Sept 2016

Just seven of us today. After a long friendly chat we watched a video from one of Alan Watts lectures. Just a bit hard for some of us to understand the reference to a happening reality where there is no nouns only verbs and the impossibility of the ego either banishing, or improving its self.

After tea and biscuits we looked at these two ways to improve our relationship with the world. Not so deep but more practical. 

“If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”– Meister Eckhart

Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It means learning to live your life as if everything were a miracle, and being aware on a continuous basis of how much you’ve been given. Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that is already present. In addition, behavioral and psychological research has shown the surprising life improvements that can stem from the practice of gratitude. Giving thanks makes people happier and more resilient, it strengthens relationships, it improves health, and it reduces stress.

Research Shows Gratitude Heightens Quality of Life

Two psychologists, Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, wrote an article about an experiment they conducted on gratitude and its impact on well-being. The study split several hundred people into three different groups and all of the participants were asked to keep daily diaries. The first group kept a diary of the events that occurred during the day without being told specifically to write about either good or bad things; the second group was told to record their unpleasant experiences; and the last group was instructed to make a daily list of things for which they were grateful. The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy. In addition, those in the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, were more likely to help others, exercised more regularly, and made greater progress toward achieving personal goals.

Dr. Emmons – who has been studying gratitude for almost ten years and is considered by many to be the world’s leading authority on gratitude – is author of the book, “Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier”. The information in this book is based on research involving thousands of people conducted by a number of different researchers around the world. One of the things these studies show is that practicing gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%. This is significant, among other things, because just as there’s a certain weight that feels natural to your body and which your body strives to maintain, your basic level of happiness is set at a predetermined point. If something bad happens to you during the day, your happiness can drop momentarily, but then it returns to its natural set-point. Likewise, if something positive happens to you, your level of happiness rises, and then it returns once again to your “happiness set-point”. A practice of gratitude raises your “happiness set-point” so you can remain at a higher level of happiness regardless of outside circumstances.

In addition, Dr. Emmons’ research shows that those who practice gratitude tend to be more creative, bounce back more quickly from adversity, have a stronger immune system, and have stronger social relationships than those who don’t practice gratitude. He further points out that “To say we feel grateful is not to say that everything in our lives is necessarily great. It just means we are aware of our blessings.”

Notice and Appreciate Each Day’s Gifts

People tend to take for granted the good that is already present in their lives. There’s a gratitude exercise that instructs that you should imagine losing some of the things that you take for granted, such as your home, your ability to see or hear, your ability to walk, or anything that currently gives you comfort. Then imagine getting each of these things back, one by one, and consider how grateful you would be for each and every one. In addition, you need to start finding joy in the small things instead of holding out for big achievements—such as getting the promotion, having a comfortable nest egg saved up, getting married, having the baby, and so on–before allowing yourself to feel gratitude and joy.

Another way to use giving thanks to appreciate life more fully is to use gratitude to help you put things in their proper perspective. When things don’t go your way, remember that every difficulty carries within it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit. In the face of adversity ask yourself: “What’s good about this?”, “What can I learn from this?”, and “How can I benefit from this?”

There are Many Ways to Practice Gratitude

A common method to develop the practice of gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal, a concept that was made famous by Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book “Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude”. This exercise basically consists of writing down every day a list of three to ten things for which you are grateful; you can do this first thing in the morning or before going to bed at night.

Conclusion

Once you become oriented toward looking for things to be grateful for, you will find that you begin to appreciate simple pleasures and things that you previously took for granted. Gratitude should not be just a reaction to getting what you want, but an all-the-time gratitude, the kind where you notice the little things and where you constantly look for the good even in unpleasant situations. Today, start bringing gratitude to your experiences, instead of waiting for a positive experience in order to feel grateful; in this way, you’ll be on your way toward becoming a master of gratitude.

