Touching the Cause of Water
Koan Diving into the Unknown Ere the Baptismal Water Got Dirty
Sitting on the Floor, A Cross-Legged Introductory Koan Query
I am not sure what I am doing here, now, in front of this computer screen sitting with this nearly empty e-page. Beyond the obvious regurgitation of words. It is the great unknown despite the idea that I think I know, or at least I’m reasonably confident in knowing the continuity of this form of the unknown dream, wherein I am sitting on the floor in a one-room cabaña. And that that cabaña in turn is sitting on the earth within the arbitrary definitions of a tiny Spanish speaking village up the side of this mountain. I am alone, mostly distant from people. I am not lonely. I hear dogs in the distance. A mosquito is dancing with death at my almost quick-enough hands.
Earlier, amidst an array of flora that includes cacti and a very large pine tree, I shared the beautiful expansive teraza with the sight and sound of birds in sunlight as they rustled through the near-drought dry grass and leaves looking for grains or insects. The air thrummed with the strength of their wings when another spot became more appetising to them. At one point a mostly white cat on the prowl slinked by. More recently I heard distant turkeys and a more distant donkey announcing their unique form of presence into the sky as the sun continued its quick and unhurried descent behind the mountain. The sky placidly transformed itself into a darkness that was quickly pricked by tiny holes of light and the faintest silvery sickle.
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This is the here and now that allows for this unknown reality to remain confused by the feelings of legs on the floor, buttocks on a cushion stack, and the exquisite and perversely delightful twinges and twitches in my loosening sacral joints and musculature of mid and upper back. And these loosely defined and yet specific bodily places, known by a non-verbal awareness of feeling them, are delighted in the exorcise that has embodied yogic freedom. Freedom that is manifest in this relaxed cross-legged sitting, in the expanding ease into the uprightness of this natural human form from sacrum to atlas as the stagnant samskara’s heart-protective hunch, its once stony somatic fortitudes, dissipate into the aether like CO2 fog.
The sound of that mosquito, or another one, tempting death. The ants confident that they will find something on the Niyama #1 sauca-clean floor before they too find death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, … (Edward de Vere (aka Shakespeare) Hamlet Act III, Scene I my emphasis).
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No Traveller Returns. Really? And So This ‘It’ Begins
This thing sitting here gently pressing fingers down onto these nearly magical letter-makers is seeking, perhaps, to vicariously discover that this ‘undiscover'd country’ is extant somewhere in this cross-legged form, in this somatic now-moment dancing with words. I am here with fardels† borne, of trauma, drama, unconsciousness and delusion as I stumble into the unplanned travels of new lands and circumstances whence I became this peculiar covid refugee of mind, consciousness and body. A seeker discovering spiritual resurrection out of the ashes of convidiana and the many other moribund distractions we have societally embodied as our age, an age of deadly amusement. And I laugh, now, a little, with having punched ‘amusement,’ because with recent study of various histories, distractions and death have been part and parcel of ‘civilised’ humanity for millennia, albeit without the near ubiquitousness that concentrated technology has provided us now. Yesterday bread and dead gladiators, today virtual realities and death by medicine.
†fardels: n. A fourth part: a quarter of anything. Used by Hamlet in ‘To be or not to be.’
Yesterday, in what began as an amusing synchronicity that became more profound as I explored it more deeply, I opened The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. Early in the first chapter she disses about the one who did in fact return from that ‘undiscover’d country’ to tell Peter to be the nascent Christian religion’s midwife. Pagels elaborates that there was a political requirement for the bodily resurrection of Christ, even though such a resurrection is disputed by most(?) of the pre-heretical Gnostic texts. The bodily resurrection was used, in a perverse way, as a tool in the evolution of Catholic Christianity in order for it to become the obscenely wealthy hierarchical and patriarchic structure it became. That was my paraphrase of:
… If the New Testament accounts [revealed by the Gnostic Gospels] could support a range of interpretations [of the resurrection, for example], why did orthodox Christians in the second century insist on a literal view of resurrection and reject all others as heretical? I suggest that we cannot answer this question adequately as long as we consider the doctrine only in terms of its religious content. But when we examine its practical effect on the Christian movement, we can see, paradoxically, that the doctrine of bodily resurrection also serves an essential political function: it legitimises the authority of certain men who claim to exercise exclusive leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter. From the second century, the doctrine has served to validate the apostolic succession of bishops, the basis of papal authority to this day. Gnostic Christians who interpret resurrection in other ways have a lesser claim to authority: when they claim priority over the orthodox, they are denounced as heretics.
