3 Big Ideas from The Daimon and the Soul of the West by Bernardo Kastrup

The central idea of this book is both simple and counter-cultural: 

“Your Life is Not About You”. 

It’s about what nature wants to do through you. 

What follows is a short summary of three of the main ideas I took from it. 

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#1 – Two Halves of Live: Two Different Tasks

Bernardo uses his own story as well as the experiences of many other creators, philosophers, entrepreneurs, and artists to suggest that human life can be divided into two halves, with different tasks required for each. 

The first half of life is about “developing your instrument”, or “building your podium”, as the author puts it. 

At this stage, the goal is to build a strong foundation in the form of skills, knowledge, resources, relationships, finances, etc., for what’s to follow. 

The logic being that it’s difficult to be an effective force for nature from a place of scarcity — i.e. if you’re constantly stressing about paying the bills. 

As the old maxim goes:

“You can’t pour from an empty cup.”

Once that foundation is in place, the second half of life is about answering the question:

What does life want to bring into this world through me? 

You’ll know you’re in the second half if the material goals which previously motivated you and brought meaning to your life, no longer do. 

Often this awareness will enter into one’s life in the form of a mid-life crisis. 

Through this lens, these crises can be thought of like a “wake-up call” from nature to re-orient your trajectory and re-organise your value structure. 

Now that your instrument is developed, it’s about letting nature play its music through you to bring new creations into this world.

From the book:

“We must allow ourselves to be played by nature like a violin allows itself to be played by the musician. Persisting with an egoic, personal agenda into the second half of life is akin to sticking chewing gum to the strings of the violin: the whole thing goes out of tune.”

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#2 – Meaning is Found in Context

Another insight I loved was about the contextual nature of meaning. 

To illustrate this, imagine ripping out page 250 of a 500 page Harry Potter book, and handing it to someone who had never read the series before. 

The words would mean nothing. 

It is only the pages that come before and afterwards that give this particular page its meaning. 

And the same with our lives. 

Your life is like one page in the middle of a 600 page book. 

Both your biology and your psychology are intimately connected to the 300 ancestral pages (lives) that came before you and the 300 that will follow you. 

As Bernardo puts it: 

“There is a crowd within each of us, looking out through our eyes and living life through our deeds.”

So although your actions, personality, desires, fears, and emotional landscape appear to be uniquely your own, they are actually part of a flow of biological and psychological life that has been in motion for millennia. 

For me, there’s a practical implication here.

If we want to experience more meaning in life, we’d be wise to develop a greater understanding of our historical context, which we can do by learning more about our ancestors and the cultural heritage we emerged from. 

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#3 – Embracing the Sense of Not Being Enough

A third idea that resonated was Bernardo’s take on the feeling of “existential lack” most of us experience at some point in our lives. 

The sense of not being enough. 

In recent years, we’ve been doing our best to extinguish the flames of this inner fire, with mantras such as “I am enough” now commonplace in popular culture. 

But what if this is a mistake? 

What if this primordial lack is not a “bug” in the system, but rather a key feature?

An archetypal element that’s there for a reason?

In other words, in the same way that the ghrelin hormone regulates our hunger levels and appetite, what if our sense of lack is a kind of “psychological hormone” that regulates our hunger to become more? 

What if it’s there to serve the purpose of getting us to actualise as much of our innate potential as possible? 

When this idea seeped in, I felt foolish for ever having wanted to get rid of it.

Now I welcome it. 

Because I know it’s the call to become more. 

Maybe we’re not enough after all—and maybe that’s a good thing to realise. 

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If you take an interest in the meaning crisis we’re currently experiencing, you’ll love this book. 

It comes out on 26th August and is currently available for pre-order. 

For a taster, check out my interview with Bernardo here.