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Speakings
Speakings episodes
- In Praise of Stupidity
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking":
Everyone has a defining insecurity. Our lives circle around these insecurities through exclusion.
To be a human being is to be in direct and dangerous contact with time. Are we more afraid of finitude or eternity?
Perhaps there is something beneath time and eternity that makes this duality possible. But this something can only be sensed, not conceptualized.
We build identities based on exclusion so we don't have to dissolve into everything. Just as every person excludes traits from their identity—from fear and insecurity— so do professions.
In academia, that excluded fear/ characteristic is stupidity. Lately, I've been wanting to embody this shadow. Not stupidity as the opposite of intelligence, but rather as a spaciousness of mind, a wide unknowing.
Even though this blankness may seem to be a kind of stupidity, it's in fact the key to using intelligence (as a tool) effectively, holding paradoxes, and being willing to change your mind.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
12 min - Can Pleasure Be Trusted?
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking"
- Why are we so suspicious of pleasure?
- The darkness of the other's body— that the other remains uncontrollable and uninhabitable—reveals a fundamental separation. In response to this anxiety, we try to control the chaos of the other's sovereign body.
- Perhaps we fear desire when we first glimpse its infinite nature. Human desires are beyond the simple needs of other animals, and we seem dangerously driven towards insatiable pleasure.
- My "miraculous" experience with intuitive eating.
- Most of us live with a psychological rift between a disciplinarian and a child in our heads.
- Developmental ethics: where do rules end? Can intuition be trusted? How do we know our desires are "good"?
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
19 min - Staying Human While the World is Ending
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking":
- How can we live in such urgent times of climate change and not take continuous, drastic, urgent action?
- On the risk of over-emphasis on personal responsibility: your personal "carbon footprint" was actually marketed by British Petroleum (BP) as a way to shift responsibility from oil companies to individuals.
- And yet, doing nothing because we can do little cannot be the way to move forward. We must find a way to act in accordance with a truer, more beautiful reality.
- Any future speculations about climate change disaster cannot tell us how to act in the present. To find an ethical grounding, we need only look at the inequities and irrationalities of our societies as they are.
- Through socialization, "normalcy" is established and maintained.
- We live in such an unreal society that the reality of our interconnectedness strikes us as absurd. We must act as if everything around us is living, good, and deserves our respect. If we act that way, we'll begin to see it intellectually and perceptually.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
20 min - The Sound of the Body: An Essay Excerpt
This episode is a recording of one section of an essay I originally wrote for subscribers. Read the full essay here.
The key points in this "speaking":
- The world arrives as one: body and soul together, one uncaused arising.
- "Foods prepared with presence can open the pores towards particular worlds."
- "The human is a virtual animal, an ideological construct that derives its meaning from material exclusion."
- "The Yukaghirs say that before children learn to speak, the body is open: “raw meat.” Language is learned and the flesh bends into itself, circling small worlds of human-centric meanings."
- "Foregoing language re-attunes the flesh to the fluid, sensual conversation outside of fixed human meanings."
- "I would also like to be less dependent on this technology we call speech. Can I learn the subtle speakings of wilder things?"
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
10 min - A Living Landscape, an Animate World
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking":
Why I still sometimes call myself a poet even though I don’t write proper poetry: because poetry is the most immanent disclosure of reality. Direct experience has a particular rhythm, a symbolic structure. Meaning is unquestioned before interpretation.
In spite of our differences from other animals, what is it that allows us to understand the world? We must share a common ontological "atmosphere" with all visible beings in order to understand or perceive them at all. There must be a background of sameness upon which difference can appear. What is completely outside a shared intelligible world would be completely outside of perception, language, or analysis.
If the world were entirely green, we wouldn’t have a word for “green,” because we wouldn’t be able to see it as something that stands out from all objects. We could only say: the world is intelligible to us, perhaps because each being shares a common essence.
Perhaps "animism" is not the right word, but no word can capture fully the common nature that is shared by everything. Knowledge is inherently dualistic, but reality is deeper: something sensed rather than said.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
24 min - The Miraculous is a Mode of Thought
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking":
- Is the miraculous simply a supernatural happening? Like God is a supernatural entity?
- Richard Rohr’s distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the universal Christ: Jesus as a pattern, archetype, and meme.
- Beliefs are about facts, which refer to objects in the world. But the whole of reality is no object at all, and so cannot be captured by beliefs.
- A particular spiritual framework is not about facts, but is a lens through which one sees the world, or a way of cleaning the lens of perception (though most modern religious people do not understand this and make religion about facts, thereby falling into irrational beliefs).
- A lens is always clear and silent. If you see your glasses lenses, it's because they have a smudge that needs to be cleaned. Perhaps this is the origin of the sense of the sacred in religious belief: one senses that to make the lens an object (i.e. by taking off the glasses and examining them) is to be blind while one does so, or to abandon the very lens that you are examining. To speak of the sacred is to always distort it, though sometimes these distortions are necessary.
- In the same way, the miracle is not a supernatural happening. Rather, the miraculous and the mundane are relative modes of sight, always conditioned by context.
- We can learn to see the world as miraculous.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
17 min - Why Your Partner Can't Complete You
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
The key points in this "speaking":
- Romantic love is the religion of the secular west. We used to seek the One (the ground of all reality), and now we seek "the one," the finite individual who can fill our infinite hunger.
- Before the advent of self-awareness, we sensed our oneness (without being aware of it). Now there is an uncrossable gap between the experiencing self and the interpretive self (or story-self, ego-self).
- In this uncrossable gap, a desire opens up: for food, time, sex, love, success, anything to complete the fractured identity.
