Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

But I have never known what I want to do. All I know is that I want to do the next project. Do you see what I mean?

On the other hand, tortoise mind works best in complex, ill-defined situations when we are not quite sure what sort of an answer we are after, where it’s not clear how many factors are involved, where we may not have all the information, and where it’s hard or impossible to measure the factors.

Because that’s how tortoise-mind thinking works—it’s curious, open-minded, follows its nose.

time at all to confront the real issues. If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called “responsibilities” accumulate to fill them up… . We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Even simply to get up in the morning, there is so much to do: open the wi

So when we need to innovate, to create, we need to access our tortoise mind. And that involves nothing more complicated than giving ourselves permission to stop trying so hard. To forget for the moment what kind of answer we think we want and just let our brains go soft and chew over a problem in a slightly contemplative, open-minded way, to let th

It’s called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. It’s a book that addresses a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that fast is always better. The third is the belief that we s

Well, Robin Skynner, from whom I learned almost everything useful, said that he felt that there were two stages that people in his therapy group exhibited as they were beginning to get happier. (I was a patient in his group for about three and a half years, a group of about eight people.) The first is they start laughing at their own behavior. Robi

No meeting is possible without reciprocal affection. If the Work seeks to enter into a man’s understanding, it would be unable to do so if there’s nothing reciprocal coming from the man. Real conjunction with the Work needs affection before it can happen. Affection is that which opens while non-affection shuts.

Christ clearly was a mystic. I mean, there’s not the slightest doubt about that. And the question I would ask is, why did I—growing up ten years in the Church of England—why did I hear so little of mysticism, given that Christ was a mystic? I mean, I never considered this puzzle properly until I found a series of lectures given by Aldous Huxley in