Category: Philosophy

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1 Minute Tips Lifestyle Philosophy Pyschology Twitter

Three Pieces of Great Life Advice I Gleaned From Twitter Today

Sounds weird right? Twitter is the negative capital of the world it would seem. It seems almost like a magnet for negativity and arguing. Boy, I spent too much of my life during the last decade engaging in both, and still do at times, although I’m much more conscious of it.

#1 Chase Jarvis. I swear there are days, and today was one of them when I said to myself, I need to unfollow everyone on Twitter except for Chase Jarvis. He’s all you need! He’s like Bob Proctor 2.0 except he specializes in the Creative career. If you really wanted to turn your life around, and especially if your dream was to be a creative (artist, writer, painter, photographer, movie-maker, actually in today’s world creativity can be applied to any career) I think listening to Chase Jarvis non-stop would do the trick. I’m certain it would.

#2 This was an unlikely source and for an unlikely and controversial reason, but I thought the main point he made was so golden. It was from Tim Brando, a former Sports Broadcaster, who was really pissed off about the way the leadership in Athletics at the collegiate level has been so poor in the face of COVID-19. At any rate, and I do trust his judgement on such issues, but I know that point could be debated, but I thought his immediate cure was self-help gold:
“Do what you love. Get your mind off what pisses you off!” It may not sound sexy, but it works!

#3 Dolly Parton. Actually this one isn’t from twitter. I heard it last night, but I can’t remember from where, but I thought it really hit home. “Find out what you are good at, and do it on purpose.” It sounds too simple to be true, but that one sentence is almost all you need to know to not only be happy in life (if you are good at it, it’s usually something you enjoy in and of itself) and also make a good living that provides at the very least for your food and shelter and more than likely for a whole lot more.

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Philosophy Pyschology Spiritual

What the Call in Mythology Means to Your Life Now

When you follow your calling, when you listen to what your soul is telling you you are here for, when you follow that “Theseus” thin thread out of the Labyrinth to the T, then the whole universe opens up and comes to your aide, and a magical track opens up that automatically takes you where you need to be, and the things you need to fulfill your destiny come to you automatically. Life becomes effortless simply by making a decision to say ‘yes’ to your calling which is more often than not, not respected by the outside world, and that’s one of the first hurdles.  

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Philosophy Spiritual

The Symbolic Meaning of the Belly of the Whale

The Beatles are metaphorical for the “belly of the whale” motif in mythology. I never realized it myself until I read “Anthology” and realized that they had spent almost 2.5 years in Hamburg playing 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now this isn’t literally true. They did have breaks. They definitely went home many times for breaks, but the most important aspect is that it is psychologically true. Apparently the clubs were physically below the street level, like walking down into a subway, and I do remember a compadre of theirs saying, “We’d go down their and wouldn’t come for air for a week.” Now this obviously is not literally true. But one understands the psychological, metaphorical implication: giving yourself over to something completely. That’s the idea of the belly of the whale motif in mythology. Even the the locals of the Cavern Club in Liverpool seemed to be stunned by the transformation of the post Hamburg Beatles. That’s the central idea of the “Belly of the Whale” motif. It’s exactly analogous to the idea of the male initiatory experience: You go in one person and come out the other side with a completely transformed consciousness. All mythology, as Joseph Campbell said, is about the transformation of consciousness.

I’d say there are two main aspects to the Belly of the Whale symbolism and they are psychologically connected although in the world express themselves in two different ways: 1) As noted above with the Beatles is the aspect of a career. The way to get to the top is complete emersion, giving yourself over to it completely, allowing yourself to be “swallowed up.” This is the appropriate attitude for a young person, say 20-30, deciding on their career. They have to know the irony that this immersion, once a decision has been made, will free them, not confine them, as long as it’s their true calling, not someone else’s.

2) Is more metaphysical in the sense primarily of acceptance. The trash compactor scene from Star Wars comes to mind. If you just take the literal, mechanical view of nature, then its all about a group of adventurers who are most certainly going to die in a horrible way. At best their chances are 50/50. But what in the deepest sense does this scene really mean?

Update 6/13/20: I realized as I was watching a lot of music production videos on Youtube, and as their algorithm keeps bringing you more, I realized that the amount of content I could watch on this subject is nearly endless. And then I realized, that’s it! You keep at something non-stop until you break through to another level. The irony is its your laser-like focus on one subject that opens up the entire world to you.

