Event on Saturdays: Intro Empathy Cafe: Find out how to listen to others and to speak without interruption or fear of interruption. Meet people from around the world. Saturdays at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Zoom Room: https://zoom.us/j/9896109339
Events on Sundays: Empathy Circle: Current Events in the World and in Your World. This is an open group which uses the Empathy Circle process of active listening. The subject is “Current Events in the World and in Your World” or whatever else is alive for you in your heart or mind. The facilitator is Mike Zonta (ECF): Sundays at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Join Zoom Meeting: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84929930360
You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting: “Current Events in the World and in Your World.”
“People do not know and need to be instructed in how – what is happening all over the world is a picture, in exaggerated degree, of what is happening inside themselves to a varying degree.” ~ Dr. Paul Brunton, The Spiritual Crisis of Man
This is an open group which uses the Empathy Circle process of active listening. (See below.) The subject is “Current Events in the World and in Your World” or whatever else is alive for you in your heart or mind. The facilitator is Mike Zonta (ECF).
1. The first person selects who they will speak to; 2. they speak about whatever comes up for them for a set time (typically 3-5 min); 3. the listener reflects back what they are hearing until the speaker feels heard and understood to their satisfaction. 4. Then it is the listener’s turn to select who they will speak to and for that new listener to reflect back what they are hearing. 5. Everyone helps hold the circle process by monitoring & sticking to the steps.
The dialog continues around the circle like this for the time allotted.
Speaker Tips
* Pause often to give the listener a chance to reflect what they heard. * When you are done talking and you feel heard, you can say “I’m fully heard” to indicate that you are done with your turn.
Active Listener/Reflector
* In your own words reflect back the essence of what you hear the speaker saying. * Refrain from asking questions, judging, analyzing, detaching, diagnosing, advising or sympathizing. When it’s your turn to speak, you can say anything you want. * You may ask the speaker to pause periodically so you can reflect what you heard.
Silent Listeners
* Listen and be present to the exchange between the speaker and active listener/reflector. You will soon have a turn to actively listen and speak.
The man represented by the Knight of Wands will be a loving and open-hearted person, with a strong sense of morality and a great sense of humour. He will be active, energetic and willing to help. You often find these types of men in the healing professions, or in other areas where they are required to assist, guide and support others.He’s a man with a deep respect for life and all living things, attuned to Nature and to the creatures of the earth. He has a deep well of compassion which spills over readily to anyone who needs his help, but he also has the restraint to know when too much assistance is a bad thing. Then he will act to enable and empower, rather than to assisting.He’s a faithful, and dedicated family man, being fully engaged in the domestic situation. His life reflects his high ethical standards, though he is not given to sermonising, nor standing in judgement on others. He could be defined as an idealistic realist – accepting the frailties of the race, whilst doing his best to strengthen it.His faults spring from his good points – for instance, he dislikes causing pain, and will therefore delay when he needs to act if he thinks it will hurt other people. He will sometimes remain in limiting or painful circumstances because of this. His sense of rightness and duty is intense, and sometimes drives him to make foolish choices and decisions. He will shy away from conflict and unpleasant situations, especially when these arise as a result of his own needs, though he will never walk away from a struggle on behalf of somebody else.If you are regarding this card as a spiritual change, then see it as an indication that the warrior of right and light is required – you’ll need to stand up for something that matters, and which is unable to defend itself.
The Lotus Sūtra (Sanskrit: सद्धर्मपुण्डरीकसूत्रम्, romanized: Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra, lit. ‘Sūtra on the White Lotus of the True Dharma’)[1] is one of the most influential and venerated Buddhist Mahāyāna sūtras. It is the main scripture on which the Tiantai, Tendai, Cheontae, and Nichiren schools of Buddhism were established. It is also influential for other East Asian Buddhist schools, such as Zen. According to the British BuddhologistPaul Williams, “For many Buddhists in East Asia since early times, the Lotus Sūtra contains the final teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha—complete and sufficient for salvation.”[2] The American Buddhologist Donald S. Lopez Jr. writes that the Lotus Sūtra “is arguably the most famous of all Buddhist texts,” presenting “a radical re-vision of both the Buddhist path and of the person of the Buddha.”[3]
Two central teachings of the Lotus Sūtra have been very influential for Mahāyāna Buddhism. The first is the doctrine of the One Vehicle, which says that all Buddhist paths and practices lead to Buddhahood and so they are all merely “skillful means” of reaching Buddhahood. The second is the idea that the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable and that therefore, he did not really pass on into final Nirvana (he only appeared to do so as upāya), but is still active teaching the Dharma.[note 1]
The Japanese title of the Lotus Sutra (daimoku) depicted in a stone inscription.
