From the Study...a conversation of possibilities

As I am sitting at my desk on the eve of a new year, I am reminded of a quote from
a young writer in Melbourne, Australia by the name of Beau Tarplin...Beau, please
forgive me if I do not get it exact...it goes something like this...

"Don't stress so much about settling on a path for 2016.
The division of time into years is a human invention,
And the fact is, every moment of every day is an opportunity for resolution and growth.
So, when the fireworks fly, relax and enjoy the moment.
The rest will come to you."

So...as we honor the passing of 2015, I leave you with my prayer...

For those I may have wronged, I ask for your forgiveness.
For those I may have helped, I wish I could have done more.
For those I could have helped, I ask for understanding.
For those who have helped me, I am grateful.

Resolved to sense more beauty, express more forgiveness, and experience more
forgiveness...Ego, my friends call me Doc.

From Inside The Sane Asylum

Looking forward to seeing you in the new year...walk in peace
Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum

To all the citizens of The Sane Asylum...
May your holidays be filled with the meaning of living...

May you walk in peace.
See you in 2016

Doc

Find meaning again and again and again

From The Sea

From The Sea...

I could see her approaching from a distance. I could tell she had grace to adorn her beauty. She was a proud site against the morning sun. She gave all that wanted to see a proud prance as she entered the foam of the sea... Children approached as she paraded along the shore. Her master gentle on the reigns to let her explore. What a site to behold as she came closer and her beauty to unfold.

She approached like a warrior and nodded as if to say, good day my admirers are you enjoying your day. I asked her master if I my approach. "She would love your attention, she is just spoiled that way", her master had to say...stood about sixteen hands tall I would guess. It did not matter, for she stood above all the rest. I stroked her mane that special day. I heard her breath, the sound of her teeth on her bits, and her smell brought back fond memories of a younger day...I saw her ears point to the air, I saw her dark eyes like a maiden fair.

In that brief moment I smelled her essence and sensed her grace and goodness to a master for keep. I thanked her master that let me approach and I bowed to the beauty as she pranced into the sea...

Her name was Stormy...
Ego...my friends call me Doc

Don't forget to S-E-E today...

Sense Beauty-Express gratitude-Experience forgiveness

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy

Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty and of self compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair, is a last protection. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.

From The Study...a conversation of possibilities

If I insult the beliefs of a person who believes themselves to be this mental "Self" they become angry, insecure or upset. If I insult the beliefs of a person who lives from a more Soulful place, they will acknowledge my statement with much less emotional reaction to it. Why? Because they have cultivated a degree of inner freedom by learning not to identify with the mind, personality and self.
A person who identifies with, and believes themselves to be their passing thoughts and emotions, will suffer in life much more than a person who has found the centered of their being, their Soul

Made Me Grin

Make The Distinction

Dr Ego Prozac

Stopped To Ponder...

Imagine our life energy, Spirit, as a massive ocean. Now imagine each wave in the ocean as a Soul. If the wave uses its "mind" to think about itself, it will look and compare itself to the other waves and "think" it is separate from them. It is only the fully present wave that is truly
 "experiencing" itself, that is truly aware. A single swell of water is just as much a wave as it is the entire ocean...

The Wisdom Series...

inside The Study...a conversation of possibilities

The Ghost of Knowing...

It is also odd to even bring up the question of what is knowledge. It’s ubiquitous; we take it for granted. If anything, knowledge belongs to that mysterious aspect called mind about which it is only known that it is not physical matter. We have become content to live with a ghost all around us. Our interest has focused on its validity, on its truth as if refers to the material, rather than on it itself. This amounts to having chosen to argue about which ghosts are good while being able to move our focus away from the fact that we are living with them...Jake Keenon

From The Study-a conversation about possibilities

    

A Common Humanity-thinking about love

Love takes many forms, some of which are in tension with one another and some of which are in tension with morality. The reasons why love commends itself to morality are also reasons why it offends it. Moralists will try to resolve this tension by moralising our understanding of what love really is and by declaring Othello's passion to be many things but never love. If they were to succeed in denigrating all love that conflicts with morality as false love, then they would undermine what is best in our morality— the faith that human beings are precious beyond reason, beyond merit and beyond what most moralisers will tolerate.

