Havana Cafe Sessions Podcast: Recent Episodes
Sarah Beth Hunt, Clay Lowe
If you love conversation and coffee, you’ve come to the right place. We meet weekly at our favourite local cafe to chat about life, the universe, and everything with the aim to make ourselves better through dialogue.
Oh and yes, we want to change the world too!
Our dialogues are not exclusive, in fact, the more people – people like you – we can engage in conversation, the more we all learn.
Our basic approach is grounded in appreciative inquiry, the Socratic method (basically asking loads of good questions that make you stop and think), and positive psychology.
As an alternative to making a laundry list of New Year's Resolutions, we choose 3 intention words that we'll to guide us through the New Year.
In this episode, we explore some of the ideas from the book, Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Sounds like a very heavy topic, but we, of course, handle it in our normal low-key, informal way.
In this episode, writer Cherry Williams and I have a coffee and chat about creativity and the courage to live a creative life.
On this episode, Jeremy Sadler joins me to talk about positive affirmations and why they don't work. Of course, you know they do work, but Jeremy lays out where we go wrong in making affirmations causing them not to work.
In this episode, Sarah and I explore our thoughts on Don Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreements.
Excited to have as my guest host, Victoria James, founder of Mindflowers, in the studio with us to talk about self-importance and how mastering it will boost your authentic happiness by a factor of 10.
This week, Sarah returns back to the studio, and with her, she brought an interesting topic.
Do you ever get the feeling that something is not quite right with the world? This feeling sometimes manifests itself in the form of dissatisfaction, anxiety, or existential dread. But is this dissatisfaction inherent? Well, that's exactly what Sarah and I dive into for episode #139.
In our open-ended casual style, we examine the topic through a variety of lenses from Samsara ("wandering through, flowing on", in the sense of "aimless and directionless wandering"), to Stoicism, The Matrix, and our own personal life experiences.
In this episode, We're talking about resilience and how to bounce back from bullying.
Viki has first-hand experience with bullying both as a kid and as an adult, and now as a parent whose child has had to deal with bullying. She drops some useful tips covering the problem from multiple levels.
In this episode, we're joined by Aimee Mann of CEO of Your Special Needs Family Podcast to explore the question, can women do it all?
In this episode, Sarah asks the question does manifestation, like in The Law of Attraction really work?
In this episode, we explore biohacking coffee to extend life and answer the question of how to live through learning how to die.
How do you nurture an idea from its initial conception to fully realizing it into the world?
In this episode, we use the Star Wars saga as a lens to explore some major life themes. Also, Clay has a massive mind-shift.
In this episode, Clay and Sarah share their individual experiences of walking the Road to Santiago.
In this episode, we discuss where spirituality fits on the spectrum of personal development.
In this episode, we share our love of having conversations that matter. We share some of our backstory on how and why we do the podcast.
In this episode, Clay and Sarah share 3 books each that have influenced their lives in a major way. As Clay describes it, "Books that punch you in the face."
In this episode, we explore the philosophical idea of becoming who you are using John Kaag's book, Hiking with Nietzche as the backdrop to our conversation over coffee this week.
In this episode, we discuss how you can use the body to explore your emotions and your thoughts.
In this episode, we discuss the cult of personality and the compulsion for everyone to be famous.
As you gear up for Valentine's Day this week, consider this: romantic love is a modern construct that emerged in tandem with the novel. The idea of romantic love, as we know it today, came on the scene in tandem with In Madame Bovary (1856).
That's one type of love. As it turns out, love has many levels. In this week's episode, we explore the 7 types of love.
In this episode, we explore Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning
In this episode, we explore the value of adventure and how adventure enhances your overall well-being.
In this week's episode, we explore the process of growing older and how to face up to the inevitable march of time.
In this episode, we explore the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, the art of imperfection.
in this episode, we explore a couple of useful models for identifying and changing behaviors.
