 Thank you and welcome so today we're going to try an experiment it's really the first time I'm doing this in a academic setting and I'm going to need you because we're going to collaborate and we're going to co-create a talk we have the topic here how to write the book of your life and we're going to try to think a little bit about it both of us will try to think Pieter will thinking music and I will try to think with words around the words that you will give me so I will ask each of you to give me a word if possible inspired by the topic but it can also be the first two words that come to your mind so we will go around first one word each and then we'll start again we like to start meditation thank you mother mother bubble bubble challenges challenges evolution life life experience and one one again you like to give us enthusiasm ocean lost history ordinary travel troubles troubles you know this how he says the words like take this one let's see what you can do this one troubles and the person who has arrived we do like to give me two words inspired by the topic how to write the book of your life unapologetic one more okay so we have meditation mother bubble challenges evolution life experience stuckness enthusiasm ocean lost history ordinary trouble troubles and apologetic time and voyage and now for the next 20 minutes I will only repeat this world until you get to close your eyes if there's not much to see this is going to be a meditation and improvise meditation about the journey we call life of course I've already put three words in less than 30 seconds which is not advisable but isn't it what we do in the first decades of our life and perhaps our entire life we keep repeating the same words the same hopes perhaps the same mistakes but also the same generous acts now there is this idea that to meditate you need to empty your mind it's one of the reasons why I don't do yoga whenever I go to a yoga class and I hear empty your mind I sorry I cannot do that I'm a philosophy stop thinking no sorry cannot do that and this is what I mean by the book of your life as a philosophical counselor I try to help people rediscover the fact that we are integral beings that need to think as much as we need to breathe and to think is not a disease this picture you see my daughter and this weekend for some reason I said the word disease and she found that word was very very funny then we were playing for half an hour bad diseases we were watching outside a look walking disease etc but we all have these easy is in that sense many things that for us are not easy I'm sure we can all find here something with us that is extremely difficult and that seems so easy for the others but one thing I think is difficult for everybody is to write the book of our lives to lead our lives as if it were a book with a beginning in the middle and then something consistent something even perhaps worth telling and of course by worth telling I mean to your mother a good listener the words that I see here is bubble and challenges and usually we say I will tell someone go out of your bubble something negative to have a world of our own and we see challenges as something positive and it might be true but we can also think in another way we can think that in this life in this existence that we share at least in this space time not a lot of us did actually manage to constitute her own bubble that yet would be open enough to outside reality without jeopardizing one's integrity that's strange image right have a bubble with holes and some form of energy perhaps an aura perhaps love perhaps inspiration poetry words music go out through the world through the walls and throughout the world that would be a real challenge as opposed to this pre scripted challenge that we find a lot today as boxes that we take to make sure that we have the right titles some of us clicking boxes all the way up the Nobel Prize and they call that evolution and it seems to me that in fact I don't know what your opinion about that is but sometimes I think it's hard for most of people to evolve it's hard for those who think they don't evolve it's hard also for those who think they evolve in psychoanalysis they call it sometimes the compulsion of repetition we think we are so we think we got there we think we solve a lot of things we find ourselves doing the same mistake we did 25 years ago and we realize that we turn in circles and perhaps they are not circles but they are spirals we have the illusion that we are going back but in fact it's a spiral or a mobius strip it makes us think that no we're not turning in circles is experience everybody has had an experience that has challenged the way they saw themselves where they really thought okay now I am perhaps partly someone else or maybe completely someone I've never experienced I were completely someone else and I won't ask who in the room has personal question and the thing is if you experience that at some point of your life you became totally someone else are you still writing the same book you start another book that you're someone else you get stuck just trying to think if we have evolved if we have changed we realize perhaps that that stuckness itself might be what has changed perhaps we have different forms of stuckness that evolve through time and I don't know if that is helpful but it might be in the sense that I think we can leave a certain time with a stuckness actually a stuckness can be quite creative for a while so perhaps a creative person an artist for example right is someone who creates new stucknesses every six months or one year and thinking about that in fact one book is all we have a written by one think about yourselves your psychology most of the time we are changing and actually to write a book is sometimes to fight again this against this entropy that is created by the fact that over the years the author is not completely the same at least to be honest to say something personal that is often how I write books actually my books whether they are theoretical