I'd like to begin with a myth that I've always loved from ancient India and it's a story

of a musk deer that detected in the air a faint but heavenly fragrance and decided that this

was the most amazing, delicious scent it had ever experienced and it wanted to find the source.

So it began traveling around looking for where the scent might be coming from and it crossed

high icy peaks and it went across huge stretches of dry hot desert and crossed rivers and seas

and steamy jungles and it still couldn't always there was a vague hint but never could it find

the source. Finally at the end of its life the the musk deer collapsed, exhausted and as it

collapsed it's horn pierced its own belly and as it lay dying that scent just emanated all over

and it realized that the source of what had been seeking all those years had been within its own being.

So that's an easy one to translate and and yet it's one like all the great truths that we forget.

We forget in ways that we might call it a trance that were in this this idea that what will make us

happy, what we most need, what will really bring us satisfaction and peace is in some way down the

road or it's located in somebody else or it's only available after we jump through a certain

number of hurdles. So if we look at our lives and this to me is quite amazing many moments we

really feel like we're on our way to something else that this this isn't really what counts what

really counts is what we're preparing for or what's down the road or what we left sadly years back.

So there is this sense in us that now isn't really it and if you wonder is that true just sense how many

moments you actually have been present and said yeah this is enough this is it this right here this

this is it this is the center of my life this is the meaning this is the preciousness this is what counts

usually it's not in our minds right here and it's not right within our own being and to me that is

the myth and the trance that we live within that it's somewhere else. So for many of us there was

probably about a hundred of us that spent four days on retreat this last during this last week

...