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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

Épanouissement

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on April 13, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Wingspan

One of the great things about learning a second language is how you keep stumbling across words which are difficult to translate exactly into your first language. I find that doesn’t just expand my vocabulary, but it increases the ways I have to think about, and express, my experiences.

So, here’s a new word for me, and, if you don’t speak French, it’ll be a new word for you too – épanouissement.

I have a Larousse English-French dictionary app on my iPhone – here’s what it says about this word – “blooming”, “opening up”, “lighting up”, “fulfilment”, “self-fulfilment”.

Doesn’t that give you a nice, rich and deep range of ideas and concepts all at once? I love that.

When I took this photo yesterday, I was lucky to catch the bird stretching out its wings and then when I looked at the image on my computer I thought that the combination of the bird stretching out and the tree blossoming really conveyed one underlying phenomenon.

Isn’t this what Life does in the Universe?

Life emerges, expands, grows, matures, expresses itself.

Don’t each of us, as living beings, express ourselves to our fullness? And doesn’t a tree do that, a bird do that, just as you and I do that?

I wouldn’t claim to know what life is all about, but it seems to me that this Universe manifests itself through “épanouissement” – it opens up, it blooms, and it lights up the cosmos with a constant process of self-fulfilment.

Daily I become the most “me” I can become.

Daily the bird in the tree becomes the fullest expression of its unique life. Daily the tree grows from one form to another through the seasons, expressing the uniqueness of its own particular life.

I hope you enjoy both your own personal “épanouissement” today, as well as having the opportunity to enjoy that of some of the other lives around you.

 

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Nourishing – what nourishes your heart, feeds your soul?

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on April 12, 2015| Leave a Comment »

The “N” in my A to Z of Becoming, can stand for “nourish”, so here’s my focus for this week – what nourishes my heart, feeds my soul?

Looking back over the series on re-enchanting life which I posted over the last couple of weeks (scroll down to read them, if you haven’t seen them already), I realise that everything which I find enchanting, stirs my blood, sets my heart beating stronger or faster, and touches me right down to the core of my soul.

Beauty is one of the common factors. Difficult to define but don’t we sure know it when we see it, hear it, touch it?

Love is one of the common factors. Wherever love stirs, the heart leaps and the soul expands.

You’ll have some of your own, I’m sure, but here’s just a few photographs I’ve taken recently which nourish me –

…the first “gariguettes” of the season – wow! what a taste!

The love locks in Paris – it’s as if they exude love into the air, surrounding you, filling you, gladening your heart.

Relaxing by a pool at lunch time, seeing the simple pleasures of sharing a bite to eat, of chatting with friends, of reading, sailing a boat, or simply snoozing..

Cheers! Here’s to whatever nourishes your heart, your soul, your body and your mind. May you taste it, feel it, hear it, see it, know it, be amazed by it, every single day.

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Shiny new leaves

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 10, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Shiny new leaves

Oh, wow! Look at the new leaves coming out on the vine at the end of my garden!

Look how shiny they are! Brand new and glistening!

I love to stumble across these moments of emergence, seeing the Life Force surging through the bare stalks and bursting into colour and shape like this.

It reminded me – there is no such thing as a fixed object in this universe. You can see that easily when you encounter the leading edge of life, but if you think anything you see is a fixed object, then you are either just not paying close enough attention, or you aren’t looking for long enough.

Becoming not being, that’s the way of the universe.

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We are not machines

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 6, 2015| Leave a Comment »

cogwheel
Andreas Weber, who coined the term “enlivenment” (to follow the “enlightenment”) describes how biology is changing to a more life-focused understanding, than the till now dominant reductionist parts-focused one –

Such eminent biological and systems thinkers as Lynn Margulis, Francisco Varela, Alicia Juarrero, Stuart Kauffman and Gregory Bateson have opened up a picture in which organisms are no longer seen as machines competing with other machines, but rather as a natural phenomenon that “creates” and develops itself in a material way while continuously making and expressing experiences

I like that. It captures a lot in a few words. We are self-making, self-developing creatures who are bodies (not who have bodies). And we continuously make (co-create) and express (not least through our stories and our art) our experiences.

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Re-enchanting life with symbols

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on April 4, 2015| 1 Comment »

Triskele buttons

What are your favourite symbols? Which symbols mean the most to you?

i wear a yin yang symbol around my neck. I love what it represents, that flowing balance of darkness and light, the harmony of the male and female energies, and the subtle hint that each opposite contains the other.

But I am also a fan of the more Celtic type of triple spiral, the triskele. I took this photo of buttons when I visited an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris because in all the variations of triple spirals I have seen, this is a new one on me.

