Sleepy Philosophy Radio

Fall asleep to Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, the great book on despair and the self.

This longform essay reads the book of eighteen forty-nine closely and in its own order, beginning with its famous opening definition, the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. It follows the diagnosis that Kierkegaard published under the invented name Anti-Climacus (Sygdommen til Doden in Danish), the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity, and the sickness that cannot kill. It meets the girl who loses her lover, the man who wants to be Caesar or nothing, the house whose owner lives in the cellar and the king without a country. It sets out the despair of weakness, the despair of defiance, despair as sin before God, offense and the despair of forgiveness, and the sentence in which the book states its cure. A shorter chapter tells the life, from his engagement to Regine Olsen to his late attack on the church.

Which is harder to see in oneself, a despair that hides or a despair that wears the look of strength?

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:
0:00:00 Man Is Spirit: The Opening Lines
0:07:34 This Sickness Is Not Unto Death
0:15:09 The Self as a Relation and a Synthesis
0:22:39 Despair as a Misrelation of the Self
0:30:45 The Sickness Unto Death Explained
0:38:35 Despair Over Oneself: Girl and Caesar
0:46:20 Why Everyone Is in Despair
0:53:37 Losing Oneself: Infinitude and Finitude
1:02:00 Possibility, Necessity and Despair
1:10:13 Unconscious Despair and the Cellar
1:18:06 Despair Over the Earthly and Oneself
1:26:32 Defiance: Willing to Be Oneself
1:34:24 Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus
1:41:05 Despair Is Sin: Before God
1:49:08 Sin Continues: Despair Over Sin
1:56:33 Despair of Forgiveness and Offense
2:04:36 Offense, Christendom and Denial
2:12:25 Faith: Resting in the Power

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music:
"Colorless Aura" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Deep Noise" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Promising Relationship" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Relent" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lost Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Evening Fall (Harp)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Sunset at Glengorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mourning Song" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Echoes of Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Smoother Move" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Agnus Dei X" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Quinn's Song: A New Man" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lone Harvest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 03" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
"Cylinder Eight", "Cylinder Seven", "Cylinder Nine" by Chris Zabriskie
From the album Cylinders
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a close reading of guilt, conscience and moral permission.
A student imagines that exceptional people may cross the moral boundaries binding everyone else. This essay follows Raskolnikov's extraordinary man theory through his published article, Porfiry's questions, the competing demands of poverty and pride, and the relationships his reasoning cannot fully explain.

Sonya's care preserves responsibility instead of erasing it. Razumihin offers useful work, Dunya resists generosity that expects obedience, and a false accusation exposes the difference between respectable confidence and reliable evidence. Crime and Punishment, also searched as Prestuplenie i nakazanie, separates fear from repentance and private admission from public confession. Its Siberian epilogue asks what remains to change after a sentence has been imposed.

Brief context from Poor Folk and The House of the Dead locates Dostoevsky's attention to dignity, dependence and penal life without replacing the novel with a biography. The ending leaves renewal as a beginning requiring further choices.
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:
0:00:00 Crime and Punishment and Isolation
0:10:27 Poverty and the Price of a Person
0:22:02 Raskolnikov's Extraordinary Man
0:37:30 Dostoevsky and the Criminal Mind
0:44:38 Guilt Before Repentance
0:55:23 Razumihin and Useful Work
1:05:22 Dunya and the Cost of Gratitude
1:16:39 Porfiry and the Limits of Evidence
1:27:34 Sonya and Moral Attention
1:39:55 Luzhin's Accusation
1:48:51 Confession Without an Excuse
2:02:49 Svidrigailov and Unbounded Choice
2:13:48 Porfiry's Offer
2:25:21 The Public Confession
2:33:46 Siberia and an Unchanged Judgment
2:47:29 Redemption and the Unwritten Future

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.
Music:
"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Relent" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Colorless Aura" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Echoes of Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Deep Noise" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lone Harvest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Overheat" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Smoother Move" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mourning Song" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lost Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lamentation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Soaring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 02" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
"Cylinder Five", "Cylinder Two" by Chris Zabriskie
From the album Cylinders
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and The Rebel, a reading of absurdity, freedom, and revolt.