The earliest known Sanskrit title for the sūtra is the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra, which can be translated as “the Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma” or “The Discourse on the White Lotus of the True Doctrine.”[4][5] In English, the shortened form Lotus Sūtra is more common.
Translations of this title into Asian languages include the following:[6]
Chinese: 妙法蓮華經; pinyin: Miàofǎ Liánhuá jīng (shortened to 法華經; Fǎhuá jīng). This is the title of Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation. The characters mean: Subtle (妙) Dharma (法) Lotus (蓮) Exalted (華) Sutra (經). Shortened title: 法華経, Fa-hua jingin (Dharma Exalted Sutra). The title of Dharmaraksha’s Chinese translation is Zheng-fa-hua jing (正法華經), or True Dharma Exalted Sutra.
Vietnamese: Diệu pháp Liên hoa kinh (short: Pháp hoa kinh).
According to Donald S. Lopez Jr., the puṇḍarīka (the white lotus) is “a symbol of particular purity in Indian literature,” while the term “saddharma” (“true doctrine”) is “used to distinguish the Lotus Sūtra from all other previous teachings of the Buddha.”[5] The lotus flower imagery is also said to point to the earthly connection of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The lotus is rooted in the earthly mud and yet flowers above the water in the open air, just like the bodhisattva lives in the world but remains unstained by it.[6]
The Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282) regarded the title as the summary of the Lotus Sūtra‘s teachings. The chanting of the title is the basic religious practice he advocated during his lifetime.[7][8]
Main themes
In the parable of the burning house (shown in the upper part of this Korean illustration of the sutra), a father uses three types of carts as a way to get his sons to exit a burning house. However, when they escape the fire, they all receive only one type of cart.
One Vehicle, Many Skillful Means
The Lotus Sūtra is known for its extensive instruction on skillful means (Sanskrit: upāyakauśalya or upāya, Ch.: fangbian, Jp.: hōben), which refers to how Buddhas teach in many ways adapted to the needs of their disciples. This concept of Buddhist pedagogical strategies is often explained through parables or allegories.[9] In the Lotus, the many ‘skillful’ or ‘expedient’ practices and teachings taught by the Buddha (including the “three vehicles” to awakening) are revealed to all be part of the “One Vehicle” (Skt.: ekayāna, Ch.:一乘; yīchéng), the supreme and all encompassing path that leads to Buddhahood.[9][10] Moreover, this single vehicle is none other than the myriad skillful means which are its expressions and modes. As the Buddha says in the sutra “seek as you will in all ten directions, there is no other vehicle, apart from the upāyas of the buddhas.”[9]
The One Vehicle is associated with the Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle”), which is a path that rejects the cutting off of rebirth (the individual nirvana or “extinction” of the Buddhist saint) and seeks to heroically remain in the world of suffering to help others attain awakening, all while working towards complete Buddhahood.[9] In the Lotus Sūtra, the One Vehicle encompasses many different and seemingly contradictory teachings because the Buddha’s great compassion and wish to save all beings (bodhicitta) led him to adapt the teaching to suit many different kinds of people and contexts.[11] As the Buddha states in the Lotus Sūtra: “Ever since I became a buddha, I have used a variety of causal explanations and a variety of parables to teach and preach, and countless skillful means to lead living beings.”[12]
The Lotus Sūtra sees also all other teachings are subservient to, propagated by and in the service of the ultimate truth of the “One Buddha–Vehicle”, a goal that is available to all.[13][14] This can and has been interpreted by some figures in an exclusive and hierarchical sense, as meaning that all other Buddhist teachings are to be dispensed with.[9] However, Reeves and other interpreters understand the one vehicle in a more pluralist and inclusive sense which embraces and reconciles all Buddhist teachings and practices. Some have even applied this universalism to non-Buddhist teachings.[9][14]
Reeves also notes that the theme of unity and difference also includes other ideas besides the one vehicle. According to Reeves “on more than one occasion, for example, the many worlds of the universe are brought together into a unity.” Similarly, though there are said to be many Buddhas, they are all closely connected with Shakyamuni and they all teach the same thing.[15]
All beings have the potential to become Buddhas
The dragon king’s daughter offers her priceless pearl to the Buddha. The narrative of her instantaneous attainment of Buddhahood was understood as a promise of the enlightenment of women.[16] Frontispiece of a 12th century Lotus Sutra handscroll.[17]
