How to reinvent? When Authenticity and Meaning Conflict How can we authentically engage in new projects that don’t fit with the meaning we have attached to an identity we have created for ourselves? Most of us have run up against this at some point: You want to do or be something new, meaningfully, and give it your all. But a little voice inside says, “That’s not you. You’re always trying new things. Stick to who you are, what you are good at.” You reply, “But I’m not satisfied with who I am, what I am good at. I want more out of life. Not a new hobby. I want to reinvent.” I long to be someone who is not the person I have come to think of as me. What should we do when we dream about a new way of being but are hesitant because we’ve come to identify with a self that has a history and boundaries we’ve created along the way? How can we best think about authenticity … [Read more...]
Reality and the Problem with Transcendence
To live fulfillment, we must release identity and embrace difference. Fulfillment To grasp what might be meant by leading a fulfilling life, to experience it and feel it, we have to have an understanding of our environment. Otherwise, we have no bearings. Our lives unfold and connect with everything around us, and everything inside. We dream and fantasize at times, and sometimes spend long hours interpreting events in our lives, but we always come back to our relationship with this place where we exist, our universe. Our reality, what we consider to be real, is a cornerstone of our understanding of how to live fulfillment. We forget this sometimes. We fall into a routine of selective perception of our surroundings, and sometimes fail to see and hear the remarkable — that we could connect with, if only we noticed. How might we change this way of being? For the idea or … [Read more...]
Affirm the Return of Pure Difference
Thoughts on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. If the world had a goal it must have been reached — Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche posited the eternal recurrence, the will to relive every moment of a life, exactly as it has been lived, over and over again. Did Nietzsche mean that what eternally returns is exactly the same every time? What returns is pure difference, becoming. Being is static, an image, complete. Becoming is a never-ending return of the new, the open. There is no world goal, no perfect state of being. Nietzsche urges us to open our lives to that which is the genesis of life itself: a process of evolving to something new, over and over again. What must return in us is the will to pure difference — transformation of what exists, what was, into the creation of something that has never existed before. For life is the affirmation of the new, … [Read more...]
To Create Reality not Observe
Bergson, Deleuze and time as duration: the possibilities for radical freedom in a universe alive with creativity. To grasp meaning in our lives, and enjoy that meaning, we require a new sense of time. Time is our most precious commodity. But our common understanding of time, scientific time, marches forward with or without us, and runs us down in the process. We require a theory of time that accounts for our most important moments in life: life changing moments, when common time stands still, becomes irrelevant. Armed with a new sense of time, we can immerse in the pure bliss of life, and access the force of creativity and love that we know intuitively is the stuff of which we are made. Time as Duration An immanent philosophy of difference, as put forward by Gilles Deleuze, is a process philosophy, a temporal philosophy. It requires a revitalized theory of time. … [Read more...]
Ecophilosophy is the Affirmation of Life
To address climate change we must transform the way we think. Nowhere is there a need to openly explore our concepts and values more than in relation to the current environmental issues we face collectively. The drastic reduction of biodiversity, accelerating overpopulation, and the marching onslaught of climate change threaten to destroy the planet’s current ecosystem once and for all. We require a new understanding of reality. Nothing short of changing our understanding of reality and existence, our way of thinking, and our collective values vis-à-vis the environment are required to avoid extinction of the biosphere as we know it. Deep Ecology Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that argues for a radical change to the way we think of and interact with the environment. Deep ecology asserts the inherent worth of all life irrespective of its instrumental … [Read more...]