I stumbled across this amongst my emails on a lazy Sunday morning and loved listening to you reading what you wrote.
It really speaks to what has been a theme of my life, and what excites me to explore. I know how intolerable it is to conform to the expectations of society and what is is to embark on the bumpy road of answering the question of "what is mine to do?" and then trying to live that.
I founf it really inspiring and thought privokinh....and really appreciate your openness in asking for responses. I'm not sure if anything is complete until we put it out there and allow the world to respond...and even then it's ever evolving.
My angle (which is also not complete!) on what you say is a shift from "becoming who we were meant to be" to "reclaiming who we are" and I have chosen to bring a trauma and embodiment perspective to my work. I'll explain why...
When we were young alongside learning to walk, talk socialise etc we also learnt what to repress and these aspects get locked in our subconscious, and without them we cannot be whole (Carl Jung:" i must have a shadow if I am to be whole") . The embodiment piece comes in because we can access these stuck parts through our bodies - reaching the parts that talking can't and begin a process of reclaiming them. I choose the Internal Family Systems model to do this, of which there are many.
What has also worked for me is placing an importance on going beyond the rational brain, beyond talking and thinking and duscussing, to accessing the present moment, connecting to our senses, and our sense of connection...experiencing a glimpse of who we truly are beyond the limitations of our rational mind and allowing this to inform us of what is ours to do. Nature, breathing techniques, visualisation, psychedelics etc. are ways ...and help us experience "the eternal tao that can't be spoken." Then we can bring the rational in to help make sense of what we have experienced and bring it into our life.
Thanks Sarah, I love the idea of "reclaiming who you are" - it conjures an image of chiselling away an outer casing that we've built up around ourselves to reveal what was there all along, or like climbing a ladder but knowing what wall to lean it up against before setting off.
Personally I've found embodied sensing a really useful way to get closer to understanding who I am - physical exertion, extended fasting (I do 5 -7 days water fast quarterly to coincide with the solstices and equinoxes), breathing techniques etc. Psychedelics have been informative too. I'm fascinated by the range of human experiences outside of just 'thinking' that have the potential to connect us to our essence - one thing I find frustrating though is the pressures of everyday obligations that limit the extent to which these things can be fully indulged.
Lovely to hear that you enjoyed the article, it's a deep subject because it relates to who we are, our deeper essence, and that's something we often only get fleeting glimpses of - and in our everyday lives of superficiality, it's not something the people tend to converse about much.
Thanks John...love that image of chiselling away at outer casing. reminds me of some quote from Michelangelo about the sculpture being in the marble before he begins and he just has to reveal it.
Yes, it is fascinating to contemplatethe vastness of our being.....and really hard to relate that to day to day life with the bills that need paying!
Re. Marcus Aurelius quote “Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”: A few years ago I opened a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. Typically the phrases they offer are insipid. But this one was so good that I stowed it away and still have it. Here is what it said: “Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you have sown.” That statement helped me several times since I discovered it. It strikes me that it expresses the same idea Marcus Aurelius is stating, with cookie’s “harvest you reap” equaling Aurelius’s “what happens to you” and cookie’s “seeds you have sown” equaling Aurelius’s “your own actions.”
Re. Goethe: I deeply admire Goethe. But in this quotation he seems to confound talent and aspiration. Talent is what you are good at. Aspiration is, according to you, what you are called to become. Your aspiration need not be grounded in your talent.
My big comcern is: The world we live in places so many external demands on you that it becomes very easy to form what you call “ambitions:” externally motivated goals. These ambitions tend to drown out any notion we have of our aspirations. So the question becomes: How does one discover what one’s aspiration is? My sense is that for such discovery it really helps - in addition to your very good question prompts - to disconnect from the treadmill of career and ambition and practice listening to, and thus freeing, your inner voice. In the absence of such stillness and mental freedom, can you really find your aspirations with question prompts alone?
You make such thoughtful contributions that bring in different dimensions to these topics.
I really like the fortune cookie slogan you mention. It nicely subverts usual success metrics.
Also on Goethe - as you observe, your aspiration need not be grounded in your talent - and just to add to that, we might not even know what our talent is until our aspiration reveals it.
For some people stillness and mental freedom away from the treadmill might lead to a discovery of one's callings, but perhaps even that isn't sufficient for everyone, as it just leads to boredom for some people who a not accustomed to solitude and reflection. Maybe we need to experience the treadmill to first discover what we don't want. You're right about prompts being insufficient, my intention is to create a spaces for conversation and self-inquiry from which insights may emerge, but I don't think we can force these things, I think they emerge on their own when we are listening as you imply.
Thanks you so much for your thoughts - I'm here as a student of life and I love the exchange of ideas in this way.
Well done. This is a compelling start to fleshing out your ASPIRE model.
