Kurosawa's "Ikiru: To Live"

This is the third and last film in the Authentic Happiness Series. Lauded as one of the greatest films ever made, and arguably Kurosawa's greatest masterpiece in a long line of masterpieces, Ikiru narrates the story of a man who has realized he is quickly dying of cancer. The story follows his coming to terms with a life he now deems as largely wasted, and his search for something meaningful to do in the remaining time. It is anything but sappy. I hope you can make it to the screening of Ikiru on Thursday, April 17th, at 7PM in McClendon 2. There will be plenty of delicious finger foods and a lively discussion after the film. Hope to see you there.
To RSVP, visit http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10291379517

Discussing Happiness

Thanks to everyone who contributed to a great discussion last night after the movie about Happiness. We hope to continue the same blend of the personal, philosophical, and spiritual discussion through comments on this blog. Feel free to share any thoughts and opinions you have about happiness, how the pursuit of it manifests itself in your life, its ultimate meaning. Below are some questions related to what was discussed last night among the 10 or so who stayed after the movie to talk:


Is there a point in time when you thought you were happy, but looking back on it you actually were not?

What is some event or thing that makes you happy that makes very few other people happy?

For you Matrix fans: The red pill vs. blue pill question. On a practical level: Would you be okay with having a sense that you are somehow deluded about life or about yourself if the delusions were comforting? [Recommended reading: H.G. Wells' "Country of the Blind"]

Do you feel more happy now or more happy when you were younger? What events/points of view affect your happiness across long periods of time?




Keep an open mind, be willing to act and experiment... With wishes for a more fulfilling life for us all,-- Let the conversations begin!

Happiness

An uncommonly humanistic look at the lives of some very desperate individuals, "Happiness" is a perfect springboard for a discussion of what we, in some way or another, are all looking for. As always, free food will accompany the viewing and discussion of the movie. The screening and discussion will take place at Soc Psych 126 on Thursday, April 3rd.

Authentic Happiness Movie Series

Come celebrate life with "Zorba the Greek", enjoy some greek food, and discuss happiness: Thursday at 7PM in the McClendon Media Room (2nd floor).

Eighth Meeting - 3/18/08

The reading for this week was an excerpt from "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho:

"A certain shopkeeper send his son to learn about the secret of happiness from the wisest man in the world.  The lad had wandered through the desert for forty days, and finally came upon a beautiful castle, high atop a mountain.  It was there that the wise man lived.

"Rather than finding a saintly man, though, our hero, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity: tradesmen came and went, people were conversing in the corners, a small orchestra was playing soft music, and there was a table covered with platter of the most delicious food in that part of the world.  The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait for two hours before it was his turn to be given the man's attention.

"The wise man listened attentively to the boy's explanation of why he had come, but told him that he didn't have time just then to explain the secret of happiness.  He suggested that the boy look around the palace and return in two hours.

"'Meanwhile, I want to ask you to do something,' said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil.  'As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill.'

"The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the palace, keeping his eyes fixed on the spoon.  After two hours, he returned to the room where the wise man was.

"'Well,' asked the wise man, 'did you see the Persian tapestries that are hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that it took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?'

"The boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing.  His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted to him.

"'Then go back and observe the marvels of my world,' said the wise man.  'You cannot trust a man if you don't know his house.'

"Relieved,, the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the palace, this time observing all of the works of art on the ceilings and the walls.  He saw the gardens, the mountains all around him, the beauty of the flowers, and the taste with which everything had been selected.  Upon returning to the wise man, he related in details everything he had seen.

"'But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you?' asked the wise man.

"Looking down at the spoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone.

"'Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,' said the wisest of wise men.  'The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.'"

This reading began a discussion on happiness, which is the SKS theme for the rest of the semester.  We talked about different possible metaphors the oil could represent in the reading.  That lead us into describing what we thought happiness was, personally and theoretically.

