🖌️ Monday Muse | Life, Death, and the Mystery of Existence
Perennial Newsletter (July 17th, 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) inspired by the writings of the philosopher Epicurus.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
Most of us prefer not to think too vividly about what becomes of our bodies after we die, but it is an ancient and noble contemplation. For hundreds of years, Buddhist monks in Vietnam have meditated in open cemeteries, bodies of their brethren in different states of decay around them. There, they envision the same processes that will inevitably be at work upon their own bodies. Saint Benedict, a fifth-century Italian monk and scholar, authored a famous book-length Rule for living that is still followed by many monastic orders and their oblates. Sisters and brothers following the Rule are counseled to “keep death ever before you.” Such meditations call us to acknowledge more fully the insistent ephemerality of our existence and to live with more intention, generosity, humility, and love.
Source: Rooted by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Listen to the conversation)
💡 Perennial Question(s)
If it doesn’t harm your character, how can it harm your life?
Nature would not have overlooked such dangers through failing to recognize them, or because it saw them but was powerless to prevent or correct them. Nor would it ever, through inability or incompetence, make such a mistake as to let good and bad things happen indiscriminately to good and bad alike. But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.
Source: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
🔥 Recommendation(s)
This week’s recommendation is a philosophical debate. It’s a recent episode of the Panpsycast Podcast. This episode features Jack Symes in conversation with four of the biggest names in philosophy: Richard Dawkins (representing science and atheism), Jessica Frazier (on Hinduism), Silvia Jonas (speaking on Jewish philosophy), and Richard Swinburne (defending Christianity).
🎧 Recent Podcast(s)
Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
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