Bach Remedies and short, meaningful reads as gentle reminders that meaning, beauty and joy are within us.

The Bach Flower Remedies revitalize, restore the inner well being, help us in bringing to light the positive qualities we possess and in overcoming fears, depressions and states alike.


Let your soul grow

Tuesday 31 December 2013

Modern Stoics

Excerpts from From http://philosophyforlife.org/philosophies-for-life/stoics/


Who were the Stoics?
The founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (pictured on the right in Raphael’s School of Athens), who lived and taught in Athens in around 300 BC. He and his students taught and discussed philosophy under the Stoa Poikile, or ‘painted colonnade’ in the Athenian market-place. Stoicism became very popular among the Roman ruling class, and most of the surviving Stoic books were written by Roman Stoics, particularly Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You can access many of the Stoic texts for free here and here.
What did the Stoics believe?
Stoicism originally emerged at quite a volatile period in Greek history, when Athenian city-states were being conquered by foreign empires. It developed as a way of staying sane amid all that chaos. An important part of the therapy of Stoicism was to remind yourself at all times of what you can control and what you can’t. We can’t control geopolitics, we can’t control the weather, we can’t control the economy, we can’t control other people, we can’t even control our own bodies, not entirely anyway. The world is beyond our control. It’s a rough and unpredictable environment that is constantly changing. The only thing we can really control are our own thoughts and beliefs. If we remind ourselves of that, and focus our energy and attention on our own beliefs and opinions, then we can learn to cope wisely with whatever the world throws at us.
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Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about events’. This inspired Ellis’ cognitive therapy of the emotions, which became the basis of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). It’s based on the idea that our emotions follow our beliefs and judgements. If we change our habitual beliefs, we also change our emotions. We can use this technique even to overcome chronic emotional disorders and severe traumas.
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It’s important to understand that Stoic therapy doesn’t involve suppressing your emotions or denying them beneath a ‘stiff upper lip’, as the popular understanding of ‘stoic’ might suggest. In fact, Stoic therapy involves exploring the beliefs and opinions that give rise to your negative emotions, seeing if those beliefs are irrational, and if they are, challenging them and replacing them with new beliefs. So Stoic therapy involves dismantling the beliefs and habits that create an emotion, rather than simply denying an emotion.

CBT may have been inspired by Stoicism, but there are some big differences as well, aren’t there?
Certainly. I discuss some of the differences and similarities in this talk . The biggest difference is that Stoicism wasn’t just a set of therapeutic techniques. It was a spiritual philosophy, the end of which was bringing the self into harmony with the Logos.
What’s the Logos?
The Stoics followed Heraclitus in believing that the cosmos is connected by an all-pervasive intelligence called the Logos, which you can translate as the Word or the Law. It’s a form of divine providence that guides all things. It exists in all things, but it vibrates particularly strongly in human consciousness. For the Stoics, the meaning of life, the goal of human existence, is to develop our consciousness and bring it into harmony with the Logos.
How do we do that?
By overcoming our attachment and aversion to external things. Nature is constantly changing, nothing is permanent, so if we become attached or averse to external things, we’ll often be unhappy, insecure and anxious, because the world will not be the way we want it to be. By focusing not on external goods but on the inner goods of virtue, we can become one with the ebb and flow of the cosmos, accepting whatever happens to us as the will of the Logos.

Monday 30 December 2013

Spinoza

From http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza

Spinoza contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality,[76] namely a single, fundamental substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is understood only in part. His identification of God with nature was more fully explained in his posthumously published Ethics.[1] Spinoza's main contention with Cartesian mind-body dualism was that, if mind and body were truly distinct, then it is not clear how they can coordinate in any manner. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites which affect their minds while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do. Spinoza has been described by one writer as an "Epicurean materialist,"[76] although to call Spinoza a materialist (as the Epicureans were) would be misleading as he treats both thought (the realm of the mind and thought) and extension (physical reality) as derivatives of an ultimate, infinite substance (Deus sive Natura, or God) which expresses infinite attributes and modes. To use an example, human experience is but a single drop of water in an infinite ocean which constitutes existence.
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Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as intertwined, causally related, and deriving from the same substance. It is important to note here that, in Parts 3 through 4 of the Ethics, Spinoza describes how the human mind is affected by both mental and physical factors. He directly contests dualism. The universal substance emanates both body and mind; while they are different modes, there is no fundamental difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. Spinoza's system also envisages a God that does not rule over the universe by Providence in which God can make changes, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. While it could be said that this still accounts for Divine Providence, as Spinoza argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case,"[83] he directly challenges a transcendental God which actively responds to events in the universe. Everything that has and will happen is a part of a long chain of cause and effect which, at a metaphysical level, humans are unable to change. No amount of prayer or ritual will sway God. Only knowledge of God, or the existence which humans inhabit, allows them to best respond to the world around them. Thus, according to this understanding of Spinoza's system, the universe humans currently live in and experience comes from God. God is completely impersonal to existence because, not only is it impossible for two infinite substances to existence (two infinities being absurd),[84] God - being the ultimate substance - cannot be affected by anything else, or else it would be affected by something else, and not be the fundamental substance.

