The Guardian for this meeting was Zen Arado. The comments are by Zen Arado.

Zen Arado: Hi Riddle :)
Riddle Sideways: Hi Zen
Zen Arado: no region restart yet
Riddle Sideways: :) hehehehe came to watch it
Zen Arado: uh oh spoke too soon
Zen Arado: :)

Zen Arado: will amble over to Kira
Riddle Sideways: will go back to work
Riddle Sideways: thanks for taking the region restart sessions

After the region came back to normal I returned to the pavilion but no one else turned up. I added to some notes I had been making to clarify my thoughts and am posting them here in (the unlikely) event someone finds them interesting:

Some thoughts on religious traditions and experience.

As a child, I didn’t have any choice of religions to follow. Christianity was drummed into me both at school and Sunday School. My parents weren’t particularly religious but thought it a good moral training for children to  attend Sunday School. At school and church, Christian missionaries who travelled to other countries to convert them to Christianity (from their heathen ways) were much praised.

Should children be taught about a wide variety of religious experience? And also about an atheistic secular worldview? In what way should they be taught? To regard religions critically? To me there is a big question here since examining a religion from a philosophical standpoint is almost to advocate a critical reasoning way of thinking. Religions work in a deeper faith based way, at least, not by believing only what is amenable to reason.

It seems important that we recognize that there are many spiritual paths that can be followed and we can practice tolerance to the beliefs of others. This may not be reciprocated though. It appears to me that monotheistic faiths preach that there is only one path and anyone not on that path is doomed.

Anyway, even within any religious tradition, there is a huge variety of divergences and distinctions of beliefs. And each individual believer has a different take on what his/her particular sect teaches. In the non-duality perspective there are radical non-dualists who believe there is nothing to do and that any injunction to perform any practice is going back to dualistic thinking. On the other hand, the ‘be here now’ school encourages being in the present moment.

Many of these differences could be accounted for by a difference of emphasis on various teachings. In Buddhism there are those who lay more stress on meditation and others on scriptural injunctions in sutras. I see in Buddhism and non-duality teachings the same division between people who think you need to do something and those who say it is realising there is nothing to do. It reminds me of what seems the same concept in Christianity expressed In the famous verse in Ephesians:

“ 8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Finally, a quote where Joan Tollifson recounts her own struggles and resolution of differences in teachings:

“.. The whole conflict was seen to be about conceptual maps and identities. Reality is so much simpler and more immediate. Waking up is not about joining the winning team, or crossing the finish line and being done for ever, or being certified or approved by someone we will look up to as an authority figure, or having all the answers. Waking up is simply seeing through the imaginary problem – not once and for all, but now. What remains is a groundlessness that needs no answer.”

Joan Tollifson ‘Painting the Sidewalk With Water’