Such political and religious authority developed in a most remarkable way. As we have noted, diverse forms of Christianity flourished in the early years of the Christian movement. Hundreds of rival teachers all claimed to teach the "true doctrine of Christ" and denounced one another as frauds. Christians in churches scattered from Asia Minor to Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome split into factions, arguing over church leadership. All claimed to represent "the authentic tradition" (p6-7 The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels my emphasis).
The domineering authoritarian, really anti-human, church structure hid itself behind a pragmatically and physically non-sensical spiritual truth-claim, bodily resurrection. I now see that claim as not significantly different from ones like 9/11’s official story because of the powerful dissociative psychological impact these big lies create.
The purpose of propaganda is not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponds to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control”. ( – Edited quotation from Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, British psychiatrist. Cited in ‘Both Believers And Disbelievers Of The Bodily Resurrection 9/11 Story Must Accept Miracles And Absurdities: Paradoxical? Not When You Consider [The Bodily Resurrection] 9/11 Propaganda Strategy And How Mind Control Works’. My emphasis and edit.)
And Pagels is coming close to something Tereza Coraggio talks about, a binary between empire [domination by bully of the many by the few] or sovereignty of the individual self. See, for example Coraggio’s comment here in her recent podcast
Pagels elaborates that the apostles’ forty days of proximity with the resurrected Christ gave them the authority to dominate the discourse over all others. They, men, became the powerful or, perhaps more likely, came to represent the powerful who are hiding behind their skirts. This seems to be a very straightforward political logistical or structural argument that makes historical sense. And now I suspect that the ease of this conclusion is a little too pat. What is behind door #3?
Washing Out How The Few Came To Control The Many. Let’s Go a Bit Deeper
Now for some speculation and inferences informed by recent contemporary research into things like the Khazarian Mafia and the Babylonian Rhadanite Banking Cartel and the reversal of Old Testament Biblical ‘truths’ that Tereza Coraggio has been exploring. (See, to begin,
and the links she provides there.)
The people really in power behind the Roman senate were looking to control or consolidate power in the turbulent time when Rome’s obvious decadence and abuse of power had undermined its authority and its secure continuity. Compounding the problem of (or creating an opportunity from) Rome’s decline was the explosion of Christianity. In its myriad of forms Christianity had fired up the population’s imagination and curiosity about alternative ways of living and loving and creating society. It threatened the viability of the slave state that Rome was built on. By some estimates at its height 30% of Rome’s population were slaves. The Gnostic Gospels put great emphasis on sovereignty of the self which strongly threatened the deference and obedience to authority the autocrats wanted to maintain.
And this brings me back to present day jargon of a very old awareness. How were the real power holders to make use of a perfectly good economic and social crisis?
It turns out that Naomi Klein’s vision was too small. It didn’t consider that government would be run as a health disaster enterprise to create tyranny.
Before going on I recommend the Irish philosopher Ubergoyo’s interesting look at the fall of Rome. Since all our history has been shown to be one long controlled propagandised narrative, and if we are to better understand how we are here now, anyone who has cogent arguments that question our oh so too obviously true narratives is worth considering. Uberboyo, citing Nietzsche’s idea of life-energy, interweaves a broad and powerful reconsideration of the rise and fall of power, why Catholicism didn’t actually work, and suggests that Rome’s fall was primarily because the ‘power elite’ had given away their active-life-energy to books of words with rules which created an endless drain into the additional words needed to control the narratives of the previous sets of words. It is great example of how powerful words are when abused. His argument gives great support to why the current cabal will ultimately fail in their efforts to put life under their thumbs: enervation by the rule of words. (See ‘Exploring Nietzsche's BRUTAL Criticism of Christianity’.)
With this thought I see a direct parallel with the pathological narcissistic gaslighting propaganda of convidiana with what was done by those future fathers of the Catholic Church — likely orchestrated by the same people who were buying the Roman senators. They stepped up to take control of the narrative by directing the ‘true’ apostles to burn everything that didn’t support their objective, to kill reputations and people who could and did influence cogent dissent and counter-arguments and, most powerfully, create a cognitive dissonance-trauma big enough to dissociate the body from the mind and soul.
