• Absurdism is founded on the belief that we live in a chaotic, purposeless universe and human existence has no inherent meaning. Despite this, humans still try to find or create meaning. This paradox produces the absurd.

• “The realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end in itself but only a beginning. It is not the discovery which is interesting but the consequences and rules for actions which can be drawn from it.” (Camus, quoted by Foley in Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt, 2014)

• While absurdism was proposed by Camus in the 1940s, it was influenced by other philosophical and artistic movements including avant-garde art and the writings of Franz Kafka.

like many of the bands from the 1960s, The Beatles were part of a counter-cultural revolution, or so it seemed at the time; this was a time when the youth fought for liberation. They did this through self-expression, growing their hair and practising free love. This was in direct opposition to violence, hatred and war which found its tangible form in protest against the Vietnam war. The Beatles were associated with the hippie-counter culture due to their call for peace and love. 

The secret to their success was their ability to walk the line between commerciality and artistic integrity. It seemed like they kept their own agenda and were not swayed too much by outside forces. They kept their finger on the pulse and led trends into the next.

They even wrote their own music, which seems absurd to call “innovative,” but was unheard of for bands before them. (https://vocal.media/beat/the-cultural-impact-of-the-beatles)

Even though the Beatles were primarily considered a musical group, they were political activists.

They used their music to talk about issues happening in the real world at the time, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

They spoke their minds by writing songs like, Give Peace A Chance, Revolution, and All You Need Is Love.

You must learn how to observe your own mental states, rather than drowning in them, and realise that you are not these various mental states being presented to you and have a choice in how you react to them. This is why meditation is presented as part and parcel of surviving in the bardo since it provides exactly the mental control necessary to become lucid enough to detach from transient phenomena and remain poised.

"dying before dying"

It provided an underworld journey, an initiation, in which one battled with mythical beasts of one's own making. What you expect is what you get. What you fear is what you get.

One sees a world of individuals caught up in their projections, not realising that they are in some ways occupying their very own universe, and fighting against themselves.

One can wake up in a dream (become lucid), of course, and I would view that as the proper goal for humanity, rather than escaping to some non-dual nirvana.

We must be slapped in the face with death to pull ourselves out of distraction and see what’s important.

Reducing the limit to a million years, there hardly seems any urgency to make wise choices in what we decide to do with our time.

If there is too big a gap between the old and the new, there is a tendency to become accustomed to the old and not create the new. We become comfortable with the status quo and stop imagining that the world could be anything other than it is and has been. Were it not for those folks we label "geniuses" who seem to look ahead, we would be forever stuck in the past.

1. Online purchasing of equipment (studio)

2. Personal computers, smart phones, lighting equipment (recording)

3. Personal video / audio editing tech (editing)

4. Social platforms (group distribution)

5. Streaming services (mass destruction)

6. Block chain (commercial transactions)

A final example is artwork being sold as NFTs. This is Dada artwork in its most modern incarnation. I would call it Neo Dadaism except that Neo-Dada was invented in the 1960s.

I think a new Dadaism is forming in the world today as a backlash to the new digital revolutions that have been happening and the new platforms that make expression easier than ever.

Design for decomposition is design for life that is next to come.

Lord Buddha’s teaching on universal reality is so profound. It shows us the best way to be healthy by shattering all our concepts and illusions. He said, “Even if you hold concepts of me, the Buddha, you’re still trapped in samsara.”

The Buddha taught so that we might also become buddha: healthy, eternally happy and free of all concepts, misery, doctrine and bondage. That’s all he wanted.

“All existent phenomena in the universe and I are of one reality.” At the moment, our ego divides us from other phenomena. It says, “You are this, this, this; I am that, that, that.” It keeps us from getting close to even our loved ones. We spend our whole life with another person but never get really close because of the games our ego plays. Our ego prevents us from understanding one another.

> Analyse and interpret the entire system as well as people’s personal experiences and perspectives.

> Learn about the people affected by the problem and find out about their personal experiences by utilising ethnographic research techniques such as speaking to, interviewing and observing behaviour.

Remember why you are doing the project, who it is for and avoid falling into the pitfalls of ‘big ego’ or ‘self-referential’ design.

Make Issues Public. Tell Stories & Build Networks.

> Reframing: By presenting your issue in a new way, you can change the way the public things about it. For example, by packaging baby carrots as junk food, advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky made vegetables more appealing to children. They packaged the carrots in similar crinkly packaging to crisps, placed them inside vending machines and ran a ‘Baby Carrots: Eat ’Em Like Junk Food’ campaign. Their campaign reversed record declines in the carrot business and ignited conversations around healthy snacking.

Jungian archetypes include the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, the self, and the hero. The persona is the mask we wear in social situations, while the shadow represents our repressed or hidden aspects.

Personal Unconscious has a large variety of emotions and memories that the person has rejected or repressed. In most cases, it is impossible to recall these emotions and memories consciously. A person may be unaware about these but his personal unconscious may repress memories of pain, hatred, bitterness and many others.

An example of Collective Unconscious is how different cultures have same legends featuring similar themes and characters, for instance the beginning of the universe.

These archetypes are universal symbols that represent common human experiences and emotions.

Jung's four major archetypes are: the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self.

Over the course of development, children learn that they must behave in certain ways in order to fit in with society's expectations and norms. The persona develops as a social mask to contain all of the primitive urges, impulses, and emotions that are not considered socially acceptable.

The persona archetype allows people to adapt to the world around them and fit in with the society in which they live. However, becoming too closely identified with this archetype can lead people to lose sight of their true selves.

