Roshi Bernie Glassman: Bearing Witness to the Oneness of Life 2013 (Part 3 of 5)

Amazing stories of forgiveness. In this Saturday afternoon session, Roshi Bernie discusses forgiveness using the Rwandan genocide as a backdrop. During a 100 day period starting in April of 1994, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutus. In light of extremely horrific, unimaginable atrocities, Bernie offers a number of amazing and beautiful stores of forgiveness. Bernie also spends some time talking about the 2014 Bearing Witness Retreat in Rwanda. The session concludes with a brief question and answer period. One question comes from a person that has a very difficult time feeling any connection to those people that are capable of such heinous actions. How does one experience interconnectedness in light of such a feeling? In answering the question Bernie describes his conception of Indra’s Net, a metaphor for the interconnectedness of life. Bernie believes that there is just a huge field of energy, a collective (un-)consciousness, everything as it is before we label or name it. That through work to cultivate interconnectedness we are seeing more and more of this field.