Camus and Sartre began as friends and became public opponents over The Rebel. Their argument reaches deeper than the quarrel: Camus starts with the absurd and insists on revolt with limits; Sartre starts with radical freedom and asks what commitment to history requires. The reading follows their wartime friendship, the break, and the strongest version of each view. It asks how a person acts when no final authority can decide in their place. The chapters give each major claim enough space to become clear, then test where its evidence and limits lie. The narration follows the subject through the named texts and arguments, with its historical context where that changes the meaning. It keeps quotations and disputed interpretations in view, and leaves room for a listener to weigh the question rather than accepting a ready answer. Search terms include L’Homme révolté and La Nausée.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:

(00:00:00) Camus Reads Sartre's Nausea

(00:02:19) Camus and Sartre Become Friends

(00:14:00) Camus's Absurd and Sartre's Contingency

(00:25:43) Sartre's Freedom Without Excuse

(00:38:02) Camus at the Combat Newspaper

(00:48:41) Sartre's Student and the Choice

(01:00:47) Camus's Plague and Shared Happiness

(01:13:39) Sartre's Literature of Freedom

(01:26:41) Camus's Rebel and Its Limits

(01:40:40) Sartre's Commitment to History

(01:52:53) Camus and Sartre on Human Nature

(02:04:57) Camus and Sartre's Break of 1952

(02:14:28) Camus and Sartre's Nobel Choices

(02:22:34) Camus and Sartre After the Quarrel

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music:

"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Promising Relationship" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Overheat" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Meditation Impromptu 03" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Meditation Impromptu 02" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Gymnopedie No. 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Immersed" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Colorless Aura" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Lost Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"Cylinder Five", "Cylinder Two", "Cylinder Nine", "Cylinder Eight" by Chris Zabriskie

From the album Cylinders

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to The Kybalion's seven Hermetic principles, usually attributed to William Walker Atkinson.

The Kybalion places a living mind beneath the visible universe and presents seven principles for understanding existence. This carefully researched narration follows Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender, giving each its own argument and concrete examples. It distinguishes the book's American New Thought setting from its claims of ancient authority, and separates its speculative cosmology from established physics. The discussion also considers mental transmutation, deliberate attention, the relationship between a creator and a created individual, and the demand that knowledge enter action. Atkinson's Thought Vibration helps locate its publishing world, while the ancient Hermetica, including the Corpus Hermeticum, provides a contrast with the modern numbered system. The book's afterlife is considered through its portable maxims and the historical framing of The Kybalion: The Definitive Edition. The aim is to understand what the text actually proposes without turning mental practice into promises that wishes control physical events.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:
0:00:00 The Kybalion and Its Real Origins
0:13:50 Mentalism and the Mental Universe
0:33:30 Correspondence and the Unseen
0:48:58 Vibration and the Language of Science
1:04:25 Polarity and Degrees of Feeling
1:20:18 Rhythm and the Return of Moods
1:35:48 Cause and Effect and Human Freedom
1:51:48 Gender and the Creative Mind
2:07:25 Mental Transmutation and Attention
2:21:00 The All in Every Individual
2:37:30 The Kybalion and Its Afterlife
2:51:34 Knowledge Intended for Use

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music:
"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Evening Fall (Harp)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Soaring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Clean Soul" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Sunset at Glengorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 02" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Promising Relationship" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Gymnopedie No. 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Overheat" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Meditation Impromptu 03" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Smoother Move" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
"Cylinder Seven", "Cylinder Eight", "Cylinder Four", "Cylinder Five" by Chris Zabriskie
From the album Cylinders
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to the history of hell and Dante’s Inferno, a reading of Hades, Sheol, and Dante’s Inferno.