Follow the Money
And as I was wresting with this I looked at my limited investigations of Biblical scholarship, where I’ve come across the push to create singularity of vision, of course. However, while my research is small enough to not really count as research, I’ve not seen or heard how it was the apostles who became the Catholic Church, funded the heresy pogrom? Where did they get the authority to kill the people they did? The Roman senate simply pulled a Joe Biden and printed more money to fund the purge? Under whose direction and financing? It is glibly attributed to Roman authority/government, and that is likely superficially true. It skips over who directed that power and paid for it.
Can You Spot the Difference?
When I substituted something like ‘Health Scientists’ or ‘WHO Plandemic Experts’ for ‘Fathers of the Catholic Church’ I don’t see much difference.
Of the people the Catholic Priesthood demanded obedience, wealth and for the obeisant to defer the sovereignty of their bodies in order for them to be bodily elevated by the ingestion of the actual blood and flesh of Christ. For the disobedient some form of shunning and/or shaming that frequently lead to death.
And of the people the Convid Priesthood demanded obedience, wealth and that the obeisant give up sovereignty of their bodies in order for them to be bodily elevated by an injection into their blood of a magic-like elixir — science’s stand-in for the actual flesh and blood of Christ. (And it is likely not an accident that there is strong evidence that actual animal DNA (SV40) is a component of at least some of the injections. And that embryonic stem cells have been included to some extent as well.) The uninjected faced shunning, economic censure, loss of liberty and often the reduction or denial of medical treatment.
Why Was the Creation of Dominion Successful, Then And Now?
In an earlier essay series I argued that the creation of the binary ‘deserving and undeserving’ was a natural consequence of the development of agriculture and the biological substructure within the human that looks for and creates hierarchy. (See “Obedience to Authority: An Exploration: On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News”. Part I: ‘Saviour from What?’
And in particular Part VI ‘Deservedness and Death in a Post Modernist Bully Culture’.)
And now, here, I will extend that argument a bit and bring it closer to the pith. Trauma. Trauma has the power to undermine individual sovereignty and give obeisance and obedience the required ingredients to grow and flourish under dominance.
One of the interesting forms of trauma, one that I’ve been exploring deeply recently through a narcissist recovery summit, is gaslighting. I’ve read about the gaslighting practices of the convidians and their minions without appreciating, at that time, a deeper purpose and consequence of the practice. And perhaps, gaslighting’s psychological source. In various ways narcissists control the narratives around them in order to achieve power over the their target. Pathological narcissists have several tools by which they create confusion within their targets about what is real and what isn’t. With time, and depending on the players, a ‘good’ narcissistic with a ‘good’ target can create in her/his target the near total inability to distinguish between truth and fiction.
Believe the Unbelievable — Or Else!
One of the most powerful tools narcissists use is the requirement for their target to believe the unbelievable. JFK, 9/11 and Bodily Resurrection all have that in common. And a society that will willing inject unknown ‘stuff’ into themselves and their children because they were told to.
When done successfully believing the unbelievable creates at least a binary split within the individual because to believe that which denies the truth of our physical experience is often a trauma that divides the self up. (Michael Stone suggested the neologism ‘divide-ual’ to suggest that split.) This is very well documented with the expanding awareness of the prevalence of narcissistic people (more than 25% of the population by some estimates) and their practices. And also the increased refinements of neuroscience that measures the difference between narcissistic and non-narcissistic brains. And lastly, we have seen a huge expansion and success of somatic body-centric therapies designed very specifically with healing these kinds of traumatic splits. Now these therapist are primarily receiving people who were gaslit as children or as adults by family members or by partners. (See for example, the excellent work of Heather Monroe or Annie Boerner and many many others.) Not so much the overtly acknowledged consequences of societal propaganda as gaslighting even though people like Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz, Alice Miller and Dr. Gabor Maté have identified our culture as ‘toxic.’
