Living Circle Camp - unused draft copy

Living Circle Camp - this was my first draft for the invitation for the camp which I didnt end up using so I put it here as it has some alternate points that may serve your attention.

I have always invited a spiritual intent without exoteric trappings to the camps I hold. This doesnt require or espouse overt ‘spirituality’. But it does require a willingness to join with the invitation that IS the camp’s inspiration or you are at the wrong camp.

Living Circle runs as a single circle gathering of people; meeting, camping, cooking, sharing silence, music and dance together.

I invite Living Circle as an act of worship and renewal in which we step out of thinking-mind into relationship with the Living world. Such reality we do not make or control but in and of this we presently and always Are, whether we are aware of this or not. Living experience is indescribable and direct, (whatever words may be used to point to it), because it is not filtered or distorted by thinking. Such can be uncovered by opening into presence - this moment - without using the lens of the past.

A journey into simple presence in which time-bound thinking falls away is easy if we simply do NOT do the things that keep us distracted into elsewhere and elsewhen, unconsciously acting out a past that is not actually here - but whose imposition upon the present ensures that the future merely extends the past. The present is a gap between memory and imagination. They are not continuous. We have a choice in the way we see the present and a different world arises from a different choice.

Until one has a real experience of the living present as a unique expression of a shared joy, an unbounded peace, a recognition of love’s radiance, then it is hard to realise just what it costs us to live as if we actually are what we think we are. Yet even a moment of such experience is enough to witness that there is vastly more to what we are and what life is - than what we have come to accept (and suffer) as ‘the human condition’.

Becoming present as a living practice is the essence and is an allowing or letting into what is already here. It simply cannot be ‘done’ but only accepted and shared. This is profoundly different from most of our previous learning which tends to promote a time based ‘becoming this’ or ‘getting that’ which is aimed at some other moment than that which we are living right now.

Our adaptions to coping as a time-separated mind fall away when not serving any useful function and we may feel threatened or uneasy when anything that we identify with is open to change. Learning not to react to fear with that which promotes fear is a worthy endeavour whose fruit many hope for in our larger world, not realising that it is this which we need to give.

Whatever the forms of the camp, they are expressions of where we are coming from: our intent and invitation. How could it be otherwise? I do not seek music and dance as the content of the camp but we will use it as a common structure or vehicle through which we live and express our life together - just as we do with morning meeting and shared circle cooking.

Please do not bring ‘social’ drugs or alcohol to Living Circle. If such is your preference please be willing to explore living without for a few days. We are inviting the renewal of a simple clear awareness rather than its distortion. Boredom, doubt and discomfort can be the catalyst for either growing beyond one’s unrealised mindset or addressing inappropriate behaviour in others. This takes trust and support to stay with and come through. We can grow such a trust within our self and in our community. Everyone is both a teacher and a student to themselves and each other.

Living Circle is experiential and while we trust that we each and all welcome and include, our fundamental responsibility is self inclusion. Our perceptions shift as our state of mind calms. The essential learnings are of a highly personal relationship within one’s living self. The fruits of this process share in the community in terms of the light and quality of our presence. There is no private enlightenment to be gotten. We have it by seeing others in recognition of their worth - especially when it is not apparent.

In our human conditioning we all carry shit or guilt which we at times get stuck in or sticks to us if we try to throw it out. If we are to come into a shared presence that heals and enlivens it will only be through being straight and grounded within ourselves. The ego or time-bound mindset is an ingenious defence mechanism that can easily be set off, take us unawares and insinuate itself as if it were ‘I’. But it is dependent upon being fed with attention and I trust we can find better things to do with our minds.

The willingness to live with others is where the treasure is. It is also where the stuff comes up. There is no need to look for trouble but, if obstructions to your joy and essential peace of being seem to turn up in ambush, then trust it is coming up to be undone. Either over a process of years - or in a moment. But never by force of will imposed by self or another. The freedom to say no is essential to having the capacity at another time to say yes. I do not invite coercion as a valid expression of being at Living Circle. We are not here to fix the world or others - but to regain a grounded and clear sense of being ourselves in the shared life of the camp and take this into our lives. Such sanity is often lacking in the larger world in which we live. Fear will react but only love can respond; for to respond we must respond TO something that we receive by listening, in relationship, beyond the confines of chattering mind and pictures from our past.

Brian Steere