’re touching the diamond.” 

“Every revelatory experience of true nature or reality has its potential delusions built into it. And we’re usually not told that.”

“If you’re able to be sensitively attentive, you can sense the quiet right in the midst of words. Words don’t actually disturb the quiet. The words are coming from, and in some way expressing, the silence. The silence is actually using your mind.” 

“Silence is one of the foretastes of true nature.” 

“It’s not ‘you’ or ‘me’ as a personality that wakes up. That’s what we wake up from.” 

“Our depth, by whatever name you want to call that—true nature, Buddha nature, Christ nature—seems to have two instincts. There’s an instinct for it to become conscious of itself. And when that instinct is activated, we feel it as a kind of spiritual yearning. It’s the transcendent instinct within us. The other instinct is an instinct towards embodiment.”

“I see meditation as some sort of a metaphor. It’s going to show you your relationship with your experience. And your relationship with your own experience is going to be very similar to your relationship with other people and your relationship with the rest of life.” 

“May we all serve what we love. It’s so important.”  

Recorded at Woldingham School in Woldingham, Surrey, U.K. on August 11–16, 2019.
© 2019 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.