🖌️ Becoming One with the Tao, Paradoxes, Wandering, and Determinism
Monday Muse (October 16th, 2023)
Greetings Readers!
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a morning meditation, perennial reminder, question, and recommendation(s) to consider.
Be wise and be well this week!
📿 Morning Meditation
This week’s morning meditation is courtesy of The Wisdom School podcast (Apple or Spotify). Today’s meditation is a short selected reading (delivered in a Lectio Divina style) from the Tao Te Ching (often attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
We experience paradoxes in our psyche, in groups, in organizations, and in broader systems. Psychologists and psychoanalysts point to paradoxes in our psyche. Paradoxes infuse the writing of psychoanalyst Carl Jung—mind and matter, virtues and vices, spirit and body, life and death, good and evil, truth and falsehood, unity and multiplicity, and so on. …
Human dysfunctions arise when we veer too far toward either pole, habits that can result in depression at one end and mania at the other. The challenge is to live with these tensions, continually seeking points of intersection. […]
Source: Both/And Thinking by Wendy K. Smith & Marianne Lewis (Listen to the conversation).
💡 Perennial Question(s)
Do you get sidetracked when external things intrude? Free yourself from them, in favor of learning something new and worthwhile, and stop your purposeless wandering. But now there’s another kind of meandering that you need to guard against: people who’ve become world-weary, and lack a goal to which they can direct every impulse and, in general, every impression, act in ways that are as meaningless as their words. […]
Source: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
🔥 Recommendation(s)
This week's recommendation is a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast. The specific episode I’m recommending is with Dr. Robert Sapolsky (author of the new book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will). You might find it interesting if you enjoyed my recent conversation with Ken Sheldon (author of Freely Determined).
🎧 Recent Podcast(s)
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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