Conclusion

If you spend almost all your time focused on one destination after another, then you'll resist--or not fully avail yourself of--the many pleasurable "detours" that life, in its infinite richness, may have to offer you. Anything that doesn't fit your preconceived notions of where you need to go, and how you'll get there, will likely be dismissed as imprudent, extraneous, or unwarranted. And yet how crucial to your overall well-being might it be to selectively--and mindfully--immerse yourself in some of the intriguing diversions that vie for your "distracted attention."

It's only when you choose, periodically, to de-focus from your subjectively chosen goals and--childlike--follow these "disruptions," that you'll be able to live fully and richly. Are these distractions purposeful?--in the sense of being practical, profitable, advantageous? Well, no--at least not literally. But why should they need to be? Isn't it much better to embrace these distractions for what they are? Opportunities to play, to laugh, to create, to feel inspired, and to enjoy living for its own purposeless sake?

If you become aware of how dynamic, how restorative, how centering so-called "purposeless" behavior can be--which on various levels I've been discussing in all four parts of this extended post--hopefully you'll begin to schedule it into your daily life. Just as it's essential to balance your work with play, and your activity with rest, it's just as critical to counter whatever may have "conditioned" you to act purposefully with an equal, though opposite, practice of "letting go." Abandoning for the moment both your long- and short-terms goals and acting without utilitarian (or even idealistic) motives. A playfully with delight, and with no purpose other than affirming the simple joy of be-ing.

For if in the end the best "made-up" purpose in life is to live happily, then regaining your sense of wonder and curiosity, and re-discovering your inner child's passion for having fun, might just be a whole lot more satisfying than living to reach goal--after goal--after goal. . . .

August

Ann B decided to come along to see if philosophy was for her and first reaction is that she will come again. Everybody enjoyed the short videos. 

I did write to an American Philosophy professor asking did he believe that our knowledge of the world is in our mind. He replied 

Yes it is . Of course it has already been proven, many times over, it is just that the proof has not been persuasive over the power of naive realism. 

The eyes are cameras not projectors.

Below is interesting articles I found on the net.

No Self, Separation, and Why

I’ve always wanted to know the truth about life in terms of who we are, what we are doing here, God, the whole enchilada.  That desire predates all my OCD and depression.  You say “just this” is the truth, and that at least makes sense.  But then I read there is no person or no separation anywhere…that idea does not compute at all.  What is meant by those statements?

Reply:

Regarding your question. I don’t claim there is no person. There is a person. It is obvious. But there is no abstraction behind that – at least none that can be found. We’ve been led to believe that all of this perception is my perception. This is my life. These are my thoughts. But have you ever found the object all of that supposedly belongs to? That abstraction can’t actually be found. This isn’t some kind of deep or difficult thing. It’s obvious. It’s perfectly obvious to any child. Because we have to be taught to believe in some imaginary abstraction.

But there is no doubt but what all of this is happening. So here it is all happening. And there is no need for anything more. Because this is the totality. It’s already complete.

The desire to understand why we are here and what it all means and all that is, in my view, a compulsion. It serves to try and protect us from the unbounded immensity of this present happening because we wrongly imagine that the immensity of what is happening is terrifying. We mistakenly interpret the unboundedness as a threat.

But my experience is that when I simply stopped assuming those things to be true and instead began to look directly for myself at what is actually going on, the terror transformed into allowing.

That’s kind of a misleading statement, though. Because terror didn’t actually transform. It was just a misunderstanding to begin with. It’s like that cliche story about the snake in the rope. It never was a snake. It was a rope. But it was mistaken for a snake.

So it was never something to be terrified of. It was just a misunderstanding.

As for separation. My experience is that the actuality is obviously not separate. Separation is conceptual.

I addressed this in a comment recently, but I imagine most won’t have read it.

My actual experience – and I imagine yours too – is seamless. We speak as though it had seams, boundaries, borders, and divisions. We speak as though there was separation. We say my experience and your experience. We talk about this object and that object. We speak of divisions between various senses.

