Lessons in Human Experience and Spiritual Adventure
The chapter delves into eight important lessons that help individuals understand and accept themselves in the complexities of life, discussing concepts like true love, freedom, suffering, and the acceptance of limitations. By embracing imperfection and interconnectedness, individuals can embark on a spiritual adventure where they learn from every experience and eliminate shame and blame. The speaker emphasizes the significance of embracing impermanence, compassion, and interconnectedness in human life to deepen the understanding of existence and interconnected nature of all things.
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Episode notes
This episode is the opening lecture of a weekend given by Polly Young-Eisendrath. It contains a 1-hour lecture followed by an hour of Q&A. From the seminar description:
We all sense a connection with the source that underlies our existence, whether or not we recognize it as such and we all wish to identify with something larger than ourselves. Some feel this as a spiritual yearning, while others wish for fame or celebrity or the knowledge of a larger truth. The spiritual isolation and materialism (both economic and philosophical) of our times make it difficult to find trustworthy methods from institutional religions, non-traditional approaches, psychology, or philosophy for seeking knowledge of this source. However, our desire to help others (and ourselves) and our willingness to love deeply and authentically can offer the common ground through which we can find this knowledge, but it requires a dedicated understanding of our own suffering and its transformation.
Instead of seeking such insight into our subjective lives, we Americans embrace popular myths of biological salvation and pharmaceutical soothing. It?s not just that we seek instant solutions to complex problems, rather we have lost our taste for the adventure of human life, replacing it with ideals of economic and biological ?security? and hopes for absolute control of our diet and health.
This program offers a critique of this contemporary myth of biological salvation and presents accounts from psychoanalysis (Jungian and otherwise) and Buddhism of how embracing our limitations can open the path to transformation and lasting contentment.
Building on the presentation The Adventure of Being Human, this workshop investigates the challenges of human life through an exploration of our difficulties with perfectionism, the three types of suffering we encounter, and the ways in which love challenges us to develop a true discipline of our hearts. Among other things, this program explores mythologies, the Human Realm (from Buddhism), the inner critic of perfectionism, the value of the human sciences, and the differences between the two major sciences of subjectivity: psychoanalysis and Buddhism.
It was recorded in October 2001, so there is some discussion of the 9/11 attacks and related issues.
Note: In the Q&A portion, questioners were not microphoned and so the volume was very low. We’ve increased the volume, but they are still somewhat difficult to understand against the background noise, and back-and-forth is somewhat disorienting because of the frequent changes in amplification.
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