In this episode, we share our intention setting process for getting ready for the New Year to ensure we're set up to have a fantastic year of achievement.
In this episode, we explore the 5 literacies you need to survive in the 21st century. In part II we explore our relationship to time.
This week we explore the give and take of freedom. Are we really free and is the freedom we do have, balanced?
This week we found ourselves wondering if it's important to try or if it is better to let go and just go with the flow. To help us explore this, we delve into the Taoist concept of Wu Wei.
This week conversation at the Havana Cafe centers around intentionality and our continuing pursuit of happiness.
Hi, it’s Clay and Sarah — We’re back in action this week at the Havana Cafe drinking coffee and discussing where life has taken us on our quest to find wisdom in the messy realities of life.
In this episode, we explore the attachment we have to things and how those things sometimes demand too much of us.
This week we enjoyed a winding conversation about how individual connections spread cultural norms, and how different cultural groups shape our lives.
This week we take a close look at the hero’s journey and how we can apply it in a practical way to our own life journeys.
This week we wax a bit lyrical about the poetics of space, the possibilities of feng shui, and what it means to ‘hold space’ for oneself and others.
In this episode:
This week we're continuing our discussion of the films Ex Machina and Her, and adding on insights from the TV series Westworld and Humans, looking more closely at the question of Consciousness & Free Will.
What makes us human? Is it consciousness? Is it our emotional complexity? Is it merely our physical body? Sometimes the only way to see through our biases in perception is to consider an alternative...an opposite. This week we are discussing our big question in the context of two great films — Ex Machina & Her.
This week Clay and Sarah reach for their cups of coffee and contemplate how and why we might rediscover the wild.
This week we use Burroughs’s famous quote “language is a virus from outer space” to contemplate language as instinct, technology or virus.
In this episode, we revisit the original idea of hedonism as ancient Greek philosophy that argued that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the aim of human life.
When the very things that once excited us now feel boring and repetitive... When we’ve achieved our big goal but now feel as if we are stagnating and wanting more... When we’ve mastered a set of skills and feel a new call to adventure and change...
It’s time to ‘level up’.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss what it means to ‘level up’ in life.
Hooray. We've made it to episode 100. For this episode, we reached out to you, our listeners, to find out what their ultimate questions are.
Obstacles, difficulties, things “not going according to plan” are an inevitable part of life. But how we respond to these so-called obstacles is what defines us.
This week Clay and Sarah explore the idea of obstacles as the pathway to growth and new opportunities.
Within the “consensual hallucination of cyberspace” which we call the internet, a creative explosion is taking place. We have access to an immense range of audio-visual arts, stories, poetry, music...and new combinations of these. And the internet has also made it possible for us to create art in new ways and then share it with, literally, the WORLD.
This week Clay and Sarah consider the multitude of ways cyberspace has transformed creativity as well as our ideas about what it means to be ‘an artist’.
Many of us feel a sense that there is more to Life than meets the eye. Perhaps we call it God. Perhaps we consider it a Force that pervades all life. Perhaps we don't even bother to name it. But at times we feel a yearning to know it, to experience its vast spaciousness. This is the realm of Mysticism — the search to experience union with the Divine.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss what Mysticism can tell us about the human search for the Divine.
In an age when we share so many personal experiences on social media, when data about what we buy and who we communicate with is stored, when we willing carrying a tracking device in the form of our smart phones everywhere we go... we should ask ourselves a very important question. Is privacy dead?
This week Clay and Sarah discuss the issue of privacy.
How much do you sleep? What time of the day are you most awake? These are questions of our circadian rhythms, our natural biological clocks...you know the ones we try to side-step with caffeine, electric lights and our super-human work ethic?
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss sleep, day-time cycles of alertness and how we experience our natural bio-clocks.
If our attitude largely determines our reality...do we owe it to ourselves to strive for happiness? And if our mood and demeanour impact others... do we owe it to the people we love to try to be happy?