Seventh Meeting - 3/4/08

The reading for this week was unconventional - a radio clip instead of a piece of writing. It dealt with the role testosterone plays in our behavior. Without the chemical, the man being interviewed had no desire and described everything, even mundane objects as beautiful. It lead us to discuss whether our desires are a part of who we really are.
A link to the clip is below from the "This American Life" webpage.
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1230

Sixth Meeting - 02/26/08

The Baal Shem Tov is one of the most beloved spiritual teachers of the Jewish tradition. He emphasized sincere prayer, joy, and a fervent personal search for Truth in religious worship, over scholastic understanding, in a way reminiscent of more Zen Masters than rabbis. The reading we chose to begin this session with was a brief summary of Baal Shem Tov's world-view as expressed by Heschel in his book, "A Passion for Truth". Joanna related that she finds herself often on this ladder between heaven and earth, but is usually looking down rather than behind her. This is interesting because one of the most salient teachings of the Baal Shem Tov was the falling away of the distinction between mundane and divine things. Of course, this teaching can be easily dangerously misinterpreted and lead to complacency and mindlessness. If we are all princes and children of God, why do we need to try to become better people at all? Why try to wake up from delusions we notice ourselves to be in, delusions like the tendency to rationalize, to self-deceive, to live half-heartedly despite our desire for a full and authentic being? The Baal Shem believed that our true selves love the truth and love God, and if we only let go of falsehood, we will naturally turn towards a way that leads beyond our usual sense of self and towards a union with everything, with God. How to let go of falsehoods cannot really be explained, though we all know that it is done within us and is in our power, so the discussion on that topic ended there where it should have.

Fifth Meeting 02/19/08

The first reading was a passage from Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych."I chose it because it is a poignant reminder of the great goodness and importance of life at its most fundamental level, as it is often seen by those near death.
Following the same vein, we went on to read the third act of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" as a group, each taking roles of 1 or 2 characters. Our conversation following the reading naturally went towards the things we care about the most.

What Is SKS?

Anyone who is curious about what the SKS philosophy consists of should take a look at this informative little pamphlet.

Fourth Meeting 02/12/08

We began by listening to and meditating on the excellent passage below, by J. Krishnamurti. This provided a segue to an exercise based on the assignment for the week: writing a page or two on answering the question, "Who Am I?" We did not, in fact, share our written work, but rather wrote about and shared our experience of writing the assignment itself. The analysis of what we did in writing the assignment gave us as clear an insight into our own functioning as sharing what we think of ourselves would have.
Our assignment for this week is to continue working on the "Who Am I?" piece and bring it to the next session. Of course, sharing is not obligatory, and it is much better to write something honest and difficult to share than something merely safe.

Please take a few minutes to read the passage below and reflect on it, experiment with its ideas and see if they are true.


Reading:
An Excerpt from Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Chapter 2 - Learning About Ourselves


I have nothing to teach you - no new philosophy, no new system, no new path to reality; there is no path to reality any more than to truth. All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary. If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.

In enquiring into ourselves we are not isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. It is not an unhealthy process. Man throughout the world is caught up in the same daily problems as ourselves, so in inquiring into ourselves we are not being in the least neurotic because there is no difference between the individual and the collective. That is an actual fact. I have created the world as I am. So don't let us get lost in this battle between the part and the whole. I must become aware of the total field of my own self, which is the consciousness of the individual and of society. It is only then, when the mind goes beyond this individual and social consciousness, that I can become a light to myself that never goes out.

Now where do we begin to understand ourselves? Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe myself, see what is actually taking place inside myself? I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship. It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself. I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself. Every other form of understanding is merely an abstraction and I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; therefore I have to study myself in actuality - as I am, not as I wish to be.

