🌟 INTRODUCTION

✨ In this deeply moving reflection, Master Woo Myung describes how people leave their homes searching for a better life, only to remain bound by memories, attachments, and illusions. 🌿

He reveals that longing for home is not about a physical place, but about childhood, innocence, and the false mind world that people carry within. 🌌

This message shows that when life is lived only inside pictures of the past, it becomes a wandering through an illusionary world, leaving behind nothing but emptiness. 🌠

đź“„ ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG

Those Illusions…

As a bitterly cold wind blows,
a person takes leave of his beloved home and family.
He is loath to go.
But regardless of what he is leaving to do,
the reason he feels he must leave
is in order to find a better life.
For man, life is a continuous series of partings.
Of those who left their homes long ago,
countless people returned home as chilly corpses.
Only a few had the deliberate intention of success;
in search of a better life,
many left for further study
or to work in factories.
All of them left with their homes in their hearts,
keeping those homes of the past in their minds
even with the passing of the years.
The reason one misses home
is because of his childhood –
a time spent freely without responsibilities.
In all the towns and villages where there are people
each household lives with their own tales of sorrow,
because everyone lives inside his own mind,
from which they are unable to escape.
At home, all close, bosom friends have gone;
now, no such people remain,
and from time to time one may hear news
of them living in foreign places.
Home was a place where all people lived inside human minds –
it all happened inside falseness, a picture.
It was a false world.
Life is meaningless and false
because the past was lived entirely inside a picture.
In ignorance of whether Truth comes, goes, exists or not,
man lives out a futile life, at the end of which
only a grave remains.
In places where life was lived affectionately together
people, their once-generous natures, have changed.
Such places, of my memories, have disappeared
and apart from a few familiar faces,
most are strangers.
I have wandered and wandered,
searched high and low,
for a place that is good to live
but those who had fulfilled their will have vanished –
they followed the passage of time
ignorant of where they were headed.
Who knows where they went?
Those illusions…
They must all be lost still,
wandering round the illusionary world.

– Woo Myung

🔍 REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION

At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners are guided to recognize how memories and longing bind the mind to an illusionary world. 🌿 Through meditation and reflection, they learn to release attachment to the past and to return to the living Truth that exists beyond all pictures, exactly as taught by Master Woo Myung.