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.

What We Dive Into:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.

https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com

✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:

https://www.sleep.me/knowthyself

To get up to $640 off your Chilipad 2.0

with code KNOWTHYSELF

https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself

Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide

Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial!

https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself

___________

00:00 Intro

02:00 A Stroke and the Backyard Amazon

10:03 Writing a Book by Hand

13:07 The Circle of Everyday Consciousness

18:54 The Anti-Sublime

25:01 The Cosmic Sublime

35:00 The Pagan Sublime and Eleusinian Mysteries

42:50 The Hunger for Collective Ecstasy

47:01 Childhood as an Awakening

52:20 Returning to a Second Innocence

59:15 Despair as a Doorway

1:02:51 Vulnerability and Feeling Ridiculous

1:04:25 The Naked Brain

1:12:37 Gurdjieff and the Power of Attention

1:22:22 The Interspecies Sublime

1:31:00 Loneliness and the Animal World

1:37:56 The Love Sublime

1:45:58 Love and the Art of Seduction

1:50:07 The Historical Sublime

1:55:13 How Language Shapes Experience

1:59:46 The Daemon and the Primary Self

2:06:27 Mastery and the Inner Voice

2:15:04 Ingrid Bergman and Her Daemon

2:19:07 Different Forms of Intelligence

2:23:22 Talent Without Love

2:27:33 The Aesthetic Sublime

2:36:03 The Dynamical Sublime

2:43:41 Inviting Challenge Back In

2:52:13 Suffering as a Rite of Passage

2:56:32 The Death Sublime

3:00:34 Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness

3:08:31 Visualizing Your Own Death

3:12:51 The Haiku Poet Issa

3:17:13 One Thing to Carry Forward

___________

✨MORE FROM ROBERT GREENE

↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/

↳Pre-order The Law of the Sublime: https://sites.prh.com/lawofthesublime?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAad30lDYWsD_tVwsefFroQ0yA0SpKuRsN-lBhV7iqF_2m0foDmB2qlDKpVA9pg_aem_pjv6BG4q4JoEqBVGGwHeDA

↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertGreeneOfficial

↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robertgreene

↳All Books: https://powerseductionandwar.com:

📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF

↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l

↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/

↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum

↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/

↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/

👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ

↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum

↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast

↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

E219 - Robert Greene: The 12 Doorways to the Sublime & What Almost Dying Taught Me About Being Alive

Know Thyself

E219 - Robert Greene: The 12 Doorways to the Sublime & What Almost Dying Taught Me About Being Alive