Talent Development Resources..........awareness / thinking : page 3

 

 

People who will embrace a new medium.. tend to be younger, people who haven't achieved enormous success yet, but who are looking for a new path, a new arena to shine in. They might be more avant-garde, more experimental, and they will often come from an interdisciplinary background, rather than a high level of specialization, which enables them to adapt to and create new paradigms. ....Celia Pearce.*the interactive book

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"Our scared and arrogant ego has an enormous capacity not to know itself."

psychotherapist David Richo

....Shadow Dance

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In many ways, the illness [Parkinson's disease] has been a blessing to me. It got me out of my own showbiz garbage and really made me realize there are bigger things in life.  Michael J. Fox     [imdb.com celeb news June.2001] * Michael J. Fox  Lucky Man: A Memoir

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"Most children are avid and natural learners. For about the first eight years of our lives,
we are in a wide-open state, ready and able to absorb whatever comes in front of us...

Then, quite subtly, something changes. We begin to collect ideas, attitudes, and concepts,
to draw conclusions, and to form our belief structures. Of course, all this is proper and natural...

But [these structures] also seal us off from the open and absorbing attitude with which we learned
to walk and talk... the gap between our 'critical' and 'creative' selves becomes wider..."

book: The Inner Game of Music
 

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.. .. What is the nature of the mental demands that modern life makes on us adults? If you think of the culture itself as a school in which every adult is compulsorily enrolled and the subjects of the school are our various roles (spouse, parent, worker, etc.), then what you find, over and over again, is a demand for a particular order of consciousness that is of unprecedented complexity. ...

In fact, I think if we are to overcome the tribal hostilities and the big lesions in the human family, then more and more people need to develop fourth order, self-authoring consciousness.  That is the modal growing edge of the species as a whole. from article:  Epistemology, Fourth Order Consciousness,  and the Subject-Object Relationship or... How the Self Evolves - interview with Robert Kegan [What Is Enlightenment? site] ...In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life - by Robert Kegan

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.. .. ...Waking Up in Time - by Peter Russell The first part of the book, "The Quickening," sets the scene. It opens with the increasing pace of life we are all experiencing today.  I show how this trend is not limited to modern times, but can be traced back through history all the way to the beginning of creation.  What we are experiencing today is the culmination of billions of years of ever-accelerating development.  Why does evolution accelerate? The answer lies in the fact that new evolutionary breakthroughs often facilitate future advances. Multicellular organisms, sexual reproduction, the emergence of nervous systems have each done their part to hasten the pace of evolutionary change.  ... Combining these two evolutionary breakthroughs has made us the most creative species this planet has ever known. And the more we apply that creativity, the faster things change.

The second part, "The Crisis" focuses on the less welcome consequences of humanityís rapid development, and the devastation we are bringing to the rest of the planet. How is it, we ask, that a species that is in some ways so intelligent can in other ways be so short-sighted? Where have we gone wrong? These questions lead on to an exploration of our inner needs and the way our societies have seduced us - in effect hypnotized us - into a set of false assumptions about what it is we really want, and how to go about achieving it.  Amplified by the might of our technologies, these errors of thinking are now having global ramifications. We see that the global crisis is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness.  If we are to navigate ourselves safely through this critical moment of history we must make a break with the past, and look at ourselves and our world with fresh eyes.  This will entail a fundamental shift in thinking and perception - a shift in consciousness more profound and far-reaching than any in our history. ... The final part, "The Future ," looks at where we may be headed. It considers some of the many prophecies that seem to foretell these turbulent times.  And it looks behind their literal interpretations to deeper meanings, suggesting that they are metaphors for inner transformation and awakening.  < from book overview on his site

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.. .. Like others who are involved in education.. I had always assumed that textbooks were based on careful research and designed to help children learn something valuable. ...  What I did not realize was that educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive.  Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school. ...

One of the most charming informational stories that our committee reviewed was about a rotting stump in the forest that provided shelter and food to a succession of insects, birds, plants, and animals.  The story probably would have passed muster with flying colors in light of its environmentalist emphasis on natureís ways of recycling except that it made the fatal mistake of comparing the rotting stump to an apartment house for the many different creatures of the forest.  The twenty members of the bias committee voted unanimously to reject this passage because, in their view, it contained a negative, demeaning stereotype of apartments and people who live in them.  If this passage were included on a test, the panel claimed, poor inner-city children would be upset: ìYoungsters who have grown up in a housing project may be distracted by similarities to their own living conditions. An emotional response may be triggered.î Diane Ravitch randomhouse.com excerpts from her book  ...The Language Police: How Pressure Groups  Restrict What Children Learn

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.. .. from "Cracking the Wachowskis' code" by Peter Bart, Variety.com May 25, 2003] Cannes ... I was especially pleased last week when wandering the back streets off the Croisette I came upon the Wachowski brothers having coffee at a sidewalk cafe. ...  [I asked them about] a Keanu Reeves interview where he said, "The truth is often terrifying when the cost of knowledge is the central theme."  Maybe you could elaborate on that in terms of Neo's personal quest and the role of Morpheus as teacher and spiritual leader. "You're oversimplifying, man," said the bearded brother. "You're forgetting that dialectic thought is only an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means... Theodor W. Adorno demonstrated that in his book 'Reflections From a Damaged Life.'" I haven't read Adorno recently, or Schopenhauer. But look at it this way: you've given great entertainment to the mass audience, both in your movie and your videogame. There's truth in that alone. The second brother shook his head ruefully. "Erecting truth directly amid the general untruth only perverts the former into the latter." ...Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno The Matrix and Philosophy : Welcome to the Desert of the Real -- by William Irwin

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"In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs,
we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought
outside for answers that can only be found within... latent but unexplored
creative capacities, depths of psyche, states of consciousness, and stages
of development undreamed of by most people."

