The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “alan watts”

How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life
How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life

“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”

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Iris Murdoch’s Pocket History of the Five Phases of Freedom, in Literature and Life
Iris Murdoch’s Pocket History of the Five Phases of Freedom, in Literature and Life

“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.”

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What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities
What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

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The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength

“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.”

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The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke
The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke

We are not “patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance” but “specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life.”

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The Soul-Slaking Joy and Body-Poetry of Swimming
The Soul-Slaking Joy and Body-Poetry of Swimming

In praise of the exquisite instrument that channels “the huge chaos of sensations — sensations of temperature, water, force, light.”

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So I Danced Again: A Vibrant Animated Meditation on the Limits of Words and the Power of Embodied Music in our Search for Meaning
So I Danced Again: A Vibrant Animated Meditation on the Limits of Words and the Power of Embodied Music in our Search for Meaning

Sound, color, and wonderment where the body meets the soul.

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What Makes You You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of What We Are
What Makes You You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of What We Are

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.”

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Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram on the Language of Nature and the Secret Wisdom of the More-Than-Human World
Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram on the Language of Nature and the Secret Wisdom of the More-Than-Human World

“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

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Favorite Books of 2018
Favorite Books of 2018

The anatomy of feeling, the science of psychedelics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s final poetry collection, arresting essays by Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Lamott, and Audre Lorde, a physicist’s lyrical meditation on science and spirituality, and more.

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