Jan Höglund's Blog

Category: Life

  • Retrospective 2024-45

    This is a retrospective of week 45, 2024 (2024-11-04–2024-11-10). I’ve started reading Sarah Kendzior’s books Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America and They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent this week. I will return to these books next week. I’ve also listened to the…

  • Rudolf Steiner on Natural Objects

    This is one of several posts which are based on my reading of The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner. For other posts, see below. Ruldolf Steiner seems not only to overvalue thinking, but seems to be stuck in mechanistic thinking? Steiner writes: I construct a machine purposefully when I bring its parts into a…

  • Retrospective 2024-42

    This is a retrospective of week 42, 2024 (2024-10-14–2024-10-20). I’ve seen The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner (part 1 & part 2) this week. Rudolf Steinder said we shouldn’t “accumulate learning” as our own “treasure of knowledge”, but “place this learning in the service of the world”.1 He called Goethe the “Copernicus and the Kepler of…

  • From Coincidence of Opposities to Transcendence of Opposities

    This is a placeholder for an idea which can be expanded much further. The coincidentia oppositorum is a latin term for the coincidence of opposites. It’s also the name of chapter 20 in The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist. This is the first chapter in Part III of the book. The coincidence of opposites…

  • Jon Young on Deep Connection

    The following is from a conversation with Jon Young on Nature Connection and How to Prepare for the Future on March 15, 2020. Jon Young said: We can all go sit in nature and remember what it feels like to be connected to it. …and then remember we’re part of this living earth, and that it…

  • Retrospective 2024-39

    This is a retrospective of week 39, 2024 (2024-09-23–2024-09-29). I’ve continued immersing myself in Iain McGilchrist’s work this week. I was also reminded by Christopher Alexander’s work in two articles by Bonnitta Roy and Or Ettinger, respectively. I will come back to that. I’ve reviewed what McGilchrist writes about lateralization during the week, but came,…

  • Bradford Keeney on shaking up everything

    The following is from an interview with Bradford Keeney on February 7, 2018. Bradford Keeney said (my emphasis in italics): (6:16) Everything that we admit is permissible and legitimate in our culture…is that it must be tame,…it must be convenient for words to map, express and articulate… But in fact…the old ways, the original forms…

  • John Gribbin on Instantaneous Interconnectedness

    “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts of the whole are interconnected by feedbacks — feedbacks which seem to operate instantaneously. This is where we can begin to make a fruitful analogy with living systems.” —John Gribbin https://johngribbinscience.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/a-quantum-myth-for-our-times/ “…each individual charged particle — including each electron — is instantaneously aware of…

  • Philip Ball and Iain McGilchrist on How Life Works

    This post contains highlights from Philip Ball’s conversation with Iain McGilchrist which focuses on Ball’s book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Philip Ball …this is a book that has…taken me decades to get to. …when I’m talking about a new biology, I’m trying to get across what has changed in…

  • Retrospective 2024-23

    This is a retrospective of week 23, 2024 (2024-06-03–2024-06-09). This is a reminder to myself that I still haven’t finished my review of Robert Rosen’s book Anticipatory Systems which I started writing week 10. The reason I mention this is that I listened to Krista Tippett’s conversation with Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton this…