The idea of hell did not enter history in one finished form. This reading follows Egyptian judgment, Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades, the Zoroastrian bridge, Gehenna, and arguments in early Christianity about the reach and duration of judgment. Dante gives the tradition its most enduring imaginative architecture; Milton, Swedenborg, and modern philosophers change its terms again. The focus stays on ideas about justice and the human conscience, rather than scenes of torment. The chapters give each major claim enough space to become clear, then test where its evidence and limits lie. The narration follows the subject through the named texts and arguments, with its historical context where that changes the meaning. It keeps quotations and disputed interpretations in view, and leaves room for a listener to weigh the question rather than accepting a ready answer. Search terms include Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Inferno.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:
0:00:00 The History of Hell and Its Names
0:04:53 Dante's Inferno and the Gate
0:15:27 Dante's Nine Circles of Hell
0:26:14 Egyptian Weighing of the Heart
0:35:40 Sheol and the House of Dust
0:44:16 Hades and Plato's Judges
0:56:28 Zoroaster's Bridge of Judgment
1:04:10 Gehenna and the Divided Dead
1:13:19 Hell in the Gospels and Revelation
1:22:28 Origen and the Hope of Restoration
1:39:41 Augustine and Eternal Punishment
1:56:57 Medieval Judgment in Stone
2:07:11 Milton's Hell Within the Mind
2:12:26 Swedenborg and the Chosen Hell
2:25:36 Darwin and the Moral Objection
2:33:08 Sartre's No Exit and Other People

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music:
"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Deep Noise" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"The Dread" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Echoes of Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Sunset at Glengorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mourning Song" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Virtutes Instrumenti" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Agnus Dei X" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Soaring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Quinn's Song: A New Man" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Immersed" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
"Cylinder Four", "Cylinder One", "Cylinder Seven" by Chris Zabriskie
From the album Cylinders
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to the life and mind of Samuel Beckett, who made an art of failure, waiting, and going on.

Born on a Good Friday in a comfortable Dublin suburb, a brilliant, restless young Irishman drifts to Paris, falls into the orbit of the greatest writer of the age, and spends a lost decade unable to find his own voice. Then a war, a betrayal, and years in hiding change him, and afterward, in a single astonishing burst, he writes the works that remake modern literature. This is the story of the man behind Waiting for Godot and Endgame, of two tramps by a bare tree and a woman buried in the earth, of a trilogy of novels that descend into a voice that cannot stop. We follow his idea of habit and time, his comedy of the abyss, his strange doctrine of failure, and the deep kindness of the private man, all the way to a plain grey stone and the words that outlived him. A life, and a way of seeing, for the quiet hours.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:

0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Life

0:11:49 Chapter 2: The Suffering of Being

0:20:48 Chapter 3: The Years in Hiding

0:27:35 Chapter 4: The Way of Subtraction

0:36:51 Chapter 5: Waiting for Godot

0:48:47 Chapter 6: The Comedy of the Abyss

0:56:39 Chapter 7: Endgame

1:08:11 Chapter 8: The Need of the Other

1:13:49 Chapter 9: The Voice Goes On

1:25:14 Chapter 10: Krapp's Last Tape

1:31:43 Chapter 11: Voices and Shadows

1:39:59 Chapter 12: Happy Days

1:46:08 Chapter 13: Fail Better

1:54:22 Chapter 14: The Body in the Dark

2:00:41 Chapter 15: Grey Upon Grey

2:09:02 Chapter 16: Still Going On

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to the life and ideas of Alan Watts, the philosopher who taught the West how to let go.

Across sixteen unhurried chapters, we follow the strange and luminous life of Alan Watts, the self-taught Englishman who became the most listened-to interpreter of Eastern wisdom the West has ever known. From a boyhood spent gazing at Chinese landscape paintings, through a brief and surprising career as a priest, to the houseboats and mountain cabins of California, we trace how a restless amateur turned Zen, Taoism, and the old Indian teachings into clear and living English. Along the way we sit with his best-loved books, on insecurity, on Zen, and on the taboo against knowing who you really are, and with the great question at the center of them all. And we look, without flinching, at the gap between the serene teacher and the troubled man, and at why his gentle voice, decades after his death, still finds people in the dark.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:

0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Painted Mountains

0:11:56 Chapter 2: The borrowed light

0:17:57 Chapter 3: The habit and the collar

0:26:22 Chapter 4: The menu and the meal

0:32:27 Chapter 5: To hold your breath

0:43:01 Chapter 6: A finger pointing at the moon

0:55:28 Chapter 7: Beat, square, and neither

1:02:32 Chapter 8: The war with nature

1:11:34 Chapter 9: Two ways of healing

1:23:06 Chapter 10: The chemistry of consciousness

1:30:13 Chapter 11: The game of hide and seek

1:40:53 Chapter 12: The taboo against knowing

1:52:45 Chapter 13: You cannot live in tomorrow

1:59:27 Chapter 14: The watercourse way

2:08:41 Chapter 15: The genuine fake

2:19:58 Chapter 16: The voice that remained

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to Sigmund Freud, from a room full of buried gods to a chosen death in exile.

