#1 Vishrant: Remembering

Q&A

Welcome to our Archived Dance sessions. Here is our first week with Vishrant giving an attunement.

Week 1 Attunement: Remembrance

Question: Zikr means remembrance. What is it we are trying to remember?

This is Vishrant fom the Vishrant Buddhist Society. He lives and teaches in Perth Australia. He met with Zareen for a short attunement on Zikr and remembering. The following Sunday we met for Zikr practice. Which you can follow below.

Question: The practice of Zikr means remembrance. What are we remembering?

So I see this as a bit of a falacy. I know that zikr means remembrance, but really it is a methodology towards the annihilation of the ego — so one knows oneself as God. Now you can’t do that by remembering because memory is just dream. You can only do it through the practice of Zikr, the practice of whirling, which takes you to no-mind which is the launching ground, if you like, for awareness to find itself and for freedom.

And so, I think there has been a big misunderstanding about Zikrs for a long time because people teaching them don’t understand that it is about enlightenment. It’s not about remembering, really.

Remembering is, once again, remembering knowledge, and the remembrance of knowledge doesn’t set you free. It is a trap. And it’s the biggest trap that seekers and sannyasins fall into. Because they listen to teachers, they collect knowledge like they did at school and they get nowhere because it doesn’t raise your consciousness levels, it doesn’t heal the wounds of your heart, it doesn’t make you enlightened.

Question: What is a good attitude as we step into the zikr?

Practice. It’s just repetition. Practice practice practice until there is nobody left to practice. And then you’re getting what zikr is about. Annihilation. And in that annihilation the knowing of God as self. And that appears as a vast emptiness, a vast nothingness. People are quite often looking for something and so they miss it. Because it is silent, it is still and it is nothing. And it is everything.

Experiences appear in it but we are so used to tracking experiences, that that moves that makes noise, we missed the background. We missed the ocean that everything is appearing in.

Finding our inner point of listening and building the muscle of remembering