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Philosophical Self-Inquiry Discussion Group
Discussion & Retreat Topics
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"When we think of hope … we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking." ~ Sherwin Nuland, TED.com talk "On Hope"
> Is there a direction other than where you've been looking?
Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. He is the author of ten books, including How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, which won the National Book Award and spent thirty-four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
"Experience generates and affirms identity. The identity-experience becomes the lens through which all other experience is focused and measured for threat to that identity, or enhancement of that identity.
"Witnessing, or observing experience disrupts this cycle of identity weaving itself from experience. Call it psychological self-study if you like, but whatever it is called it is necessary for Self-realization."
~ Bob Cergol
"All scriptures are only for the purpose of investigating if there are two consciousnesses."
~ Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi
"… [Experience] may be likened to someone in his room watching a television, and being identified with the characters in the dramas as they unfold on the screen. Losing contact with himself, he has become hypnotized into believing he is a character in the TV. The freedom he began with, that he was (and still Is), the innocent observer, has been lost, traded for the mind-motion of thought and feeling projected into the plastic box in front of him…. His innocence and detachment have been replaced with the sense of motion and thought, and the thrill of losing energy. Now that he is inseparable from his role in the drama, he places a high meaning on the feeling of belonging, which he now values as part of his very definition. He has fallen deep into sleep and is dreaming the life he thinks he lives, a mere ghost in a box of motion, emotion, and thought…. Fear and desire drive his every move, and he is firmly engrossed in his dreams."
~ Bob Fergeson, from Ghost in a Box
"A few people decide that experiencing more is equivalent to living a fuller life. In other words, more Pepsi in the glass will make the Pepsi taste better. An entire life is spent moving through increasingly exotic experiences, never realizing it is the experiencer which is the source of the problem. It is you that suck life dry. The telescope distorts the view of the moon-the moon is as it should be."
~ Shawn Nevins
"Loneliness is a feeling of being without the kind of companionship one desires. It is the feeling of an unmet desire, often unnameable. It is the feeling that there is something missing, usually something one percieves as essential to their happiness or sense of fulfillment. The feeling of loneliness includes feelings of lack of intimacy and being understood and being accepted just as one is, and lack of opportunity to express oneself joyfully and spontaneously in a setting of total security.
"The feeling is real and is an indication that something is indeed missing....."
~ Tess Hughes, who will be joining us for the meeting.
See Tess's presentation at the April 2011 TAT meeting.
A new message dropped down the long chute from the Unknown, one of several just like it. One of the tireless busy-men running about the place opened it and read it off: "Itch! Back of head." He walked from the chutes over to the big machine at the center of the room and dropped the message into a slot at the top. It was a miracle that this big hunk of machinery worked at all. It had a tangled shape to it, too wrapped around itself for any onlooker to figure out how it worked. It shook furiously, spewing steam, oil, and the occasional expletive as it processed the new message. Finally, just as it seemed like the thing would explode, it suddenly stopped with a ding and popped out its verdict. "Lift right arm. Scratch itch with finger. Don't bump into guy on right," the last bit a reference to an earlier incoming message about an irritable fellow apparently to the right somewhere "out there." If one looked closely enough down at the bottom of this output directive, there was another message in small print: "…but I'd really like to go Home now." These little messages had been showing up a lot recently, stuck down in the corner of the directives spewed out from the worn out old machine. "Turn left at next light… but I'd really like to go Home now." "Walk to kitchen. Get glass of water… but I'd really like to go Home now." "Keep up appearance of being professional and capable… but I'd really like to go Home now."
~ Ben Rainey
"It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives."
~ Francis Bacon
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
~ Albert Einstein
"I don't believe in the 'evolution of consciousness' line of thinking that is increasingly manifest in thinking about spiritual work. If anything, I see a devolution – as the manifestations of the least common denominators of human nature – albeit well-dressed – are recast en-masse as spiritual growth. The Perennial Way has become one of self-magnification and the self-delusion of 'knowing' things in esoteric literature simply because it is so widely available and widely read. Everyone 'knows' these days – and seeks affirmation from others – of course they know nothing as their preconceptions of spirituality blind them from seeing clearly. Real going within is experienced as a loss of self – and it takes a rare and unique seeker motivated at a very deep level to weather that."
~ Bob Cergol
"On what authority do I have my self-esteem?
"So what if I'm a gift from God, a creation from God? Isn't that quite a different
thing from my self-esteem program that I'm going with? They come from
different places. Sometime around that I was in front of my jewelry box one day.
It's sitting there and there are some things in it, so I'm looking at: 'There's a gold
ring, there's a gold bracelet, there's a gold brooch.' And the thought struck me:
'The value of each of those things is in the fact that they're gold, not that they're
a ring or a whatever.' And then I thought: 'So the value is in the gold-ness rather
than the thing-ness.'"
~ Tess Hughes, talk given in April 2011
"Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can't bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe."
~ Jonah Lehrer, "The Truth Wears Off" (The New Yorker, December 13, 2010)
To thine own self be true,
He says, "There's nothing left of me.
~ Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, as quoted in Head and Heart: A Personal Exploration of Science and the Sacred (2002) by Victor Mansfield
"If freedom is absence of limitation and of determination from without, only that can be free besides which naught else exists and is there any human will of which we can say that?
"In this sense of the word freedom, and philosophically we cannot well take it in any other sense, only the Absolute is free; the relative is ever determined by its very relations to the world of relativity."
~ Conquest of Illusion, J.J. Van der Leeuw
> Are you running the show? Did you write the script?
> What in this life is under your control? What's beyond your
control?
> Is there a power higher than or greater than your self?
How do you know that you are?
"You now know that you are. How has this happened, because of what do you know that you are? You have to go to the source. One hundred years earlier you did not know of your own existence. You had no problems at that time. Now, because of this knowingness, all the problems have started. This 'I Amness' has happened because of the body, so what knowledge do we have about the body and what knowledge of this 'I-ness'?" ~ Nisargadatta, I Am That
Is it possible to know for sure what you are?
"… Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of,
themselves and their slow-movin' dreams."
~ Refrain: Willie Nelson, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
> Are you one step in back of yourself and your slow-moving dream?
"Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in his beauty deigns to walk." - Charles H. Spurgeon
"There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war." - Marianne Moore
* What is your inner landscape made of? *
Picture source: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/maps_cartography_history_of_mapmaking/page/2/
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Hope
"How can you live life fully? Perhaps you know of adventurers who watch sunsets in the Himalayas. Perhaps you know of monks who tend tiny gardens with meaningful strokes of the hoe. How is your life in comparison? Are you grinding out the 8 to 5 in front of a computer, or immersed in the pointless noise of campus life? You want something called fullness of life-where your actions carry meaning; where you are aware of your actions and fully conscious of life. Vague stuff when you try to convey it to someone else, but you know it is more than a dream.
