Tag: Philosophy

The Accumulated Self – Therapy and Meditation, Two Approaches Towards

You had a line I thought was interesting where you said:

Traditional therapy unpacks in order to make sense. Meditation asks us to stop making sense so that we can find where happiness truly abides. Therapy examines the accumulated self, the only one that is shaped by all the defenses we’ve used to get through life.

Meditation asks us to divest ourselves of those very defenses.

Tell me a bit about that tension. You’re setting them up as almost, not quite opposite ways of knowing, but one mode is very cerebral and takes the stories very seriously, and the other mode is, in some ways, trying to get you to loosen your grip and be very skeptical of the stories your mind tells.

Yes. I was trying to channel David Byrne there with “stop making sense.”

Taking the story — one’s own personal story — seriously is superimportant. And there’s a real tendency among people who don’t have a psychotherapeutic interest but are coming strictly from the meditative point of view to diminish the importance of everything we’ve learned from a hundred years of psychotherapy: Early childhood experience, emotional pain, even traumatic events — those are all just phenomena to be observed. Don’t make too big a deal.

I think that’s a mistake. I think we need to take ourselves seriously and understand ourselves as best we can, and then begin to loosen the attachments that we all have to the various events that have formed us.

From the spiritual side, freedom from identity is the goal. And we can see what happens in the world when people are unable to free themselves from their identity. It’s a big cause of conflict and pain. But those identities are superimportant to be able to make sense of, too. So that’s one of the ways that I see these two worlds really helping each other.

Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?
The Ezra Klein Show
Interview with Mark Epstein
Epstein is a Buddhist and a psychotherapist. His first book, published in 1995, was called “Thoughts Without a Thinker.” His 2022 book is “The Zen of Therapy.”

Now a lot of people go to therapy. The fact that today it might have all these dimensions of mindfulness and awareness in it would seem normal and natural. But some people built that bridge, and Epstein was one of them.

The Joke, Milan Kundera – Couple Quotes from

“Do you think demolition can be beautiful?” said Kostka, and I smiled inwardly, recognizing in his response (delivered mildly, but conceived as a challenge) the Kostka (at once likeable and ridiculous) I had first met more than fifteen years before. I replied, “I know you’re a quiet workman on God’s eternal construction site and don’t like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I’m not one of God’s bricklayers. Besides, if God’s bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we’d be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished.”
…
“What you’ve just said sounds good. But tell me: How can a skeptic like you be so sure he knows how to tell a stage set from a wall? Haven’t you ever doubted that the illusions you ridicule are really nothing but illusions? What if you’re wrong? What if they were genuine values and you were a demolisher of values?” And then: “A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful form; they resemble each other and there is nothing easier than to mistake one for the other.”

The Joke
Milan Kundera

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Elvis Costello opens his L A show with “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”

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— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 9:22 PM

As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself, “Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred and misery?”

And each time I feel like this inside
There’s one thing I wanna know
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

And as I walk on through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong, and who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

So where are the strong, and who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away
Just makes me wanna cry

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Synchronicity II, Scottish Loch Connection

“Synchronicity II” – what’s with the part about the Scottish lake?
I just downloaded the Police’s “Synchronicity II” off iTunes. As I listened to it, I got to wondering about the lyrics. The verses portray the mundanity of life, but the choruses talk about something happening in some faraway Scottish lake. What’s the connection?

Mr.Blue_Sky
Sting is comparing the man about to mental with the monster in the lake about to attack some poor hapless schmoe in the cabin near the lake.

At least, that’s the way I see it.

Revtim
I took it as the Loch Ness Monster, which represents the narrator’s rising insanity.

vibrotronica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity refers to Carl Jungs “acausal connecting principle.” Basically, everything is interconnected and things that seem like coincidences really aren’t coincidences. The two story threads of the song–a man’s mundane day and the Loch Ness monster doing…whatever the hell she’s doing–seem to be totally independant phenomenon but are actually connected by a mysterious “spooky action at a distance” force. Hence the title.