Another important teaching of the Lotus Sūtra is that all beings can become Buddhas.[18] The sutra sees the awakening of a Buddha as the only and ultimate goal and it boldly claims that “of any who hear the dharma, none shall fail to achieve buddhahood”.[9] Numerous figures in the sutra receive predictions of future Buddhahood, including the ultimate Buddhist villain Devadatta.[19][20][21] In chapter 10, the Buddha points out that all sorts of people will become Buddhas, including monks, nuns, laypeople, along with numerous non-human beings like nagas.[22] Even those, who practice only simple forms of devotion, such as paying respect to the Buddha, or drawing a picture of the Buddha, are assured of their future Buddhahood.[23]
According to Gene Reeves, this teaching also encourages this potential for Buddhahood in all beings, even in enemies as well as “to realize our own capacity to be a buddha for someone else.”[18] According to Reeves, the story of the little Dragon Girl promotes the idea that women can also become Buddhas just like male monks.[24] Reeves sees this as an inclusive message which “affirms the equality of everyone and seeks to provide an understanding of Buddha-dharma that excludes no one.”[24]
Although the term buddha-nature (buddhadhatu) is not mentioned in the Lotus Sūtra, Japanese scholars Hajime Nakamura and Akira Hirakawa suggest that the concept is implicitly present in the text.[25][26] An Indian commentary (attributed to Vasubandhu), interprets the Lotus Sūtra as a teaching of buddha-nature and later East Asian commentaries tended to adopt this view.[27][28] Chinese commentators pointed to the story of bodhisattva Never Disparaging in chapter 20 as evidence that the Lotus taught buddha-nature implicitly.[9]
Could DAOs, or “decentralized autonomous organizations,” be the key to building the next great city? Experimental urbanist Scott Fitsimones shares how these mission-driven, blockchain-governed, collectively owned organizations could increase the speed and efficiency of building cities (among many other applications) — all while pooling decision-making power in a radically collaborative way. Hear about how he started a “crypto co-op” that bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming and learn more about the potential for DAOs to get things done in the future.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.
Scott Fitsimones believes in building the things you want to see exist in the world. In his case, this means trying to build a new kind of city, powered by blockchain.
Each of us has, I hope, at one point in time discovered a thinker whose writing captures exactly what we think, or have been trying to think, but couldn’t find the right words to say. As the poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1711, in self-fulfilling lines: ‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,/ What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d …’ Regular readers of Aeon+Psyche will be familiar with the dilemma that such a discovery poses: the powerful influence of this great mind, who promises to broaden the horizons of your thinking, is at the same time so potentially overwhelming that it threatens your ability to think for yourself. What was supposed to help expand your mind may, in fact, close it. How, then, to keep it open?
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – who was, as it happens, this sort of discovery for me – placed the highest value on thinking for yourself. (There is, of course, a single German word for this activity: Selbstdenken, which is also the title of one of Schopenhauer’s essays.) For him it was, above all, an intellectual virtue: it is the only way for us to make our knowledge truly secure. But it appears also to have had an existential dimension for him: if we lose the ability for independent thought, then we miss out on a key opportunity to become our authentic, original selves. And then there is a straightforwardly practical consideration: if you fail to think for yourself, how will you know what you should do, as opposed to the things you are simply told to do?
For these reasons, Schopenhauer was surprisingly critical of the value of reading; if we read too much, he thought, then we will fail to think for ourselves. His stance on reading is surprising in a couple of ways. First of all, it is a paradoxical piece of advice from anyone who expresses themselves in writing and therefore, presumably, hopes to be read. Secondly, Schopenhauer was himself extremely well read. Turn to any page of Schopenhauer’s works and you will likely find him quoting from ‘great books’ in all traditions – ancient and modern, East and West. I just tried it myself and landed on Lucretius.
The novelist Marcel Proust, who admired Schopenhauer and noticed the same ‘dangers of erudition’ as him, also noticed how Schopenhauer’s own approach to book-learning offered an exemplary solution to the problem. One solution – not Schopenhauer’s – would have been to suppress his erudition and contrive or pretend to be as little well read as possible; the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, prided himself on how little philosophy he had read (although he too had been an avid reader of Schopenhauer). However, Schopenhauer, says Proust, ‘offers us the image of a mind whose vitality wears the most enormous reading lightly …’ In other words, Schopenhauer never pretended to be anything other than extremely well read, but he was always, clearly, his own ultimate authority.
