Mari Otsu joins Stephen Blackwood for a deeply personal conversation about her journey through the wounds of materialism, ideology, and spiritual forgetting, and her return to the soul through the beauty of the humanities. Reflecting on her years at NYU and the Grand Central Atelier, Mari speaks of a longing that nothing in the modern, politicized worldview could satisfy, and how she found healing in therapy, classical painting, and, most profoundly, the living philosophical community of Ralston College. Engaging with the works of Plotinus, Boethius, and Dante, she discovered a path of purification and ascent that restored her sense of meaning and inspired her to share these treasures with others. This conversation explores the roots of today’s meaning crisis and the redemptive power of beauty, thought, and imagination to heal the soul.

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Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

Plotinus’ Enneads
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
Augustine’s Confessions
Plato
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Monique Wittig’s The Straight Mind

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction
01:29 - Conversation Begins
02:18 - About Mari
6:00 - Βrief Review of Mari’s time at Ralston
8:00 - Mari’s Descent into Anguish and Fragmentation
15:20 - The Ideological Component: NYU
23:30 - Leaving Blame Behind
27:20 - Fear as a Symptom of a Spiritual Pathology
29:00 - The Role of Therapy and Right Relationship
34:00 - The Power of Art
44:16 - Moving from Beauty to Contemplation
46:51 - Beginning at Ralston
1:00:00 - Plotinus Moving Beyond Beauty
1:08:00 - Wrapping It All Up
01:11:01 - Exit Music and Fade

Katabasis and Return: A Conversation With Mari Otsu About Her Time at Ralston College