He set out to be the coldest of scientists and ended by telling the strangest story modern people had ever heard about themselves. This is the life and the mind of Sigmund Freud. We begin in his consulting rooms in Vienna, among the ancient statues he could not work without, and follow him from a provincial childhood to the discovery that made his name, the claim that most of the mind is hidden, and hidden on purpose. We move through his masterwork on dreams, his scandalous account of childhood, the drama he found buried in every family, and the movement that made him famous and cost him his dearest friends. We watch his vision darken, after a war, into a theory of the wish for death and the permanent discontent of civilization. And we follow him to the end, through illness, exile, and a death met on his own terms, into the strange afterlife of ideas that science keeps rejecting and no one can quite escape.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:

0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Life

0:11:51 Chapter 2: A Cure by Talking

0:20:10 Chapter 3: Not Master in the House

0:26:21 Chapter 4: The Lamp Turned Inward

0:34:05 Chapter 5: The Royal Road

0:46:20 Chapter 6: What the Tongue Betrays

0:51:26 Chapter 7: The Child's Secret Life

0:58:38 Chapter 8: The Drama in the Nursery

1:09:36 Chapter 9: The Difficult Patients

1:15:48 Chapter 10: The Cause and Its Heretics

1:24:25 Chapter 11: The Crime at the Origin

1:30:27 Chapter 12: The Undertow

1:38:57 Chapter 13: The House Divided

1:44:52 Chapter 14: The Consoling Illusion

1:52:30 Chapter 15: The Price of Civilization

2:05:08 Chapter 16: The Fire and the Flight

2:13:33 Chapter 17: A Climate of Opinion

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to Plotinus, the mystic who taught that all things flow from a single source and long to return.

In the third century, in the crowded city of Rome, a gentle teacher who was ashamed of his own body and would not sit for a portrait built the last great philosophy of the ancient world. This episode follows Plotinus, the founder of what we now call Neoplatonism, from his youth in Roman Egypt and his years with a secret master in Alexandria to the circle of devoted students who gathered around him. We trace his single luminous vision of reality, a great outpouring from one nameless source down through mind and soul to the very edge of matter, and the long road home by which a person may climb back. Along the way we sit with his thoughts on beauty and on time, on evil and the goodness of the world, on the self that never fell, and on the rare and wordless union he was said to have reached four times. It is a slow, patient walk up the oldest ladder in philosophy.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters:

0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Face He Would Not Leave

0:11:56 Chapter 2: The Heir of Plato

0:17:59 Chapter 3: From One, All Things

0:26:27 Chapter 4: Beyond Being Itself

0:37:55 Chapter 5: Where Thought Is Being

0:48:00 Chapter 6: The Moving Image

0:54:04 Chapter 7: The Soul of the World

1:02:52 Chapter 8: The Shadow of Contemplation

1:09:13 Chapter 9: Where the Light Fails

1:18:36 Chapter 10: The Statue Within

1:30:45 Chapter 11: The Self That Never Fell

1:39:33 Chapter 12: Alone, to the Alone

1:51:34 Chapter 13: Happy on the Rack

1:59:51 Chapter 14: The Order of the Books

2:05:41 Chapter 15: The Long Afterglow

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Thank you for listening, whether this is your first episode or your fiftieth.

Our regular episodes are free for everyone, and they always take hours of reading and writing. If you'd like to support the show directly, you can become a member on Spotify. Members get our book episodes: each one takes a single book and walks through it, in our own words. On Spotify, members also hear every episode without ad breaks.

To join, press play on any of our episodes with a lock, or use this link: https://members.spotify.com/to/sleepyphilo

Membership is separate from Spotify Premium. It is available in the US, Canada, the UK, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Music:

"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/