More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Don’t try to tackle what seems most wrong out there; develop the unique potential within yourself and then, through indirect work and in everything you do, be a resource to others and help them to see theirs.
the shadows represent the world as it is conveyed to us by our senses, and the chains are the paradigms and mental models by which we interpret this world. The puppeteers are the priestly caste of experts and opinion leaders to whom we look in order to learn what is true, right, and good. The fire that casts the shadows is the cultural milieu that shapes what we believe, know, and consider worthy of knowing.
A philosopher doesn’t try to persuade us that this or that phenomenon is a shadow on a cave wall. Instead, she provides us with the method and means to step out of the cave and its illusions so that we can see for ourselves. We do this by learning to challenge the apparent evidence of our senses and the interpretations we make of this evidence. Indirect work teaches us to discern and then evolve the reality-making apparatus within ourselves.
I believe that this self-reinforcing pattern of thought is the crucial issue of our moment. Most of us agree that things need to change, that neither society nor our planet can maintain their integrity if we continue on our current path. But confusion arises when we try to figure out what change actually means and how to make it happen.
The deeper purpose of the intermezzos is to develop your capability to manage, filter, process, and discover ideas as they arrive in your mental space. This requires intentional self-observing, the creation of a conscious awareness, separate from ongoing mental activity, that allows one to objectively observe this activity. It is a common spiritual or consciousness-development practice, and in some traditions, it is referred to as cultivating an “inner witness.”
See if you can catch yourself feeling aligned with what I’m saying rather than challenged by it—this is often an indicator of filtering out what’s genuinely new in a concept and thereby losing its value.
the most significant change Jackson introduced was his insistence that players had a sacred duty to the sport and to its fans. The game, he reminded them, was about spirit, not about scoring.
Profound change rarely comes from direct interventions in the world. Rather, it comes from working indirectly over time, helping people engage consciously to develop their own understanding,
Collectively, we are trapped in a mechanistic (or even more archaic) paradigm, and this causes us to make seemingly logical and ethical choices that actually produce destructive results. The urgent question now is how to provide leadership that is more appropriate to the world we find ourselves in, a world that is in crisis precisely because of the paradigms from which we’ve been operating.
Our work as a species is to be conscious participants in and stewards of life’s evolutionary processes. To do so will require far more from us than simply to repair the damage we’ve done to the world and to one another, and it will require more than becoming better people.