In addition to substance, the other two fundamental concepts Spinoza presents and develops in the Ethics are attribute – that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and mode – the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
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Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from our human consciousness, experience and our indifference to prior natural causes. Humans think they are free but they ″dream with their eyes open″. For Spinoza, our actions are guided entirely by natural impulses. In his letter to G. H. Schuller (Letter 58), he wrote: "men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined." [85]
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This picture of Spinoza's determinism is ever more illuminated through reading this famous quote in Ethics: ″the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. ... All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.″[86] Thus for Spinoza morality and ethical judgement like choice is predicated on an illusion. For Spinoza, ″Blame″ and ″Praise″ are non existent human ideals only fathomable in the mind because we are so acclimatized to human consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false ideal of choice predicated upon this.

Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.[87]

Ethical philosophy
Encapsulated at the start in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) is the core of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final good. Spinoza held good and evil to be relative concepts, claiming that nothing is intrinsically good or bad except relative to a particularity. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil, Spinoza argued, were simply good or bad for humans. Spinoza believes in a deterministic universe in which "All things in nature proceed from certain [definite] necessity and with the utmost perfection." Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and nothing is contingent.

Spinoza's Ethics
Main article: Ethics (book)
In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God/Nature. According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality. While components of the chain of cause and effect are not beyond the understanding of human reason, human grasp of the infinitely complex whole is limited because of the limits of science to empirically take account of the whole sequence. Spinoza also asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal truth; Spinoza's mathematical and logical approach to metaphysics, and therefore ethics, concluded that emotion is formed from inadequate understanding. His concept of "conatus" states that human beings' natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being and an assertion that virtue/human power is defined by success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one's central ethical doctrine. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue is the intellectual love or knowledge of God/Nature/Universe.

In the final part of the "Ethics", his concern with the meaning of "true blessedness", and his explanation of how emotions must be detached from external cause and so master them, foreshadow psychological techniques developed in the 1900s. His concept of three types of knowledge – opinion, reason, intuition – and his assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind, lead to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal. His unique contribution to understanding the workings of mind is extraordinary, even during this time of radical philosophical developments, in that his views provide a bridge between religions' mystical past and psychology of the present day.

Given Spinoza's insistence on a completely ordered world where "necessity" reigns, Good and Evil have no absolute meaning. The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception.

Saturday 28 December 2013

The secret art of inviting happiness

The five Reiki Principles
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The secret art of inviting happiness,
The miraculous medicine for all diseases.
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At least for today:

Do not be angry,
Do not worry,
Be grateful,
Work with diligence,
Be kind to people.
Every morning and evening, join your hands in meditation and pray with your heart.
State in your mind and chant with your mouth.
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For improvement of mind and body.
Usui Reiki Ryōhō.
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The founder,
Mikao Usui.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki



Make your soul grow

From Lettersofnote : http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/10/make-your-soul-grow.html

Back in 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City (one of whom, "JT," submitted this letter) were given an assignment by their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, that was to test their persuasive writing skills: they were asked to write to their favourite author and ask him or her to visit the school. Five of those pupils chose Kurt Vonnegut. His thoughtful reply, seen below, was the only response the class received.

Transcript follows.

Transcript November 5, 2006 Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.


God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut

Tuesday 17 December 2013

The Four Agreements

Excerpt from http://www.raptitude.com/2013/02/five-self-help-books-that-actually-helped/ The Four Agreements – Don Miguel Ruiz

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz characterizes personal beliefs as agreements, which is right on the mark; nothing is true to you unless you agree that it is. If, in your eyes, you’re no good, you have agreed at some point that you are no good. You will live this truth until you stop agreeing. We typically don’t realize we’re constantly making these agreements, yet they define your personal world, which is the only world you’ll ever live in. Ruiz advocates identifying and challenging all the agreements you’ve accumulated, and toss them out in favor of agreeing to four commitments:

Be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best.

