I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings. --- ELIE WIESEL

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. --- MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

the end of education

The end of all education should surely be service to others. - Cesar E. Chavez

Don't worry, professor, you are the only one who knows the answer

I took a class in Economics department. While the famous professor was talking about some math formulas, one PhD student raised a question about the math formulas shown on the blackboard. The famous professor kept on apologizing for his mistakes and tried his best to solve the math formulas problem all by himself. When he was trying his best to re-calculate/re-write the formulas, which took some time, one PhD student said:
Don't worry, professor, please take your time, you are the only one in the class who knows what you are talking about. Thus, it doesn't really matter whether the math formulas are correct or not, because we really have no clue about what you are talking about.

3 step, 3 minute recipe for qualifying exam

Someone kindly shared with me the mysterious 3 step, 3 minute recipe for qualifying exam. (When we are preparing for qualifying exam, we don't have too much time to prepare and cook food.)

Step 1--- buy vegetables in supermarkets nearby campus
Step 2--- put the vegetables under hot tap water, therefore, the vegetables are washed and cooked simultaneously
Step 3--- eat the vegetables

Reminder: someone told me that sometimes someone feel confused-- either the vegetables are washed throughly or well cooked

To be human is to be born into the world with something to achieve, namely, the fullness of one's human nature, and it is through the virtues that one does so...the virtues are the only guarantee against a wasted life. ----- Paul Wadell

Safety in no refuge

Only when all the crutches and props are broken....and there is no hope for security, does it become possible to experience... the archetype of meaning---- C.G. Jung

We consider bibles and religions divine....they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of your still
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or tress from
The earth, than they are shed out of you----- Walt Whitman

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. ----- William Shakespeare

For we must be clear that to live or love only where one can trust, where there is security and containment, where one cannot be hurt or let down, where what is pledged in words is forever binding, means really to be out of harm's way and so to be out of real life. And it does not matter what is this vessel of trust--- analysis, marrige, church, or law, any human relationship.--- James Hillman

the Fertile Void

When we find out that the great void is full of chi, we know there is no such thing as nothingness.--- Chang Tsai

Our planet has vast areas of desert in its topography. Archetypally, these represnt the dark side of the blooming world. Nature is a metaphor of our inner life. Thus in our psyches we can expect a tormenting desertlike time in which nothing seems to be moving or growing in us. Such a torturous void is the unlit era in life when exuberance is gone, when nothing seems to succeed in reviving or renewing us, when things do nor improve no matter how much effort we expend, when our spiritual practices become flat and uncomforting. This is the ruthless shadow side of our psychic world, a wilderness with no visible horizon of relief.

Distressing voids are thus challenges to stay with ourselves. To stay is to say say. Mindfulness is a practice of attending and staying. Mindful presence in the void happens when we pay attention to what is with no attempt to understand it and when we stay in it with no attempt to end it. If we simply stay with the experience of that void, something eventually opens in it and us. What is born from our yes to the void is not emptiness, but spaciousness, transparency.

It is unhealthy to deny the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal. ----- British psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott

Not till we are lost...do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations---- Thoreau

Existential reality and Essential reality

An existential reality is conditioned by its moment and our mood. This is the figure, what we experience conditionally. The existential reality faces us right now; the essential reality is not visible until we shift into it. The challenge is to stay steadfastly with the here-and-now existential reality, however unsavory, while the essential reality truth--always comforting--hovers in the wings awaiting the audience that will happen in its own time.

We tirelessly and ceaselessly search for Something, we know not what, which will appear in the end to those who have penetrated to the very heart of reality. --- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

For our heart to yield without revolt to the hard law of creation, is there not a psyhchological need to find some positive value that can transfigure this painful waste in the process that shapes us and eventually make it worth accepting?...... Dark and replusive though it is, suffering has been revealed to us as a supremely active principle for the humanization and the divinization of the universe.----- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

May I trust the forces that help me know who I am and where I am going, and may all those who doubt themselves and disregard their destiny likewise be surrounded by inescapable evidence of their limitless identity and destiny.

Calling

This is the true joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being throughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making your happy.------------- George Bernard Shaw

Hot girl and compare latent means across groups in structural equation modeling

Someone whose name is hotgirl and whose blog name is sexy girls in lingerie wrote something on the my post, "compare mean of latent variable across groups". Although I don't know who is the hot girl, I am happy to know that the hot girl likes latent mean model comparision in structural equation modeling. I guess not many people on the earth love structural equation modeling, but at least the hot girl likes it, which makes me feel very proud of my blog.

Sexist, Alcoholic, and Academic Conference

Caroline and two male professors were eating in a hotel before the conference. Suddently, two male professors started to talk about a young/beautiful/single female assistant professor in the school.
Male professor A (who hates women) said---Well, you know what. I know that she cries a lot when she feel stressful. (implying that she is useless)
Male professor B (who hates sexist) said--- Well, you know what. I know that you (male professor A) drink a lot when you feel stressful.
The situation got cold. To break the ice,
Caroline said--- Well, you know what. I know that I eat a lot when I feel stressful. Might we start to eat now?