- The fantasy of the "other half" comes from Plato's symposium, in which Aristophanes recounts the myth of Zeus splitting a soul in two and placing one in each body, so we must find the person that carries the other half of our soul. But in fact, our two souls live side by side in one body, and completion cannot be found in another.
- However, real love can see past the story-self into the true, non-dual nature of reality. This is why romantic love can be so exciting, and even transcendent.
- Love is not only not blind, but is the essence of clarity and an enhanced form of rationality.
- How can we learn to approach each interaction from a place of completion rather than lack?
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
20 min - On "Barbie" & the Allure of Ideology
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
Key points of this "speaking":
- I saw "Barbie" and was disappointed. I’m a feminist who did not disagree with any part of its message, and yet I felt it was a wasted opportunity.
- Is this film doing more harm than good for this conversation?
- The best way to approach this question, I think, is to analyze some early forms of virtual reality. One of the first forms of virtual reality is the story (stories, with their beginnings and endings, cannot be found in the empirical world). Ideologies are second-order virtual realities that swallows stories whole (including the story of the self).
- A "message film" is a necessarily dominating aesthetic structure, just like patriarchy is inherently dominating. By being close to a message film, Barbie participates in the same patriarchal logic that it is trying to critique.
- The goal of the artist is to bring us into direct contact with reality, as free as possible from ideology. When we are in direct contact with reality, we realize that reality can be otherwise.
- Unfreedom is feeling there are only the most obvious set of options: a feeling of inevitability creeps into our lives. This happens due to a scarcity of good stories. The path of freedom is nuance.
- If you are brave enough to tell a good story or to live a good story, you will carve new paths of possibility for future generations.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
28 min - The End is Always Joy
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
Key points of this "speaking":
- Every conceptual schema is a mythology if you go down far enough. Hold these mythologies lightly.
- In order to be truly successful, you have to tend to your particular energy in the way that it requires.
- We have to risk self-deception in order to find our inner guide. No one knows for sure whether or not their lives are progressing in the direction they want them to.
- Because of the risk of self-deception, systems of control are created to manufacture the illusion of progress.
- It’s possible to arrive at the end of your life and realize your life was a variation of hiding. But you won’t arrive there without having allowed your body, mind, and heart to go blind in to some degree throughout your life.
- This blindness is not darkness— that depth of feeling and thought that makes tender and meaningful your life— but a flinching in the face of darkness.
- Anything can be a tool of awakening or an opiate.
- Positive thinking will not save us, but deep-rooted joy will.
- Where there is truth, joy will follow.
- If you are still in despair, you are not at the end. The end is always joy.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
Music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
15 min - Analogizing Ourselves Into Being
Welcome to the Speakings podcast! My name is Sondra: I'm a writer, philosopher, and lover of (among other things) trees, artisan chocolate, old bookstores, and other human and non-human beings. Both my philosophical and creative projects explore ways of being-in-the-world that are more rational and more connected to the broader body of the earth. In this podcast, I hope to capture the dynamism of philosophical and spiritual thought by speaking in an unscripted manner, belonging to the moment as fully as possible. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future topics, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also check out my website at www.sondrawriter.com, where you'll find my essays and links to my memoir.
You can find the synopsis of this episode, further notes, and a convenient place to comment here. I will also periodically update my thoughts on this episode's content at that same link.
Here are some key points in today's "speaking":
- Humans must analogize in order to self-define: are we a little lower than the gods or a little higher than the apes?
- All disciplines are founded on a key “as if,” a founding tautology that cannot itself be explained (the system cannot explain that which possibilizes explanation). Philosopher Alfred Lord Whitehead wrote that all first principles are “metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”
- In other words, all worldviews are built not on facts, but on metaphors.
- Today's modern "Western" worldview is biased towards the biologically abstract while excluding the biological senses (e.g. it's not true, it's just hormones, a chemical imbalance, etc.).
- Bias is seen as impediment, as if the person were an obstacle to truth. Rather than defining truth as a gathering/composite of diverse perspectives, we see truth as the exclusion of particularity— particular persons and particular bodies.
- I believe that all experiences are "true" and that the truth is always in excess of those experiences. My experience cannot exhaust reality and it cannot be reduced to a single cause either.
- In Meghan O'Gieblyn's book, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, she describes the founding metaphor of cognitive science as the computer. Thus, not a single intelligible statement can be made about the brain (within cognitive science/ neuroscience) outside of this metaphor. This is only dangerous when we begin to believe this is the only metaphor that can be used to speak of the brain, or that the brain can be reduced to a single metaphorical framework.
- Idolatry (speaking conceptually, in the manner of Jean Luc Marion) occurs when the gaze gets trapped in the object. Our self-defining gaze is highly prone to becoming trapped in the objects we make.
- Example of conceptual idolatry: philosophers and physicists (like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, and others) claim that there is a high likelihood that we are living in a computer simulation. This is a strange reversal of the technology-creator relationship in which the created object is seen to have pre-existed and invented the creator!
- There is no way to properly understand the origins of the human without invoking (at some point) a mythology. We understand ourselves through conceptual tools, but the hammer did not invent the carpenter, and evolution is not our creator-god.
- Reality—humans included— cannot be reduced to any explanation, religious, scientific, or otherwise.
Intro and outro music is L'épisode cévenol by Circus Marcus, from the Free Music Archive. License type: CC BY-NC.
28 min
About Speakings
From the publisher's feed
Welcome to the Speakings Podcast, where I explore philosophical and spiritual topics in an unscripted manner, hoping to revive language as living presence and philosophy as contemplative, embodied…
practice. You’ll find blog posts associated with each podcast on my website, including practices for many of the “speakings.” If you’d like to join me in crafting more whole and authentic lives, please share your insights, experiences with the practices, or suggestions for future episodes on my website at https://www.sondrawriter.com/speakings-podcast or by email at [email protected].