culture

Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being

An invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.” …

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An Antidote to the Anxiety About Imperfection: Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers

“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” …

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Wonder-Sighting on Planet Earth: The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop

Inside Earth’s most alien vision. …

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The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.” …

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Between Matter and Spirit: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Substance of What We Are

“We are carriers of spirit… into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation.” …

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Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your Intuitions

“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” …

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A Victorian Visionary’s Prescient Case for Animal Rights and Vegetarianism

“Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but also eating their relations.” …

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Kierkegaard on the Value of Despair

“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.” …

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The Universe and the Soul: Richard Jefferies on Nature as Prayer for Presence

How to grow “absorbed into the being or existence of the universe.” …

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A Taste of How It Feels to Be Free: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on Our Inner Conflicts, the Psychology of Hopelessness, and the Path to Wholeness

“The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that conflicts are resolved.” …

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The Poetry of Reality: Robert Louis Stevenson on What Makes Life Worth Living

“The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.” …

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William James on the Most Vital Understanding for Successful Relationships

“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” …

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Enchantment and the Courage of Joy: René Magritte on the Antidote to the Banality of Pessimism

“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” …

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Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe

How to bear the gravity of being. …

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Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality

How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.” …

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The Challenge of Closeness: Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Paradox of Avoidance

The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. …

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Dead Stars: Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Stunning Love Poem to Life

“We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” …

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Sundogs and the Sacred Geometry of Wonder: The Science of the Atmospheric Phenomenon That Inspired Hilma af Klint

Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality. …

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May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone

“The people we love are built into us.” …

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What We Look for When We Are Looking: John Steinbeck on Wonder and the Relational Nature of the Universe

Searching for “that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life.” …

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Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love

“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.” …

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What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but… the prime moral privilege.” …

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The Paradox of Free Will

The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws. …

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Stunning Century-Old Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales from the Artist Who Created Bambi

Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.” …

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How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” …

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