Now, I would say there is at least one caveat: whatever that subject is, I think it needs to be your true soul’s calling. In other words, if your only reason for doing it is to get rich and famous, it still might work, but there’s something lost in translation. And the whole process will not be fun. If it is your true soul’s calling, then it will be feeding you the whole way in terms of inspiration, joy, and fulfillment, even in this so-called “Belly of the Whale” period in which you are not getting outside attention or rewards. I’d say that’s the test for your true calling: If you feel emotional reward from the act itself, then that’s it. Stephen King and writing is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this analogy. Especially if you want to be a writer, go watch some of his speeches and interviews on Youtube. He mentions this aspect as being primary.

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Mythology Philosophy Pyschology Spiritual

The Essential Function of Mythology and Religion

It’s to put the psyche in accord with nature. Once a hero begins an adventure he quickly learns he has to let go of his ego thinking and let the quest itself be his guide. In some adventures the hero is humbled (Odysseus, Parsifal, Job, Indra). In others he is completely eaten up or otherwise destroyed (Jonah, Jason). In all of these cases some kind of submission is required to an unintelligible, invisible force. That submission has to be utter (Actual death in the Christ story, and a complete willingness to die in the Buddha—at which moment his fulfillment is activated, and he achieves Nirvana). Yet all the while he is still striving for his goal. Though chaos may blow him all over the place for reasons that don’t seem fair, he somehow maintains his inner acceptance even in the face of the ultimate. And continues to try to move forward. The schizophrenic is the person who does the opposite: He won’t let fate wash over him, won’t let his consciousness transform, and keeps insisting on his ego’s program of control. He can’t accept the cards he is dealt and when the world around him won’t conform to his ego’s desire (which in truth like Jay Gatsby’s can never be fulfilled) he finally refuses to play the game. But that leaves him in a frozen state in which the intensity of suffering only increases until he feels he utterly cannot escape it and finally is left wailing on the ground.
So the hero is representative of a psyche that has learned to accept, submit to, and otherwise come into accord with nature, which is also analogous to his subconscious and as Jung put it, his “undiscovered self.”
Some heroes start out too proud and have to be humbled. Others start out too humble (Al-addin, many peasant types in the Grimm tales, Jack, etc.) And their adventure consists of realizing the diamond glowing inside. The lowly peasant boy, usually the third and youngest child, whom no one else respects either, turns out to be the only one in the kingdom with the courage to defeat the dragon and win the princess. Somehow his willingness to get in the game with the same type of straightforward intent, yet without expectation, and even more crucially without desperation, just like the Buddha’s acceptance under the Bo tree, and the Christ’s acceptance hanging ostensibly, metaphorically from that same tree, activated his superpowers, transformed his consciousness and that of the whole world around him.
Religion is simply when the act of being with these stories, symbols, and rituals, has the same effect on your psyche. The labyrinth is your socially conditioned mind and body. What’s trapped inside is your undiscovered self, your soul. Adriane’s flax thread is symbolic of religion and mythology itself, the song of the soul’s calling. One only has to follow it. The Great Way, as the koan says, has no gate.

Refusal of the call converts the adventure into its negative.

Joseph Campbell

Categories
Philosophy

The Secret of Success: Having Fun

I’m having a blast. It’s really fun. I don’t know why… But it’s just been a joy.

Conan O’Brien Jan. 12, 2020, “Nikki Glaser” 1:12

Why were you trying to find my extension?
I have a friend who’s opening up a new restaurant in Soho and I was hoping you’d go with me.
What?
Do you want to go out with me tonight?
Why?
Because it would be fun, and you seem cool.

30 Rock S1 E11 4:39
“Did you ever imagine that your podcast would be…like where its at right now is crazy, man.”
Joe Rogan: “No, there’s no way I could have imagined it. I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Tom Segura: “It’s so nuts.”
Joe Rogan: “It’s just…yeah, I just thought it was fun to do.”

Let me ask you something, why do you do what you do?
I don’t know. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m singing

Jennifer Hudson’s character in ‘Sandy Wexler’ [-1:55:54].

