When Serbian Rebel Gavrilo Princip and Pandaros of the Trojan army shot their powerful victims
It’s hard to say why wars happen. The words dispute and conflict get thrown around a lot. It might be a territorial dispute over a piece of land that starts a war, or a conflict over who has the right to rule it. It’s a simple enough explanation: when two groups of people can’t peacefully resolve a material dispute, they turn to violence.
You’ll also find psychological explanations for war. Here, war is some deeply embedded instinct which brews for a long time in the depths of the human psyche, before it bubbles up to collective consciousness and explodes into…
It’s the way in which they accept the universe as it is, says William James
Christianity and Stoicism have one important thing in common, they both insist on a radical acceptance of everything that happens. You see, it’s not always easy to accept the world as it is. We all have our fair share of troubles. Sickness and death, betrayal and injustice, pain and suffering, those are just some of the bitter pills we’re forced to swallow by being thrown into existence.
Does the pain make you bitter and resentful? Does the suffering make you curse the universe for being so cruel and wish you were never born? …
From Ibn Hazm’s 1022AD treatise on love, The Ring of the Dove
This if I win, the earth’s expanse,
And all mankind, are but as dust,
Yea, the wide world’s inhabitants
Are flies that crawl upon its crust.
Ibn Hazm, translated by A.J. Arberry
Ibn Hazm, an Islamic polymath of the 11th century, conceptualised love in a way similar to the idea of soul-mates. He believed that just as each person possessed a body in the physical universe, they also possessed a soul in the subliminal universe. …
Stay open to feedback, put things into perspective, and pay attention.
Is there a more annoying creature known to mankind than the common housefly? Less disgusting than a roach, but more aggressive. Less erratic than a spider, but more mobile. It’s as small and insignificant as they come, but if persistent enough, it can still spoil a pleasant summer afternoon.
Hate is a strong word, but to say I dislike these creatures wouldn’t really express the darkness I have in my heart for them. They seem to exist for no other purpose than to eat garbage and spread disease. …
Explaining one of the most intriguing and elusive concepts in psychology
A dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the actor, the prompter, the producer, the author, the audience, and the critic.
Carl Jung is a controversial and immensely influential figure in the world of psychology. He sought to establish a scientific basis for everything which had been rejected by the modern mind as irrational: mythology, astrology, alchemy, occultism, and of course religion. For Jung, all of these things, along with dreams and visions, had at least one important thing in common. …
A guide to the afterlife from The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The ancient Egyptians believed that the sun god Ra sailed across the sky each day on a boat. At night, he would disappear into the dark underworld to fight the forces of chaos, embodied by the giant serpent Apophis, only to re-emerge into the sky at the break of dawn and bring forth the light of a new day.
The underworld and the sky through which the sun god sails each day are the very same underworld and sky which are the abode of the dead and of the gods. For the Egyptians, the hereafter was not a remote place…
Technology is not just a means to an end, it’s a dangerous mode of being in the world
Who was it first
Distorted the ties of love
And made them into ropes?
Friedrich Hölderlin — The Rhine
Martin Heidegger, arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th century, and like most Germans of the time, notoriously tied up with the Nazi party, wrote about the ‘great danger’ that modern technology poses to humanity in his 1954 work ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.
For Heidegger, the only way for us to understand the danger of modern technology, and safeguard ourselves against it, was to go beyond the “correct” definition of technology as a means to an end, and come to…
Why ancient wisdom can sometimes feel stale and irrelevant
Historical things have always had the power to fascinate me and captivate my attention. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, I might catch myself daydreaming of a bygone era. A daydream furnished with details I’ve learned about how the Egyptians celebrated their annual Nile festivals, or how an ancient Athenian court of law dished out justice, or how an aspiring medieval Knight had to work hard to afford his horse and armour.
It’s not a bad way to pass the time, if you’re into that sort of thing. But is there much practical utility in it? …
Hibernation actually leaves animals sleep deprived
Some animals are blessed with the unique ability to hibernate for months on end during winter. In times when the weather is too cold, and food too scarce, it’s just not worth their while to stay awake. They’ll burn too much energy just to keep their body working, and they won’t be able to make up for it because there’s not enough to eat in the cold of winter.
Nature’s ingenious solution to this is for the animals to enter a state — similar to sleeping, but not quite the same — where they use a minimal amount of energy…
Ibn Tufail’s feral child finds himself on a desert island
For a thousand years, at least since Ibn Tufail wrote the story of Hayy Ibn Yaqthan in 12th century Spain, people have been asking themselves these questions:
- How can I be myself?
- What is my truest and innermost self and how can I realise it?
- Do I have a unique and individual essence that makes me who I am?
Our true selves can be elusive. We don’t always feel that we have a strong and stable sense of self. …
Khaled Serafy
Egyptian, Londoner, and Data Scientist. I write about every awesome thing I encounter on the serpentine path to the straight and narrow road.