This week, Clay and Sarah ponder to what extent happiness is a moral obligation.
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss the experience of ‘Seeking’, interrogate the idea of Ego and wonder what we are actually looking for...
In a world in which we are all connected and even our smallest action can impact another person, how might we understand the limits of personal freedom?
A social contract refers to a common understanding among a group of people on acceptable ways of behaving. It is a way of theorising how and why we have laws, codes of conduct, and social norms. Yet what we believe about our essential human nature has a direct influence on how we imagine our social contract.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau as they envisaged the social contract.
This week Clay and Sarah debate the usefulness as well as the problems of Utopian thinking and ask whether we need visions of Utopia.
Have you ever thought about an old friend you haven’t seen in years and then bumped into them shortly after? Have you ever known something you couldn’t have known — that someone in your family had been hurt or had died? Have you ever been recommended the same book by several different people that came at just the right time to answer a big life question?
We call these events Coincidences. But Carl Jung called them something else...examples of Synchronicity, and the result of the Interconnectedness of Things.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss Synchronicity, our interconnection and how this impacts our lives.
So what is art for? What purpose does it serve for us as individuals and for our society? How does the experience of creating art differ from a visit to a museum to view the artwork of others?
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss the purpose and role of Art in our lives.
There is ‘what happened’. And then there is ‘the story we tell’ about what happened. Over time, our propensity to narrate events into a story that means something creates something much larger... our own story of our life. A story of how we became who we are, and who we are becoming.
But which events do we choose to remember? Which events to we mark out as significant in our Life Story? And how does the version of the story we tell impact our own self-perception and what life we think we’re living into?
This week Clay and Sarah discuss narrative identity, the significant way we construct stories about our life.
Behind and beneath all our smaller goals sits one enormous Ultimate goal — to be Happy. Whether by purchasing the latest consumer product, doing yoga, taking a holiday or searching for our dream job, we are all trying to get there. Happy. Happiness. But is happiness really a goal we can strive to achieve?
In this episode and in honour of the New Year, Clay and Sarah ask — should Happiness be our goal?
It’s that time of year again. Time to Celebrate and Evaluate what has happened over the previous year. And time to Invision, Create and Commit to our intentions for the coming New Year.
This episode is our big end of 2017 finale with a conversation about our own personal evaluation of the past year and intentions for the new year... as well as how we all might all do a better job making clear, achievable Resolutions for 2018.
Clay’s got some tips based on the concept of Well-Formed Outcomes where we should:
-
state goals in the positive
-
decide what evidence we will use to evaluate success
-
put in context of your overall life (where, when, how and with whom)
-
ensure the goal is within our realm of influence
-
consider what we stand to gain and what we will lose if we achieve our goal
Hope you enjoy the chat over your own cup o joe... and we’ll see you in 2018 for Season 3!
In this episode, Clay and Sarah explore The wheel of Life and how to use it to identify areas of your life you want to improve.
Movement — We’re all encouraged to exercise, to get in our 10,000 steps, to use standing desks, take walks at lunch. We focus on the way movement impacts our health, or our weight. But rarely do we focus on the way movement can shift our mindset, our mood, our thought-process. And yet moving the body is often the easiest way to get ourselves out of a mental rut and ‘clear our heads’.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss how moving the body can impact our mindset.
Aristotle claimed that Contemplation is the highest form of happiness. Yet as he himself admits, there is a dispute about what happiness means and how to achieve it. Some seek happiness through pleasure, some through active service or work, and some through contemplation and the search for wisdom. Was Aristotle right?
This week Clay and Sarah discuss the importance of Contemplation to finding lasting happiness.
The idea of one’s Life Purpose can be tricky. Many of the supposed self-help gurus will tell us that we have one, or that we need to find one. And there are times when we believe them. Times when finding our greater purpose feels necessary. Yet other times — perhaps more often — the idea can feel like too much pressure. With so much choice of what to do with our time and our work, we are easily dragged in many directions and are left feeling a lack of any Higher Purpose directing our lives.
