Old Joshu Lives On

Joshu was a Chan master back in Tang Dynasty China. Some of his dialogues became koans that are still widely used by contemporary Zen aspirants. Indian Buddhists originally employed the word ‘doubt’ in a way that developed new shades of meaning, both as Joshu played with the word, and as this term evolved further in the koan traditions of Sino-Japanese Buddhism. Joshu lived for 120 years. This extraordinary lifespan is far beyond that of today’s so-called ‘SuperAgers’. Recent research based on the brain imaging data and the telomere length from many long-term meditators suggests the possibility that some of old Joshu’s longevity reflected his one hundred years of prior meditative practice.     

Trauma Lives in Speech

The author approaches the topic through infant observation. At the age of eight months the baby moves in the borderland between the physical and the symbolic. When the baby hurts herself, she needs the mother's arms to protect her: at the same time, her budding spoken symbol "mama" is comforting in itself, it carries the memory of the mother's arms. Can speech - tone of voice, rhythm, pauses - and the moments of loss, absence, the losing of self also be intertwined? The author discusses the question of how trauma starts to live in speech through two patients. She talks about "a silent language" which speaks in between the words and sentences - changes the rhythm of speech, makes lose words, tears a hole in speech. This "silent language" talks about trauma, reaches for its very essence - a bodily experience and meaning to the wholeness/disruption of self.     

Traditional Ideologies,Nontraditional Lives

This study examined how blue-collar couples whoalternate work shifts and share the care of theirchildren reconcile their traditional gender ideologieswith their nontraditional lives. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-three alternatingshift couples in which the husband was a blue-collarworker. Ninety-six per cent of the participants wereWhite, and the remainder were Hispanic. The results suggested that despite their nontraditionalbehavior, these couples maintained traditional genderidentities by adherence to three central beliefs abouttheir families: 1) the father was still the breadwinner; 2) the mother only worked in the paid laborforce because of financial pressures; and 3) the motherwas still the central parent. The ways in which each ofthese myths is constructed, and the functions they serve of both maintaining traditionalgender identity, and of obscuring potential conflictsbetween husbands and wives over identity arediscussed.     

Whole Lives and Good Deaths

This article discusses two views associated with narrative conceptions of the self. The first view asserts that our whole life is reasonably regarded as a single unit of meaning. A prominent strand of the philosophical narrative account of the self is the representative of this view. The second view—which has currency beyond the confines of the philosophical narrative account—is that the meaning of a life story is dependent on what happens at the end of it. The article argues that the connection between these two views is more tentative than often supposed: philosophical narrativists that see life as a single unit of value and meaning nonetheless provide grounds for arguing that the end of life is not the best and may be a particularly bad time to approach and intervene in the matter of how well one's life as a whole has gone.     

The Worthwhileness of Meaningful Lives

Philosophia - The M?→?W thesis that a meaningful life must be a worthwhile life follows from an appealing approach to the axiology of life. Yet one of the most prominent voices in...     

Lives of women who became autonomous

We examine the lives and growth processes of women who have achieved considerable development of personality. Subjects of study are seven women in a longitudinal sample who, at ages 42-45, are classified by the Loevinger Sentence Completion Test at the highest ego-levels. As a way of describing their lives, all seven are analyzed in terms of Levinson's model of male development, one case is presented in terms of Gilligan's model of female development, another in terms of Loevinger's general model, and linkages among theories are observed. Characteristics of Loevinger's autonomous stage are illustrated and the extent to which they are gender-related is discussed. Findings show that women with very different personalities, problems, and ways of life can attain a high level of ego-development; that their lives tend not to have been orthodox or easy; and that theories of adult development are useful but uneven in application.     

Positive Aging Through Reading Our Lives

The same turn toward ??narrative?? that has been making its way across psychology, sociology, and related disciplines is influencing how gerontologists view the inner experience of aging??inside aging, as it were: subjective aging or biographical aging. In sympathy with Kenneth and Mary Gergen??s vision of ??positive aging??, and in contrast to the biomedical paradigm that dominates societal perceptions of aging in general, a narrative gerontology appreciates that lives are in many ways ??texts?? that are socially constructed - and co-authored??amid our relationships with others within a wide range of narrative environments, larger stories, and master narratives??families, friendships, cultures, creeds, etc.. In this way, it opens up a theoretical space for appreciating the poetic complexity of later life and for seeing aging as a process, potentially, of growing old and not just getting old. This paper explores how a poetic or narrative perspective sheds light on the intimate links between memory, meaning, wisdom, and spirituality; moreover, how learning to ??read our lives?? can aid us in developing resilient, robust stories??of self, other, and world??with which to meet the many challenges of later life.     

Balancing Personal and Professional Lives:

Graduate women have unique concerns as they cope with graduate school and attempt to balance their personal lives and relationships with their professional identity and achievements. In this article a review of women's developmental issues and the conflicts that women experience in graduate school will be described. Clinical observations of support groups for graduate women will be presented. The central themes described by both master's and doctoral level women who participated in these graduate women's support groups will be identified and discussed.     

The Multitextured Lives of Women of Color

In this commentary, I suggest that our work with women of color should be held together by three primary threads: (a) appreciation for history as we decipher and interpret the adaptive strategies of women of color; (b) recognition of the intersections of race, gender, and class as central to our work; and (c) self-critical examination of the meanings we attach to difference. The papers in the current special issue provide good examples regarding the importance of each thread. I argue that attention to these three themes should help us to keep our focus on contextually driven questions and to move forward our appreciation for the lives of women of color.     

The Dialogical Nature of our Inner Lives

Abstract

Classically, we have treated talk of such things as meaning, understanding, and thinking, etc., as raising problems about mental states assumed to exist inside people's heads. And in our philosophical inquiries, we have sought determinate in-principle solutions to these problems. In the dialogical, relational-responsive view of language use presented here — influenced by Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov — a very different view of such talk is presented. Our ‘inner lives’ are not hidden ‘inside’ us, but are ‘displayed’ out ‘in’ the unfolding, living encounters spontaneously occurring between us and the others around us as we live out our lives     

尊重——公共生活的基础性道德价值

尊重是公共生活中基础性的道德价值诉求.康德伦理学揭示出了属于现代公共生活的尊重类型,它不仅与私域生活中以情感为基础的尊重有区别,更与传统社会的等级性尊重不一样.尊重作为公共生活的道德价值,既需要通过制度的安排去实现,又要在人们平等的相互对待行为中体现出来.