Every year, the Self Knowledge Symposium offers a "house course"—a distilled, highly intense version of the kind of self-examination that goes on throughout the year in regular SKS meetings and events. A recent house course included readings from Interior Realization by Hubert Benoit, The Way of Zen by Albert Low, Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger, some selections from Embracing Heaven and Earth by Andrew Cohen, and The 4 Quartets by TS Eliot.

The peak of the House Course is the Spring Break trip. This year students had a choice of three trips: a Trappist (Catholic) monastery, a Buddhist monastery, or an Insight Meditation Retreat in Massechusetts.
But the experience is far more than a bunch of readings and a field trip. To capture the flavor of past trips, we have Web pages with pictures and quotes from previous years:

House Course 2004
House Course 2003
Spring Break 2005
Spring Break 2003
Spring Break 2001
News and Observer article about Spring Break 2001
House Course 2000
Spring Break 2000

"Give me a man in love; he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry; give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the eternal country. Give me that sort of man; he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about." --St. Augustine