Futile_Gesture
The idea of Synchronicity is that everything is interconnected, no matter how irreleveant to each other they may appear. “Synchronicity II” is the tale of a stressed-out man playing his part in the rat race and supressing his anger and rage. Consequently this rage manifests itself as something stirring many miles away in a dark Scottish lake.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/synchronicity-ii-whats-with-the-part-about-the-scottish-lake/297472/8

See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePolice/comments/l1zic3/meaning_of_synchronicity_ii/

Hagakure Quote – Not Perplexed, But You Will Still Get Wet

“There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/56099-there-is-something-to-be-learned-from-a-rainstorm-when“>Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure: A code to the way of samurai

Some Schools of Thought on Tlön

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe—and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives—is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius

Monomania and the Tyrannical State

Plato claims that justice in a republic was the same virtue as justice in a human being, and that the parts of a human soul match those in a state and stand in the same just or unjust relationships to one another. A monomaniac runs his life as a tyrannical state runs itself.

Plots (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
Robert Belknap

In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, “one”, and mania, meaning “madness” or “frenzy”) was a form of partial insanity conceived as single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomania

Belief as Default Behaviour

Daughters and stepdaughters alike—sons-in-law and grandchildren, for that matter—all had the same reaction. They laughed and laughed. “Michael!” they gasped. “Dad! You didn’t really believe any of this, did you?”

A serious question. Had I really believed it?

I’m not quite sure. I hadn’t not believed it. Does one go around believing all the various bits of information that cross one’s path in life? Not in any very active sense, surely. The question doesn’t arise; it doesn’t usually occur to one to examine things in that light. If you look at a list of train times to Manchester, it’s not like being a conscientious young candidate for holy orders faced with the Thirty-nine Articles. You don’t have to examine your soul and wrestle with doubt. If the timetable says that’s when the trains arrive, that’s when they arrive.

Yes, I had simply accepted it, in the way that one accepts the times of trains and almost everything else in life.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
Michael Frayn; David Burke

Daniel Day Lewis as Hamlet, Acting as a Two Track Activity – David Burke on

The idea of a hoax had first come to me during a performance of the play. If anyone is shocked by this, all I can say is that I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may of course be what happens to Hamlet—he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck in it. Something rather like this seems to have happened once to an actor who was playing the Prince. Daniel Day-Lewis, as was widely reported in the press at the time, suffered a breakdown in the middle of the performance, and the explanation most commonly offered was that he came to believe that the actor playing opposite him as the Ghost of his father was his own father, who had been dead many years; whereupon he abruptly left the stage, never to return, and never to play the role again.

This was not a warning that I am ever likely to forget; I was the Ghost.

Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too.

I had a painful illustration of this just before we finished our run in the West End. After nearly three hundred performances I was tired, and I suppose that the sight of the finishing tape made me relax. At some point I failed to make one of my moves. Sara told me later that a mobile phone had just gone off in the audience. A second or two later I was standing on the stage not knowing where I was or what I had to say. A black hole had opened up around me. Niels Bohr had vanished from Track One, and an alarmed David Burke on Track Two had to take a prompt from the equally alarmed prompter. The move I had failed to make was tied to the thought and the words; when one went, they all three went.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
Michael Frayn, David Burke

‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ – Chesterton Quote

My Country Right or Wrong

QUESTION: I am looking for the origin of or Chesterton reference to the idea that someone saying “My Country, right or wrong,” is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”

ANSWER: The line is from Chesterton’s first book of essays, The Defendant (1901) from the chapter, “A Defence of Patriotism”:

“‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

https://www.chesterton.org/my-country-right-or-wrong/

John Cheever – Desultory Quotes

“I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.”

“I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.”

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

“The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books. You read the books they write for little children and you’ll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.”

“Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

“The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7464.John_Cheever?page=1

Is It the Universe or Is It Me?