Understanding is not an intellectual process. Accumulating knowledge about yourself and learning about yourself are two different things, for the knowledge you accumulate about yourself is always of the past and a mind that is burdened with the past is a sorrowful mind. Learning about yourself is not like learning a language or a technology or in the present and knowledge is always in the past, and as most of us live in the past and are satisfied with the past, knowledge becomes extraordinarily important to us. That is why we worship the erudite, the clever, the cunning. But if you are learning all the time, learning every minute, learning by watching and listening, learning by seeing and doing, then you will find that learning is a constant movement without the past.

If you say you will learn gradually about yourself, adding more and more, little by little, you are not studying yourself now as you are but through acquired knowledge. Learning implies a great sensitivity. There is no sensitivity if there is an idea, which is of the past, dominating the present. Then the mind is no longer quick, pliable, alert. Most of us are not sensitive even physically. We overeat, we do not bother about the right diet, we oversmoke and drink so that our bodies become gross and insensitive; the quality of attention in the organism itself is made dull. How can there be a very alert, sensitive, clear mind if the organism itself is dull and heavy? We may be sensitive about certain things that touch us personally but to be completely sensitive to all the implications of life demand that there be no separation between the organism and the psyche. It is a total movement.

To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that yourself is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgments and values.

In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand - a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.

When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.

Third Meeting 02/05/08

Aleks started us off by reading an excerpt from one of Erwin Schrodinger's writings: My View of the World, chapter "Seek for the Road." Here is the passage:

"What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living with them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?
Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a apice of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
It is the vision of this truth (of which the individual is seldom conscious in his actions) which underlies all morally valuable activity. It brings a man of nobility not only to risk his life for an end which he recognizes or believes to be good but - in rare cases - to lay it down in full serenity, even when there is no prospect of saving his own person. It guides the hand of the well-doer - this perhaps even more rarely - when, without hope of future reward, he gives to relieve a stranger's suffering what he cannot spare without suffering himself."

Second Meeting

The theme of this discussion was commitment. It seems that it is easy and common for a person to live with only a dim awareness of his or her priorities. So the question we started with was: What are you committed to? Are you living in accordance with your priorities? The personal discussion that followed was incredibly honest and enriching, and provided all of us with an opportunity to take a step back and see more clearly our direction in life.

"What is Cosmic Consciousness?"

"All religions aspire to a union with God in some way or another."
- Thomas Merton

Sufism calls it "Fana," Buddhism "Enlightenment," Christianity "The Beatific Vision." It is the ineffable experience that made St. Thomas Aquinas say of his life work, "All of my work seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me."
August Turak began to seek after this Truth when he was in college in the early 70's. Some 25 years later, something happened without which he would have regarded his entire life as "straw." The revelation was so infinitely meaningful, yet so inexpressibly simple, that he began to dedicate his life to encouraging and convincing anyone who would listen to seek after it. He started the Self Knowledge Symposium as part of this effort, and now is here to give, for the first time, this lecture titled "What is Cosmic Consciousness?" I hope you can all make it to what is sure to be an inspiring and challenging lecture/discussion on Tuesday night, January 29th, at 8PM. The talk will be held on the 5th floor of McClendon tower on Duke's West Campus.

For more information or to RSVP please visit our Facebook Events profile
Free tickets will be available on the Plaza this week. Additional questions? Please email Andreas Pfenning at Andreas.Pfenning@duke.edu.

First Meeting

Early in the meeting, we stumbled into a familiar discussion about children. There seems to be a vague sense that we lose something very valuable as we grow into adults. Joanna remembers thinking about adults, "What's wrong with them?" Spontaneity is a crucial part of what is lost - the sense of always being in touch with what's right in front of us that makes it so refreshing to interact with children for Kaitlin. The question that lingered in the room for a while was how one could recapture that authentic spontaneity while functioning correctly in the world.

Andreas then moved us on to the planned reading: Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If". Living with principle as being a source of meaning. As the discussion of what the poem is really about started to get too heady, Joanna brought us down to Earth by suggesting a brief writing exercise that tied the poem to our day to day lives.