In this episode I sit down with Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The Art of Seduction, and The Laws of Human Nature, to explore his latest book on the sublime. Robert first imagined researching it through travels to the Amazon and distant mountains. Then a stroke nearly took his life and confined him to his home. With his left side paralyzed, he spent seven years handwriting the book and discovered that the sublime was waiting in his own backyard.
What We Dive Into:
1. Robert describes adult life as dead time, measured in abstract blocks of minutes and hours. Children live inside time like a river, seeing the world for the first time, and much of our restless dissatisfaction is a buried memory of that open, unfiltered way of meeting the world each day.
2. The brain prunes enormous amounts of sensory data so we can function, constructing both our reality and a sense of a separate self. Focused attention, like Gurdjieff’s practice of self-remembering, can loosen that filter and let the world appear strange, vivid, and alive again.
3. Robert links our avoidance of pain, discomfort, and death to a loss of inner resilience. When suffering and mortality are faced deliberately, they can be transmuted into acceptance and compassion, along with a deeper kinship with everyone who has lived, suffered, and died before us.
Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
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00:00 Intro
02:00 A Stroke and the Backyard Amazon
10:03 Writing a Book by Hand
13:07 The Circle of Everyday Consciousness
18:54 The Anti-Sublime
25:01 The Cosmic Sublime
35:00 The Pagan Sublime and Eleusinian Mysteries
42:50 The Hunger for Collective Ecstasy
47:01 Childhood as an Awakening
52:20 Returning to a Second Innocence
59:15 Despair as a Doorway
1:02:51 Vulnerability and Feeling Ridiculous
1:04:25 The Naked Brain
1:12:37 Gurdjieff and the Power of Attention
1:22:22 The Interspecies Sublime
1:31:00 Loneliness and the Animal World
1:37:56 The Love Sublime
1:45:58 Love and the Art of Seduction
1:50:07 The Historical Sublime
1:55:13 How Language Shapes Experience
1:59:46 The Daemon and the Primary Self
2:06:27 Mastery and the Inner Voice
2:15:04 Ingrid Bergman and Her Daemon
2:19:07 Different Forms of Intelligence
2:23:22 Talent Without Love
2:27:33 The Aesthetic Sublime
2:36:03 The Dynamical Sublime
2:43:41 Inviting Challenge Back In
2:52:13 Suffering as a Rite of Passage
2:56:32 The Death Sublime
3:00:34 Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness
3:08:31 Visualizing Your Own Death
3:12:51 The Haiku Poet Issa
3:17:13 One Thing to Carry Forward
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