...where the Two become the One
Do the employees of a private corporation, such as the National Football League (NFL – which holds their player’s rights), who are privileged to play American football at the professional level, have the right to free speech at their employer’s offices (stadiums)? What is the nature of rights and privileges, and what is their difference? There is an argument, such as when Facebook, YouTube, or Google censors people, that since […] Read more »
“In this lecture we examine the ideas of Socrates. We look at his exhortation to ‘care for your soul’, his conviction that knowledge of virtue is necessary to become virtuous, his belief that all evil acts are committed out of ignorance and hence involuntarily, and finally his presumption that committing an injustice is far worse than suffering an injustice.” ~Academy of Ideas Read more »
The following are excerpts from the book “The Thinkers Guide For Conscientious Citizen’s in How to Detect Media Bias & Propaganda” by Richard Paul and Linda Elder: “Objectivity” may appear in three ways. Two are genuine. One is a facade, a counterfeit of objectivity. The Objectivity of Intellectual Humility The first form of objectivity is based on the possibility of developing intellectual humility, knowledge of our ignorance. Thus, a critical consumer […] Read more »
The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our thinking. The quality of our thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of our questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking. Without questions, we have nothing to think about. Without essential questions, we often fail to focus our thinking on the significant and substantive. When we ask essential questions, we deal with what […] Read more »
“In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction. In other words, I dropped […] Read more »
The mystic and psychologist Carl Jung on free will: “Where you are not conscious, there can obviously be no freedom. Through the analysis of the unconscious, you increase the amount of freedom. A complete consciousness would mean an equally complete freedom and responsibility. If unconscious contents approaching the sphere of consciousness are not analysed and integrated, then the sphere of your freedom is even diminished through the fact that such […] Read more »
The biggest thing being overlooked by the “alternate community” is the inner process work needed to transform their shadow sides and make it an integrated aspect of their conscious lives. Websites, blogs, and teachers that make emotional integrative work available are not as attractive as the disclosure aspects (disclosing aliens, government conspiracies, etc), probably because it is esoteric vs exoteric in nature. Just as the mystical practices are esoteric compared […] Read more »
When we’re triggered, it is a clear indication that we are behaving as if an external person or circumstance is cause over our life experience, which triggers our protector (ego) to come in and rescue us from the experience with a fight, flight, freeze, or tend & befriend survival response. Our protector (ego) is merely the effect of our originating belief that the external realm is cause over our internal […] Read more »
Quite often, we give “how” answers to “why” questions, which is not a valid nor logical way to cope and deal with a “why” question. If the question is “why do I feel triggered by such and such”, the answer cannot be “then stop interacting with such and such”, as that is a “how” solution to a “why” question. It could be said that the “stop interacting” answer is the […] Read more »
We often ignore our negative feelings when pursuing a course of action, where we think, suppress, and then act, but we’re meant to think, feel, and then act. If something feels bad to us, it could actually be a poor course of action, but to understand if this is so, we must first honor our feelings as a messenger, and ask why we are feeling them. Once we fully understand why, […] Read more »
Rationality and spirituality not only mix, they are intimately tied into one another; spirituality devoid of logic is ignorant and delusional, while rationality devoid of spirit is entropic and lifeless. In order for us to experience a life filled with meaning and direction, the two must be harmoniously balanced by a third ingredient—our emotions. It is our emotional attachments that make us either too logical or too irrational, where we […] Read more »
Einstein is often quoted as having said, “education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” However, this was not his exact wording, but a paraphrasing of what he said in a letter to Thomas Edison: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The […] Read more »
My truth as I understand it is relative, just as your truth as you understand it is relative, but just because our truths are relative, does not mean that THE Truth is also relative — THE Truth is indeed absolute. It is each person’s grand work to bridge the gap between their relative truth and THE absolute Truth, to ultimately achieve that pinnacle of merging the Self with THE absolute […] Read more »
Just because we are all equal in our core being as aspects of Source, does not mean that we are all equal in the hierarchy of life, nor in our understanding of life. Is it reasonable for a sales clerk to correct a fireman in his craft, or for a computer repair person to correct the technique of a skilled artisan? We are not all equal in our abilities, in […] Read more »