Ha! What a great way to express the fundamental mandate for being human— creating hope by transforming our lives and helping others do likewise. New neural connections are demanded, understanding our own karmic tendencies and how we tend to react to our home-grown environments; isn’t it a bit like building the aircraft while flying it? How fortunate we are to have such authors deeply pondering the true aspect of all phenomena. Having not read these 3 books, I appreciate the synopsis and how we can use the insights they provide.
Lovely analysis. Everyone gets a shot at the same material. I’ve long-since shaken off the dry, strangulating skins of my life’s prescriptions and now breathe my own breathes. The less I need, the better off I am. A hearty toast to all you beautiful survivors.
I love the perspective that our wrong turns and wasted years are actually the required material for the lives we’re building. It makes the messy parts of the past feel less like mistakes and more like necessary raw ingredients.
God damn. You took me back. Hit me like a North Shore winter wave. It's been awhile. Almost sixty years ago reading Steppenwolf. I didn't want schools or rules or reasons or plans. I wanted experience, everything I could feel. And off I ran. Thanx for the rerun.
Thanks for the memory! I read Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” when young and was fascinated by it. Now I see meaning everywhere. Your sentence, “Meaning does not show up when you unify the story. It shows up when you learn to move between your contradictions without lying about them,” is deeply meaningful to me. When mature I think we bc the crucible where we learn to peacefully coexist with opposites.
Resonates w/what I see when I look back on 73yrs of a life that tried to build itself on pretenses, only to have them stripped away … What's left is Art mediating its own ongoing existence thru the medium of a body & mind …
When I was coming up in the 70s Hesse was still required reading... not in school, but amongst the wisdom-seekers. Recently I revisited both Glass Bead Game (which I first knew about through Clifford Jordan's album of that name) and Narcissus and Goldmund, which made me cry.
It funny but Demian was the book that hit me hardest before those two. Or at least the one that stayed w me longest. Sounds like you should write a self discovery novel perhaps like Hesse or Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
Ah, this takes me back to my early thirties, when I was newly sober in AA and looking desperately for a reason to keep on living. I gave myself a year of sobriety to find that meaning, otherwise I had decided to kill myself swiftly and cleanly (instead of slowly with alcoholism and its many ramifications) only after the long bout (since I was 12) of, jails, mental hospitals and drug addiction and failed relationships.
Who helped me? Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, Krishna Murti, Albert Camus, J.P. Sartre, and Samuel Beckett, all of whom proposed in their various ways, via a kind of existentialist doctrine, that you must find your own meaning if your life is to be worth living, a doctrine that saved my life, persuaded me to go on living (after multiple failed suicide attempts, not just due to ambivalence, but because I was generally to loaded to carry them out decisively). I will be forever grateful for their teachings, as I will be for AA (thanks to 52 years of sobriety despite my atheism and reluctance to adhere to any kind of doctrine).
So yes, I agree, we must find our own teachers and our own meaning in whatever fragments of wisdom that apply to your own way of being. The teachings specifically geared toward you, are everywhere. I am so grateful for my life.
Remembering Hesse!! My favorite book of his is "The Glass Bead Game"!!!!!!
Hey Michael--Reading it now for the second time in years. As they say in jazz, a monster.
All best, Peter G Newton MA
Thanks Peter. I should read it again. It has been 50 years and had such a profound effect on my thinking.
Yes!
Brilliant, Bret. Thank you.
Ha! What a great way to express the fundamental mandate for being human— creating hope by transforming our lives and helping others do likewise. New neural connections are demanded, understanding our own karmic tendencies and how we tend to react to our home-grown environments; isn’t it a bit like building the aircraft while flying it? How fortunate we are to have such authors deeply pondering the true aspect of all phenomena. Having not read these 3 books, I appreciate the synopsis and how we can use the insights they provide.
Also very resonant with the theory of positive disintegration proposed by Dabrowski.
Lovely analysis. Everyone gets a shot at the same material. I’ve long-since shaken off the dry, strangulating skins of my life’s prescriptions and now breathe my own breathes. The less I need, the better off I am. A hearty toast to all you beautiful survivors.
I love the perspective that our wrong turns and wasted years are actually the required material for the lives we’re building. It makes the messy parts of the past feel less like mistakes and more like necessary raw ingredients.
God damn. You took me back. Hit me like a North Shore winter wave. It's been awhile. Almost sixty years ago reading Steppenwolf. I didn't want schools or rules or reasons or plans. I wanted experience, everything I could feel. And off I ran. Thanx for the rerun.
Thanks for the memory! I read Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” when young and was fascinated by it. Now I see meaning everywhere. Your sentence, “Meaning does not show up when you unify the story. It shows up when you learn to move between your contradictions without lying about them,” is deeply meaningful to me. When mature I think we bc the crucible where we learn to peacefully coexist with opposites.
You wrote: "And one day you wake up exhausted, not from work, but from impersonation." This is exactly what a woman discovers when she turns 50!
Resonates w/what I see when I look back on 73yrs of a life that tried to build itself on pretenses, only to have them stripped away … What's left is Art mediating its own ongoing existence thru the medium of a body & mind …
Good writing, Bret. A short novel by Hesse that I read years ago and it meant something to me is “Knulp”
You’ve now made me want to read it again. Keep wailing my man!
When I was coming up in the 70s Hesse was still required reading... not in school, but amongst the wisdom-seekers. Recently I revisited both Glass Bead Game (which I first knew about through Clifford Jordan's album of that name) and Narcissus and Goldmund, which made me cry.
You are writing with a red hot poker, Bret. The heat and sizzle of your insights are just delicious.
Now I want to re read Hesse as I did sixty years ago.
I loved Herman Hesse books❣️
It funny but Demian was the book that hit me hardest before those two. Or at least the one that stayed w me longest. Sounds like you should write a self discovery novel perhaps like Hesse or Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
Ah, this takes me back to my early thirties, when I was newly sober in AA and looking desperately for a reason to keep on living. I gave myself a year of sobriety to find that meaning, otherwise I had decided to kill myself swiftly and cleanly (instead of slowly with alcoholism and its many ramifications) only after the long bout (since I was 12) of, jails, mental hospitals and drug addiction and failed relationships.
Who helped me? Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, Krishna Murti, Albert Camus, J.P. Sartre, and Samuel Beckett, all of whom proposed in their various ways, via a kind of existentialist doctrine, that you must find your own meaning if your life is to be worth living, a doctrine that saved my life, persuaded me to go on living (after multiple failed suicide attempts, not just due to ambivalence, but because I was generally to loaded to carry them out decisively). I will be forever grateful for their teachings, as I will be for AA (thanks to 52 years of sobriety despite my atheism and reluctance to adhere to any kind of doctrine).
So yes, I agree, we must find our own teachers and our own meaning in whatever fragments of wisdom that apply to your own way of being. The teachings specifically geared toward you, are everywhere. I am so grateful for my life.