431: Your Life is Not About You

What if we mistake ourselves for the stories we've been told - that life is about our happiness, that we should wrestle control from circumstance, that we're separate from the world around us? A conversation about discovering that we didn't parachute into nature but grew from it, like apple blossoms on a vast tree of generations of living things. We ask: what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to feel the fullness of being human, grief and joy and all the rest, rather than contracting around our preferences? Could recognising ourselves as nature's response, rather than isolated egos demanding certainty, reveal what we're here to do?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Episode Overview
00:00 Welcome to Turning Towards Life
02:45 Creating Conversations That Matter
04:35 The Irony of Pursuing Happiness
08:21 The Metaphor of Apple Blossoms
13:28 Rethinking Happiness
18:10 The Complexity of Human Experience
22:46 Engaging with Life's Uncertainty
26:32 Responding to Life as Nature
30:29 The Practice of Consciousness
32:31 Closing Reflections

This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast in all the usual podcast places.

Here's our source for this week:

Your Life is Not About You

One of the cruelest ironies of Western life is that, today, the key, unquestioned, seemingly self-evident axiom of the Western wellbeing and self-help industry is precisely that our life is about us; that we have to wrestle the reins of our life from mere happenstance and circumstance and determine its course ourselves; that we have to proactively pursue our agenda and project meaning onto it; and - perhaps cruelest of all - that our life is about our being happy. All of this is unnatural and unjustified to the point of being grotesque... Is the life of an apple blossom about the apple blossom? If not, then for precisely the same reason ours cannot be about us. And this is the great discovery of the second half of life: our life isn't, has never been, and can't ever be about us. Why would it? We are part of nature; why would our life be about us and not nature as a whole? … Nature is, of course, impersonal. It's agenda is universal and holistic, not restricted to the petty egoic tastes and preferences of a person. It is naïve to expect a human being to be able to comprehend the … universal agenda, just as it is naïve to expect an apple blossom to comprehend what its role is in the grand scheme of apple trees and life on Earth. We are segments of nature, not mere witnesses; we didn't parachute into nature, but grew out of it. Therefore, we are nature, as expressed in a particular volume of spacetime.

Bernardo Kastrup - The Daimon and the Soul of the West

Photo by Anastasiya Romanova on Unsplash

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About Turning Towards Life
Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Amazon Music and Spotify.

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