| Winter | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Fall | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
WINTER
Week 2
I call [those persons] rich ... who can satisfy the requirements of [their] imagination[s].... [T]ime and space open up as soon as you take leave of the simple ways in which you define yourself. [p. 189]
[I]t was still possible to think of reality in a different light. [p. 188] (Pico Iyer, Sun after Dark)
Week 3
Group 1: Since then I have given up the "religious" which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given up on me. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken.... I do not know much more. If that is religion then it is just everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue.... You are not swallowed up in a fullness without obligation, you are willed for the life of communion. (Buber, Meetings, p. 55)
Group 2:
"Most of us acheive only at rare moments a clear realization of the fact that they have never tasted the fulfillment of existence... If we knew the secrets of the upper worlds, they would not allow us so much actual participation in true existence as we can acheive by performing, with holy intent, a task belonging to our daily duties. It is a greater thing if the streets of a man's native town are as bright to him as the paths of heaven. For it is here, where we stand, that we should try to make shine the light of the hidden divine life. Our treasure is hidden beneath the hearth of our own home." (Martin Buber, The Way of Man pp. 28-29.)
Group 3:
Week 4: The situation is starkly simple. If we let it have its way without cooperating, Strife will manifest as violence and destruction all around us. But if we are willing to cooperate, we can consciously channel its energy instead into destrying ourselves--our beliefs and illusions, our attachments, our clinging to the way things are. For what can be so difficult to realize is that the very act of becoming conscious is, itself, a process of destruction; of separation; of learning to die before we die. (Reality, p. 435)
Then there is nothing to go after any more, and nothing to avoid. You will never believe anyone who tells you incarnation in this world of beauties is good--because you have experienced the terrible, agonizing call of the soul longing to be free.
But you also know that the return of the soul to freedom is just as transitory; just as illusory.
And, ultimately, it makes no difference at all if you are up or down. For in reality nothing matters. We are simply where we are....
We are exactly where we always will be. (Reality, pp. 472-3)
FALL
Week 2
Thinking was not self-oriented, but turned toward
and necessarily in the service--love--of the Infinite... "God descends through mercy as far as the human intellect ascends through love." (Bamford, "Thinking as Prayer")
Week 3
...nothing is meaningless. "All of nature speaks of God, all of nature teaches man, all nature reproduces
its essential form--nothing in the universe is sterile." ... "All nature is pregnant with sense, and nothing in the universe is sterile." ... All creation is given to us as a book, a picture, and a mirror. (Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text)
Week 4
from Heather:
"In talking of an object's qualities do we form an object's qualities?"
(Empire of the Senses, p. 60)
"Because he had suppressed his memory and the flood of undisciplined personal associations that an object usually evoked, he was no longer distracted from it to his own concerns, he did not subjectivize it, but could see it ‘as it really was’..."
(Buddha, p. 58)
from Christian:
"As long as we persist in closing our minds and heart to the universal pain, which surrounds us on all sides, we remain locked in an undeveloped version of ourselves, incapable of growth and spiritual insight." (Buddha, p. 31)
"It is only when people become aware of the in escapable reality of pain that they can begin to become fully human." (p. 30)
"The Buddha was trying to find a new way of being human." (p. xxv)
from Katy:
“Enlightenment is never easy. It is frightening to leave our old selves behind, because they are the only way we know how to live. Even if the familiar is unsatisfactory, we tend to cling to it because we are afraid of the unknown." (Buddha, p. 35)
Week 5
Bill's seminar:
"Friends, friends ... gratuity, just so, for the fun of it, for your sake..." (p. 228)
Sarah's seminar:
"The word is a prison cell, or straightjacket constructed by
unquestionable experts; and what we call education, particularly
higher education ... forces people into this straightjacket. " (p. 159)
"Rituals, in other words, have an ability to generate in their
practitioners a deep adherence to convictions which may be,
internally, highly contradictory, so that somehow, the adherence to
the belief is stronger than most people's capacity to question what
they believe." (p.140)
Week 6
"It is not easy for us to be satisfied with ourselves." (p. 99) "In the end, our readiness to be satisfied with loving what we actually do love does no rest upon the reliability of arguments or evidence. It rests upon our confidence in ourselves." (p. 49) "... hang on to your sense of humor." (p. 100)