"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.