In this week’s episode, Clay and Sarah discuss whether we have a higher purpose — and if so, whether everyone’s higher purpose is the same, or whether it is as individual as we are.
In this episode:
- Eckhart Tolle’s distinction between Inner and Outer Purpose
* Areas of purpose: to serve others, to make a mark on the world, to find Truth (spiritual, scientific etc.), to be Happy, to simply Be & the potential that there is No Higher Purpose
* Why some people feel clearabout their higher purpose while others do not
- How our higher purpose might be linked with our Values
* Aspirational aspects of higher purpose - what we would like to be or do
When we post something on social media, are we sharing something about ourselves? Or is this specific technology shaping what we say and therefore think about who we are? Do we choose our identity? Or is our identity shaped and even determined by external forces like technology and social media?
There’s that old saying — Curiosity killed the cat. There are stories that warn of the dangers of curiosity, stretching back to Adam & Eve, Icarus & the sun, and Pandora’s Box. For much of western history, curiosity has been regarded as a negative, a distraction, even a poison. But when we look at the great Masters — of science, of art, of life wisdom — they all share one important trait in common. Curiosity.
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss the importance of Curiosity, what it can add to our lives and why it is the trademark of the great Masters.
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau moved into a little house he built himself on Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts. His experiment in simple living and renewing connections with nature has inspired people like us ever since.
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss what lessons we might take away from Walden today.
Food, water, shelter - these are essentials. But a spiritual practice? Is it also an essential part of our lives? Is it a natural compulsion, responding to something within us? Or is it something we simply use to comfort ourselves in the face of inevitable death?
Many of us listening to this podcast are on a track now...we've been through school, chosen to specialise in some area and are now out in the working world. But what happens when we want a career change? Or if we leave one career and start looking for another kind of work? And what can we do to help our kids who are going to have to go through this process for themselves? Perhaps we should even ask whether 'career' is even a relevant term anymore??
This week Clay and Sarah discuss how we go about choosing our career, whether it's our first or our seventeenth...
In this episode we examine the nature of certainty and why we seek it even though it can lead to our own happiness.
Stephen Hawking says that AI will be "either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity", and Elon Musk claims it is the "biggest risk we face as a civilisation". So what's so threatening about the future of Artificial Intelligence? What might happen when computers get smarter than we are?
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss what it might mean to be human with the rise of Artificial Superintelligence.
In times past, the role of a Man and the pathway of becoming a man would have been clearly defined. Hunter, warrior, provider, protector — these roles and responsibilities would have been bestowed through initiation and also would have been non-negotiable. In this day and age, however, with the infinite range of individual choice and identity, and the blurring of gender roles, how to be a man has become less clear. This has freed men to redefine their identities, but has also led to feelings of confusion about what constitutes manhood and masculinity.
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss what is Manhood in the modern world, and how we might raise our sons to become good men.
Breathing. It's the most fundamental part of life.And unlike so many aspects of our health like our diet, exercise, and sleep, it's something we don't really have to think about. Or do we? In this week's episode, Clay and Sarah discuss the health benefits of deep relaxed breathing, the repercussions of poor breathing, and why we often get something as simple as breathing so wrong.
Coming to the end of the summer, many of us will have spent some time pitching a tent and camping in a field under the stars. It's a lot of work, there are a lot of bugs, and as Clay reflecting while finding himself sitting in a camping chair in a random field, we all have nice comfortable houses with electricity, running water and various forms of entertainment. So why do we choose to pack up all our stuff and venture out in to great outdoors to set up camp?
In this episode Clay and Sarah explore what it means to truly listen to another person and how important sound is to our daily life.
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance."Karl Popper's famous Paradox of Tolerance seems something important to explore in light of recent events and what seems ever-increasing strands of extreme intolerance from terrorists to NeoNazis. But what is Tolerance? Is it still something to strive for? And where are the limits of tolerance?