or where they are novels are written in 30 or 40 different layers it's like the I think it's folder I think the the in Holland they could pull it when you conquer the sea you build land on the sea and that's how I feel when I write books and I have to go back again and again to the beginning because I don't recognize completely the author of the first chapter and then the author of the second chapter comes back and edits the author of the first chapter and by the time there are 30 chapters we have 30 authors if possible in the end the 31st author things I get this under control I have the big picture vision and I can come up with a title and the title sometimes is the only thing that is true like tonight I don't see often going to meet him again in Paris is a writer also he writes for Gallima very inspired books about the fact that we are all dead already anyway and only God can save us the reason I mentioned God is because we one of you spoke of enthusiasm and of course the etymology of enthusiasm is God to be in God to be with God to be moved by God and there are many names we can give to God or the higher power and another name was in French sentiment océanique and you can find that in Freud's opening of I always forget the English title because they changed from German there is this comfort and civilization and Freud says oh there's this thing that a friend who is a writer told me he says yeah but we have this océanique feeling of being one with every being in the world and Freud says I never really understood that I can admit it and I think the truth is that Freud knew but he was so preoccupied trying to build a science that would look like real science that he needed to evacuate everything that would feel a bit too poetic to religious not evidence base unfortunately this is how a lot of people still think today I mean we are on building be here of Stockholm University perhaps there on COD is the philosophy department very analytical very preoccupied with appearing to be as scientific as possible and logic which can lead to interesting propositions but of course we are not only logical machines and sometimes what looks like logical fast might be actually a breakthrough sometimes the more logical we are the more lost we feel and of course the worst is perhaps not to feel lost the worst is not because that might mean that your life if it's a tree doesn't have any branch and perhaps the trunk is so thin that in fact comes a stronger we will fly away so we want to be lost in the way we try different ramifications mine was inspired by many historical writings thoughts propositions and it distinguishes three forms of understanding we just spoke of the first one the analytical which is important because it helps us divide realities that might be a bit overwhelming or complex into parts that we understand better in order hopefully to reconstruct them but of course the analytical understanding has a problem with that reconstruction reintegration then there is the dialectical form and it is related first of all to dialogue and dialogue can do a lot we know that since Socrates something happens when two people talk and when one of them is at least is listening very carefully that looks a little bit like the spiral we're talking about and this is what I do at the philosophical parlour I have a dialogue with people and I don't try to apply a methodology that would be too rigid but I also know that I'm trying to take this dialogue into the domain that I call creolectical the third form of understanding and it's based on the idea that yes in fact there is something that we could call a form of divinity some higher power some creative flow infinite abundance of possibilities of which we only actualize a very very but we can always actualize something I call that the creole the real with a sea of creation and so creolectical understanding what is this regenerative form of being in the world that precisely allows us invest ourselves in our life in a way that actually transforms even the stuckness into a form of inhabiting the world that is healthier attentive to diversity pluralism and sometimes the unheard of is hiding right in the middle of the ordinary perhaps it's just a matter of the ordinary being able to travel or we being able to travel within the ordinary there is this book by an 18th century french author which is called traveling around my room there's another book by a portuguese author juzes remago which is about the fact that yes metaphorically we have so many blind spots and sometimes even we we get a bit angry about it we get disappointed we blame the others the old zombies they're all blind why don't they see but the truth is is that probably in that bus where you're thinking like that probably half of the people are thinking the same thing at the same time people talk to each other on the bus a microphone somewhere in their brain that would be an interesting experiment so we are about to enter the last moment of our unapologetically unacademic lecture to much trouble perhaps that's the weakness perhaps i should have done something more risky but why force i did try to make this time as present as possible the opposite perhaps of a voyage in the sense that sometimes people give to a voyage which is an escape to hand with this image of the tree that came to us earlier by telling you what i would like to do in the future is it really how an academic talk ends my research projects my research project is creolectics and philosophical health and philosophical counseling and one of the things i would like to do is to see if i can help people when at a given moment of their book of life they feel these ramifications and they wonder which one will be fecund which one will allow me to multiply healthily which one on the contrary might look very attractive but should in fact be proven for the sake of the tree as a whole and that's a question i hope to answer with you back here perhaps in 10 years okay so we can have a little bit of questions and comments if you want