« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 09, 2006
Relationships
The first session of the New Year started off with questions from Manju, Jags, Dinesh and Kamala on relationship: Among married couple, many women seem to have a natural emotional dependence on men. Men don’t know how to deal with it and women blame it on their nature. What can couples do to cope with it? Everyone creates an image about oneself and others and most relationships are relationships between images. Are we constantly manipulating with images in our relationships? How can we invite people into a conversation or to participate in any activity in order to build a community?...Posted by Ragu at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
Dangerous Idea: Knowledge is not the basis of Wisdom
The Edge magazine's question for 2006 is: What is your dangerous idea? It says: The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true? Read the dangerous ideas of leading thinkers here. Here is my dagerous idea: Knowledge is not the basis of Wisdom I borrowed this idea from my...Posted by Ragu at 05:03 PM | Comments (126)
January 19, 2006
Self-Image
Attendees: Prasad, Kamla, Srikanth, Manju, Vijay, Dinesh, Deepak, Nirmala, Senthil. Session highlights by Vijay The session started off with a question from Srikanth: "Why do I have self-doubt in a situation even though I have successfully handled a similar situation before?" Dinesh talked about a workshop he attended called "Mindset Mastery." It explores the impact of our mindset on everything we do. Manju asked how, as a speaker, she should handle a person in the audience who appears to be more knowledgeable about the subject, and is trying to fluster her. The common topic that emerged from these check-ins was...Posted by Ragu at 03:36 PM | Comments (66)
January 23, 2006
Exploring purpose
Number of participants: 18. Age range 8 – 74. As usual, we started off with a few minutes of silence, which lead to a few quotes on silence: Manju shared a quote that talks about “speaking only if it will improve upon silence”. I found many interesting articles later when I googled the phrase “improve upon silence”. I quoted John O’Reilly, “Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation.” Prasad read a beautiful poem on silence from the book Circle of Love by Debashish Chatterjee. “Silence is the language of the spiritual seeker”, said another...Posted by Ragu at 04:10 PM | Comments (32)
January 31, 2006
Self-inquiry
Manju opened the session with the quote, “Life cannot give happiness for selfish acts, but cannot help give happiness for selfless acts” There seems to be something fundamentally flawed about acting for and acting on behalf of (what we think and feel as) our self – a self that we usually define too narrowly without consideration to all that we are dependent and inter-dependent on. If to be selfish is to serve a narrowly defined self, then could ‘selfless’ be service to a larger Self so large that the narrow self submerges into it and becomes selfless? In that case,...Posted by Ragu at 04:17 PM | Comments (50)