But in my actual experience none of that can be found. What is actually happening can’t be divided. I can’t find my experience versus your experience. I can’t find the divisions between objects. I can’t find the distinction between hearing and seeing.

Because of our conditioning we think that the separations are obvious. We think that because we can speak of this object and that object or hearing and seeing or whatever that it means that the actual divisions are there. But, in fact, I can’t find them. And I don’t believe you can either. Not if you really look honestly.

None of what I’m proposing here is something extraordinary. It’s actually quite ordinary. In fact, it’s what babies and very young children seem to know as the exclusive reality. They don’t seem to know of separation.

We have to be taught separation. We are taught to see separation where there is none in actuality. And we are taught to invert things such that we imagine that the obvious is non-obvious and that the imaginary is obvious.

But if you really look right now. Just look. See if what you’ve learned is true. See if you can actually find the separation.

Perhaps you’ll find as I have that the separation is conceptual.

Not that thinking is wrong or bad or a problem. But just to prove that separation is conceptual, try this. For a moment don’t think. I know that might seem like an impossibility. But actually, it’s pretty easy because naturally you’re not thinking quite frequently. So just tune into one of those moments between thoughts.

And in that moment of no thought, notice how there is no separation. Separation is only a concept. It only comes from believing thoughts to be a truthful narrative about life.

But in that moment without thought there is no separation. At least that’s what I find.

Again, this isn’t to say that thought is a problem. It’s not. Not at all. How could it be?

But with this simple experiment you can see for yourself that separation isn’t obvious. Non-separation is obvious. We’ve just inverted things. We just got mixed up.

Everything is as it must be. Certain conditions simply led things to be as they are. That's reality, that's the truth. Fighting against it, this is what leads to suffering. When you stop fighting the reality of the present moment, when you accept that everything is "as it should be," you'll find peace, and you can act and react to the situation without all the inner turmoil that we needlessly create.
Paying more attention to thought than to right now masks the inherent perfect Is-ness of this incredible Now. And if you pay attention, you can witness the next one in its perfect beauty.

Analysis is paralyzing, dampening perception. Worry of the future creates the experience of fear now. Regret or guilt of the past creates depression and anger now. It is the resistance to what is that creates stress. It is the desire for something to be different that creates unease. It is the judgment of right Here, right Now that creates suffering. Hanging on to the projection, hanging on to the emotion deadens the experience of What Is, this priceless, eternal moment.

Should things be different? How can you possibly know? Have you experienced the fullness of what is happening right now? Be the witness to everything. Life moves. Things come and go. Stuff happens. But the witness remains. Awareness is aware. That’s you. Be exactly as you are and let everything as it is.

July meeting

Watched a TED video where the speaker was a 15 yr old schoolgirl  genius expounding her view that adults should be more childish . Followed by a video of Allan Watts saying that we can not improve or learn about  our self as there is no self to work on. His advice is just wash the dishes as a zen master would advise do nothing special.

I like a saying that the Buddha is supposed to have answered when a disciple said
All I want is happiness.
He replied
First remove the I or ego.
Then remove the want which is desire
Then all there is left is happiness