The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.

This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos, and the unknown. These latent dispositions are present in all of us, Jung believed, although people sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it on to others.

Anima/Animus : In many cultures, however, men and women are encouraged to adopt traditional and often rigid gender roles. Jung suggested that this discouragement of men exploring their feminine aspects and women exploring their masculine aspects served to undermine psychological development.

The combined anima and animus is known as the syzygy or the divine couple. The syzygy represents completion, unification, and wholeness.

For Jung, the ultimate aim was for an individual to achieve a sense of cohesive self, similar in many ways to Maslow's concept of self-actualization.

• Art. Art can provide a way to access the unconscious and explore images that arise. Through art, we can learn about our self-image and what symbols and themes emerge when concentrating on a particular problem.

• Dream analysis. One of the most important means of achieving insight in the Jungian analysis is through dreams, which often provide material to work with in therapy.

• Active imagination. This technique allows you to imagine yourself in scenes that represent the unconscious material you are working on.

• Word association. This is a technique in which you say the first word that pops into your head after hearing another word. This exercise can help reveal the unconscious thoughts and feelings that influence your behavior.

will provide you with an opportunity to discover the root cause of your issues through dreams, fantasies, art, play, and active imagination techniques.

Children understand what it’s like to be small. Not just small in stature, but small in the recognition that there is so much about the world that is beyond themselves. There is an expansive curiosity in the way they approach their everyday experiences that opens them up. They have not been desensitized to the uniqueness and beauty that surround us at every moment.

Researchers at the Universities of Toronto and California-San Francisco have studied the emotional experience of awe, and they say that it changes us. Jennifer Stellar, PhD, and her colleagues define awe as “the emotion we feel in response to something vast that defies our existing frame of reference in one area or another, and leads us to change our perception of that frame of reference.” They have discovered that awe, as opposed to other emotions like inspiration or surprise, makes us feel small. This sense of “self diminishment,” as scientists call it, is actually good for us.

“Feeling small makes us feel humbled (thereby lessening selfish tendencies like entitlement, arrogance, and narcissism). And feeling small and humbled makes us want to engage with others and feel more connected to others,” Gordon adds. “All of that is important for wellbeing.”

‘The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We may not have rules, and when we do have rules, there are no rules that are to us sacred. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular "world". We are there creatively. We are not passive. Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.’ - Maria Lugones, 'Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception', 1987. ⁠

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Images: ‘Din blinde passager’, 2010. Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.⁠

An infant is not born with a sense of self. That sense is acquired over the course of many interactions with others, especially caregivers. The child that is loved and nurtured internalizes those experiences and feels worthy of love. The child that is neglected or abused internalizes those negative experiences and later might find it difficult to accept love from others.

Where does such perfectionism come from? More often than not, the self-critical adult was a child who received plenty of attention for his or her performances in school and extracurricular activities. Repeated experiences of being praised for good grades and successful performances, as well as experiences of not receiving support when results were less stellar, provide a kind of mirroring. What is internalized is the sense of being only as good as one’s performances. Conditional praise becomes a mirror that leads to conditional self-acceptance.

A good therapist is a good mirror: if I can value her company and conversation, perhaps that starts her on the path of valuing herself as an equal.

One implication of the mirror principle is this: When we set our calendars, we define who we will be. The activities that populate each hour of our schedules are the sum and substance of how we’ll experience ourselves that day.

Unlike the tantrikas and Siddha yogis, who used their bodies as alchemical ves-

sels, medieval Western alchemists utilized the laboratory, specifically the crucible

or furnace, where raw, dense materials (prima materia) were converted to a more

purified, refined product called the lapis, or philosopher's stone. Considered by

the alchemist to be the ultimate goal, the creation of this stone and its discovery

was believed to bring immortality to the one who created it (Goodrick-Clarke 2008,

pp. 73-74).

Individuation

Jung saw his concept of the Self, the archetype of integration and wholeness, as the psychological equivalent of the lapls. To Jung, the goal of both the alchemical and psychological work was the creation of a more differentiated unity (the Self). He termed this journey of Self-becoming individuation. Jung defines individuation as the psychological process through which an individual becomes more whole, or integrated, through "bringing into consciousness the un conscious contents of the mind . . . thereby facilitating their differentiation and ultimately their integration" . Individuation is primarily a process

of differentiation, a "separating out" (the alchemical separatio), in order to reintegrate as a more fully differentiated whole.

Camus writes that “during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

“carried by time” and “carrying time”

One can either be pushed along by the everyday flow of things, or one can assert oneself and make the choice to determine one’s own course of actions.

Furthermore, my experience of time changes depending on whether it is me or time that is doing the “carrying.”

Everyday temporality (what Bergson calls “spatialized time”) is thus relative: we use certain symbols (second, minute, hour) to designate specific periods of time, and all clocks are relatively tuned to a central one in London. By describing everyday temporality as relative, Bergson hints at the disconnect between symbolic representations and actual lived experiences of time.

On the other hand, an absolute understanding of time comes out of the experience of being in time. When “I insert myself in [an object] by an effort of imagination,” then I gain absolute knowledge of it. “What I experience will depend neither on the point of view I may take up in regard to the object, since I am inside the object itself” (Bergson 21), nor on the way the experience is translated into symbols, because absolute knowledge is not expressed symbolically.

Bergson's name for this 'insertion' is intuition, and an intuition of time yields what he calls duration, or pure time. Since duration is constantly evolving– one moment slips into the next with no clear division in between– intuition must also adjust with(in) the duration that is being examined.