I’m not sure if these astute social critics used the word ‘narcissistic’. What is the toxicity of our society? Domination by a few people who use narcissistic practices to control the rest of the members of the society. In my previous essays I describe that as the ‘bully culture’ and that our society is in a state of near total bully Stockholm Syndrome because we, the targets of the narcissist propaganda practices in the news, our music and entertainment, extend by our own language and actions those of the bully in total unconsciousness. We with victim-language point to someone to blame or to someone to save us. And the recent deep roots of this, and likely the reason it is almost completely invisible is because the Catholic Church is the master in demanding a traumatising split from reality to create obedience within its bully culture.
And the majority of people deny the reality of our actual experiences of life. For example, with the current massive iatricide, our officials and their believers are (or pretend to be) oblivious to rises in all cause mortality, health and life insurance claims, athlete and pilot deaths, drop in births rates and rise in spontaneous abortions. Are these any different from the longstanding public denials of the reality of JFK’s assassination or 9/11 and Tower #7?
Both of these events (and others I won’t delineate here) were successfully gaslit to the public and, as some have described, created a psychic rupture in the American public that allowed them to be more easily manipulated into living under tyranny called airport safety, for example. This was and continues to be a narcissistic gaslighting ploy on a societal level. And with perfect synchronicity, earlier this evening I watched a well put together video that describes this to a ’T.’ I am very happy to introduce you to Conspiracy Sarah: “Start A Conversation This Holiday: Here's A Video To Help’.
To be or not to be? Riffing off Sarah’s ‘Well, How Did We Get Here?’
Which is stronger? Fear of imminent although not exactly known death? Or of being found out by the mob that you have been a high profile lying eugenicist in a family or cabal that has been robbing the world blind with lies and death for millennia? It may be that those who initiated the covid iatricide did so to a significant degree because they had become frightened that they would be found out, caught, so-to-speak, by a mob potentially the size of billions. Technology was getting out of control as it spread into more and more hands. With that spread comes the perception of a possible tipping point of people using that technology to wake up. Handling a mob of a few hundred million would be far easier, don’t you think, than possible billions? This may in part elucidate the crazy behaviour by the cabal, almost like a panic, that has created that glitch in the matrix that has begun to really wake people up. And again I am reminded of the very similar types of truly horrific destructive behaviours that often emanate from the malevolent narcissist when s/he has become frantic to save her/himself from disclosure.
Where is the Cause of Water?
This essay began with the idea I would explore my recent experiences with a couple of koans. And somehow those koans remained at the bottom of the page, waiting patiently for me to bring them up.
Here is the first koan, presented by Rachel Broughton Flower Mountain Zen
The Cause of Water
In ancient times Bhadrapāla, one of the 16 awakened beings of this eon, spoke to the Buddha. “At the proper time I went in to bathe, and realised the cause of water, which cleans neither the dirt nor the body. I felt at ease and awakened. This is the effect of meditation. The exquisite touch of the Tao shows bright and clear. As the Buddha now asks about the best means of realisation, to me touch is the best, according to my own experience."From Broughten’s extended comment on the Flower Mountain Zen webpage:
This koan can be found, in various forms, in the Suringama Sutra, The Blue Cliff Record, and in many other places, too. Bhadrapāla became Battabara bosatsu, the Japanese deity of bathing and bath houses, and is known for being enlightened through the touch of water.
My intuition is directing me to bring forward a small Buddhist piece of a long comment Tereza Coraggio made in response to my latest epistle to my dead father:
I replied to her engaging comment that I would be exploring it beyond a comment. And this is that exploration, at least in part.
Her comment with questions and a small condemnation brought a smile to my face and, at the same time, puzzled me a little too. Well, actually quite a lot as I felt it was inherently contradictory. And I include it here in this essay because somehow the comment feels like a kind of bridge between how I started the essay, thinking about koans, that became an exploration of the equivalency of narcissism and Christianity as mechanisms to traumatise people enough to create a survival-mode splitting off of the personality. Split people are more susceptible to obedience to authority structures — co-dependency, projection and distressing attachment practices. Now to figure out why my intuition is suggesting that!
Nov 8th, 2023 Tereza Coraggio comment:
… Is my relationship to you and everyone else hierarchical or equal? My one and only dogma is that it's equal. The dogma of every imperial religion is that it's hierarchical. This is the 'radical' spirituality that goes back to the root.
Does Buddhism have the same hierarchy? Historical war texts say, "One thousand perished but only four people died." So the same regard for the 'other' being animals was true.
