Benedict de Spinoza taught that the mind can enter a rare state of eternity, timelessness – not as a spirit enduring beyond the corpse, but as a mind collapsing into the eternal. How then should we treat time in our lives? What should time mean to us? Philosopher of mind and metaphysician Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H examines, through the lens of Spinozaism and psychedelic experience, our relationship to time.
The Speaker
Peter Sjöstedt-H is a philosopher of mind who specialises in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of mind.
This video was recorded at the Institute of Art and Ideas’ annual philosophy and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn. For more information and tickets, visit https://howthelightgetsin.org
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UCSF will be among seven California hospitals first in line to get doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. The first to get the vaccine will be healthcare workers, likely beginning in December. [SFGate]
It’s recommended that Aquarians don’t act like alpine swifts, which have been known to fly 200 days without landing; rather, they should stay way down to earth. (Shutterstock photo)
Aries, take stock of exploring frontiers outside your comfort zone
ARIES(March 21-April 19): “A little too much is just enough for me,” joked poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. I suspect that when he said that, he was in a phase similar to the one you’re in now. I bet he was experiencing a flood of creative ideas, pleasurable self-expressions and loving breakthroughs. He was probably right to risk going a bit too far, because he was learning so much from surpassing his previous limitations and exploring the frontiers outside his comfort zone. Now here’s your homework, Aries: Identify two actions you could take that fit the profile I’ve described here.
TAURUS(April 20-May 20): Biologists believe that no tree can grow more than 436 feet tall. As much as an individual redwood or spruce or mountain ash might like to sprout so high that it doesn’t have to compete with other trees for sunlight, gravity is simply too strong for it to pump enough water up from the ground to its highest branches. Keep that in mind as a useful metaphor during the next 10 months, Taurus. Your assignment is to grow bigger and taller and stronger than you ever have before — and know when you have reached a healthy level of being bigger and stronger and taller.
GEMINI(May 21-June 20): I haven’t felt the savory jolt of bacon in my mouth since I was 15, when I forever stopped eating pigs. I still remember that flavor with great fondness, however. I’ve always said I’d love to find a loophole that would allow me to enjoy it again. And then today I found out about a kind of seaweed that researchers at Oregon State University say tastes like bacon and is healthier than kale. It’s a new strain of a red marine algae called dulse. If I can track it down online, I’ll have it for breakfast soon. I bring this to your attention, Gemini, because I suspect that you, too, are primed to discover a fine new substitute — something to replace a pleasure or resource that is gone or taboo or impossible. What could it be?
CANCER(June 21-July 22): By age 49, Cancerian author Norman Cousins had been struck with two debilitating diseases. His physicians gave him a one in 500 chance of recovery. He embarked on a series of unconventional attempts to cure himself, including “laugh therapy” and positive self-talk, among others. They worked. He lived lustily for another 26 years, and wrote several books about health and healing. So perhaps we should pay attention to his belief that “each patient carries his own doctor inside him” — that at least some of our power to cure ourselves resides in inner sources that are not understood or accredited by traditional medicine. This would be a valuable hypothesis for you to consider and test in the coming weeks, Cancerian. (Caveat: But don’t stop drawing on traditional medicine that has been helping you.)
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In accordance with astrological rhythms, I’m giving you permission to be extra regal and majestic in the coming weeks. You have a poetic license to be a supremely royal version of yourself, even to the point of wearing a jeweled crown and purple silk robe. Would you prefer a gold scepter with pearls or a silver scepter with rubies? Please keep in mind, though, that all of us non-Leos are hoping you will be a noble and benevolent sovereign who provides enlightened leadership and bestows generous blessings. That kind of behavior will earn you the right to enjoy more of these lofty interludes in the future.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In the coming weeks, I will refer to you as The Rememberer. Your task will be to deepen and refine your relationship with the old days and old ways — both your own past and the pasts of people you care about most. I hope you will take advantage of the cosmic rhythms to reinvigorate your love for the important stories that have defined you and yours. I trust you will devote treasured time to reviewing in detail the various historical threads that give such rich meaning to your web of life.
LIBRA(Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “Those who build walls are their own prisoners,” wrote Libran author Ursula K. Le Guin. She continued, “I’m going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.” I hope that sounds appealing to you, Libra. Unbuilding walls is my first choice for your prime assignment in the coming weeks. I’d love to see you create extra spaciousness and forge fertile connections. I’ll be ecstatic if you foster a rich interplay of diverse influences. If you’re feeling super-plucky, you might even help unbuild walls that your allies have used to half-trap themselves.
SCORPIO(Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “If you can’t help me grow, there’s no point with you being in my life.” Singer and actress Jill Scott said that. In my view, Scorpios may be the only sign of the zodiac that can assert such a sentiment with total sincerity and authority. For many of the other tribes, it might seem harsh or unenforceable, but for you it’s exactly right—a robust and courageous truth. In addition to its general rightness, it’s also an especially apt principle for you to wield right now. The coming weeks will be a potent time to catalyze deep learning and interesting transformations in concert with your hearty allies.