This week Clay and Sarah discuss the Paradox of Tolerance.
In this episode:
- a discussion of the whole of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance (including ways it is often misquoted)
* what is Tolerance? (Malcolm Gladwell claims we often misinterpret the meaning of Tolerance)
* is truth more important than tolerance?
-
The limits of tolerance
-
Tolerance with different relgious and political opinions and how this differs in extreme cases such as the recent NeoNazi rally in Charlottesville
-
The Dalai Lama on Tolerance - a Buddhist perspective
What is true friendship?C.S. Lewis famously claimed that "like philosophy, like art...friendship has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival." Kalil Gibran has written "Your friend is your needs answered. He is your friend which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving."
Yet in our modern world of Facebook, pressures of professional networking and the general commodification of the word 'friend', we felt it was time to revisit this often un-asked question —What is a true friend? What role do friends play in our lives? Do we have levels of friendship? How should we 'be' with our friends?
In this episode:
* definitions of friendship from Stoic philosophers down to Emerson & C.S. Lewis
-
the role of trust and judgement in friendship
-
social media & the commodification of the word 'friend'
* levels, taxonomies and kinds of friendship
-
psychological studies on the necessary elements of friendship
-
can men and women ever really be friends?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both...Here in lies our dilemma. With every choice we make, we also say goodbye to other opportunities, possibilities. And knowing how way leads on to way... each choice we make leads us down a path with new possibilities, but usually not the ones we left behind.
This week, Clay and Sarah ask: How do we think about those 'Roads Not Taken'? And how is our life shaped by the choices we make?
An old favourite of the Victorian era, Willpower has made a big comeback in recent years as the key to a succcessful life. But what is Willpower exactly? Is it a force like a muscle that we can strengthen with practice? Does it exist at all? And why does it seem to work in some instances and not others?
This week Clay and Sarah tackle the question of Willpowerand whether or not it works as a way to direct our life choices.
We seek spiritual paths to remind us who we truly are. If we don't nurture our spiritual selves we stand in danger of losing ourselves. And, indeed, we can even get lost in spirituality if we allow ourselves to identify ourselves with a single 'right' system that moves experiential knowledge into the realms of passive belief.
This week Clay and Sarah continue their discussion of walking our individual spiritual paths.
This week Clay and Sarah discuss why we embark on a spiritual journey and reflect on their own journeys up to this point. From magick and mysticism to eastern philosophy, Native American wisdom and Celtic paganism to yoga and Buddhism we've collectively been through it all. Come listen in and hear what we've tried to take from each of these wisdom traditions.
What can a man searching for an experience of the divine learn from Zen masters and Archangels? When the Archangel Gabriel suddenly appears to a simple Zen practitioner, the narrator must reassess what he believes about the potential of human life and the nature of our human reality. In this episode, Clay and Sarah discuss what they have taken away from Stephen Mitchell's fictional tale Meetings with the Archangel.
"To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings!” In honour of George Orwell's birthday on 25th June and the relevance of many of the ideas about personal privacy, mass surveillance and 'alternative facts', Clay and Sarah discuss to what extent our we living in Orwell's 1984
"To thine owe self be true." Hamlet's words have become famous because they resonate with so many of us. We are happiest when we feel we can truly be ourselves, and yet this often feels more complicated than it should. So what is an 'Authentic Life'? And what do we do when our need for Authenticity conflicts with our need for Social Acceptance and Belonging?
In this episode, Clay and Sarah discuss aspects of authenticity and how it applies to the way we live our daily lives.
There are times when we long to be alone and seek out our own company. This kind of solitude can be a restorative and energising. However, there are other times where, even though we are surrounded by people, we can feel very much alone.
What is the difference between these two ways of being alone? In this episode, Clay and Sarah discuss the vastly different experiences of loneliness and solitude.
