From Mushin
Sejiki is an important ceremony in the Soto Zen school where we comfort and feed the ancestral spirits and hungry, restless ghosts. Every autumn we enact this ceremony of offerings to the ancestors, to our parents, relatives, community and other restless spirits endlessly searching for sustenance. Included are the ghosts of our own unresolved karmic energies that need attention. Sejiki reminds us to break through our confining limitations and open our hearts to the unbounded fields of beneficial influence. We attend to our shadow selves – selves that are hungry, not quite satisfied….not quite okay, not quite enough, always searching.. These are the ghosts that haunt us and call us away from our true home.
During the Sejiki Ceremony we offer these energies the sweet nectar of dharma. Another name for the Sejiki Ceremony is the Gate of Sweet Nectar. We invite all the shadows to pass through this gate to taste the longed-for liberation in each brief and precious moment. This calls to our own hungry ghosts, who have not yet come to know the nourishment of the dharma and feeds any and all those hungry ghosts wandering in hunger, addiction and desolation. We’ll be offering the full Sejiki Ceremony during the Sunday service on October 26th. And during the Family Program the day before we’ll offer a simplified version especially for children. Please join us for one or both of these.