Camps as spiritual resource

I have in fact been a well adjusted individual to the world that I have grown up in. From earliest self awareness I felt it expressed less than what life is and what I can be. It seemed to demand that I be what I am not. In one way or another I met unlove. In reaction I grew a false independence that was essentially a form of complaint and feeling hard done by, whereby I avoided addressing my own failure of relationship. I thus become less than what I am and actively undermined my own unfoldment in life. A false presentation. A social identity.
 
Recognising this came about only via extremely painful change, but also because there is in me (as in everyone) an innate or God given capacity to recognise truth. I could not invest in falsity once I became aware that it wasnt true. Even though my world collapsed and I was terrified without the buffer of a false self to hide in or be.
 
I then began to grow from a sense of responsibility that before would have been inconceivable and therefore invisible. Unlike societal responsibilities, living responsibly does not carry the sense of ‘should’ or ‘ought’ but rather expresses one’s own intelligence as an expression of desire or free will. Albeit that life brought such crisis where I was not able to evade or delay such choices. Such has been - and remains the ongoing responsiblity of consciousness. Without this responsibility we reenact the past as a program of which we are unaware.
 
Camps offer temporary but periodic occasions of living in which we are much more communal and communicative that we normally are in daily life, and more immersed in the natural world and its living qualities. The camp offers renewal in the capacity for relationship.
 
New relationships will either grow on a new basis and call forth new behaviour and experience, or replicate the old set patterns. For the latter, the honeymoon period is soon replaced by a more obviously contractual ‘relationship’ where each participant holds ongoing private judgments which become associated with ‘no go areas’. The ‘trouble’ that surfaces over time in relationship will either tend to become ‘mapped out’ and avoided or the relationship is abandoned. Attempts to force solutions fail because the nature of human conflict expresses unconscious private histories we each carry and this is only recognised in freedom and not at all likely when righteously energising conflict.
 
A kind of peace can be maintained by those willing to obey the rules of non engagement that the group’s atmospheric carries. But it covers hidden conflict and is superficial. This is largely a picture of humanity at large - the human condition.
Camps - if they are to offer spiritual resource, need to discover the basis for relationship where we find enough willingness to remain in the experience of conflict and release our convictions of rightness or wrongness enough to let the presence of life come in.
 

This can be a simple as letting an uncomfortable silence be just that - uncomfortable. By not trying to lubricate or fix something that seems to be ‘out there’ we can just be with it and feel it ‘in here’. Being with anything without fretting and thinking and defining is to become actually present. The moment that we allow the presence of what is actually alive in us to connect, we are transformed. Now, instead of looking outside for conditions to be met and finding disappointment, we are unselfconsciously expressing our own sense of self inclusion. If the previous discomfort was related to issues in the camp, then one is awake and responsive rather than restless and reactive. There is now a relational basis on which one can act by discerning what is appropriate to the whole situation.
 

To value a relationship enough to stay in when issues arise that embody loss of trust requires a faith in oneself and life whereby one is willing to forgo investing in conflict and remain in relationship - ( As described in the above paragraph). However we are not obliged to submit ourselves to actual abuse or indeed abuse ourselves or others by futile attempts to enforce our wills. Withdrawal or restraint is appropriate as an expression of love toward ongoing willful violence at any level. If a mutual channel of relationship does not exist it cannot be forced into existence. To deny access to that which refuses to look within and only attacks is sanity - but only if we remain open to their essential worth beyond the costume and posture they are currently identifying as.
 

There is something in human conditioning that always tries to usurp and do what in fact is not its responsibility - and thus we obstruct our own good. To bring ourselves present is to be in an ongoing relationship with others and the world, just as we are, but not in conclusion or judgement as to where we (or they) are. Compulsion to fix, grasp and control is an expression of insecurity that always represents an avoidance of looking within. Life is intelligent, we do not persist in what doesnt serve any purpose, once we are awake enough to see.
 

To be in the messiness of involvement is not comfortable in human terms. But to regain recognition of your and your brother or sister’s innate worth is to have found the way to live in and from your own. Learning to live is to a very large degree learning how to not get in the way; how to let in and join with the life that arises.
Joy arises from within. It cannot be bought or made. All pleasures are external and their ‘joy’ will pass. Yet joy can fully drink pleasure’s essence without grasping at the forms. Joy is the call to live that we will have no peace unless we respond.
By becoming present we become receptive and life will reveal itself as we allow it. To be in joy is far too simple and requires no preparation - though it may require patience as old habits diminish.
 

What better than a relationship in which you can let be yourself as is, for your own joy to show you an alternate to the ways the past would dictate, that seem safe but lead nowhere; that wear us down and out of joy? Therefore the camp is an opportunity for you to offer that freedom to others once you have realised it is yours to receive.
 

Everyone expects spiritual life to demand sacrifice of himself herself. Everyone expects that looking within or being revealed is to encounter judgement against oneself. Until the attempt to go it alone as a self made man or woman becomes untenable, there will be the tendency to defend against love and to protect fear. But if there is any willingness in the day we live now toward change from conflictedness to wholeness then that is enough to take one step. To embrace the step we are inspired to take is not only enough - it is all we will ever need to live.

Brian Steere