Our weekly meeting yesterday took place just the day before a rather special event in the Triratna Buddhist Community's existence: exactly 50 years ago, on the 6 April 1967 Urgyen Sangharakshita dedicated the Triratna Meditation and Shrine room (yes it was called Triratna!) in a basement below a shop in Covent Garden.  The few few decades of its existence though we were known as 'The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order'. 

So many lives have been transformed by the Buddhist movement that grew from that simple ceremony! 

Here is a short (2 mins) clip for you enjoy on the buddhistcentre online's triratna50 page 

In honour of the event that took place 50 years ago I introduced the evening by talking about Triratna's Six Distinctive Emphases and have attached a few pages of information to this post. 

Most of the evening tho was spent reflecting on how and why practice of 'The Arts' might support our spiritual life.

As well as practice meditation we spent some time drawing some simple items from the natural world.  As Karunadarshin pointed out, we so readily and automatically assume we 'know' what things and people are that we meet in our life - but as we start to draw, we quickly realise that we really have no idea about them at all, and instead realize that we have made all kinds of assumptions. But as we start looking closely, we suddenly see more and more detail, and deeper levels of our experience open up .... so, when we engage in observation and paying attention, this opens up another, quite new level of understanding; we see more, we see things differently.