Johnny Cash is not cast in amber, this is the guy before he was canonized, when he was just a musician, when he had runway in front of him and was less worried about getting it right than just doing it. Yup, when done right music is here and then gone, you had to be there, that’s one of the reasons live is such a big deal these days.

— Bob Lefsetz https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2019/12/04/matchbox/

“And one does it not to be good for you, but just because you dig it. Because at last you find yourself in the center, the eternal now, in which past and future drop away, in which divisions created by words drop away.” — [YouTube Link]

Alan Watts

Something I do for like no reason besides the fact that it was just like for fun………Mmmm mmmm, I mean because making music is messing around. [Youtube Interview Link]

Billie Eilish

You’ve got to find something that you love to do in an of itself that could also become a career. I would even go a step further: the actual doing of it and navigating all of its challenges (like an adventure) actually gives you more pleasure, feeds your soul even more, or if you want to get unromantically scientific about it, releases even more dopamine, than all the other possible accoutrements it could give you (money, fame, sex, adoration).
That’s a big ask. But I think it’s the key to not only giving yourself the best shot at not only the accoutrements, but producing work that is worthy of them. In another words, work that gives more value to the audience (and keep in mind, especially in today’s world this could literally be anything: arts, business, science, etc.) than the money and attention they are giving to it. This is the key fundamental law of business: B = V + D. Business equals Value plus Distribution. But it’s an equation that can be applied to any career. And thanks to the internet, or more robustly “technology” the definition of what a career can be (“Youtube Star”) has grown at least by an order of magnitude over what it was when I graduated from college in 1989, maybe two.

Categories
Philosophy Poems

Attempting an Explication of the Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.



Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Update: 8/15/20: I still feel as vexed by this poem as the rough beast feels vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. Which leads me to the main point of this update: Who’s rocking rocking cradle had the power to wake up twenty centuries of stony sleep? Was this Jesus in the manger?

Some rough beast, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Maybe the biggest question of this poem is why is the thing slouching? It’s a huge monster with a lion body. We think of lion bodies as being fierce, muscular, solar king-like, even devine in their beautiful symmetry (“What immortal hand or eye/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”) not slouchy! Lions are proud. People who slouch are ashamed and or dejected with being. For someone about to become Jesus 2.0, the next savior of the world, he’s not too excited about taking the job, that’s for sure!

And why go back to the original place? London, Paris, or New York would seem a more appropriate place for a new savior of this day and age to be born. With going back to the Levant, I sense its a metaphor that the ideals of the pagan West, namely that of the ideal of the individual, which is what the sense of the Grail romances, the pagan myths and fairy-tales, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all about, have now been thoroughly overthrown, for the ideals of the Levant which are that of the group. If you’ve ever experienced a mob mentality break out, you definitely have seen gazes that are blank, pitiless, and soulless. That’s the equivalent of falling to all three temptations of the Buddha (Lust, Fear, Social Duty) in one fell swoop.

But why use “the Sun” as a simile? That definitely catches your attention. The sun is usually a metaphor and simile used for bright and hopeful sentiments. But not if your walking across the desert, right? Also, if you think of the sun only in its scientific definition, if you leave out the romance, mythological dimension of life, and only understand it as a function of physics, groveling as it were before shear fact, then the sun is indeed dead, a ruthless fireball fusing hydrogen into helium, that cares not a wit about life.

Some part of us knows something is wrong, but….

We are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

Say what? Here’s my shot: A “rocking” cradle suggests instability, an unknowingness in an instinctual way, of whose side the MOTHER is on. Is she Athena or Circe? Does she want to kill us or for us to be the savior of the universe? Or in a way, as only Greek Mythology can intimate, be both? Or in another sense, the ground of our own being, of life’s being. Is it an inherently good thing, evil thing, or indifferent? I.e. “Something that should not have been,” as Schopenhauer suggests. Is nature, this thing that our consciousness rests on, inherently nasty, disgusting, and evil? If one has that sense, you will certainly be vexed to nightmare all the way back to birth.

This is when it gets exciting, the adventure. Because this is the entire sense of the burning point what is uniquely you that wants, that must be expressed, that has never been expressed before. Becoming imminent, and yet in a gesture to the East, most likely spontaneously, as the eminence of transcendence, completely without ego.