SAGITTARIUS(Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “You live best as an appreciator of horizons, whether you reach them or not.” Those words from poet David Whyte would be a perfect motto for you to write out on a piece of paper and tape to your bathroom mirror or your nightstand for the next 30 years. Of all the tribes in the zodiac, you Sagittarians are most likely to thrive by regularly focusing on the big picture. Your ability to achieve small day-by-day successes depends on how well you keep the long-range view in mind. How have you been doing lately with that assignment? In the coming weeks, I suspect you could benefit from hiking to the top of a mountain — or the metaphorical equivalent — so you can enjoy seeing as far as you can see.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Sensible Capricorn author E. M. Forster (1879–1970) said, “Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity.” That’s the opposite of what many poets and novelists have asserted down through the ages, which is that passion isn’t truly passion unless it renders you half-crazy, driven by obsession, and subject to delusion and irrationality. But in offering you counsel in this horoscope, I’m aligning myself with Forster’s view. For you in the coming weeks, Capricorn, passion will help you see clearly and keep you mentally healthy.
AQUARIUS(Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Alpine swifts are small birds that breed in Europe during the summer and then migrate long distance to Africa for the winter. Ornithologists were shocked when they discovered that at least some of these creatures fly for more than 200 days without ever once landing on the ground. They’re not always flapping their wings — sometimes they glide — but they manage to do all their eating and drinking and sleeping and mating in mid-air. Metaphorically speaking, I think it’s important for you to not act like the alpine swifts in the coming months, dear Aquarius. Please plan to come all the way down to earth on a regular basis.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): There’s substantial evidence that when people talk to themselves out loud in the midst of doing a task, they improve their chances of succeeding at the task. Have you ever heard athletes giving themselves verbal encouragement during their games and matches? They’re using a trick to heighten their performance. In accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to experiment with this strategy in the coming weeks. Increase your brainpower by regularly offering yourself encouraging, supportive instructions. It’s fine if you just sort of whisper them, but I’d love it if now and then you also bellowed them.
Homework: Imagine it’s 30 years from now and you’re telling God the worst things and best things you ever did. What would they be? Testify at FreeWillAstrology.com.
Reading Maggie Scarf’s groundbreaking new book could change your life. In Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, the bestselling author of Unfinished Business, Intimate Partners, and Intimate Worlds brilliantly explores how the body holds on to painful episodes from the past ”including secrets we may be keeping even from ourselves” and how we can release them to live freer, healthier lives.
The body has a unique memory system, in which early trauma and deeply buried feelings become woven into the fabric of our physical being. Certain events can trigger these body memories, which may then manifest themselves symptomatically”as persistent anger, mood swings, headaches, muscle tension, and fatigue. These echoes from the past also cause destructive patterns in our lives and relationships.
Why does a beautiful, successful woman like Claudia seek out abusive, explosively tense relationships in which she is forced to hide the truth about herself? Why does the presence of a strange woman’s name in her husband’s cell phone directory make Karen feel physically ill, to the point where she cannot get through her daily life? And why does the author herself experience painful physical symptoms when she wrestles with contradictory memories of her mother? Exploring these and other personal narratives, Scarf reveals how the body, through its neurobiological systems, retains some of life’s most important experiences”and describes how new power therapies, such as reprocessing and psychomotor, have had immediate results where traditional therapies have had a lower success rate.
Grounded in recent breakthroughs in mind/body science and drawing on Scarf’s personal experiences, this book is a masterpiece of research, analysis, and insight into the human psyche, and into human life.
In his eighty-first letter to Lucilius, Seneca writes under the heading “On Benefits”:
You complain that you have met with an ungrateful person. If this is your first experience of that sort, you should offer thanks either to your good luck or to your caution. In this case, however, caution can effect nothing but to make you ungenerous. For if you wish to avoid such a danger, you will not confer benefits; and so, that benefits may not be lost with another man, they will be lost to yourself.
It is better, however, to get no return than to confer no benefits. Even after a poor crop one should sow again; for often losses due to continued barrenness of an unproductive soil have been made good by one year’s fertility. In order to discover one grateful person, it is worth while to make trial of many ungrateful ones.
True generosity, Seneca argues, is measured not by the ends of the act but by the spirit from which it springs. He writes:
Benefits, as well as injuries, depend on the spirit… Our feeling about every obligation depends in each case upon the spirit in which the benefit is conferred; we weigh not the bulk of the gift, but the quality of the good-will which prompted it. So now let us do away with guess-work; the former deed was a benefit, and the latter, which transcended the earlier benefit, is an injury. The good man so arranges the two sides of his ledger that he voluntarily cheats himself by adding to the benefit and subtracting from the injury.