If you can be sure of one thing, then surely it is that you exist. Even if the world were a dream or a hallucination, it would still need you to be dreaming or hallucinating it. And if you know nothing else about yourself, surely you know that you have a mind, one perspective on the world, one unified consciousness?
Yet throughout history, there has been no shortage of people claiming that the self doesn't exist after all, and that the individual ego is an illusion. And such claims are no longer the preserve of meditators and mystics. The only disagreement many scientists would have with philosopher Thomas Metzinger's claim that "modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self" is that the destruction has already occurred.
There is a wide range of scientific evidence that is used to deny "I think, therefore I am". In René Descartes' famous deduction, a coherent, structured experience of the world is inextricably linked with a sense of a self at the heart of it. But as the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks explained to me, we now know the two can in fact be separated.
People with Cotard's syndrome, for instance, can think that they don't exist, an impossibility for Descartes. Broks describes it as a kind of "nihilistic delusion" in which they "have no sense of being alive in the moment, but they'll give you their life history". They think, but they do not have sense that therefore they are.
Then there is temporal lobe epilepsy, which can give sufferers an experience called transient epileptic amnesia. "The world around them stays just as real and vivid – in fact, even more vivid sometimes – but they have no sense of who they are," Broks explains. This reminds me of Georg Lichtenberg's correction of Descartes, who he claims was entitled to deduce from "I think" only the conclusion that "there is thought". This is precisely how it can seem to people with temporal lobe epilepsy: there is thought, but they have no idea whose thought it is.
You don't need to have a serious neural pathology to experience the separation of sense of self and conscious experience. Millions of people have claimed to get this feeling from meditation, and many thousands more from ingesting certain drugs.
Consciousness of self emerges from a network of thousands or millions of conscious moments. This means that when we lose bits, the way a split-brain patient does, we don't sense anything as lost at all. Gazzaniga explains this thought with a metaphor of a pipe organ. "The thousands or millions of conscious moments that we each have reflect one of our networks being 'up for duty'. These networks are all over the place, not in one specific location. When one finishes, the next one pops up. The pipe organ-like device plays its tune all day long. What makes emergent human consciousness so vibrant is that our pipe organ has lots of tunes to play."
Gazzaniga's metaphor holds for healthy as well as damaged minds. In other words, what the numerous pathologies of self-experience expose is that even in normal cases, there is no unified "I" behind experience. Rather, to use another musical metaphor, the mind is like a jazz orchestra that usually plays with sufficient harmony to disguise the fact that it lacks a single player, a score, or even a conductor. A few bum notes or absent musicians, however, and the illusion is shattered.
This is not an idea most are comfortable with. "People do not want to feel that the continuity of their life is just a matter of which molecules are arranged in which order inside their brain," the psychologist Susan Blackmore told me. Similarly, Broks said, "we have this deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off – probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."
Many writers, such as Blackmore and Metzinger, draw the conclusion that the self is an illusion. This is true in the sense that it is not what it seems to be. But that is not to say that the self doesn't exist.
This can be most simply explained by thinking about what it means for anything other than fundamental particles to exist. In Buddhist philosophy, there is an analogy attributed to Sister Vagira, a contemporary of the Buddha's, which compares a person to a cart. There is no cart, she says, only the wheel, the axle, the flat bed and so on. In the same way, there is no self, only experiences, thoughts, and sensations. But, of course, there is a cart – it's just that it is nothing other than the ordered collection of parts. In the same way, there is a self – it is simply no more than the ordered collection of all our experiences.
To take an even simpler example, water is not something that has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: it just is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. In the same way, we are not things that have experiences – we just are our experiences.

Neuroscience and psychology provide plenty of data to support the view that common sense is wrong when it thinks that the "I" is a separate entity from the thoughts and experiences it has. But it does not therefore show that this "I" is just an illusion. There is what I call an Ego Trick, but it is not that the self doesn't exist, only that it is not what we generally assume it to be.

June meeting

Watched a video one of Ted's all about designing an ear from an apple's structure, nothing to do with philosophy but interesting. Then a video on how to relax in 60 seconds good ideas but delivered too fast and by the wrong person.
Then David Ike's short videos on reality who I agree with apart from the lizards and the moon theory.

Understanding the Difference Between Non-Attachment and Detachment

By Elle - 11/06/2016 5 42

The teachings of non-attachment shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of love or compassion.

It’s often mistaken as detachment, which is something altogether different.

Non-attachment is essentially a practice of presence and mindfulness. It is not allowing your sense of wellbeing to rely upon anything other than your own presence of awareness. It means to be in the world, but not of the world.