Is it the events in our lives that shape us, or our beliefs about what those events mean? How do we interpret our past experiences to create beliefs about who we are and what we are capable of? And do we always acknowledge the beliefs we hold about ourselves or can they live in the shadowlands of our subconscious, whispering to us, and holding us back from really living the life we want to live?
This week Clay and Sarah tackle the concept of our 'Limiting Beliefs'.
"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates famously said. Since the times of Ancient Greece, Socrates's Method of questioning everything from beauty, virtue, courage and friendship down to our most basic assumptions has endured as a way of living an Examined Life.
So how can we apply the Socratic method to think not only about the human condition but to examine our own individual life?
When we think about our physical health, it is usually in terms of nutrition and exercise. Occasionally we consider how stress might be impacting us. However, some traditions that argue that an individual's physical health must be examined within a much broader context of their life -- in terms of their personality type, mental state and energetic constitution.
So how can we understand the links between physical health and healing, and our psychological and spiritual practice?
In this episode, Clay and Sarah discuss:
-
Ayurveda - the traditional Indian health practice, known as the 'Science of Life'
-
The three types of bodily constitutions (known as doshas) in Ayurveda - Vata, Pitta & Kapha - including physical characteristics, approaches to work & social situations, responses to stress and lifestyle tendencies
-
Sarah and Clay discuss their own results of the 'dosha test' -- you can take it yourself here!
-
How we can use the knowledge from this Ayurveda 'dosha' test to keep ourselves in balance physically and mentally
-
Similarities to Hippocrates's concept of bodily 'humors' (fluids) and the way the balance of these humors in the body impact mood and personality
-
The Keirsey Personality Test - derived from Hippocrates's understanding of the link between the physical and psychological aspects of the self
-
Four 'types' of the Keirsey Personality Test - Guardians, Artisans, Idealists, Rationals
-
Clay and Sarah discuss their own results from the Keirsey Personality test... You can take the test for yourself here!
According to Ayurveda, the mind and the body are inextricably linked. Therefore, it makes no sense to only consider 'physical' aspects such as nutrition and exercise when attempting to maintain overall health. In the same way, physical medicine is not considered enough to uproot the causes of disease.
Perhaps we should consider something that western medicine almost wholly dismisses -- the way an individual's health and healing from disease is influenced by a whole range of factors including our psychological makeup, our mental state, even our underlying energetic 'constitution'.
Ayurveda's goals include preserving the health of a healthy person, preventing disease, and promoting longevity through improved quality of life in mind, body and spirit. Sounds pretty good!
According to this system of health, there are three principle energies governing the cosmos and manifesting in certain ways in our bodies. Vata is the energy of movement, associated with the element Air, and governs things like our blood circulation, breathing, heartbeat, communication and even the movement of our thoughts. Pitta is the energy of transformation, associated with the elements Fire and Water, and governs things like our digestion and turning our thoughts into action. Kapha is the binding energy, associated with Earth and Water, and in our bodies is the aspect that closes cuts and generally keeps our body in a particular shape.
Although these energies are in a constant state of flux depending on our diet, lifestyle, weather, emotions and state of mind, all of us typically have one energy that is dominant in us, and a secondary energy with the third being quite weak. For instance, a person with high Vata energy tends to be physically slight, a light sleeper, and anxious under stress. They tend towards hyperactivity and restlessness and like a lifestyle that is free and unattached. A person with high Pitta energy, by contrast is typically of medium weight and build, and tends to be purposeful and intense in their working life. They become irritable and frustrated under stress, are generally active and prefer their lives to be well-planned. People dominant in Kapha energy tend to be slightly heavier build and are deep sleepers. They tend to be easy-going and accepting in personality, a good listener with lots of friends. Under stress they become withdrawn, and although prefer a regular, reliable lifestyle, have a tendency to get into a rut.
If you want to know your Ayurvedic constitution, take this dosha test here.