In a delightful reminder that even the most serious of thinkers can regard themselves with a sense of humor, Seneca adds a remark he cheekily qualifies as “one of the generally surprising statements such as we Stoics are wont to make and such as the Greeks call ‘paradoxes’”:
The wise man… enjoys the giving more than the recipient enjoys the receiving… None but the wise man knows how to return a favour. Even a fool can return it in proportion to his knowledge and his power; his fault would be a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of will or desire.
In a sentiment which Henry Miller would come to echo two thousand years later in his reflection on the intricate balance of giving and receiving, Seneca considers the meaning of generosity and the proper object of gratitude:
Anyone who receives a benefit more gladly than he repays it is mistaken. By as much as he who pays is more light-hearted than he who borrows, by so much ought he to be more joyful who unburdens himself of the greatest debt — a benefit received — than he who incurs the greatest obligations. For ungrateful men make mistakes in this respect also: they have to pay their creditors both capital and interest, but they think that benefits are currency which they can use without interest. So the debts grow through postponement, and the later the action is postponed the more remains to be paid. A man is an ingrate if he repays a favour without interest.
At the heart of his message is the insistence that true generosity is not transactional and that gratitude, in turn, ought to be calibrated to the intrinsic rewards of the generous act rather than to the veneer of a transactional favor:
We should try by all means to be as grateful as possible. For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves, in a sense in which justice, that is commonly supposed to concern other persons, is not; gratitude returns in large measure unto itself. There is not a man who, when he has benefited his neighbour, has not benefited himself, — I do not mean for the reason that he whom you have aided will desire to aid you, or that he whom you have defended will desire to protect you, or that an example of good conduct returns in a circle to benefit the doer, just as examples of bad conduct recoil upon their authors, and as men find no pity if they suffer wrongs which they themselves have demonstrated the possibility of committing; but that the reward for all the virtues lies in the virtues themselves. For they are not practised with a view to recompense; the wages of a good deed is to have done it. I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act; I feel grateful, not because it profits me, but because it pleases me.
The endless faces of the human psyche become a fascinating playground when it comes to Jungian archetypes. Used in storytelling and psychological methods and dream work, the countless numbers of archetypes provide a framework for the potential paths of the human hero.
Jung outlined that each person should identify and work with twelve main archetypes running through their lives and use them to understand themselves better; their disposition, how the world sees them, and ultimately, their shadow.
Here are 7 particularly transformative ones that can help us to look within. As with our circumstances and past lives, it is best not to associate with one or two in the ego’s need to be labeled, but to recognize that we display all facets within our psyche, whether they’re dormant or active, and that archetypes can embrace the notion that we’re all interdependent; an expression of the same source and the reflection of one another.
We are one.
The Child
The Orphan, the Wounded child the Nature, Magical, Divine and Eternal child all lay deep within. We all have an inner child and the type we need to nurture can tell us a lot about what really wrenches at the chambers of our hearts.
The Orphan is the lost child, without a solid identity they have the opportunity to feel deep suffering yet see life for what it is without attachment. Its shadow is its likelihood of becoming the victim, consumed in its loss, much like the Magical child it will assume it will be ‘saved’ and that fate has more strength than its own actions.
The Divine and Eternal child represents the wise master who is already beginning to return home, they are the sages and prophets who have much to teach us and are calm and all knowing from a young age.
When we begin to take these steps towards the light we will find within us a great sense of innocence and the true loving nature of the world, unlike the Orphan who must be street wise and dog eat dog.
The Ruler
The Matriarch, Patriarch, King, Queen and Ruler use leadership as a means to express and discover themselves.
How we treat others when handed great power can tell us a lot about ourselves and the storybooks are littered with this archetype: the good and mighty rulers, and the tyrants.
The Ice, White Queen or Witch, represented by the Queen of Swords in the Tarot pack is particularly interesting as well as prevalent and questions our traditional notions of ‘evil.’ A woman who has had her heart broken again and again has become so ‘cold’ that she removes herself from society and becomes isolated in a blizzard-ridden landscape, luring children and followers to ride her chariots through the snow.
She is one who can be found in all of us and calls upon us to melt our hearts and trust again, to reconnect with the hero/ine or Goddess within ourselves and rediscover the positive aspects of the Sacred Feminine of kindness, loving compassion and community. In a way we are all coming in from the cold.
The Clown
The Norse trickster god Loki as depicted on an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript
The Jester, Tramp, Joker or Fool’s shadow is those who have become bitter and use their humour to make cruel jibes at those around them. They can be dewy and dim or jackal-like tricksters who invoke the ever-present comedy of life. They call on us to detach from the harsh realities of life and take it with a pinch of salt, often doing so in a seemingly cruel fashion.