And Proust, in his own reading of Schopenhauer, is of course an exemplary case study himself. Apart from the fact that he evidently read Schopenhauer very carefully, it will be obvious to anyone who reads his novels that Proust, like Schopenhauer, was deeply bookish – especially with his characters’ tendency to produce verbatim quotations from Jean Racine or Victor Hugo. There’s a reason, after all, that Proust devoted an entire essay to the topic of reading and the important role it had played in his intellectual development, which is where we can find his remarks on Schopenhauer. And yet, no one will deny that Proust was, or became, a truly original writer and thinker.
So, apart from leading by example, what advice did these two great minds have for being highly erudite, on the one hand, while still thinking for yourself, on the other.
Think it through
Don’t use reading as a substitute for thinking
Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking’ and, for this reason, ‘erudition makes most people even more stupid and simple than they already are by nature’. We have already discussed the irony of this coming from a man as erudite as Schopenhauer, but what exactly was his problem with reading? Two main things seem to concern him. The first is a sort of opportunity cost: when you are reading, you could be thinking for yourself. But this is only a problem if the kind of thinking you do while you are reading – because reading is at least some form of thinking – is significantly different from, and lesser than, the kind you do when you are not reading. This leads to Schopenhauer’s second and deeper concern, which is to do with originality. Reading, he thinks, inserts ‘foreign and heterogeneous’ thoughts into our own, which never truly belong to us. Characteristically, Schopenhauer draws on a range of images to illustrate this point: reading is like ‘the seal to the wax on which it presses its imprint’; it ‘sticks to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose or at best one formed by rhinoplasty from another’s flesh’; the book-learner ‘resembles an automaton put together from foreign materials,’ while the independent thinker ‘resembles a living, begotten human being’, because ‘what is acquired through one’s own thinking resembles the natural limb’.
Thinking for yourself will make your thoughts your own
As is clear from Schopenhauer’s attack on reading, the primary intellectual virtues that derive from thinking for yourself, apart from originality, include authenticity and ownership. We can see this in Schopenhauer’s tendency to think of the book-learner as being like an artificial composite of foreign elements, as opposed to the natural and organic unity of the independent thinker. Thinking for yourself also enables a special kind of spontaneity, variety and responsiveness to one’s surrounding: ‘the intuitive environment’, Schopenhauer says, ‘does not force one specific thought on the mind, like reading; instead, it provides the mind with material and occasion to think what is in accordance with its nature and present mood’. The world we encounter in reading has already been organised according to the mind of the author, whereas our own direct experiences of the wider world demand that we impose some order on it for ourselves. If all goes well, the ultimate result of thinking for yourself is what Schopenhauer calls ‘the maturity of knowledge’, a state of total organic integration between thoughts and experiences:
an exact connection has been brought about between all of his abstract concepts and his intuitive apprehension, so that each of his concepts directly or indirectly rests on an intuitive basis … and likewise that he is able to subsume every intuition coming before him under its correct and suitable concept.
‘This maturity,’ Schopenhauer adds, ‘is entirely independent of the remaining greater or lesser perfection of anyone’s capabilities.’ In other words, it’s not to do with the power of one’s intellect, but the organisation of its contents.
For Schopenhauer as for Proust, thinking is, at the very least, paying attention; it is taking a look at things for yourself. Above all, it avoids putting an alien concept between the mind and the world, otherwise the two will not make contact. This is not to suggest that we should aim at seeing the world as it is without concepts – whatever that would mean – but that we must find, or sometimes create, just the right concepts in order really to see it at all. When Proust said that with Schopenhauer ‘each new item of knowledge [is] at once reduced to its element of reality, to the portion of life that it contains’, he meant that, as if authenticating a work of art, Schopenhauer always checked the provenance; anything he found in books was assimilated only if he could trace it back to experience.
Combine your reading with thinking for yourself
Of course, Schopenhauer was never totally against reading. Some parts of the case he makes against reading could even be presented as its virtues rather than its vices: it’s important to be introduced to thoughts and experiences that, from your perspective, are alien and foreign. Seeing the world as arranged by someone else is precisely what many readers are looking for; it brings to our attention things that we simply wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Schopenhauer’s real point, then, is that reading is best when it is at least accompanied by thinking for yourself. It’s always better to read a little and read it well than to read a lot but read it poorly. Once again, Schopenhauer illustrates his point with a well-chosen analogy:
Just as the largest library when not properly arranged does not provide as much use as a very moderate but well-arranged one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not worked through by one’s own thinking, has much less value than a far lesser quantity that has been thought through in various ways.