Hippocrates, the supposed 'Father of Modern Medicine', had a surprisingly similar understanding of the body. He incorporated the idea that there are four tempermental types into a medical practice based on four physical bodily humors.
Derived from this Ancient Greek system of medicine, the Keirsey Personality Test highlights psychological tendencies and distinguishes individuals into four 'types'.
The Guardians are concrete and organised, seek security and belonging, and are concerned with duty and responsibility.
The Artisans are concrete and adaptable, concerned with making an impact.
The Idealists are abstract and compassionate, seeking meaning and significance. They are concerned with personal growth and finding their own unique identity.
The Rationals are abstract and objective, seeking mastery and control. They are concerned with knowledge and competence, and are excellent at strategy.
You can take the Keirsey Personality Test here!
One last note, and something to take to heart. In these systems that link our physical health with our psychological and spiritual constitution, self-care becomes a sacred duty! So take care of yourself! :)
Remember your six year old self? Your thirteen year old self? Your twenty year old self? Are you the same person as you were then? Memory provides an important sense of continuity to our lives. But do our memories make us who we are?
In this episode, Clay and Sarah delve deep into the land of memory to discuss:
-
Amnesia and what is reality like when you've forgotten your past (see this great article by Daniel Levitin, 'Amnesia & the Self that Remains when Memory is Lost')
-
Different kinds of memory (Semantic, Procedural, Episodic)
-
Are we the same person through time?
-
High school reunions - when the person people 'remember' collides with the person you are now
-
The impact of shared memories - family memories & communal memories
-
Questions of memory in pop culture - the film Momento & the TV series Black Mirror
-
What makes you You? Memories? Personality? Habits? Deeper consciousness?
What is memory for anyway?
A simple answer would be -- so we can learn from our past. So we can respond quickly and appropriately to new situations based on past encounters.
However, scholar Pascal Boyer has an interesting answer to this question. First we should understand that there are actually three different kinds of memory: Semantic Memory (memory of info about your environment), Procedural Memory (memory of skills and how to do things) and Episodic Memory (memory of unique, specific situations in the past - what we think of as our memory!). Both Procedural and Semantic Memory help us by taking specific situations and extracting common elements about them so that we might use that information when a similar situation arises again.
But Episodic Memory doesn't do this. Instead it focuses on what is unique about an event, and 'remembering' this kind of information can involve not only a recall of information but a sense of 're-experiencing' the past event. In other words, this kind of memory -- what we think of as our Memory -- does not give a simple, straightforward answer of what it is for.
Instead, these unique past events line up as thoughts in our mind and form a kind of 'Autobiographical Memory'... the story of who we are and how we got to be this way.
Or, as Ulric Neisser named it, the "Narrative Self" which consists of events linked in a causal story leading to one's present.
But as we all know, often we remember what we want to remember. And we remember events the way we want to remember them. This suggests that it isn't our memories which made us who we are... it is who we are (or who we think we are) that makes our memories. In other words, we remember certain events precisely because they fit into our causal story about why we are who we are.
And then of course, it is impossible to escape the fact that, although we might get lost in our thoughts and feel as if we were re-experiencing a past event... although we might feel angry, embarrassed, or suddenly sad by remembering something that has already happened, ultimately all these memories are all just thoughts. Made up thoughts. Imaginary thoughts. They aren't happening anymore. And they may not even accurately represent what actually happened.
"A memory is a mental event in the virtual reality of the mind..."
Do what you love. Follow your passion. This kind of advice has become a common catch-phrase of our time. But is this actually good advice? Does it correspond to the reality of how successful people who are 'doing what they love' got to where they are today?
This week, Clay and Sarah discuss the question of whether following your passion is worthwhile advice.
On the strange road to Santiago de Compostela, Paulo Coelho reflects about the experience of pilgrimage and journeys of all kinds. In this episode, Clay and Sarah talk about what they’ve taken away from reading Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage.