If you make those agreements it’s almost impossible to let yourself down, feel guilt or give in to fear. They short-circuit virtually all self-defeating human behaviors. These days, rather than trying to be perfect each day with each agreement, I work the agreements backwards when things seem to be going wrong. Any time I feel stuck, it takes about five seconds to identify which of the four agreements I broke to get there. Either I’ve been untruthful in some way, I’m making assumptions, I’m taking something personally, or I’m cutting corners. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten myself into trouble in any way other than those.

Tuesday 10 December 2013

A Good Grip or Our "Reality" Tenouchi

What makes a good grip? It's not a too strong either a too soft grip. A good grip applies an amount of energy equally proportional to the thing it wants. The harder the thing, the stronger the grip. We do it unconsciously with all the things we handle every day. And ideally we should do it also with bigger things like everyday attitude to problems or life goals. This is what tenouchi, the martial art holds.

The next fragments are from http://earlyretirementextreme.com/tenouchi-and-appropriate-action.html

Within the martial arts tenouchi is a fairly high level concept which literally means “inside of hand” (te/hand no/of uchi/inside) and which can be translated as grip. Understanding grip is obviously very important. What I offer here are just some general observations as they pertain to two-handed cutting weapons and how those observations translate into a couple of “life-lessons”. However, it should be clear how understanding grip is also important to the archer or in hand-to-hand combat; in particular in the latter understanding your opponent’s tenouchi will be important. The grip must be appropriate for what the sword is doing. When it is striking, the grip only need to be strong enough to hang onto the sword. (This leaves room for a quick reversal without working against yourself). Only when the sword hits must the grip be strong. Again, this is very awkward because a sword is a strange thing to handle. However, we do it quite naturally when we pick things up. Go ahead and pick something up. You’ll note you use exactly as much force as you need to to pick it up. No more no less. You aren’t squeezing the object despite not even thinking about it, nor is the object slipping out of your hand. Now move the object around from side to side or up and down. Note again how you subconsciously apply a little bit more force every time it changes direction. This is actually a tremendously hard thing to do. Humans can do it with a fragile thing like an egg without even thinking about it. Programming a machine to do the same is hard. It is the same for a sword. If we had been born with swords in hands and we spent as much time cutting things as we did picking things up and moving them around, our tenouchi, our grip on the sword, would be appropriate as well. The important thing to remember is that when the sword is “powered up”, it is my understanding that you’re committed to the motion. The key then is to only apply the minimum amount of power to get the job done—with a sharp sword, that’s astoundingly little. Yet, when considering “real life” our “grip” on things is often surprisingly inappropriate. Often too much force is applied. We build our houses too big, our transportation too fast, our food to full of fat and sugar. (We don’t seem to go about things in a way that is too small or too weak so I’m not going to comment on that problem.) When too much force is applied it is impossible to remain nimble or reverse course in the face of counter strikes. The worst part is that we are often the ones working against ourselves thus preventing us from action. This is a problem with our “reality”-tenouchi so to speak. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t have a good grip on reality—it is after all where all of us have spent all of our life(**)—yet it seems that this is not actually the case.

Sunday 8 December 2013

Real Wisdom - Rousseau, Tolstoi

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this,the most important knowledge. (Jean Jaques Rousseau)

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/15/a-calendar-of-wisdom-tolstoy
A Calendar of Wisdom: Tolstoy on Knowledge and the Meaning of Life by Maria Popova “The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.” On March 15, 1884, Leo Tolstoy, wrote in his diary: I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people. So he set out to compile “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people” — a florilegium five centuries after the golden age of florilegia and a Tumblr a century and a half before the golden age of Tumblr, a collection of famous words on the meaning of life long before the concept had become a cultural trope.

In romaneste disponibila aceasta carte: http://www.humanitas.ro/humanitas/despre-dumnezeu-si-om-fragmente-din-jurnalul-ultimilor-ani

A Calendar of Wisdom (Russian: Круг чтения, Krug chtenia), or Path of life or A Cycle of Readings or Wise Thoughts for Every Day is a collection of insights and wisdom compiled by Leo Tolstoy between 1903 and 1910 that was published in three different editions.... The book, which title is literally translated as "Life's Way", was described by Tolstoy as "a wise thought for every day of the year, from the great philosophers of all times and all people" which he himself would consult daily for the rest of his life. Wisdom from such luminaries as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, Jesus, Muhammad, Confucius, Emerson, Kant, Ruskin, Seneca, Socrates, Thoreau and many more prompted Tolstoy to write in the introduction, "I hope that the readers of this book may experience the same benevolent and elevating feeling which I have experienced when I was working on its creation, and which I experience again and again when I reread it every day, working on the enlargement and improvement of the previous edition.". http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Calendar_of_Wisdom