Some have seen tragedy as issuing from a wound in the hero, but, since Nietzsche, it has been commoner to find the flaw in the universe itself; or in man’s relation to it; or in man’s lack of relation to it. In Paul Tillich’s phrase, which is in the Nietzschean tradition, “man is maladjusted to the universe.” Life is “absurd,” as the French existentialists have it. Camus finds human effort symbolized in the myth of Sisyphus.

To what extent we need implicate the universe I don’t know. I. A. Richards once paraphrased “All’s right with the world,” as: “All’s right with the nervous system.” If that’s valid, we could paraphrase “Something’s wrong with the universe,” as “Something’s wrong with the nervous system.” At bottom, these contrasting statements aren’t as different as they sound. If man and the universe don’t suit each other, we have our choice as to which to lay the blame on. When we complain that the universe is so big, we mean we can’t fit it into our heads. When we complain that we are so little, we mean we cannot fit ourselves into the scheme of things.

The Life of the Drama
Eric Bentley

God’s Spies – King Lear quote, ChatGPT on

In King Lear there is a speech containing the phrase God’s Spies. Can you elaborate on what this means?
ChatGPT
The phrase “God’s spies” appears in King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3. This is part of Lear’s speech to Cordelia after they are captured and imprisoned. Lear, despite their grim fate, imagines a life of spiritual reflection and connection between himself and Cordelia, insulated from the corruption of the outside world.

Here is the excerpt:
“We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.”

Interpretation of “God’s spies”:
The phrase has a profound and multi-layered meaning.

Spiritual Insight and Detachment: Lear imagines that he and Cordelia, by being isolated in their prison, will achieve a higher perspective on life, akin to “spies” for God, observing human folly and the mysteries of existence from a distance. This reflects a sense of spiritual transcendence—being able to see the world’s troubles and vanities from an almost divine vantage point, while remaining apart from them.

Reflection and Observation: Spies gather secret knowledge, and by calling themselves “God’s spies,” Lear implies that their suffering and isolation will allow them to perceive deeper truths about life, society, and human nature. They’ll observe the rise and fall of power and the transient nature of worldly concerns as if they were privy to a divine understanding.

Redemptive Suffering: The idea that suffering and imprisonment might bring them closer to God or divine purpose is also present. Shakespeare often explores how suffering can lead to enlightenment or redemption, and Lear’s vision here reflects his longing for peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation after the chaos and betrayal earlier in the play.

Contrast and Irony:
This hopeful vision of Lear’s is deeply poignant because it is tragically short-lived. The audience knows that this imagined life of peace and reflection will not come to pass; Cordelia will soon be killed, and Lear will die in anguish. Thus, the phrase “God’s spies” also carries an ironic undertone, highlighting the contrast between Lear’s idealistic hope and the brutal reality of the play’s conclusion.

In summary, “God’s spies” encapsulates Lear’s yearning for redemption and meaning, his newfound humility, and his desire to rise above worldly concerns through a deeper, almost divine perspective on life. However, this vision is tragically unattainable in the context of the play’s devastating ending.

No Philosophers Stone for Solving Things – How to Solve It, Quote From

Rules of discovery. The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea.

It may be good to be reminded somewhat rudely that certain aspirations are hopeless. Infallible rules of discovery leading to the solution of all possible mathematical problems would be more desirable than the philosophers’ stone, vainly sought by the alchemists. Such rules would work magic; but there is no such thing as magic. To find unfailing rules applicable to all sorts of problems is an old philosophical dream; but this dream will never be more than a dream.

A reasonable sort of heuristic cannot aim at unfailing rules; but it may endeavor to study procedures (mental operations, moves, steps) which are typically useful in solving problems. Such procedures are practiced by every sane person sufficiently interested in his problem. They are hinted by certain stereotyped questions and suggestions which intelligent people put to themselves and intelligent teachers to their students. A collection of such questions and suggestions, stated with sufficient generality and neatly ordered, may be less desirable than the philosophers’ stone but can be provided. The list we study provides such a collection.

How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
G. Polya (Author), John H. Conway (Foreword)