“Curious Souls Get Together” – 3rd meeting

Dear Curious Souls,

We met again at Art350 Gallery & Bar on December 2,2012.  

At the gallery there was a new exhibition- this time, of German artist “Helge Leiberg” and it was very pleasant to be surrounded by the large sized, colorful paintings, and sculptures of the artist while we had our meeting.

The first two TED videos we watched together involved music so they were quite pleasing and very  good entries for us to start discussing about “Happiness.” As you remember, the theme of our meeting was set as “HAPPINESS”.

 “A whistleblower you haven’t heard”:

“Bobby McFerrin plays the audience”:

Just before we started our discussions, Yaman getting ready to moderate ….

The next two videos were actually on the sources of happiness – one from the point of view of a  Buddhist Monk; Matthieu Ricard on “Habits of happiness” and the other a scientist; Dan Gilbert on “The surprising science of happiness”. We actually learned – and maybe realised once more- that it was possible to “synthesize” happiness with almost exactly the same outcomes as authentic happiness.

Our friend Yaman Cakiroglu moderated our discussions on these two videos. He put a lot of insight and personal philosophy into his work and I would like to thank him a lot for volunteering to make these discussions.

Then I wanted to show another talk- that of Prof. Martin Seligman’s on “The new era of positive psychology”:

However it was going to be tiring to watch three videos on happiness and as I did not want our participants to say: “don’t impose on us your dirty work of happiness” :-)) as one French critic wrote about and essay of Mathew Ricard, I refrained from proceeding:-)). Nevertheless, I personally believe that Martin Seligman’s talk is a must if you want to contemplate on “happiness.” So I highly recommend you to watch it if you have time.

We then proceeded to watch a different type of a magician’s Keith Barry’s video on: “Brain magic.” This video put us in controversy on whether Keith Barry was simply doing magic or was he at the same time applying some type of extra sensory abilities. We could not find the reply during our discussions 🙂

At the end of the meeting, as we discussed a lot about synthesizing happiness, training the mind etc, we tried a short self-hypnosis, meditation-concentration type of activity that was guided by me – basing it on my “not-so-quite-extensive” knowledge I acquired from books :-). I am not sure whether it was enlightening or not, but I am sure some of our participants were able to imagine the baloon getting bigger and bigger under their hands and pushing their arms up. Because when I asked them to open their eyes, half of participants had an arm up.

So it was again another wonderful and eye-openng meeting! TED Talks are a vast source of knowledge and I am very glad that on this occasion we had a chance to not only listen to the different perspectives of experts but also share our own point of views as well.

I would like to thank all participants for sharing this wonderful day with me.

By the way, please make your comments and share your views about our meetings on the wall of our group. It would be kind of encouraging to see you interested 🙂

I thank you all and I hope to see you in our next meetings.

Isil  the Curious Soul 🙂