Classes, seminars, lectures and colloquia based upon the following definitions and propositions.

Institute: an organization formed to carry out a particular mission.

Rational: based upon the human ability to reason.

Inquiry: seeking truth, information and knowledge by asking questions.

Reason: one of our two primary survival tools.

The process of survival requires choosing to act in our self-interest. If we choose not to act, we choose not to survive. The things we need to survive do not sit and wait for us, ready made, in reality. They require creation and production. We have to act in order to create and produce them. We can’t wish them into existence.

In order to go about meeting our needs, we have to have some facts and some knowledge to start with: about who, what, why, where, when and how.

Then we need some ideas. Ideas, or concepts, integrate our past experience with the present and enable us to plan ahead to make productive choices that will meet our survival requirements.

Creating concepts requires that we use a special type of thought process called reason.

Reason enables us to make what our senses tell us intelligible. Without reason, all our incoming sensory data would seem like gibberish. Without reason, we could only react emotionally to our surroundings, like a newborn baby. Reason allows us to separate, identify and label the flood of incoming sensory information. It allows us to tie-in our present experience with past experiences. It integrates our intellectual knowledge with our emotions.

Reason makes it possible for us to create concepts out of raw, sensory information. For example, sensory data says platform, off the floor, supports, color, texture, length, width, height etc. and reason enables us to form the concept, "table." Reason perceives the facts of reality in the first place; it makes connections between them; it creates symbols to represent abstractions; it arranges and assigns places for more new, incoming information; it defines and labels what we have decided to call everything; it sets the stage so that we can see things clearly, put everything together and go on to form conclusions. Thanks to our ability to reason, we can say because of this, then that.

Survival means that we have to find or produce that which we need to survive. Finding and producing requires reason, the only effective mechanism we have of dealing constructively with reality, so that we can choose the actions that will keep us alive rather than those which will kill us.

What about means of survival other than reason? Let's look at some of them.

Intuition: past knowledge or experience in our below conscious mind, applied to the present, which occasionally generates valuable conclusions. Intuition does not acquire new knowledge, it finds new applications for old knowledge, usually in ways our conscious mind failed to come up with in the first place. We have no direct control over the intuitive process nor do we have any evidence that we can absolutely count on it coming to our assistance, when we need it or, for that matter, ever. Those who choose to live their lives "intuitively" have simply chosen not to choose in order to avoid accountability and responsibility.

Accident: the notion that we can survive just by stumbling over pre-formed, ready made conclusions and concepts that have somehow appeared by magic, waiting and ready for us to fall over.

Revelation: insights from a mystical, supernatural source providing us with all the concepts and conclusions we will ever need to survive. Again, ready-made so that we don't have to do any work ourselves.

Default: by choosing not to act in our self-interest, we somehow activate an unidentified source of ideas and conclusions that will automatically provide us with what we need to survive.

Luck: an accidental process with a twist; the added feature that, if we win some cosmic lottery, something might just act in our favor and do all our work for us, activated purely on the basis of random chance.

Some people can and do rely on some of these methods in order to survive. They don't survive well or long. They exist mostly in misery, pain, frustration and despair.

The way they attempt to go about achieving their delusion requires the introduction of phrases like, "Transcending reason" or "Evolving past reason." In their mythology, our ability to reason must appear optional and, more importantly, it must appear as only one of many steps leading to some kind of mystical, enlightened state. If reason only makes up one step of a path, then we can easily hop over it.

The survival tool represented by our ability to reason can remain locked in our tool kit forever. It can even see some use and then get tossed back in the box by people choosing to deny it in favor of "alternatives" to reason. The alternatives themselves always wind up as variations upon the themes of intuition, accident, revelation, default or luck.

Reason works. It makes it possible for us to survive. Reason also takes a certain amount of hard work to implement.

We can always choose to suspend our reason and thereby avoid the hard work. Fantasy-based beliefs can tell us that mystical shortcuts will allow us to live without having to work at the business of survival. These same beliefs can tell us that we have a magical ability to get our needs met, that we can get fed, clothed, nurtured and sheltered without having to get off our tails and create, produce or acquire whatever we need. Unfortunately, mystical shortcuts only reduce the length, and diminish the quality, of our life. They shortcut us to an early physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual demise.

Mystical detours prevent us from discovering, and then celebrating, our unique identity in the real world. Those detours make us try to become something other than ourselves. We try to be what we are not and are afraid to be what we are. 

Every rational choice you make should express the real you, not some artificial avatar. Everything you do should put your stamp upon the universe rather than the mark of a contrived surrogate. Constantly expressing your true identity turns every moment of your existence into an ongoing celebration of reality.