Raymond Gaita...
A Common Humanity


Common Humanity is a beautifully written book about how the humanity of our fellow human beings is sometimes not fully visible to us. Drawing on the examples of the Holocaust, the David Irving Affair, the case of Mary Bell and the taking of children of mixed blood from Aboriginal parents in Australia, Raimond Gaita examines the reasons for this. Amongst them, he argues, are a moralistic conception of morality that runs deep in our culture and an impoverished conception of reason and understanding. Both encourage a false opposition between moral judgement and compassion and between head and heart. 

The Sane Asylum Wisdom Series

The grand project of epistemology, to separate all true knowledge from false knowledge, that was the philosophical goal of the scientific era that has collapsed. In its place two new epistemological projects have been revealed. The first is the project that is showing up in cognitive science and biology to answer the question of what is knowledge–presumed to be answerable in a naturalistic way. The second project is more diverse. It covers an array of questions of how knowledge is used. There are questions of whether or how much is knowledge embodied, what is the meaning and status of knowledge communities, what are pragmatic ways of resolving differences beyond the appeal to truth, and how does one understand special types of knowing such as intuition or particular cultural ways of knowing....Jake Keenen, Epistemology Express

From The Study-a conversation of possibilities

Surfing the Mental Ecology:
On Doing the Buddha-Descartes Boogie(Written for Burning Man "Festival," August 2003)

These are the spiritual climes that try human souls. Everywhere, to attach or not to attach. Everywhere, another "I think, therefore blah, blah, blah." And of course we live in the midst of an information explosion that runs in parallel with ecosystem stress rumblings.

In the solutions realm of changed mindsets, there is a way out of the polarized worlds of the external and the internal–of science and psychology/spiritual practices. There is the inter-world of knowledge formed by actual human entanglements with objects of interest. Three facets are worth bringing to mind:

1. Each of us is tied very specifically to the outer world by our cares, interests and knowledge.

2. A world of meaning is formed from all the knowledge entanglements of individuals, cultures and corporate bodies. This world works as any ecology where some meanings proliferate, are selected, work in certain cultural environments and so forth.

3. To acknowledge the active and extensive world of meaning that humans add to context-defining organisms is to have the choice of leaving the intolerant and boring cultural realms of various forms of objectivism for embodied forms of living where transactions of meaning are care-to-care rather than object versus object.

In Buddhist terms we are our attachments and there are many. But unlike Buddhism we can choose not to run from our attachments but rather to frolic in the mental ecology like a Zen gardener.

In Cartesian epistemology terms there are obvious peaks of agreement where the mental ecology finds just one species of meaning and where things appear–ohmigod–“objective.” No matter how wild the Zen gardener in the ecology of meaning it doesn’t preclude a little bending to the priorities of our interdependence.

Dance, dance ... with my body and with my mind, straight and high until I die.

Inside The Sane Asylum-Meet the Orginal homesteaders

OLE GOAT MAN-is like a wandering sage. He lives on the outskirts with his goat named Goat. He claims we all have a goat but we just happen to see his. Most people will call him crazy but here, we think he provides "Illusions of the Truth".

"There's an old man who keeps a small herd of goats on the other side of the Seam. I don't know his real name; everyone just calls him the Goat Man."

―Katniss Everdeen on the Goat Man

Goat Man, have you ever been married?

"Yes. The Good Lord has blessed me with three wives. As it turns out, that proved to be three to many. The Good Book says there will be seven wives for every man. Well Somebody else can have my other four".

Any words of advice?

"Yes. Eat Coca nuts while you still have your teeth".

Ches
Americas original goat man

From The Study-a conversation of possibilities

A conversation of possibility or one of action

By being clear about which conversation you’re intending to have, you’ll give yourselves much more room to explore, to breathe, and to create something new. And you’ll create a space in which hopes, aspirations, and creativity can take wing.