I actually find Buddhism to be the most 'superior' of the religions because it's based on the idea someone else understands something you don't, something too mysterious to put into words that you wouldn't 'get' anyway from your deluded little inferior mindset. It can't be challenged because there's no basis. I find gurus and yogis insufferably smug. Who is Stone to say those other yogis get stuck after 7-10 yrs of study? Who gets to tell him where he's stuck ... on himself? [My emphasis.]
As he is equal to everyone, Michael Stone has the equal opportunity to speak the truth as he sees it in exactly the way Tereza did somewhat dismissively. And he has, in this case, the experience and personal struggles with his spiritual practice to be compassionate and truthful and to see clearly. It is his own spiritual teacher who he welcomes to tell him where he gets stuck. Is that hierarchy, being a student to a teacher? So long as the teacher is a teacher and not a (narcissistic) cult leader, then student and teacher will grow together into greater and greater liberation from ‘stuckness.’ That is the ‘hierarchy’ of Buddhism at its core, although not always made manifest in its practices, of course. Equal and different, much like the totality of experiencing the cause of water. That experience is not accessible to a mind let alone a mind disembodied by trauma, distraction and the high rewards given to egoistic educational practices.
Stone has told some of his ‘stuck’ stories with love, compassion and humour. That is ‘who he is to speak about stuckness’. He spoke something true about people reacting fearfully to a spiritual crisis or demand. Something all of us, except the truly exceptional, have experienced and seen. As I have, as he has and has described for himself. And I’m sure most everyone reading this has experienced that too, to varying degrees.
The unstuckness, the deepest level of awakening into full liberation, is to know the cause of water and realise the truth of water cleaning neither the body nor the dirt.
At a gross level one way to view the success of convidiana was as the process of scaring people enough that they would rely on someone else’s story to keep them safe. Narcissistic cult-behaviour. Almost exactly the same thing Stone described and which we, who are awake to it, see even as most everyone around us are blind to. Who reading this does not sees stuckness everywhere and are puzzled by it? And depending on tenacity, may have given up on figuring out how to help people get unstuck.
So, we are all equally capable of getting stuck. And yet we are not all equally capable of seeing others or ourselves as stuck or getting unstuck. That is this whole nuance thing again. Equal does not mean the same. A teacher and the student may be equal and will not be the same, even when the student is teaching the teacher!
And even that ‘equality’ is being complicated by the assertions of many, now supported by neuroscience research, that narcissists actually have a different brain structure and do not get cured. How does equal apply here? For therapists who specialise in the particular traumas narcissistic abuse creates, they do not see a cure working with the narcissistic abuser — they are not equal — and a huge problem is that the non-narcissitic people are blind to the reality of narcissism as a relatively common and particularly pernicious human ‘reality’. See ‘The Collective Denial of [Narcissism] and its Impact on Psychiatric Treatment’ - Sheri Heller. This is also the Judaeo-Christian-Moslem stories too.
Also odd to me was her dismissal of Buddhism as more ‘bad’ than the other religions because it is structured around those who have more or deeper spiritual experiences, as if someone knowing more is worse than the Catholic Church that uses apostolic politics and authority of hierarchy and position as the judge and jury. At its best, that doesn’t exist, or is minimally present, in most branches of Buddhism. All people are equally open to enlightenment and no apostolic process is required. Very very egalitarian in a way that the Abrahamic religions are not. (I wonder how they deal with narcissists?)
And with a bit of a struggle I realised what had jarred me beyond her quick judgment of Stone. “ This is the 'radical' spirituality that goes back to the root.” Buddhism is that spirituality. It is not the Abrahamic adherent looking under the light for the keys s/he has lost in darkness. It is to look in the darkness, in the body of experience, and not this bright and shining light we call mind or consciousness. Many of the gnostic gospels make very similar arguments to those that Gautama did: spirituality is the sovereign individual’s experience of life, in the body. The body is the cause of water, it is the root. It is the body that can know the cause and inform the mind and consciousness. That is true sovereignty.
In my current practices I have come to understand more deeply what Gautama was saying when he said ‘This is it’ and referred to the body at this time. There is no other way to experience existence. He taught that God and cosmology and ontology were spiritual by-passes [my jargon] that did not express enlightenment and would in fact hinder it.