As far as I am aware, human beings are the only creatures to create and use symbols. Choosing to have around us symbols which are personally meaningful can deepen the quality of every day experiences.

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The key to re-enchanting your life

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on April 1, 2015| 2 Comments »

sunset mackerel sky

I’ve been posting a series on re-enchanting life over the last few days. Scroll down through the last few posts from here to read them, or put “re-enchanting” into the search box on the top right of the site.

What, specifically, will be re-enchanting for you, may well be different from what works for me, or someone else, but there is a common underlying key.

That key is emotion.

What quickens our heart, what stirs our soul, deepens our experience.

If you would like to explore how to develop your heart feelings, check out “Heartmath” (I have written a simple introduction to this practice on this site – put “Heartmath” in the search box to find it). It’s a simple basic technique which can be developed to increase your awareness of how you process life from your “heart centre”. I mean that both from a neurobiological physical perspective, as well as from a metaphoric subjective one.

If you would like to explore stirring your soul, then I suppose I need to be clear what I mean by soul. Thomas Moore who wrote The Care of the Soul opened up my understanding of soul when I heard him speak in Glasgow a few years ago. He said we can understand what soul is by thinking how we use the word – soul music, soul food, soul mate.

Life can be lived on autopilot. That’s the theme of “heroes not zombies”, a theme you will find throughout this blog. An autopilot life, a zombie life, is thin and superficial. It isn’t nourishing. It isn’t satisfying. And it can drop us into a place of alienation and disenchantment very easily.

I believe we can re-enchant our lives, making them deeper and richer, more meaningful and satisfying. We can do that by choosing to experience what stirs us most strongly in our hearts and souls.

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Re-enchanting life with music

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the music room, life, music, personal growth, philosophy, photography on March 31, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Opera Paris

Music.

That most human of practices. Yes, I know birds sing and so on, but look at the place of music in human life.

Is there any other creature which creates and enjoys music as much as human beings? I don’t think so. Indeed, I think we tend to hear the music in Nature, or rather, that we turn the sounds we hear into music. We even talk about the music of the spheres, as a way of thinking about the structure of the cosmos.

Iain McGilchrist, in his wonderful The Master and His Emissary, discusses the theory that music preceded language and that rings true for me.

Music is as individual as we are. How easy we find it to recognise a particular singer, or guitarist for example? Or to recognise the work of a particular composer?

Music moves us. It can affect our mood, lifting us up, getting us going, slowing us down, calming us.

Music opens the floodgates of memory taking us back in an instant to a particular time of our lives, or to a particular event.

Music connects us. It connects us to individuals in our lives, both those still with us, and those who have passed on. Sharing the experience of a concert can create an intense feeling of solidarity and belonging with the others in the audience.

Music moves us physically too, affecting our heart rate, our breathing, the release of a cascade of hormones in our bodies which change our internal environment…..one of the ways in which music can heal.

Music can inspire us, stimulating our creativity or helping us to achieve certain goals.

These days it is so easy to create playlists, to gather together particular works of music which can influence us in certain ways. And we can share those playlists with others too.

So, here’s an idea. Why not make yourself some playlists? List some of the ways in which music affects YOU and then gather some particular examples together to make playlists for each of those ways. Then use those playlists where and whenever you desire. Experience for yourself just how music can re-enchant your life.

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Re-enchanting life through stories

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, photography on March 30, 2015| 1 Comment »

Living stories

Human beings are story telling creatures.

I think our daily lives are influenced by stories. The question is which stories and who is telling them?

I took this photo in Paris a couple of weeks ago and two things strike me about it – the large sculpture, and the solo man walking by, apparently oblivious. Paris has these kinds of sculpture everywhere, and often they are of characters from classical mythology. Every one of these works of art tells a story. But most people today probably don’t know these myths. When you don’t know these myths, the sculptures become statues, and we either don’t notice them once they become familiar to us, or we notice them and can be affected by them as works of art. In the latter case, they retain the power to enchant, but what might life be like if their stories come to our minds when we pass these great works?

I think the man in this photo may be passing by uninfluenced, and somehow I get a forlorn or lonely feeling looking at him.

In the classical era, the people of Greece were surrounded by such art, but they interacted with it, dressing their sculptures, contemplating them. They represented living gods to them. Great powers which could influence their daily lives.

What stories surround us now?

Stories of fear, of violence, of injustice? Stories of hatred, division and alienation? Stories of celebrities, famous for being famous? Stories of desire and calls to consume (advertising)?

Are some of these stories responsible for the common feelings of disenchantment?

