I haven’t written about COVID. My experience with or thoughts on it. Mostly because I don’t enjoy writing about anything Janna Levin would call “local politics”. To her that is any event within 1 million years, I’d say my definition’s a bit sooner but the commonality is preferring to think about first principles and ideas vs. situations and events.
Though, as we’re coming up on a mostly quarantined year, with mental space growing alongside time, the situations and events have turned into new perspectives and foundational observations about the human experience. And that, I’ll happily think and write about all day, so here we are.
I’ll start with personal context. My two years pre-COVID consisted of near constant travel followed by a painful breakup that ended both a relationship and a version of me I don’t recognize today. Then I joined Field Trip full-time and moved to a new city. Somewhere in the midst of all that, COVID hit.
Those things combined made 2020 the year spent on moi. To focus on all that comes with a fast-growing startup, establishing a new home in a new city, and processing all the change that encompassed the first half of the year. And thanks to COVID-19, I had all the time and space in the world to do that.
So I spent the remainder of the year doing so. Partially because I needed to, partially because I had no choice.
I’m prone to fomo. Magnetized by travel, novelty, experience. When there’s opportunity for these things, yes more often leaves my lips. A familiar, sometimes impulsive sound. I’ll look down at my Memento Mori tattoo—a refreshing reminder that life is short and a thriving, stimulating existence is better than the alternative—and I say yes. But last year, life said no for me. Little to no adventure, events, external enticements. It gave me space, solitude, Saudade I like to say, to let the dust settle from years of running, and pause in the new clarity.
The space felt heavy at first. Then liberating. Then enlightening. I’d never had this much time to read. Carl Jung. Freud. Jordan Peterson. Joseph Campbell. Stan Grof. Anthony De Mello. Eckhart Tolle. There’s a common theme there—the mind. What it is, how it forms our experience, and how knowing that alone can improve it. I’ve been engulfing anything I find on this since getting a taste for its potent time-relevance in early 2020.
I don’t like uncertainty, don’t like lack of control. I respond with a tighter grip, look around at what’s closest to me where I can draw a circle of what’s within my power. It’s not an admirable tendency, one that can feel constricting. The Serenity Prayer is a common mantra behind my eyes when I clench, along with the most prominent Stoic principles. And when those don’t work, a deep mushroom trip will very poignantly remind me that actually nothing at all is within our control. And to that, I’ll respond Ok, but not quite there in my journey yet to let go of at least the illusion of it.
Last year, the control circle had to be real tight because one step outside my door was chaos and fear. What’s closest and within my power? My mind. These books and teachers, I’m grateful I found them when I did. The principles and practices first helped me reframe my response to the unrest and how I relate to it, and have since opened whole new doors of thinking and being that I didn’t intend or anticipate. New doors that ironically have put me in a better state mentally now than before COVID.
Here are the concepts, the teachers and books I gained them from, and some quote nuggets that peak into the wisdom underneath. Each concept could be a whole post on its own, and likely will be after I’ve gone deeper, as of now I’ve only scratched the surface but was compelled to share because of the impact they’ve had on me thus far:
Self-awareness, Compassion, and Integration
The Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck
“I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
The Compassion Book - Thom Bond
“Everything we’ve ever done, everything any human being has ever done, or will ever do, is an attempt to meet a need, or needs (successfully or not). All human acts can be seen as an attempt to meet needs.”
“When I can see my own actions or the actions of others in a context of universal human needs–I experience more connection and compassion.”
A Hidden Wholeness - Parker Palmer
“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”
Becoming Conscious, Meeting The Shadow, Detaching From Ego
The Portable Jung - Carl Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
“What you resist, persists.”
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
"There is no birth of consciousness without pain."
Untethered Soul - Michael Singer
“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”
“Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself.”
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”
“When you’re ready to exchange your illusions for reality, you wake up.”
“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”
Awakening the Buddha Within - Lama Surya Das
“You don’t need to see different things, but rather to see things differently.”
“Enlightenment is not about becoming divine. Instead, it’s about becoming more fully human. . . . It is the end of ignorance.”
Think Like A Monk - Jay Shetty
“If you don’t break your ego, life will break it for you.”
Living In Presence
The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the now the primary focus of your life.”
“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”
Accept it, change it, or leave it
“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
“The journey across the great ocean of existence is a journey inward. The deeper you go, the more you meet truth.”
“You see, the opposite of craving is saying baby, this is the way it is.”
“You want to change your environment? Change your head.”
Collective Unconscious & Dream Analysis
The Portable Jung - Carl Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.”
“In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.”
"The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.”
"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind."
The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
“The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”
“By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.”
Yin & Yang, Chaos & Order, Feminine & Masculine
Maps of Meaning - Jordan Peterson
“Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. They are the two ultimate categories of reality. Masculine, feminine. Left brain, right brain. Order, chaos. Order is what you can predict. Chaos is what you can’t. It’s ideal to live along the border. The ice you skate on with the water below.”
“The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. We’re not adapted for utopia. We want one foot in order one out in chaos where we don’t know what the hell is going on because that’s where you’re alert and alive and engaged.”
Goddesses: Mysteries of the feminine divine - Joseph Campbell
“Masculine, feminine. They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.”
“All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it. There is something that the world hasn’t really recognized yet in the female, something that we are waiting now to see.”
Carl Jung
“In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
The Necessity of Aim
12 Rules For Life - Jordan Peterson
“What’s the best way to have a happy life? Decide what that means.”
“You don’t get something you don’t aim at, most people aim at nothing so that’s what they get.”
“The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it. It’s to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.”
“He whose life has a why can bear almost any how” - Nietzsche
“The most daring thing in life is to tell the truth and accept the consequences.”
Spirituality & Reevaluating Religion
Carl Jung
“I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious."
Biblical Series Lectures - Jordan Peterson
“Sometimes the things you imagine are more real and informative than what you see (numbers, fiction, fantasies, dreams).”
“What matters matters more than matter.”
“We need something approximating a low-resolution grand narrative to unite us and we need a narrative to unite us because otherwise, we don’t have peace.”
“You need a philosophy that can withstand tragedy. That’s what everyone needs, that’s what everyone wants.”
The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”
“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off…. the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.”
“Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe’s words at the end of Faust: ‘Everything transitory is but a reference’”.
The Immortality Key - Brian C. Muraresku
“Once you’ve plunged into the ocean, does it really matter whether or not you believe in water?”
Sigmund Freud
“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”