Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
being, and then from a functional point of view, how to live in the
world but not of the world.
WIZARD: Is this where your buddy system cuts in?
A. RAMANA: Well, yes, our buddy system has to do with our
programs; our entry level program is what we call ISIT, which is
an acronym for Intensive Self Inquiry Training. We used to do it
on a weekend, but it can't be done, it becomes just only intellectual
then, to bring it more into an experiential existential perspective,
we offer it now on an eight-day full week seminar. Then after the
person takes the classroom instruction, which is retreat and
classroom work, and time free to contemplate what the teaching
itself is about, and then there is an eight-week home study
program following that. With that we have advanced graduates
who we assign as a guide to each participant, a person has a buddy
to be with them, to be with them to guide them, assist them in the
using of the process, and the abiding in the pure awareness of
being, and make sure a person is able and capable of abiding in the
teaching and in the awareness itself, that's what our buddy system
is about.
Then we've also got, and extended beyond that, is what we call our
sponsorship program. Now that one I tailored, I borrowed, if you
will from the 12 Step program, Alcoholics and narcotics, etc.,
Anonymous. And it's just the aspect of it having to do with the
buddy aspect of it, the sponsorship aspect of it.
It came to me a number of years ago that the real addiction is
addiction to the body mind or to the mind, and to thinking, to
thought. If one did not have addiction to the body mind and to
thought, they could easily be free of addictions from a chemical
point of view.
WIZARD: Yes.
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