We can re-enchant our lives, give them more depth and more meaning by choosing to create and live our own stories. We can choose what art, what symbols, what music, what objects imbued with personal meaning to surround ourselves with. We can choose to focus on certain stories we find delight us, challenge us, wake us up, stir our hearts, touch our souls.

We can tell our stories to ourselves as we write in our journals. We can share our stories in our blogs. We can tell our stories to each other.

You do this all the time.

But what stories do you tell? And what stories flow through your head? The first step in moving from zombie to hero (the hero is the main protagonist in a story) is to become aware. The second step is choosing to act…..moving from passive mode to active mode. You’ll find plenty of posts on this site about that. Start by putting “story” into the search box at the top of this page. Or try the “a to z of becoming”.

Storytelling is not optional. It never stops. Time to choose which stories you pay attention to?

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Love, a universal force

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on March 29, 2015| 1 Comment »

Kyoto

In my A to Z of Becoming, I’ve reached “L” again, and so the chance to contemplate LOVE again.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago. I won’t tell the whole dream here, but the relevant part is that in this dream I heard a voice. You know how sometimes in a dream there is a voice, not coming from a character in the dream but clear all the same, maybe like the voice of the narrator in a movie, or maybe your own voice in your own head. The voice said

“Love, the greatest creative force in the Universe. Love, the greatest destructive force in the Universe”

Then I woke up.

The creative force I understand. I’m comfortable with that. It seems to me that love is necessary to build relationships which are mutually beneficial (the essence of “integration”, the creation of mutually beneficial bonds). I can see that love is a law of attraction. Even as two molecules come together, what binds them and so creates a more complex compound, is affinity and attraction. Aren’t they qualities of love? At the level of molecules we aren’t thinking about consciousness of course, but in the story of the Universe from the time of only hydrogen molecules, through the creation of stars and planets, to the emergence of Life on Earth, and on towards the creation of human beings with consciousness, we see an ever increasing complexity, uniqueness and diversity from the constant creation of affinities, attractions and integrative bonds.

But the destructive force? That bothered me, and it popped into my head many times in the following days. Then I had the thought……on this planet Earth, as far as we know, from the time the world was created, there have been no new atoms. Every object,  every plant, every animal, every person who exists today is created from the exact same atoms which have created every object, every plant, every animal and every person who existed before us.

Nature, and the Universe, create by breaking down what exists to make new objects and new life.

So, if love is THE creative force, then it too can be seen to be a destructive one. It’s just that those terms are value laden terms for us – one good, one bad, or one positive and one negative – and so opposites. But if love is both of these then maybe this judging and placing into opposite categories is stopping us from seeing the inter-connectedness of everything.

Then, this week I got a copy of Mary Oliver’s “A Thousand Mornings”, and in that collection of poems is one entitled “Lines written in the days of growing darkness”. In that poem are these lines –

And therefore

who would cry out

to the petals on the ground

to stay,

knowing as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

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Re-enchanting life with synchronicity

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on March 28, 2015| 2 Comments »

Tuileries

Having been inspired to write about the re-enchantment of life by my trip to Paris last week, I have started to write a series of posts. The day before yesterday I focused on beauty – how becoming aware of beauty can make life more magical.

Later that morning I opened a novel which I purchased last week. It is “Le Principe” by Jérôme Ferrari. I bought it because it’s about Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle, which is something which has fascinated me for ages, and because I decided to start reading French novels to improve my French language skills.

I won’t quote specific passages or try to translate them here, but on page 3, the author says that Heisenberg and other Physicists investigating subatomic phenomena were startled by how their experimental results could not be explained by classical physics, and it was all very confusing and baffling for them, but what drove Heisenberg on, what stimulated and supported his determination, was “his faith in beauty”.

His faith in beauty! Not his dedication to reason, mathematics or science, but his faith in beauty.

Wow! I didn’t see that coming! How does that happen? That synchronicity? I have a number of ideas about re-enchanting life, and beauty is one of them. I happen to pick that to write about that day, then two hours later I open this French novel about a scientist, and read that passage.

Suddenly, in that moment, I sit bolt upright, put the book town and sigh. How amazing! How incredible life is! How unpredictable and curious it is! I pick it up again and re-read it carefully (I’m still a learner and might have misunderstood) and there it is – beauty – the motivating principle.

So in that moment I find another way to re-enchant life – to be aware of, and to relish, the moments of synchronicity.

Those experiences are certainly not a daily occurrence for me, but they do happen frequently. How about you? Do you experience synchronicities? If you do, take your time to savour them. They are a gift.

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