Philosophical Self-Inquiry Discussion Group
Discussion & Retreat Topics
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> Does your mind play tricks on you?
"There are two ways to live your life, one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle." ~ Albert Einstein
How is it possible that you don't know what you really are? Has someone stolen your identity?
LIFE IS REAL ONLY THEN, WHEN "I AM" ~ G.I. Gurdjieff > Is your life Real? > Are you Real?
"If you want to feel better, take a pill. If you want to get right, face the truth."
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Chalk drawing on pavement by J. Beever, seen from different angles.
"If a person would truly admit their present circumstance, their search would be over in that moment. A lot of fence-straddling would end if we would admit our complete ignorance about our selves and life. What would make more sense than to dedicate our lives to finding our true nature? Confronting the brutal facts is equivalent to developing self-honesty. "Become the truth," as Rose advised. Self-honesty and persistence are, I believe, the two fundamental traits for spiritual success." ~ Shawn Nevins, The Business of Seeking
All men should strive to learn Are you what you see … or are you what sees? Does a law of symmetry apply to seer and seen … or asymmetry? Do you think -- i.e., decide what thoughts to have and then create them -- or do you witness thoughts? Are you an individual thing that was born and is going to die … or are you an awareness of life and death? What are YOU essentially? "Man ... does not know that there is in him something invisible which works in his favor in the dark. Identifying himself ... with his imaginative mind, he does not think that he is anything more. Everything happens as though he said to himself: 'Who would work for me except myself?' And not seeing in himself any other self than his imaginative mind and the sentiments and actions which depend on it, he turns to this mind to rid himself of distress. When one only sees a single means of salvation, one believes in it because necessarily one wishes to believe in it. "However, if I look at the life of my body I observe that all kinds of marvelous operations are performed spontaneously in it without the concourse of that which I call 'me.' My body is maintained by processes whose ingenious complexity surpasses all imagination [note that Benoit was a medical doctor]. After being wounded, it heals itself. By what? By whom? The idea is forced upon me of a Principle, tireless and friendly, which unceasingly creates me on its own initiative.
"My organs appeared and developed spontaneously. My mediate dualistic understanding appeared and developed spontaneously. Could not my immediate understanding, nondualistic, appear spontaneously? Zen replies affirmatively to this question. For Zen the normal spontaneous evolution of man results in satori. The Principle works unceasingly in me in the direction of the opening of satori (as this same Principle works in the bulb of the tulip towards the opening of its flower).... An old Zen master said: 'What conceals Realization? Nothing but myself.'"
What is the abyss that separates us from ourselves? How can it be crossed? That's the issue the Philosophical Self-Inquiry Discussion Group addresses. The question of self-knowing is not one that can be answered conceptually, but discussion can help with the process of seeing the delusions that cloud mental clarity.
I do not simply want to spend my life, > What is the highest ideal you can conceive of for your life? > Have you made it your life's priority? Is knowing yourself an asymptotic adventure, getting progressively closer and closer without ever quite getting there? Is the truth about yourself relative or absolute? Is it something to be captured or to be surrendered to? Something to be learned or to become?
"The time has come to stop fooling around. It's time to get the answer—not from someone else, not someone else's version of the answer—your own answer, arrived at yourself from the depth of your very own being. "Here and now, you can begin this personal effort to determine just what Fact, Principle, Reality, Truth ITSELF is. In spite of all that mankind has been told for centuries, this is not an impossible task! It is not hard to do. It is not even an uphill struggle. It is the happiest thing you will ever undertake! As one divests himself of former beliefs and opinions and begins to arrive at his own concept of God, through his own effort, from out the wisdom of his own heart, then God, Reality, Truth reveals Itself to that one—just as it has been said, 'Seek and ye shall find.'
"Let the beliefs go. Let what 'they say' go. Drop all the old personal opinions no matter how near and dear they seem. You start anew, turning within to the heart. Then when you arrive at your own meaning of God, you happily find you are also discovering your own real Identity and its childlike simplicity."