Read for company and encouragement in your thinking
Schopenhauer even had some directly positive things to say about reading. In some ways, he admits, it’s a purer way of engaging with the mind of another person: a writer’s works may be ‘incomparably richer in content than his company’ because they are ‘the quintessence of a mind … the result and fruit of all his thinking and studying’. When explaining his own tendency to quote liberally from the authors he had read, Schopenhauer positions himself in their intellectual company: ‘Often I was pleasantly surprised afterwards to find formulations in ancient works by great men of propositions that I had hesitated to bring before the public because of their paradoxical nature.’ He takes courage from them, that is, but not content.
He stresses that this still does not mean that we can import admirable literary qualities into our own writing simply by reading them (‘for instance power of persuasion, wealth of imagery, gift of comparison, boldness, or bitterness, or brevity, or grace, or ease of expression, nor wit, surprising contrasts, laconism, naïveté and so on’). But these qualities, if we latently possess them already, and are willing to work on developing them, can be awakened in us by their example: ‘the only way reading shapes us for writing’, Schopenhauer says, is that ‘it teaches us the use we can make of our own natural gifts …’ In this way, reading can summon our true literary selves – while still not telling us exactly what to think.
Allow beautiful writing to entice you to think for yourself
Proust was just as conscious of the limits of reading as Schopenhauer, but he also thought that these very limits could be productive. At his most pessimistic, Schopenhauer sees reading as a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself, while Proust, on the other hand, sees it as an enticement to do so. He describes the experience of reading a novel by Théophile Gautier:
In it I loved before all else two or three sentences which seemed to me the most beautiful and original in the book … But I had the feeling that their beauty corresponded to a reality of which [he] allowed us to glimpse only a small corner once or twice in each volume.
The reader, in Proust’s experience, is always left wanting more; they long to see the rest of the world that the great writer has managed, teasingly and tactfully, only to intimate:
The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist only succeeds in raising partially for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe. Then does he say: ‘Look, look’ …
Beautiful writing, at its best, invites us to look at the world again.
Make your thoughts known
The beauty that called out to Proust was not limited to his experiences of reading the writers he admired; it’s clear that this beauty called out from the world around him too. There’s a good example of this in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time (1913), which is not an autobiography but certainly incorporates experiences from Proust’s own life. The young narrator Marcel is feeling miserable about his prospects of one day becoming a great writer. A local doctor invites him and his parents on an impromptu carriage ride back to their holiday home on the northern coast of France, which will first call at a nearby town. Marcel catches sight of some distant church steeples glistening in the sunlight, which appear to rotate and switch places as he journeys around them. The beauty of the scene strikes him not simply as an aesthetic experience but also as an intimation of some secret of reality that he can reveal only if he writes it down, and fast:
Without saying to myself that what was hidden behind the steeples of Martinville had to be something analogous to a pretty sentence, since it had appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure, I asked the doctor for a pencil and some paper…
Marcel’s intuition that the structure of reality mirrors well-turned-out sentences is something for philosophers of language to chew over. For our purposes, the key point is that thinking for yourself does not have to mean keeping it all in your head. Often, in fact, our original thoughts simply demand to be put in the right external form if we are to grasp their content at all. This can take the form of writing – perhaps for Marcel it must – or something else; it might take the form of conversation, or even non-linguistic forms of expression such as visual or musical arts. As the latter case makes clear, thinking for yourself doesn’t have to take the form of theorising either.
Key points – How to think for yourself
Don’t stop reading. After all, the thinkers and writers you admire were probably bookish themselves. The point is not to stop reading them – far from it – but to read them well.
Thinking for yourself will make your thoughts your own. Avoid using reading as a substitute for thinking for yourself. Selbstdenken, as the Germans say: thinking for yourself means being intellectually attentive to the raw material of life.
Combine your reading with thinking for yourself. See where things fit with your own outlook on life; or if they fail to fit, ask yourself whether they need to be rejected, or revised, or if you need to rethink your way of looking at things.
If you can’t read much, at least read well. A vast but disorganised amount of information is less useful than a moderate but well-ordered amount. In the spirit of thinking for yourself, however, how you organise your thoughts is up to you.
When you do read, get critical. You don’t have to agree with the writers you admire. You can even disagree with them on some fundamental matters.