They are the masters who have no emotional connections or family but who cause a spark of interest in us and can have a deep impact on us if we meet one. Humour and wit equates power and with this archetype looks can be deceiving.
They also often appear as the everyman and are seldom associated with romance; their path is of a higher calling than love in relationships, they often befriend a child to mirror the innocence and simplicity within themselves.
The Visionary
The Creator, Visionary, Magician and Revolutionary, traditionally very much separate archetypes, have more similarities than you might think. They are the leaders who lead the crowd through their independent thought and ahead-of-their-time ideas. The Magician in the Tarot pack is often one who has mastery over words and the four elements, as is the scientist or inventor.
The Revolutionary is usually more inspired by action, but within this umbrella archetype there can always be found the lone walker who goes against the current, is ridiculed throughout their quest to find their feet and then ultimately followed and revered when finally taken seriously. Passionate and solitary, they are always building; empires, inventions and magical spells, they often blur with the Hermit archetype and can seem more than a little crazy.
The Explorer
The Explorer in this case I’ve put as the Hero; the individual who leaves home to find themselves, battles monsters and then returns home to slay their own demons. As with all journeys, we travel far from home only to discover that what we were looking for was on our doorstep the whole time.
As with Freud’s Oedipus, we can often be so lured away from home that we become drunk on illusion and make huge mistakes, coming face to face with our worst nightmares and invoking tragic consequences. On the other hand, the plight of the hero is the most exciting and adventurous of the archetypes. We all have the hero and heroine within us and it’s often this role that we are avoiding in the form of our true potential.
The Teacher
The Guide, Healer or Teacher is someone to beware when drunk on power. They are the ones who may come with two faces, much like the Politician or Preacher, but unlike them, to the intuitive among us are easy enough to spot.
A true teacher and guru is one who has overcome the many pitfalls of the ego in order to help others in all sincerity.
To practice what one preaches is a great achievement and to awaken others with merely a word is even greater. Stepping aside – having achieved hero status already – in order to lift others up and let them shine is a path that radiates true wisdom and cannot be taken lightly.
In fact it is probably the weightiest responsibility we might take on; carrying others on our shoulders and deflecting a multitude of projections is no easy task.
And lastly…
The Seeker
Wanderer, Disciple and Dreamer, the Seeker is one who appears to be wandering aimlessly with no real goal, but in actual fact is the most freed up for spiritual transformation. Unlike the more ostentatious actions of the Hero/Explorer, the Seeker is much more secretive, nomadic, keeping to the hills and quietly inquiring about all walks of life.
To truly be spontaneous and open to danger is where the real adventure begins, and many a seeker can be found in mythological and psychological wisdom. Like Siddhartha by Hesse and many a seemingly ‘lost’ soul it can take great bravery to be completely unattached.
The shadow side may be a student who is constantly schooled and never ejected into the waters of life, but to be constantly learning with a thirst for knowledge more often than not leads us onto the path to enlightenment.
Questioning everything and searching every corner of this world for answers, the Seeker if she/he knows themselves will not fall into the trap of a charlatan Guru but find a true master or be able to eventually master themselves.
Being unattached to earthly desires and distanced from such attachments as family, career and even the pulls of karma, the Seeker often sticks to high places to remain the observer of human nature and steer clear of any obstruction to the divine.
Although this is only a sample of thousands of archetypes that infiltrate the human psyche, it may trigger an interest in you to discover which archetypes are running through your life and which ones you may be inspired to investigate further.
Created in 1961 by Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso, Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP) is the most advanced therapeutic system available for emotional re-education or reprogramming. PBSP heals past emotional deficits using unique processes called ‘Structures’ and ‘Microtracking™’ that help clients to identify emotional deficits and create ‘new memories’. These ‘new memories’ provide symbolic fulfillment of the basic developmental needs of place, nurture, support, protection and limits. With the inclusion of ‘Holes and Roles,’ the latest innovation in PBSP theory and technique, therapists learn how to provide a highly effective and streamlined approach to reducing resistance, negative transference, and somatic overload. Many aspects of PBSP theories and techniques have close parallels in recent neuroscience findings about mirror neurons, empathy, morality, and the impact of language on the theory of mind.
To learn more about PBSP theory and techniques click here.
In her book, ‘Secrets, Lies, & Betrayals: The Body/Mind Connection,’ Maggie Scarf devotes three chapters to PBSP characterizing it as ‘one of the most remarkably compelling of the alternative (power) therapies.’
You complain that you have met with an ungrateful person. If this is your first experience of that sort, you should offer thanks either to your good luck or to your caution. In this case, however, caution can effect nothing but to make you ungenerous. For if you wish to avoid such a danger, you will not confer benefits; and so, that benefits may not be lost with another man, they will be lost to yourself.