To dare is to lose one's footing. ~ Søren Kierkegaard
What did your face look like before your parents were born?This koan is an invitation for one to recognize the nature of reality by looking beyond the particulars of one's sociocultural and psychological understanding of self, body, and mind. So it is said, what can be seen by the eye or heard by the ear can be studied in the scriptures and treatises; but what about the basis of awareness itself -- how do you study that? ~ Zen Master Foyan (1067-1120) The fifth reason for investigating Who I am is that I live in a culture which is based on the scientific attitude, and I have the scientific attitude ... I do not want to look up Who I am in a book. I am going to look for myself. ~ Douglas Harding, Face to No-Face All that the reading of books can possibly accomplish, is to aid us in bringing the truth which exists within ourselves to our own understanding, and to drive away the clouds of erroneous conceptions which may keep us from knowing ourselves. ~ Franz Hartmann, Magic, White & Black
The joy is not the end-in-itself to be sought. … I have sought this Awakening for several years. I was finally convinced that, at least in all probability, there was such a thing or event, while I was in the midst of the discussions of a metaphysical seminary held at Harvard [when he was a grad student in mathematics there]. I saw, at once, that if such Knowledge were an actuality it was of far greater importance than even the greatest intellectual achievement within the limits of the subject-object field…. My final word on this particular subject is: I sought a Goal the existence of which I had become convinced was highly probable. I succeeded in finding this Goal, and now I KNOW, and can also say to all others: "IT IS ABSOLUTELY WORTH ANYTHING THAT IT MAY COST, AND IMMEASURABLY MORE." ~ Pathways Through to Space
"We fail to realize that the tensions we feel, as anxieties or promptings, are the very things that will free us from all need, if we stand up to them."
<<< Do you use tension or does tension use you? >>>
Truly do we live on Earth?
Like a painting, we will be erased.
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
Jigsaw alarm clock: The puzzle pieces fire out from the clock at the set time. Wanna shut that dreaded noise off? Sorry, gotta complete the puzzle first.
"I can't believe things are so bad that I have to do this to answer some ridiculous questions about my existence!" ~ Carnegie Mellon University PhD student
Why are you where you are?
(The realms of Psychology, Physics)
Does your existence have a purpose? If so, is it possible to know what it is?
> Are the values that you tell yourself are important to you the actual values that determine your actions? > Is it possible that you don't know yourself as well as you think you do? > If one part of you is fooling another part, which is the more interior ... closer to the core self? At the meeting we'll do a values clarification exercise followed by a discussion of the results and their possible implications. "One always finds one's burden again…The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. (As a punishment from the gods for his trickery, Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill, the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again.) "You are in prison. All you can wish for, if you are a sensible person, is to escape." - G.I. Gurdjieff, quoted in P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way.
All our problems trace back to not knowing the self.
"God does not redeem the personal man by death. He redeems himself by freeing himself from the personality of man." - Franz Hartmann > Are you a person? > Is self-identification with personality a blessing or a curse?
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Finally Securing Peace and Happiness
"Many are the traps of the mind, and many are the tricks it plays on us. Being dual in nature, we are kept running from one experience or mood to another, all the while thinking that the solution is just up ahead, that if we could just get the mix right, we could finally keep all aspects of our lives under control and finally secure our peace and happiness. But mind, being a two-faced dimension, will never be at peace, at least not for long. One of the basic traps of this thing called mind is that of compensation. We compensate, or balance, one aspect of our lives with another, in the vain hope the house of cards will not collapse and leave us face to face with the truth about ourselves."
- Bob Fergeson
There is a "pervasive and fateful human need to remain in control of one's internal and external worlds by
seemingly understanding them, even at the expense of falsifying the data."
~ Jerry Katz, a physician who teaches at Yale Law School, as quoted in How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, M.D., Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
"When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident."
~ Jim Collins, Good to Great
for?
What are you here 
for?
Certainty
Is What We See Real?