The concept of the daemon, which you mention here briefly (though one could validly say it's the central topic of the whole post), has been, for me, the most deeply evocative and moving tool for thinking about all of this for the past 20 years. I suspect you would find some resonance between the path you're blazing and my book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer's Guide to the Inner Genius, which you can access online for free. In it, I refer to the process of discovering and aligning with your implanted purpose, vocation, calling, or genius the "discipline of the demon muse"—in other words, the discipline of learning to collaborate fruitfully with the locus of your personal destiny that feels like a separate, autonomous intelligence and psychic center of gravity with which you have been inextricably linked since birth. It's in the daemon/daimon/genius/demon muse that we find our life's blueprint.
I look forward to reading your future posts on this subject.
Thank you so much for your thoughts - I've found your book and looking forward to diving in, I've had a quick scroll through and it looks like you are covering so many of my personal interests.
I like the idea of 'collaborating fruitfully' with the daemon - collaboration requires pragmatism, temperance - a balance between the competing forces of our 'ordinary' lives of obligations and constraints and the infinite potential of our calling - it is those two opposing forces that cause the tension necessary for creativity. If there were no 'ordinary life' constraints and 'pure genius' was on tap, there would be no creative struggle. At least that's how it seems to me - the idea of 'collaboration' will resonate well with people who are skeptical or resistant to submitting fully to a sense of a calling.
Yes. The collaborative struggle is the way the infinite, untamed energetic drive of the daemon is "called down" into manifestation.
Presently, my attention has turned toward understanding and framing all of this within the context of a nondual understanding of reality. That's the direction of my current thinking and writing.
Excellent writing- I think your musing about the difference between Aspiration and Ambition to be interesting and engaging.
As someone who had achieved his Ambitions, he had when young, by midlife I find creating new ambitions quiet hard. I like the idea of reframing ambition as aspiration and taking the ego out of it- I will mull it over this week.
Thanks Andy, although the real genius behind the distinction of Aspiration and Ambition is the philosopher Agnes Collard. I discovered her when reading The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd (who also writes the substack Boundless) - and the distinction really resonated with me
Really enjoyed listening to this on a walk today, John. Thank you.
I find your writing on Ordinary Mastery engaging and the ideas around ambition and aspiration make intuitive sense to me. I will enjoy pondering this on another walk or two yet!
Hi John,
I stumbled across this amongst my emails on a lazy Sunday morning and loved listening to you reading what you wrote.
It really speaks to what has been a theme of my life, and what excites me to explore. I know how intolerable it is to conform to the expectations of society and what is is to embark on the bumpy road of answering the question of "what is mine to do?" and then trying to live that.
I founf it really inspiring and thought privokinh....and really appreciate your openness in asking for responses. I'm not sure if anything is complete until we put it out there and allow the world to respond...and even then it's ever evolving.
My angle (which is also not complete!) on what you say is a shift from "becoming who we were meant to be" to "reclaiming who we are" and I have chosen to bring a trauma and embodiment perspective to my work. I'll explain why...
When we were young alongside learning to walk, talk socialise etc we also learnt what to repress and these aspects get locked in our subconscious, and without them we cannot be whole (Carl Jung:" i must have a shadow if I am to be whole") . The embodiment piece comes in because we can access these stuck parts through our bodies - reaching the parts that talking can't and begin a process of reclaiming them. I choose the Internal Family Systems model to do this, of which there are many.
What has also worked for me is placing an importance on going beyond the rational brain, beyond talking and thinking and duscussing, to accessing the present moment, connecting to our senses, and our sense of connection...experiencing a glimpse of who we truly are beyond the limitations of our rational mind and allowing this to inform us of what is ours to do. Nature, breathing techniques, visualisation, psychedelics etc. are ways ...and help us experience "the eternal tao that can't be spoken." Then we can bring the rational in to help make sense of what we have experienced and bring it into our life.
Really open to your thoughts, too!
All the best, Sarah
Thanks Sarah, I love the idea of "reclaiming who you are" - it conjures an image of chiselling away an outer casing that we've built up around ourselves to reveal what was there all along, or like climbing a ladder but knowing what wall to lean it up against before setting off.
Personally I've found embodied sensing a really useful way to get closer to understanding who I am - physical exertion, extended fasting (I do 5 -7 days water fast quarterly to coincide with the solstices and equinoxes), breathing techniques etc. Psychedelics have been informative too. I'm fascinated by the range of human experiences outside of just 'thinking' that have the potential to connect us to our essence - one thing I find frustrating though is the pressures of everyday obligations that limit the extent to which these things can be fully indulged.
Lovely to hear that you enjoyed the article, it's a deep subject because it relates to who we are, our deeper essence, and that's something we often only get fleeting glimpses of - and in our everyday lives of superficiality, it's not something the people tend to converse about much.
Thanks John...love that image of chiselling away at outer casing. reminds me of some quote from Michelangelo about the sculpture being in the marble before he begins and he just has to reveal it.
Yes, it is fascinating to contemplatethe vastness of our being.....and really hard to relate that to day to day life with the bills that need paying!