---We are all just human beings with all the imperfections. It would not hurt to try to find beauty outside of imperfections.

Facebook and Time

When the facebook was launched, I watched two famous researchers debating the issue about facebook on KCET, Newshour with Jim Lehrer. One researcher's argugment said-- Facebook just wastes time. Why would people waste time in providing the information about what they are doing now? Why would people waste time in knowing what other people are doing now?

I start to learn how to use facebook in 2008. I guess that researcher who is in his 50s might not completely understand how the young genertations do the networking. For old generations, maybe they do the netoworking through bowling, according to Putnam's famous book about social capital. However, the young generations are different from the old generations. Myself think facebook is a pretty powerful social networking tool, although I don't know how long my interest in using facebook might last.

Boundary, Self, No-Self

I am reading books about boundary in psychology. I found an arguement, I forgot the author, that tries to intergrate the "selfless" in Eastern philosophy (e.g., Buddhism) and the concept of "self" in Western psychology (eg., social psychology). The arguement says that Buddhism talks about selfless, which is based on the assumption that people have healthy senses of self. Unfortunately, western psychology, e.g., clinical counseling, has found that in reality, many people don't have a healthy sense of the "self" to be able to appropriately answer the question, who I am? Where I stop and where you begin? Thus, children who grow up in dysfuntional families might have difficulties to build a healthy sense of self, eg., who I am?

Psychological self--To be a self psychologically means operating from a coherent senes of who we are as we think and act in the world. In a sense, the psychological self is simply a descriptioin of a set of operations that keep us afloat in the conventional world. It is a provisional and utilitarian designation, not an ontological reality. Who we are is personally devised, but it is also continually being codetermined by how others act toward us and feel about us. Our self-esteeem lies in our satisfaction with our personal competence, yet it also lies in how responsive others are to us, whether they consider us deserving or their love and attentiveness, whether they find us to be worthy of caring about.

To acknowledge the fact of no self is to let go of the illusion that such a self or ego is permanent, independent, fixed, or solid. The sense of fixity and seperation is an impression, not an empirical fact. We are all interrelated and contingent.

Shadow Dance

• We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life--- Carl Jung
• The abhorred features of our own personality are projected as repulsion, rejection, or dislike of others who demonstrate the very traits we hate in ourselves---David Richo
• What we conceive of as reality is a few iron posts of observation with papier-mache constructiion between them that is only the elaborate work of our imagination---J. A. Wheeler
• It is useless to deny that evil exists; we must frankly face its existence and refuse participation--- Jane E. Harrison
• We can't eliminate evil, only acknowledge it in ourselves and in the world and then deal with it.
• There is no freedom from evil but there is freedom to face it and not to act in accord with its rules.
• There is no concrete good or evil in nature. These are moral categories, qualities of human acts.
• Every shadow issue has a past: a childhood fear that drove the quality in our shadow into hiding. A shadow issue has a present: it is being projected onto someone else and denied in ourselves. The future of a shadow is in the opening of ourselves to the truth. By befriending the shadow, we come upon a new way of being in the world, more conscious and more in touch with our full potential.
• Only that which is truly ourselves has the power to heal.--- C. G. Jung
• In a breakthrough, I find that God and I are both the same....Love God as he is: a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-person, a not-image; as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien from all duality--- Meister Eckhart
• When the mind rests serene in the oneness of things, dualism vanishes by itself---Seng Tsan
• Things are losing their hardness. Now even my body lets the light through---Virgina Woolf

Fear

• If there is a fear of falling, the only safety is in deliberately jumping---- Carl Jung
• I entered I knew not where and there I stood not knowing: nothing left to know---Saint John of the Cross
• There is nothing to be attained, yet I engage in action.---- Bhagavad Gita
• We befriend our fear by admitting we feel it, letting ourselves feel it fully, and then acting as if fear were not stopping us.

Wisdom Research Network

Wisdom Research Network --- http://wisdomresearch.org/

The Wisdom Research Network has launched a new website in its effort to cultivate interdisciplinary research on the nature and benefits of wisdom. This international networking utility enables scholars and scientists from all academic disciplines to exchange ideas and engage in richer conversations through on-line discussion forums. Such interactions aim to initiate the level of interdisciplinary collaboration required of rigorous, scientific investigations into the nature and benefits of wisdom. Wisdom-related news and recent publications are posted regularly, along with updates on the progress of the current Defining Wisdom grant competition. As a registered member, you may actively participate in the discussion forums, and create your own personal profile that may include your photo, biographical summary, as well as, your own research interests and publications.
The University of Chicago Arete Initiative