This was the enlightenment he experienced and that he almost didn’t teach because he felt that few, if any, would understand it. And it seems he was correct. Not all of Buddhist practitioners or the branches that evolved were able to resist the ease of falling back to god and soul and body as separate things. Even when he was alive the people around him struggled to understand what he was saying: body is soul and soul is body, karma is now, and this moment is it. With awareness of this we can reduce suffering. Without awareness suffering will expand.
After his death many traditions fell away from that unity of the all in the now of this body. They created separations and even, with Tibetan Buddhism, re-introduced the gods Gautama had adamantly dismissed as unimportant at best, and a distraction at worst. He didn’t ever say gods didn’t exist. Just that they were the most alluring distraction from growing up and taking personal responsibility for the physical existence in this moment, the moment we reduce, leave unchanged or expand suffering for ourselves or others by thought, words or actions.
And once again I would like to thank Tereza for her boldly coming up and looking at the face of mara with courage. And with that helping me to understand ‘things’ more clearly. In a very recent podcast she commented on something that Gabor Maté had said in an interview. His comment and her enthusiastic concurrence woke me up to one of the key underpinnings of a successful malevolent hierarchical structure.
Quotation
In ‘Damaged Leaders Rule an Addicted World’, I loved Gabor’s statement that for society to function it has to separate the soul from the body (~20:16 In YouTube. Or see her transcript and video in the substack ‘Authority, Palestine & Gabor Mate: Who owns the land? Who owns the words? Who owns the world?’)
Nope. The separation of the soul from the body is how domination and subordination work. That separation, and the widespread and actively promoted use of trauma to facilitate that, is confirmation of that error. And I will go so far as to say that I suspect that integrity of soul and body is the sovereign of self. Michael Stone talks about how when the moguls in India were consolidating their kingdoms, killing each other and forcing people to obey the new rulers, they had no success with the yogis who practiced kundalini. Threat of death wasn’t enough and death of course wasn’t preferred when you were looking to create sub-ordinates. So the Moguls made it punishable by death to teach kundalini yoga and it became in that way a secret practice for hundreds of years. The goal of kundalini, the ‘enlightenment’, perhaps, is the total liberation into the sovereignty of the bodily Self, the Self as Body not just a mindful of the body state.
And that is to be touched and to touch the cause of water, to know it as that which does not clean the body or the dirt.
Now for the second koan that had a powerful and complementary liberating impact in my body these last few weeks.
This time it is from the Spanish meditation group here in Oaxaca. It is short and simple, although it has a big history, that of the Bodhidharma, the wild red-haired man with bulging blue eyes, a fierce demeanour and ratty clothes who brought Buddhism to China from India.
When asked by the Chinese emperor Wu what was the teaching he was bringing with him, Bodhidharma replied, ‘Immense emptiness, nothing sacred... nothing sacred. The moth that is now fluttering on my window.’
Another translation I like goes like this:
The Emperor asked Bodhidharma, ‘What are the Buddha’s teachings?’ ‘Unholy boundlessness.’ In other words: everything that is not holy. The Emperor then asked him, ‘Then who is standing in front of me?’ ‘I don’t know.’ (Michael Stone “Buddha Before Buddhism 1: How I Stopped Loving the Ruling Class".)
That was the setup to this month’s short koan:
A student asked: ‘Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?’ Zhaozhou said, ‘The oak tree in the garden.’
To explore this more contact Viginia Filip at Oaxaca Zen. She speaks Spanish and English.
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Thank you for reading
Song to close
Guy, what a tragedy that Pacific Zen Institute, with whom Oaxaca Zen is affiliated, has this stipulation on their web-page regarding retreats & Covid protocols: "Each of us will take the test upon arrival at the venue, and will wait 15 minutes to get the result. The PZI host will check your status before you may enter any building.
Before Your Arrival at Retreat
**To ensure we’re all as safe as possible and can relax together, we require that everyone be vaccinated and boosted, INCLUDING the bivalent vaccine, and do their own rapid test or PCR test before arriving.** - end quote. For long term practitioners to be caught in this illusion - I don't have words.
An excellent read. I can't pretend I understand everything but I did enjoy everything! Many moments of 'Oh Yes!' and lots of re-reading sentences to understand what you were trying to make me understand, and so - very enjoyable indeed.