The attached article on Initiation by Fernando Pessoa was originally posted on 
www.greenmanscreations.com by Nicholas Lecerf and is here reproduced with his permission. It is a translation from a French version of Pessoa's work that is now out of print, alas.

CLICK HERE >> Pessoa%20on%20Initiation.pdf

How are we to achieve the kind of direct experience which will liberate us? The philosopher Husserl believed that this required of us a great deal of unhooking of ourselves from what we have learned. He called this "bracketing". Bracketing means putting on one side. When I meet a client I am well advised to put on one side whatever preconceptions I may have. Perhaps a colleague has seen this person before and tells me that the client is such and such a type of case. This information is not likely to help my first meeting with the client. I am better to set it aside and see what I experience for myself in this meeting. Later, I might go back to what my colleague thought and give some consideration to it, but now I do so equipped with my own apodictic knowledge.

Epoche is a technical term which roughly means "total bracketing", or, we might say, the bracketing of everything other than what is apodictic. It means setting on one side t

The term apodicity means certainty arrived at through evidence. In psychological usage it refers to experiential knowledge. Knowledge is apodictic for me when, because of my own experience, I cannot congruently doubt it. Clearly one can go through the motions of doubting anything as an intellectual exercise, but, in practice, there are many things in life which I do not doubt because I have experienced them for myself.

In order to get this definition clear, let us consider some other cases. There are, for instance, things which one does not doubt because one has heard about them from a good authority. I do not doubt, for instance, that it takes light less than ten minutes to travel here from the sun. These things may be within the class "undoubted" for me, but they are not apodictic. Similarly there may be things which one has worked out for oneself but of which one has no direct experience. I might infer that dinner is ready fro

Publicado por David Brazier el 31 de marzo de 2017 en el grupo “Therapeutae”

Hace poco, conversando con alguien, salió el tema de la transparencia. Hay dos contextos en los que esta idea está de actualidad: el político y el psicológico. En política existe una gran preocupación acerca de la corrupción y , en general, se cree que la mejor manera de superar este problema, es una mayor transparencia. En psicología existe la idea de que una vida transparente o “congruente “es la más saludable y terapéutica. La popularidad de estas ideas ha llevado a la asunción de que la transparencia es una virtud en sí misma, más que un medio para algún otro fin y que, por tanto, siempre es algo bueno. Yo tengo mis dudas sobre si esto es así. La transparencia es importante y valiosa en algunas situaciones, pero no en todas, ni es una panacea.

Hubo un tiempo en que la capacidad para guardar un secreto se consideraba una fortaleza de carácter. Las vidas era

I was recently engaged in a conversation in which the issue of "transparency" came up. There are two contexts in which this idea mainly has currency these days - political and psychological. In politics there is much concern about corruption and it is widely thought that the way to overcome this is greater transparency. In psychology there is an idea that a transparent or "congruent" life is the most healthy and therapeutic. The popularity of these ideas has led to an assumption that transparency is a virtue in and of itself, rather than a means to some other end and that, therefore, it is always a good thing. I have much doubt whether this is so. Transparency is important and valuable in some situations, but not all, nor is it a panacea.

There was a time when the ability to keep a secret was regarded as a character strength. Lives were more private. We did not have the internet - no social media. There were no surveillance came

I've been rereading Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, an essay that he wrote round about the time of the start of the First World War. I wrote these notes to sort it out in my own mind, but you might find them helpful.

Oceanic Oneness
In Freud’s theory, narcissism comes first. This is because the infant feels part of a great oneness and resists being separated out as a separate being. Thus the earliest form of object-relation is identification. I start to discern things from an “I am that, that is me” position. Separateness is the great problem of life. The infantile mentality at first wants to deny otherness any separate existence at all and then, as it has to begin to accept separation, wants to incorporate the other through identification. Identification is thus the most primitive form of object-relation or, we could say, it is a nascent form of it. Slowly, more mature forms of object-relation emerge in which there is a clearer

The following passage comes from the book Freedom to Learn for the Eighties By Carl Rogers. Rogers, was an important figure in the development of psychotherapy in the twentieth century, and also in the field of education. His views on learning from direct experience have much in common with Buddhist teachings, although the ethos behind some aspects of his work is different. In the passage quoted, we gain a flavour of Rogers' passion for learner-led experiences, his energy for experimentation and his belief in the trustworthiness of people and of the processes of human enquiry.
 


What Is Learning?


Dr Carl Rogers
 


If the purpose of teaching is to promote learning, then we need to ask what we mean by that term. Here I become passionate. I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed into the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insati

((C)) D.J. Brazier
1993

INTRODUCTION

Loosely speaking, congruence means genuineness. People are congruent when they are not trying to appear to be anything other than what they are. Congruence is the opposite of dissemblance. It is closely related to a number of other terms, some of which will concern us below: honesty, authenticity, transparency, immediacy, spontaneity; yet its meaning does not precisely coincide with any of these.

As a topic in psychotherapy, congruence is concerned with a person's attempts to achieve harmony in their way of being. We may speak here particularly of harmony between body and mind. Body, in this statement, refers primarily to behaviour, to all the movements and sensations which constitute our experience of our physical being. Mind refers to our sentiments, beliefs, emotions, thoughts and imagery. Sometimes we make this same distinction by talking about a person's "outer" and "inner" lives.

In practice, the line between body and mind cannot be drawn wi