Category: Philosophy

The quest for greater unity and truth is achieved by the famous dialectic, positing something (thesis), denying it (antithesis), and combining the two half-truths  (synthesis) which contains a greater portion of truth in its complexity.

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Life’s third act | Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda

“There have been many revolutions over the last century,  but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution. We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did — think about that. That’s an entire second adult lifetime that’s been added to our lifespan. And yet, for the most part, our culture has not come to terms with what this means. We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the metaphor, the old metaphor. You’re born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude”.

But many people today — philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists — are taking a new look at what I call “the third act” — the last three decades of life. They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood. And they are asking — we should all be asking: How do we use this time? How do we live it successfully? What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging?

I’ve spent the last year researching and writing about this subject. And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase — the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity. Age not at all as pathology. Age as potential. And guess what? This potential is not for the lucky few. It turns out, most people over 50 feel better, are less stressed, less hostile, less anxious. We tend to see commonalities more than differences. Some of the studies even say we’re happier.

Video

Video transcribed at https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_fonda_life_s_third_act/transcript?subtitle=en

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Dr Adam Fraser explains The Third Space

How to improve work life balance and be more agile in your behaviour by leveraging the transitional space in your day.

We spend our day rapidly moving between different environments and interactions. All too often we take the mood and mindset of the previous interaction into the next one. We might have a frustrating meeting and it affects how we behave in the next one, or we go through a crisis, and it derails our day, or we take a bad day home with us. Clearly, this has a negative impact on our performance.

Dr Adam will explore a three-step process to effectively transition between the different interactions, tasks and contexts that make up our lives, in a way where we leave the previous interaction behind and bring the right mindset to what we are transitioning into, so we can perform at our best.

We will also talk about how we transition from work to home in a way where we can disconnect from the day and be at our best for our home life.

Research Outcomes

In a number of organisations the content presented for this topic has led to:

  • 43% improvement in the mood in the home, practicing The Third Space® on the commute between work and home
  • 91% increase in Boundary strength (the ability to not let the previous interaction have a negative impact on the next interaction)

Video

Read more at https://dradamfraser.com/speaking-content/the-third-space

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THE THREE PLANES OF EXISTENCE | Ram Dass

Ram Dass

One system through which you can look at it all, is that there are a set of vibrations or frequencies, you can call them the physical plane, the astral plane, the causal plane, and that which is beyond the beyond.

That’s a good image, “beyond the beyond.” In Tibetan, there is a mantra, which is “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Para Sam gate Bodhi svaha,” which means, “To that which is beyond the ocean of existence, I give homage; to that which is beyond the beyond.” That’s the place beyond those three levels.

Now what are those three levels? Look at it this way: Imagine a light bulb, and the light bulb has three layers of glass. There is the inner layer of glass, the middle layer of glass, and an outer layer of glass. Inside the light bulb is the same thing that’s outside the light bulb, pure consciousness, pure energy, and even these layers of glass are made up of merely “patternings” of this entire package called this “light bulb.”

Now imagine dipping this light bulb into a series of births – chemical baths, and the quality of these chemical baths is that they do two things. Each chemical bath thins the outermost layer of glass, and simultaneously, it leaves on the outermost layer of glass, which determines when the bulb comes out of the bath, and what next bath it will be pulled into. It codes the bulb for what its next bath will be. It goes from bath to bath to bath to bath, until it comes to a bath where the outer layer has gotten so thin that this particular bath breaks through, and the glass goes “poof!”

Now there are only two layers of glass left.

The subjective experience of that poof is, “Oh, so that’s the way it all is…” It’s the moment of waking up out of the illusion. That’s the place where, like Ramana Maharshi said, “You are finished with physical birth,” because the outer layer is the set of pre-dispositions which pull you each time into a physical birth, and keep you going through physical birth, after physical birth. Then this “poof!” occurs, and then you only have two layers of glass, leaving the physical. So then you start birth after birth, after birth on the astral plane, without a physical body, until “poof!” that goes.

Then you have one layer of glass.

So then birth after birth, and now you’re on the causal plane, the world like Plato’s world of pure ideas. It’s the highest place you can get on in the world of form or energy. It’s the basic laws of the universe, from which all the rest is manifestation, the world of pure idea. You’ve got one layer of glass then, and finally, you go through that enough until “poof!” that’s gone and the inner and outer are one again.

The bath is your entire heredity, your entire environment, it is everything that is happening to you, that has happened, and that will happen to you in this lifetime, and it is all done. You must understand that there are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.

-Ram Dass