  **Roger Walsh:  from book Paths Beyond Ego

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 "We are often attached to our knowledge, our habits, and our prejudices...
knowledge is the greatest obstacle to awakening."   Thich Nhat Hanh

**Zen Keys
 

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What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know.

             It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.......Yogi Berra
 

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The first thing I did when I taught art, was not to teach art. I taught the students to clean their minds, to take that mind and polish it daily, to throw out what they don't need and not to clutter it.  Don't remember every telephone number, don't remember every address, don't remember every name. Keep it open and keep it empty, so that when you see something, you see it totally.          sculptor  Louise Nevelson from book: Art Talk : Conversations with 15 Women Artists by Cindy Nemser quote posted on girlscando.com         photograph by Richard Avedon

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N ow, a mind that has no walls, that is not burdened with its own acquisitions, accumulations, with its own knowledge, a mind that lives timelessly, insecurely -- to such a mind, life is an extraordinary thing.  Such a mind is life itself, because life has no resting place. But most of us want a resting place; we want a little house, a name, a position, and we may say these things are very important. ... A mind which is seeking permanency soon stagnates; like that pool along the river, it is soon full of corruption, decay.

Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding -- only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.  J. Krishnamurti **book: ** Think on These Things

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Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda  And now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still For once on the face of the earth Let's not speak in any language, let's stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. ( Life is what it is about, I want no truck with death. ) If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to twelve, and you keep quiet and I will go. **book: * * Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems * photo from Nobel Foundation site

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The answer lies in the investment in beliefs. I once interviewed J. Krishnamurti, and as I was about to ask him a question beginning with the words, "Do you believe...?" he stopped me and said, "I don't believe in anything."  Most people believe their thoughts, and if they have had a lot of thoughts on a given subject over time, there is a long-term investment in the belief of those thoughts.

The good news is first, that one need not believe one's thoughts, and secondly, that there is noloss whatsoever in abandoning the long-term investment in what had been believed.  On the contrary, without belief in habitual thought, there is clear seeing and open potentiality. It is what Suzuki Roshi meant when he said, "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few."  from article "Stop Pretending" by Catherine Ingram book: Catherine Ingram In the Footsteps of Gandhi : Conversations With Spiritual Social Activists

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For media industry leaders, one of the keys is a willingness to suspend confidence in your own knowledge. Christie Hefner - from article: Women Of Talent - Power and Leadership

 

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"We can observe attempts to bridge the gap between ordinary thinking and Sufi experience,
contained in poetic, literary and other media, which have been designed to lead the ordinary,
attenuated or embryonic human consciousness into a greater perception and realization."

     Idries Shah in his book The Sufis

For thousands of years the teaching story has been a Sufi instrument. "Their effects on the
innermost part of the human mind is direct and certain." Teaching stories are not didactic,
not parables -- a form some of us at least are still familiar with. Parables are open to a
simple interpretation: this tale means this or means that.

Being introduced to the great treasurehouse of Sufi literature taught this writer, at least,
a realistic view of her talents.      from review by Doris Lessing of the work of Shah

Idries Shah, Sayed Idries el-Hashimi (1924-1996) 30 books on traditional psychologies,
anthropology, travel, literature, philosophy and Sufi thought - including:

The Sufis

Tales of the Dervishes : Teaching-Stories of the Sufi Masters over the Past Thousand Years
 
 

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Drew Barrymore is thriving -- not just surviving. ... When she was 19, she and Nancy Juvonen founded Flower Films ["Never Been Kissed" etc]. ... After such a rough beginning [her childhood and early teen years] how did she manage to become so strong and independent?  "I really don't know," she told Premiere last year. "But if I had to come up with a reason, maybe it's being in touch with the idea that you are responsible for what happens in your life and everything is a choice, and not assuming you deserve anything."  ... Biography magazine Sept. 2001

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I was just talking to a man who said success is all a matter of will; I said, no, I think it's all a matter of belief. We talked about the image of sandpipers on the beach: they run up, get all the delicious food in the sand, then run back - and their feet never get wet. They're always in harmony, and in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the ocean.  And what's happening with women now is they are bringing to the party of life the concept of that ebb and flow with natural law. There's no willfulness around it. Willfulness is masculine energy, which this society has been built on, but it is not the natural way. from interview with writer, script consultant, Goddess group leader Viki King

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Dozens of recent studies show that optimists do better than pessimists in work, school and sports, suffer less depression, achieve more goals, respond better to stress, wage more effective battles against disease and, yes, live longer. ...  Some researchers see this "optimistic bias" as a dangerous streak of irrationality that should frequently be discouraged, the impetus for unreasonably risky behavior.  Others argue that even unfounded optimism can be highly useful, helping people tackle daunting challenges. Among those with that view is Shelley Taylor [left], a UCLA psychologist who has done numerous studies in the field. Optimism is an "underrated resource," she said. "It gives you much more than people imagine it does."         [LA Times, January 5, 2000] * book:* Positive Illusions : Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind by Shelley E. Taylor, PhD

* related page:*positive psychology **

 
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"The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fulness or poverty
of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception,
the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form
for us before the light fell on them. We turn the light here, there and everywhere
and the limits of thought recede before it."

* book:**Susanne K. Langer  Philosophy in a New Key :
                 A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art
 

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1. I am worthy of love and respect.    2. My world is a pretty safe place.

3. I perform many tasks well.     4. I am in control of my life.

5. I feel loved and cared for.     6. I can rely upon myself.

7. The world is neither fair nor unfair.    8. I feel a strong sense of belonging in my family and community.

9. Most people can be trusted.  /etc/

> from  beliefs checklist : Identify Your Core Beliefs

    questionnaire by Matthew McKay, Ph.D. and Patrick Fanning

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