Fall Festival 2024 ~ Day 1
Oct 25, 2024
09 August 2024
The peace of the Festival is indescribable. It feels so powerful to meditate as a great assembly of practitioners at the culmination of this Festival. Step by step, session by session, we have the experience of collectively holding our minds on pure objects. The Kadampa Temple becomes so quiet, even though we are a huge assembly of people. It is harmonious on a deep, subtle, heart level as we meditate together for long periods of time in silence.
Kadam Morten encourages us to rejoice, to enjoy allowing our admiring faith to arise, rejoicing that we have everything necessary to practice this Dharma and then to be creative — to imagine and believe free from distraction. As we change our minds, it is certain we also change the direction of our world and the future of others.
At the end of each session we engage in dedication prayers, believing in the strength of these radiating out into the world. Over two weeks, everything we have been learning, meditating on and putting into practice as we work together, this vast collection of virtue and merit, is all dedicated with one intention to world peace. We dedicate for all suffering, confusion, selfishness, aggression, inequality and sorrow to cease; and for every living being to have the opportunity to attain the deepest and most liberating internal experience of peace.