The Sane Asylum Quote Series

From The Study- a conversation of possibilities

A Common Humanity

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Einstein 

From The Study...a conservation of possibilities

Is it possible...a common humanity?

Follow From The Study Series. We will begin exploring A Common Humanity and the possibility

of universal values. Can we identify our better impulses and act on them...just a conversation of possibility...Doc

Searching for answers...George Rodrique

"The yellow eyes are really the soul of the dog. He has this piercing stare. People say the dog keeps talking to them with the eyes, always saying something different. People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always remember it. They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers."
— Rodrigue on the Blue Dog

From The Sea

  

Down by the Sea...29.5381*N, 81.2233* W

At dawn I chart my song
I call to all who live by the shore

I flung my net out into the sea
where the sand and silver shines its lyric lines

The waves begin to laugh as the helmsman sings
And I smile at the wrinkled shore and the salt from her soft green hair

Such are tales of ancient lore
As the helmsman chants his haunting song

Chant your song, make it loud and clear
So full of longing, the sea birds poise to hear

Never a fish have I caught so fair
Never a dream intangled in my nets have I seen

The helmsman answered, learn the secrets of the sea
Only the brave will comprehend its mystery

I smile at the wrinkled shore
Unraveling velvet flows of the maiden's hair

I held her close where at rest she would not be
I sang the helmsman's song for her beauty that I see

Helmsman, teach me that song till my heart is full
Tell me all the secrets of the sea

A joy to brief...then rolled away with the tide
Tomorrow...tomorrow I will again comprehend her mystery...

Doc

Sane Asylum Wisdom Series

"Teachings" are tools not truths; points of view that are laid aside once they have served their purpose. ~Carl Jung

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy...

"You might want to try and be more informed instead of just being opinionated."

Dr. Ego
The Sane Asylum

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy

Do we create the moment or does the moment create us---or--do they both create the opportunity for the synchronicity of awakening to who we are?

The Sane Asylum Wisdom Series

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened. When you sit, let it be. When you walk, let it be. Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing. ~  Ajahn Chah

The Sane Asylum Wisdom Series...

The Dokkodo or "The Way of Walking Alone" was written by Miyamoto Musashi one week before dying, for the occasion where Musashi was giving away his possessions in preparation for death.

It was given to Terao Magonojo, his most skilled disciple in Niten-Ichi-Ryu. After the Gorin-No-Sho, Dokkodo is the summary of Musashi's life, his will and his philosophy.

The 21 precepts of Dokkodo:

1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way.

The Sane Asylum Think On These Things

This "Self" (or ego) you possess, is composed of all the memories you have that you identify as belonging to "you," e.g. your name, your nationality, your political/religious beliefs, your life ambitions, what you've grown to like and dislike, and all the personality characteristics that are the result of your environmental experiences or genetics.

Most people go through life believing that they are this story, believing that they are the thoughts they are thinking, instead of the essence that is experiencing those thoughts.

Stopped To Ponder

When my soul fell into the hands of evil, it was defenseless except for the weak fishing rod which it could use, again with its power, to pull the fish from the sea of emptiness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus 

The Sane Asylum Wisdom Series

Sane Asylum Quote Series

From the Study-a conversation about possibilities

Drama is the unconscious strategy of a baby being lived out in an adult body.

Sane Asylum Quote Series.

To Our Children...

Dr Ego Prozac

Stopped to Ponder

Stop, feel, notice...don't be afraid

The Sane Asylum Quote Series

Old Souls

Dr Ego Prozac

Stopped to Ponder

What defines us is how well we rise after we fall.

Photo by: Sacha 1969

From The Study-a conversation of possibilities

"My friend, nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.
Take responsibility for your actions, but do not blame or judge yourself."

Don Miguel Ruiz

Stopped to Ponder

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
Bertrand Russell

Thank you +Öteki Yüzüm