Urging the circles to meet, until they disappear. It’s really possible — even in a short three-day retreat. But then the challenge is, as students develop in their practice, in their sense of life in spiritual community, they then develop new “comfort zones”. And then these require other layers of technology to dissolve. Even Dae Soen Sa Nim himself noted that “training older students can be problem” (and he wasn’t talking about biological age). The circles re-shape to older patterns, or near-facsimiles of them. It is a constant challenge and expenditure of energy, on the part of a teacher or “guide”, to have brought these folks out into the Absolute, and then need to deal with the buckets of shit that come when the student brings their habits (karma) to this “Absolutes”-view. I know this well, from bitter experience — how much suffering I probably gave to my Teacher, it cannot be known.

But when it was pointed out to me – – when the mirror reflected back, as it always does — I always applied maximum effort and openness to resolving it, and evolving.

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