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simonprone.com |
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Helping you to know yourSelf. |
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School for Enlightenment |
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The School for Enlightenment is for those who wish to attain self-realisation in this lifetime. If becoming self-realised, awakened, or enlightened is important to you, then this school may be for you.
Introduction The School for Enlightenment is currently run by an unqualified facilitator, Simon Prone. While Simon has various qualifications in different modalities, meditation courses, etc, he is not yet self-realised and, as such, is unqualified. The current plan is to introduce other unqualified facilitator(s) into the school as time unfolds.
The School will offer many teachings from meditation classes to yoga, different workshops and healing modalities. While people can take each of these offerings for different reasons, if you are participating from the perspective of the School, you will be doing so to assist you in your endeavors of awakening, or becoming self-realised. As well as offering teachings that can assist you in your realisation of your true self, the School also offers a sense of community. Maintaining consistent practice in the face of personal resistance and the chaos of everyday can be challenging. We believe and have found that having a group of like-minded people sharing similar experiences on their path of enlightenment can be motivating, aid understanding, and provide valuable insight.
Principles Some of the principles that the school is founded on are listed below. · Everything is an illusion. As such, all is subject to unexpected change, including these principles. · There are no pre-requisites to joining the school, apart from a sincere desire to attain self-realisation. However, it is expected that as a part of your desire to become self-realised you will be undergoing some sort of regular and consistent personal practice to further that aim. If you are not currently undertaking some sort of consistent practice, you may wish to adopt some of the practices taught at the School. · The School is not an organisation you are required to join, give a commitment to, pledge an oath to, or sign over your worldly possessions. It is not a mystery school, a secret organisation or an exclusive club. Attending an event held by the School signifies a commitment to yourself and your own journey towards self-realisation. This commitment you make to yourself may mean you stay with the school for a week, a year, or longer. It may mean you never come back. We recognise that everyone's journey is different. While your journey and the offerings of the school align, you will probably gain benefit from attending what the School has to offer. What determines whether you gain this benefit is, again, entirely up to you and the commitment you make to yourself. · The School is run by unqualified facilitators (at the moment just one). While they hold qualifications in various areas of expertise, as they are not yet self-realised, they are basically unqualified to teach anyone how to become enlightened. However, we feel that through our years of research and practice in these areas, we have come across several keys that can effectively assist a person to take great steps toward self-realisation. We also feel that we have become aware of much that appears to be helpful, but upon further investigation, is not. The School is therefore run in the true spirit of facilitation in that the facilitators and the groups themselves will offer assistance and guidance where possible as each individual unfolds on their path of awakening. It is expected that with a sense of community that we will as a group help to facilitate each others path, as much as our own. · The right combination of the right knowledge, awareness, practice and intention can lead to self-realisation. The school aims to provide such knowledge, facilitate greater awareness, guidelines for practice, and assistance with intentions for self-realisation. · Life is our guru. Life can, if we pay attention, teach us a great many truths, provide profound insight, and lead us to self-liberation. The School recognizes this, and therefore, especially through the group work, seeks to help each participant gain the valuable lessons and perspectives on life experiences that can assist us learn the most that life has to offer. Conversely, the unqualified facilitators are not guru's, do not hold all the answers and are riddled with their own issues, short comings and gross imperfections. · Our individual journey is sacred, not serious. If we are unable to laugh at ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, then something significant and important is missing from our awareness. The School and its supportive groups will aim to challenge the perspectives that may be keeping you stuck in a particular mode of thinking / viewing the world. Such challenges can be confronting, and if we have lost our sense of humour, such confrontations can be offensive. The School aims to provide such gifts to assist you to move through the veils of your false self more quickly than you would otherwise on your own. · The School is subject to various expenses including the time of its unqualified facilitators, and the cost of each offering (evening, workshop, etc) reflects these expenses, but nothing more. That is, as a participant attending the school, you can expect to not have to pay excessive amounts of money for an "Advanced" course. Each of these principles is an illusion.
· The class size will likely be small. This is not from an exclusive policy, but simply because there seem to be small numbers of people who are genuinely interested in enlightenment as presented by this School. Also, no full page ads will be taken out in major newspapers to promote the School. · You can expect to be challenged. Sometimes being challenged feels great. It can be empowering, liberating, and we can feel freed from the weight of past restrictive patterns. At other times, we can feel sad, angry, frustrated, and so on. The aim of the School is to provide challenges that, when overcome, will assist with progress along the path of enlightenment. Sometimes you will like these challenges, other times you will not. In terms of our self-realisation, none of that really matters, because these feelings arise from our ego, and our ego's are not who we truly are anyway. There may appear to be repetition. Becoming enlightened, it appears, is not complicated, just challenging to our false selves. It does not appear to require the mastery of some complicated course of study or in depth knowledge of any one particular system of thought. Therefore, the classes at the school may appear to repeat certain concepts in different ways and stress consistent experience of various practices. The reason for this is, while we may have an intellectual understanding of the concepts discussed, until we truly live them we will not gain the full benefit from what these concepts truly mean.
What is the Curriculum of the School? At present, there is not set curriculum for the school. At a later date, if groups develop, there may be created an initial set of evenings that it will be recommended that people new to the school can attend. For now, some of the topics that may be discussed on any particular evening are listed below. The aim of the school is not so much as to provide you with an endless supply of new information to digest, but to immerse you in truth from a number of different but similar perspectives. Some of the topics covered may include: · What are our ego's and how do they relate to our real selves? · What are our real selves? · What is illusion? How we can practically apply awareness of illusion in our daily lives. · How can we awaken and what are we awakening from? · What is reality? How may we perceive it? · What does it mean to be enlightened or self-realised? How may we further our own self-realisation?
Schedule / Attendance At the moment, The School of Enlightenment is holding meditation and contemplation evenings in Glebe on Tuesdays at 7:30 for an hour, during school terms. There is no pre-requisite to attend, but it is recommended that you read some of the information on this page to determine if the evenings are right for you. If you are interested in the material of the school but cannot physically attend, let me know. A summary of the topics covered each night may be made available via email if there is enough interest. Other modes of attendance, such as streaming the content of the evenings over the web may also be made available at a future time if the numbers warrant.
Questions If you have any questions about the evenings or the School, please contact Simon on simon@simonprone.com. |