Read for company and encouragement in your thinking. Writers can provide us with company because they are like-minded. But even if they are not like-minded, they can give us the courage to find our own voice.
Allow beautiful writing to entice you to think for yourself. Use the limits of reading to your advantage. Start from where your favourite writers left off. Let them inspire you to look at the world with new eyes.
Make your thoughts known. Write about what you think; write as a form of thinking. Write about what you read – after all, it’s the only way we know the thoughts that Schopenhauer provoked in Proust. If not by writing, then just make sure to get it out somehow.
Why it matters
Schopenhauer needn’t have worried that his readers would fail to think for themselves. One of his unlikely admirers was the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir. This was so unlikely because Beauvoir, on the one hand, was a foremost feminist philosopher, among other things, while Schopenhauer was a barely repentant sexist, who wrote a regrettably misogynistic essay, ‘On Women’ (1851). This has given Schopenhauer an ironic afterlife: some say that Beauvoir took the title of her masterwork The Second Sex (1949) from a phrase in Schopenhauer’s essay.
And in addition to Beauvoir and Proust, Schopenhauer’s other artistic admirers are legion, especially among writers and musicians: Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, D H Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Iris Murdoch (as author and philosopher), Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. They were impressed by different things in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: for Tolstoy, it was the central place of compassion; for Beckett, the unrelenting despair; for Borges, the marvellously all-encompassing system; for Wagner, the redemptive possibilities of art. But it wouldn’t be accurate to describe Schopenhauer’s best readers as Schopenhauerian; they’re original and distinctive enough in their styles of thinking to deserve their own adjectives: Tolstoyan, Beckettian, Borgesian, Wagnerian. To borrow from Schopenhauer’s most intensive philosophical reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, we can say they learned the lesson of ‘how to become who you are’ – a phrase itself purloined from the Greek poet Pindar.
Nietzsche is yet another interesting case study. In his early period, under the additional influence of Wagner, he seemed happy enough to consider himself as some sort of Schopenhauerian. In his book Untimely Meditations (1876), there is a long essay, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, on the importance of having exemplars like Schopenhauer, as well as an essay on Wagner. Towards the end of his working life, however, he reconceived what he was up to in those essays; to the Danish critic Georg Brandes (who was responsible for bringing Nietzsche to greater public awareness), Nietzsche wrote in 1888:
The two essays on Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner are, it seems to me now, confessions about myself – above all, they are avowals to myself, rather than, say, real psychological accounts of those two masters, to whom I felt as much kinship as I felt antagonism …
Nietzsche wasn’t always quite as respectful in the way he considered his erstwhile ‘masters’ – at around the same time, he wrote about them as if they were a sort of sickness: ‘I needed a particular form of self-discipline … to take sides against everything sick in myself, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer …’ But, importantly, he doesn’t find it inconsistent to say that Schopenhauer was ‘the last German who was worthy of consideration’ and still ‘wrong about everything’. It goes to show that part of thinking for yourself is the freedom and integrity to disagree even with those whom you most admire.
Visit the Five Books website for my guide to reading Schopenhauer, or the Philosophy Bites podcast to hear me talk about Schopenhauer on compassion. For a companion to reading Proust, I recommend the Proustian Paths podcast by James Holden.
You should, of course, also read Schopenhauer and Proust for yourself. You can find Schopenhauer’s essay ‘On Thinking for Yourself’ (as well as his regrettable essay ‘On Women’) in the Penguin Classics collectionEssays and Aphorisms (2004), translated by R J Hollingdale. You can pick up Proust’s essay ‘Days of Reading’ in one slim Penguin volume of the same name (2008), translated by John Sturrock.
Nicolas Sommetis an SNSF Ambizione Lecturer in social psychology in the LIVES Center at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests focus on the psychological consequences of income inequality, achievement motivation, and multilevel modelling.
Jacques Berentis a researcher and lecturer in psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research mostly focuses on intergroup relations and social influence, in the context of gender norms and gender equality.
What is the impact of pornography on the sexual lives of young people? Many researchers have tried to answer this question, as young adulthood is a key period in the development of a person’s sexuality. Yet research has not offered a clear, simple answer.
