Recording: Paying attention to life

Have you ever wondered what Bernardo really means when he speaks of the importance of paying attention to life?

Well, in this session he comes clean! (About half-way through.)

Elsewhere, our conversation ranged from the role of trauma in the Western Path to the role of art in life.

For example, we discussed:

Intuition vs instinct and how maximal individuation, living as the truest expression of your nature, results in maximal depersonalisation. Just one of many examples of the collapse of the opposites on the Western Path, and other ideas from Owen Barfield, one of Bernardo's 10 most recommended authors.

Whilst the ability to discern patterns in nature is a spiritual gift, our culture can get lost in such abstractions to the point that we call information a thing. Information can only ever be a description of the states of things. Going too far in the direction of abstraction is to the detriment of soul, of the feminine, the touchable sense of reality, and we need both soul and spirit. 

How faith is not belief - faith is an openness to that which we cannot understand, and singletarianism and transhumanism reflect the religious impulse natural to humanity, but distorted by materialism.  

We discussed the ultimate purpose of art and of life. No matter how imaginative and fictitious your creation might be, your art reveals something about you. It exposes you, to yourself as does the way you live. So whilst art may be therapeutic, the expressive self-discovery of life is not a means to an end. Rather, everything else is a means to art.

I hope you find this inspiring, and I look forward to seeing you next week!

Amir

Time stamps

Courtesy of Rita Conde

00:00:43 - Upcoming Essentia Foundation conference in Switzerland
00:05:00 - This week’s topics; poll to vote on the most pressing questions
00:06:46 - Guidance on how to submit questions
00:07:34 - Trauma appears to be less frequent in communal environments
00:09:28 - Coniunctio oppositorum in Jung
00:09:45 - What is individuation?
00:10:10 - A path of higher vulnerability
00:12:40 - Those exposed to stress help the group advance
00:13:50 - Trauma can sometimes lead to some form of good 
00:15:52 - We need a narrative
00:16:25 - What the Daimon wills
00:17:00 - Suffering and trauma as tools of nature
00:18:18 - Paying your dues to the impersonal
00:18:40 - Sacrifice grows from inner awareness
00:20:50 - Final Participation and the Second Coming of Christ
00:21:59 - Intuition and instinct
00: 23:54 - Comments on the book Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
00:24:40 - We are emotional aliens
00:25:45 - The Daimon: archetypal will that drives us and the world
00:26:16 - A deeper me is out there
00:26:36 - The historical figure of Jesus Christ
00:28:00 - Maximum individuation is maximum depersonalization
00:28:42 - What is the Final Participation?
00:29:02 - The collapse of opposites
00:29:43 - The language of early human beings
00:31:38 - Reading an interiority
00:32:42 - The power of symbolic evocation of appearances
00:35:04 - Dancing with appearances resonates more with the Western path
00:36:36 - Are we on the verge of a new science?
00:40:10 - Soul and spirit in Jungian psychology
00:45:03 - We got lost in abstraction to the detriment of soul
00:46:43 - The union of opposites
00:48:48 - Owen Barfield’s publisher 
00:50:40 - Bernardo’s view on The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser
00:53:15 - Perspectival, multi-perspectival, and a-perspectival states of consciousness
00:57:03 - Opening to the Daimon is opening to the a-perspectival view
01:00:00 - Daimonic life is living from the perspective of eternity
01:01:46 - Faith as openness to what the intellect cannot apprehend
01:02:27 - The Daimon doesn’t explain itself
01:04:08 - Meeting the Daimon without expecting it
01:04:34 - Paying attention to life
01:11:11 - Life will always self-organize
01:13:10 - Art, a path to self-discovery and the mystery of being?
01:16:10 - Jung’s Red Book
01:20:00 - Art as the ultimate purpose: to confront oneself
01:21:21 - Does Bernardo have road rage?
01:22:14 - A supernova: destroyer of stars, yet beautiful
01:23:03 - Subjectivity cannot know itself
01:23:40 - Mathematics can never be complete
01:24:48 - Life is the mirror
01:26:26 - Lapis Philosophorum, or the thing we need the most at every second of our life
01:27:00 - The abysmal secret terror
01:29:36 - If AI is a mechanism and conscious, then we must also be mechanisms
01:31:26 - The compelling desire to turn humans into mechanisms
01:32:50 - The endless depth going down, the endless pull going up
01:33:50 - If you acknowledge God, you must acknowledge the Devil
01:34:40 - Patterns of addictive culture
01:36:05 - The monster lives within
01:36:52 - Can AI become conscious? On Singularitarianism and transhumanism
01:43:40 - Everything is in consciousness, but not everything is conscious
01:45:22 - The creation of artificial life
01:46:25 - The religion of AI
01:48:28 - The religious impulse
01:53:20 - Insidious cults that bypass our intellectual defenses
01:54:23 - Creating a good God
01:55:40 - Closing the session
01:57:00 - Next week’s topic
01:58:11 - Bernardo’s remarks on classic Islamic philosophy of imagination

Recording