Can We Really Know Anyone - even Ourself?

     A senior meditation teacher once advised: "Only don't know."

     A definition of expert: "One who's incapable of learning."

     "The Renaissance is all about secret transformations. Human beings - we're not objects, we're not things. We are alive & changing every minute. Our very nature is change. Our very nature is transformation - which we forget, because we say "Oh that person is like that." And we forget they're like that today, but they could be like something else tomorrow, and maybe they were something else two weeks ago. 
     We keep actually putting labels on people and typing them. And in fact the one thing about human beings is that we're quicksilver, endlessly transforming and changeable." 

     Peter Sellars, American theatre director, interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio:
     http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/ID/2442656684/

Corner Store, Rome, Italy

 

Opening up, Forever, At our own pace

     As adults, we retain powerful ways of insulating ourselves from the world. "Some have more stomach for complexity and difficulty than others, but all of us have myriad ways of simplifying and sweetening reality. Adult life ... at best, amounts to an ongoing increase in our understanding of how to remove various sorts of blinkers and filters and in our capacity to tolerate their removal.”
        Higgins C. Human conditions for teaching: The place of pedagogy in Arendt's Vita Activa. Teachers College Record 2010; 112(2): 407-445.

     Those whose hearts are abruptly "broken open", or who more gradually reach a stage where they simply must start living an undivided life, realize that their personal growth was in fact initiated by the very same set of events and cognitive processes that could have caused distress and functional impairment.
        Kashdan TB, Kane JQ. Posttraumatic distress and the presence of posttraumatic growth and meaning in life: Experiential avoidance as a moderator. Pers Individ Dif 2011; 50(1): 84-89.


      Life, no matter what happens, is workable.


      "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."           Carl Jung