Some researchers believe that porn use distorts young people’s views of sexuality and generates anxieties about sexual performance. They argue that porn use might set unattainable standards for sexual comparison – for instance, a man watching porn could develop pervasive concerns about not ‘lasting as long’ as the actors on screen, or a woman might develop concerns about not experiencing an orgasm as easily as actresses seem to do. For Gary Wilson, author of the popular bookYour Brain on Porn (2015), this makes porn one of the root causes of the (alleged) recent surge of ‘morphing sexual tastes, a range of sexual dysfunctions, and loss of attraction to real partners’.
But others have warned against ‘harm-focused research approaches’ that concentrate on the negative effects of porn while ignoring its neutral or perhaps even beneficial effects. For proponents of this perspective, porn should not be conceived only as a psychological threat – it might also be a way to learn about sexuality and expand one’s sexual repertoire, especially during early adulthood. Some authors have even gone as far as suggesting that porn could be used as a therapeutic solution for people and couples who are struggling with sexual problems.
So, what is to be believed? Whereas some empirical studies support the view that porn predominantly hurts young people’s sex lives, other studies support the opposite view. And it is difficult to know which of these views are more correct because, in many of the studies conducted so far, only a few hundred participants are observed at one single point in time. This limits the ability to draw reliable conclusions from past research.
In 2015, we had the opportunity to launch a massive, multi-year study. At the time, we were both engaged in research on other topics in psychology. But we became interested in the literature on the psychology of pornography and, after meeting with some experts in this area, we decided to use the research opportunity to try to clarify the relationship between porn use and sexual functioning.
The evidence suggests that porn use tended to have a negative effect on men’s sexuality
Researchers had suggested many possible ways to explain the apparent inconsistencies in previous findings. For instance, people who have negative attitudes towards porn might tend to be harmed by it, whereas people with positive attitudes might benefit from it. For our part, we were interested in a different factor: gender. Men and women are known to have different sexual preferences, on average, and it seemed reasonable to think they might derive different guidelines for sexual behaviour from watching porn. To give a concrete example, men might conclude, based on porn, that cutting out foreplay during a sexual encounter is a good thing, whereas women might not reach a similar conclusion.
As we recently reported in the journal Psychological Medicine, we collaborated with Mathieu Sommet – the brother of the first author, and one of the most popular French YouTubers at the time of the research – and distributed a questionnaire on sexuality among his audience. Although the sample was not representative of the general population, it offered two key advantages: the participants were young (aged 21, on average, with 90 per cent being 18 to 25 years old) and highly connected (with easy access to online porn).
We were able to collect the responses from more than 100,000 men and women, including nearly 5,000 heterosexual couples in which both partners independently completed the questionnaire. (Our study was focused on the effects of heteronormative porn, and our analyses therefore concentrated on heterosexual men and women; more studies are needed to investigate porn’s effects on people with other sexual orientations and gender identities.) We also sent a follow-up questionnaire approximately one and then two years after the first wave of data collection, and nearly 22,000 participants responded to the three successive questionnaires.
We assessed sexual functioning from several complementary angles: we used a validated scale to measure participants’ sense of being sexually capable (with questions like ‘I am confident about myself as a sexual partner’) and a clinically recognised screening tool to assess other dimensions, including sexual arousal and biological functioning (eg, erection or lubrication) during sexual activities. Of course, the use of these self-reporting measures might be somewhat limited in how much they can reveal about people’s actual sexual functioning. So we asked partners who both (independently) participated in the study to report their own levels of sexual satisfaction. We then connected the responses within couples so as to gauge people’s sexual functioning through the eyes of their partner.
We found two consistent patterns of results that systematically differed between young men and young women. On average, the more that men watched porn, the less sexually competent they felt, the more sexual problems they reported, and (among cases where we had access to their partner’s answers) the more dissatisfied their female partner was. In sum, the evidence suggests that porn use tended to have a negative effect on men’s sexuality.
With regard to women’s sexuality, porn use tended to have a positive effect
Yet the results were very different for women: their frequency of porn use was associated with greater self-reported sexual competence and fewer sexual problems. The more that women who were in a couple watched porn, the more satisfied their male partner tended to be about the quality of sexual exchanges. So, the evidence suggests that, with regard to women’s sexuality, porn use tended to have a positive effect.
Importantly, these results were also observed over time, meaning that an increase in the frequency of porn use over the course of the study was associated with a reduction in the sexual functioning of men, but with an improvement in the sexual functioning of women. While it’s possible that the associations between porn use and sexual functioning that we found were due to other factors that were not captured in the study (such as changes in wellbeing), the longitudinal evidence makes it plausible, at least, that porn consumption in itself contributed to positive and negative changes in sexual functioning.