Detachment however, means to distance oneself from the world out of total disinterest. It’s an aloofness that separates oneself from the rest of the world. Essentially, it is escapism—which is a form of suffering.

A practice of non-attachment however, doesn’t affect how you appreciate, love, admire and enjoy life. It simply means that your happiness is no longer defined by anything outside of you. In other words, you remain free.

The question is often asked, “How does the practice of non-attachment affect one’s personal relationships?” It improves them, greatly.

A non-attached relationship is healthy, strong and filled with effortless love, kindness and compassion. In other words, it is totally selfless because your sense of ‘self’ is no longer inserted into every situation. You are no longer self-centered or selfish, and you become single-pointed in your awareness of the other person. Love and intimacy isn’t diminished in the least, in fact, it becomes even more intensely focussed—but you no longer self-identity with it, as it, or through it.

Non-attached love is pure and present. If you allow your sense of self to be emotionally swayed by everything that appears to you—including all people, places, perceptions, thoughts, sensations, events, experiences, and all seeming things—then your emotions will forever be riding a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

You will be a pendulum that forever swings between joy and disaster.

It must be understood that your sense of wellbeing is always based upon whatever you allow yourself to become emotionally attached to.

When you become attached to something your happiness is based on a duality, and it will be relative (impermanent). You will define yourself by the outside world, rather than with your true inner nature. But if you remain un-attached to the things you experience, then your happiness will be absolute and undivided.

The solution to our rollercoaster of suffering is to simply get off the egoic ride altogether.

It’s a practice of being in the moment—unattached—but with total interest, love, acceptance, compassion and intense curiosity; all while abiding in your unshakeable sense of inner calm and your unbound presence of infinite awareness—at peace in your true Self.

Non-attachment is freedom from things. It is a self-realization of the truth of reality—that you, consciousness, can not be affected by anything. It is only the egoic mind that makes you believe otherwise.

I like to think of non-attachment as being similar to the teflon coating on a frying pan—it certainly doesn’t stop the pan from cooking the food, or from doing a good job, or even from enjoying its work. Once it’s finished, everything just slips off without leaving any trace.

No emotional scrubbing necessary.

The memories aren’t gone—but you’re not attached to, nor defined by them. All is well.

Experiencing Chi: An Experiment

Most people are understandably skeptical about this energy called chi until they actually experience it for themselves. After all, in the West we have been well trained to deny even the possibility of such phenomena. While some people will never be able to sense the chi, many others do -- some on their first encounter with it.

Try this experiment with a partner, such as your child, spouse, or friend, to see if you are able to feel the chi. Both of you should either sit or stand approximately two arms-length away from each other.

Ask your partner to close his eyes and take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders and back muscles as completely as possible. Try to imagine an energy rising from the ground into your body.

When you think you can almost sense this imaginary force, ask your partner to extend an arm toward you until it is level with the floor. The palm of the hand should be facing downward.

Slowly raise your own arms and extend your fingers until they are within a few inches of your partner's outstretched hand. Using your mind, direct the imaginary energy -- what we call the chi. Move it further up through your body until it passes along your arms and out from your fingertips.

It's helpful to imagine a current of energy passing from your body into your partner's. Whether you think this is an imaginary force or not, some people feel the chi right away, even with their eyes closed.

The Tao Te Ching was written around 2,500 years ago by a man named Lao Tzu. It is one of the oldest texts in existence and certainly one of the wisest. Its wisdom is timeless and its message is as relevant and important now as it was back then - if not moreso. It is vital that we learn to come back into balance with the natural world, to live in a more harmonious and selfless way...and the Tao Te Ching beautifully instructs us in bringing ourselves and our lives into alignment with the 'Tao'. This belief in Taoist philosophy is known as the doctrine of doing-by-not-doing, and it lies at the heart of Taoist practice.

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?

I do not believe it can be done. The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

Nature is complete without us. We must recognize this fact and begin to participate with nature as a partner in the universal scheme.