Stories are the operating system of human consciousness and myths are culture-specific upgrades, each new version bringing out new features and retiring some old ones.
Yes indeed, we have a compulsion to turn almost everything into a story. Joseph Campbell has claimed it is the distinguishing mark of our species. The thing that makes us different from all other animals is not our emotional complexity or even our intellect, but our ability and indeed need to tell stories. So why do we need stories? What do they do for us?
How can stories make us more human?
We spend more time within the realm of story than you might think. This not only includes our time spent reading or watching TV or films. It also includes our propensity to constantly daydream -- playing out potential real life scenerios in our heads or replaying our version of past events. It includes the way we answer social questions such as "How are you?" Or "How was your weekend?" Even things from advertisements to watching sports are taken out of the realm of simplistic facts and instead woven into stories about what might happen if you buy this product (for instance the awesome Apple ads of 2016) or the background story of this particular athelete.
In fact we spend so much of our day in within stories that Jonathan Gottschall of The Storytelling Animal, has claimed "Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat."
With more and more of our lives being lived online on places like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram is the need for offline communities still relevant? Or do our online communities actually strengthen our offline communities by bringing people with like minded interests together like never before, spanning local and global divides to link people up regardless of their geography.
In this episode, Clay and Charlotte of @leamjoyjam explore the importance of our online and offline communities and how the two re-enforce each other.
Does it feel like everyone else is having more fun than you? Taking better vacations, going to trendier bars or cooler art exhibits or playing with newer tech gadgets? Do you worry when you step away from your iphone or email in case you miss something important (even when you're not expecting anything)? If so, you could be suffering from the latest in our line of modern mental ailments -- there was Affluenza, Comparativitis, and now, FOMO -- the Fear of Missing Out.
Are we destined to take a certain path in life? Or are we the masters of our own destiny? Or is there middle way? Some subtle truth that both fate and free-will play a part on our path in life?
"Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned," Wrote Tom Stoppard in his famous play Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. "Each move is dictated by the previous one -- that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost."
In this episode, Clay and Sarah discuss:
-
Why we don't like the idea of Fate
-
The idea of 'God's Plan' as a possible conception of Fate with Free-Will
-
Hard core Destiny (this is Oedipus's problem!)
-
The role of Habits in determining our destiny. (Remember in the Matrix, the Oracle's explanation to Neo that "You've already made the choice, now you need to understand why you made it.")
-
Hard core Free-Will (aka the World of Random Chaos)
Now if you've been listening to the show for awhile, you'll know about Clay's obsession with the Zombie Apocalypse and his not-so-secret curiosity about what would happen if all the structures of law and order that we take for granted come tumbling down so that Free-Will can reign.
You'll also hear in this episode about his other sneaking suspicion that life is like being on a massive ship. In other words, you can go where you like on the ship, but when all's said and done, the ship is headed in a particularly direction to a particular destination.
This reminded us of the film The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon where powerful agents of Fate work behind the scenes to 'correct for' our minor deviations and keep us on the predetermined path of our destiny.
But what if there were also a potential that both things are true.
What if there is BOTH an element of fate or destiny AND an element of free-will at work in our lives?
Many of us probably live in this space of contradiction all the time. For instance, as much as many of us are drawn to the idea of what I've called hard core Free-Will, that we are ultimately masters of our own destiny, I would venture a guess that most of us also live with the belief that some things were meant to happen, or not meant to be. For instance, if we didn't get that job we wanted, "it's for the best". If we bump into someone we know randomly and this leads to an important event in our lives, that it was "meant to happen".
Maybe when we believe we have the power to change the direction of our lives AND believe that some things are meant to happen, this is not a contradiction...
What do you think? Do you feel like there have been forces of fate at work in your life at any point? Do you use phrases like 'meant to happen' or 'there are no coincidences', but also believe you have free-will? How do you reconcile these things in YOUR mind?