The data used comes from the first wave of data collection; shaded areas represent standard errors
Although we cannot yet say for sure what psychological mechanisms account for the gender differences we observed, we can rely on other research to speculate.
As mentioned earlier, some researchers argue that porn can be a source of threatening sexual comparisons, highlighting evidence that people might compare their sex life against sex as it is shown in porn and feel disappointed. On the other hand, other researchers argue that porn can be a source of sexual inspiration, given evidence that porn might encourage people to broaden their sexual horizons and explore new sexual behaviours.
In light of the patterns we found, it is possible that, for men, the degree to which porn is a psychological threat or has similar negative effects tends to outweigh its usefulness as sexual inspiration or other benefits – whereas the reverse could be true for women. This interpretation echoes research suggesting, for instance, that porn use is associated with penis size dissatisfaction among men (but not genitalia or breast dissatisfaction among women) and with intrusive thoughts about sexual performance during intercourse among men (but, again, not among women). Such psychological consequences could make it less likely that men’s sex lives benefit from porn overall.
Each potential consumer of porn is different, and those individual differences matter
It might be tempting to see our findings as confirming popular beliefs about porn: that reducing porn consumption could help men to overcome sexual problems – for examples of this argument, see the popular bookPornland (2010) by Gail Dines or publications from one of the online communities attempting to tackle what they consider porn addiction; or that increasing porn use could empower women (for instance, see this relevant piece from 2015 in The Guardian). However, we want to emphasise another important finding. The overall relationship between porn use and sexual functioning, for both men and women, seems to be rather modest – without being trivial – suggesting that it is only one of many factors that might affect people’s sexual functioning.
Variables that were not considered in our study, but have been highlighted by past researchers, could influence people’s sex lives and even the relationship between porn use and sex. For instance, watching paraphilic (ie, unusual) porn rather than mainstream porn is associated with more negative sexual consequences. As another example, watching porn with one’s partner rather than alone could have more positive sexual consequences. Moreover, other research shows that perceived problematic porn use might be more strongly related to worse sexual functioning than the frequency of porn use per se. These kinds of studies highlight that each potential consumer of porn is different, and those individual differences matter.
Contrary to certain popular beliefs, porn does not seem to be the best candidate to blame for sexual issues among men, nor does it seem like one of the most important factors to consider when thinking about potential solutions to women’s sexual issues. Overall, our findings suggest that most men who choose to stop using porn might see only minor benefits in their sexual life (unless, perhaps, they seem to have a pattern of problematic consumption, such as a perceived addiction). Likewise, even if some women see improvements in their sex lives related to porn use, they might do well to avoid thinking of it as some sort of sexual panacea.
With these results and implications in mind, our study suggests a somewhat ironic trend in the relationships between young people’s porn use and their sex lives. It seems that porn – created by a male-dominated industry that typically caters to a male-dominated audience – is more likely to have real-world sexual benefits for young women who use it than it is to have such benefits for young men.
As down as the times seem, there is hope, and there is a road forward. For some of us, who have been pushing against the wheel for decades, it seems the go to place at time ends in dispair. This is natural, the Dharma Wheel turns slowly, and we are caught up in Indra’s web. Yet, every action of kindness, every gesture of love pushes the wheel, and it reverberates into the future, a message that will touch so many that we will never know.
Here is to all of you who continue in the great struggle to make love visible in the world, to bring justice, to bring life, to save our dear Mother Earth.
We can do this.
Much love,
G
Please read the following:
“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
“Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
… The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.” ― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
“The Dawn of Everything” – David Graeber & David Wengrow
Extract:
“They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia.
None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.” ― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
The Astrology Podcast Jul 28, 2022 A look ahead at the astrological forecast for August 2022, with astrologers Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and special guest co-host Nick Dagan Best. The astrology of August starts with a Mars-Uranus-North Node conjunction in Taurus on August 1, and then a few days later Mars squares Saturn in Aquarius. The Full Moon in Aquarius takes place on August 11, emphasizing the fixed sign tension further, and then later in the month there is a New Moon in Virgo on August 27. Late in the month, on August 20, Mars ingresses into Gemini. Mars will then stay in Gemini until March 2023, since it is going to turn retrograde later in the year. At the top of the show we talk about some recent events in the news, including the continuing food shortages and recent instability in the markets, and then eventually get into the forecast for August.
Unividual: an individual who experiences a greater sense of unity with other human beings, the natural world, and the whole of the cosmos without losing touch with their individuality.
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