In this episode I sit down with Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The Art of Seduction, and The Laws of Human Nature, to explore his latest book on the sublime. Robert first imagined researching it through travels to the Amazon and distant mountains. Then a stroke nearly took his life and confined him to his home. With his left side paralyzed, he spent seven years handwriting the book and discovered that the sublime was waiting in his own backyard.
We explore Robert’s image of everyday consciousness as an invisible circle our thoughts rarely leave, and the twelve doorways that lead beyond it: cosmic, biological, pagan, childhood, neural, interspecies, love, historical, daemon, aesthetic, dynamical, and death. Along the way we discuss the Eleusinian Mysteries, how the brain filters reality, Gurdjieff’s practice of attention, the inner voice that guides a life’s work, and why suffering and mortality may be our most powerful teachers. This is an invitation to wake up to how strange it is to be alive.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Life in Dead Time
Robert describes adult life as dead time, measured in abstract blocks of minutes and hours. Children live inside time like a river, seeing the world for the first time, and much of our restless dissatisfaction is a buried memory of that open, unfiltered way of meeting the world each day.
The Filtering Brain
The brain prunes enormous amounts of sensory data so we can function, constructing both our reality and a sense of a separate self. Focused attention, like Gurdjieff’s practice of self-remembering, can loosen that filter and let the world appear strange, vivid, and alive again.
Suffering as Passage
Robert links our avoidance of pain, discomfort, and death to a loss of inner resilience. When suffering and mortality are faced deliberately, they can be transmuted into acceptance and compassion, along with a deeper kinship with everyone who has lived, suffered, and died before us.
JOURNAL PROMPTS
PROMPT 01
Where in my day am I living in dead time, and what would it take to step inside the moment instead?
PROMPT 02
What challenge have I been avoiding that would actually test who I am?
PROMPT 03
If I truly felt my own mortality today, what would I stop doing and what would I begin?