Here in the
Napa Valley,
the
wine
country
in California where I live, there were once four
working
monasteries.
Now there are two. I think of a
monastery
as a place of retreat where people can go and live and renounce
worldly
ways,
take vows of silence, and dedicate their lives to
God
- or
(spoken
more
rigorously)
to finding
God.
For some, that will be an intellectual search. For others, it will
be
personal
one. For still others, it will be a
spiritual
one. Many people, not only monks and nuns, take
time
to advance their
spiritual
searches in
monasteries.
And when I say
"monasteries",
I'm also using it generically to include convents, ashrams, and any
other form of retreat etc.
Time
spent in such institutions is
universally
considered
to be useful for advancing one's
spiritual
development, resulting in what we call
"getting it ie the Big
IT"
ie an
awakened
state
some label
"enlightenment",
a term which itself is
interpreted
differently depending on which
path
it's
viewed
at the end of. However, whichever way it's
interpreted,
a
belief
common
to all its
interpretations
is that with practice it can be attained, and without practice it
probably won't be. Or can't be.
So it's not that we're
simply
in search of something
spiritual.
It's we're convinced that with enough dedication and practice,
we'll soon find it ie we'll eventually
"get"
it.
The way
Werner
turned this
paradigm
on its
ear
is by boldly (if not famously brashly and irreverently) asserting
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