You have done some serious reading! 👏🏼👏👏🏼
Re. Marcus Aurelius quote “Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”: A few years ago I opened a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. Typically the phrases they offer are insipid. But this one was so good that I stowed it away and still have it. Here is what it said: “Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you have sown.” That statement helped me several times since I discovered it. It strikes me that it expresses the same idea Marcus Aurelius is stating, with cookie’s “harvest you reap” equaling Aurelius’s “what happens to you” and cookie’s “seeds you have sown” equaling Aurelius’s “your own actions.”
Re. Goethe: I deeply admire Goethe. But in this quotation he seems to confound talent and aspiration. Talent is what you are good at. Aspiration is, according to you, what you are called to become. Your aspiration need not be grounded in your talent.
My big comcern is: The world we live in places so many external demands on you that it becomes very easy to form what you call “ambitions:” externally motivated goals. These ambitions tend to drown out any notion we have of our aspirations. So the question becomes: How does one discover what one’s aspiration is? My sense is that for such discovery it really helps - in addition to your very good question prompts - to disconnect from the treadmill of career and ambition and practice listening to, and thus freeing, your inner voice. In the absence of such stillness and mental freedom, can you really find your aspirations with question prompts alone?
You make such thoughtful contributions that bring in different dimensions to these topics.
I really like the fortune cookie slogan you mention. It nicely subverts usual success metrics.
Also on Goethe - as you observe, your aspiration need not be grounded in your talent - and just to add to that, we might not even know what our talent is until our aspiration reveals it.
For some people stillness and mental freedom away from the treadmill might lead to a discovery of one's callings, but perhaps even that isn't sufficient for everyone, as it just leads to boredom for some people who a not accustomed to solitude and reflection. Maybe we need to experience the treadmill to first discover what we don't want. You're right about prompts being insufficient, my intention is to create a spaces for conversation and self-inquiry from which insights may emerge, but I don't think we can force these things, I think they emerge on their own when we are listening as you imply.
Thanks you so much for your thoughts - I'm here as a student of life and I love the exchange of ideas in this way.
Well done. This is a compelling start to fleshing out your ASPIRE model.
The concept of the daemon, which you mention here briefly (though one could validly say it's the central topic of the whole post), has been, for me, the most deeply evocative and moving tool for thinking about all of this for the past 20 years. I suspect you would find some resonance between the path you're blazing and my book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer's Guide to the Inner Genius, which you can access online for free. In it, I refer to the process of discovering and aligning with your implanted purpose, vocation, calling, or genius the "discipline of the demon muse"—in other words, the discipline of learning to collaborate fruitfully with the locus of your personal destiny that feels like a separate, autonomous intelligence and psychic center of gravity with which you have been inextricably linked since birth. It's in the daemon/daimon/genius/demon muse that we find our life's blueprint.
I look forward to reading your future posts on this subject.
Thank you so much for your thoughts - I've found your book and looking forward to diving in, I've had a quick scroll through and it looks like you are covering so many of my personal interests.
I like the idea of 'collaborating fruitfully' with the daemon - collaboration requires pragmatism, temperance - a balance between the competing forces of our 'ordinary' lives of obligations and constraints and the infinite potential of our calling - it is those two opposing forces that cause the tension necessary for creativity. If there were no 'ordinary life' constraints and 'pure genius' was on tap, there would be no creative struggle. At least that's how it seems to me - the idea of 'collaboration' will resonate well with people who are skeptical or resistant to submitting fully to a sense of a calling.
Yes. The collaborative struggle is the way the infinite, untamed energetic drive of the daemon is "called down" into manifestation.
Presently, my attention has turned toward understanding and framing all of this within the context of a nondual understanding of reality. That's the direction of my current thinking and writing.
HI John,
Excellent writing- I think your musing about the difference between Aspiration and Ambition to be interesting and engaging.
As someone who had achieved his Ambitions, he had when young, by midlife I find creating new ambitions quiet hard. I like the idea of reframing ambition as aspiration and taking the ego out of it- I will mull it over this week.
Thank you - Andy
Thanks Andy, although the real genius behind the distinction of Aspiration and Ambition is the philosopher Agnes Collard. I discovered her when reading The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd (who also writes the substack Boundless) - and the distinction really resonated with me
Really enjoyed listening to this on a walk today, John. Thank you.
I find your writing on Ordinary Mastery engaging and the ideas around ambition and aspiration make intuitive sense to me. I will enjoy pondering this on another walk or two yet!
Thanks Dan, hugely appreciate your words - thanks for listening to my ramblings...
This is great. Serendipitously, I posted yesterday on Understanding Your Impact Potential focusing on the meaning of potential. https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/understanding-your-impact-potential. All the best in the development of your ASPIRE model.
Thanks Ed for your feedback, and thanks for the link to your post - bookmarked for a read through tomorrow morning when I'm fully awake!
Thank you, John. It is a poorly understood and neglected aspect of our lives.
Thanks John. I will check it out.