A Precious Feat in the Jungle

“To live among today’s society and to influence others instead of being influenced by them  —now that’s a feat !” -Ostad Elahi In his pioneering book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) examines our susceptibility to outside manipulation, and tendency for self-deception. Our minds or mental spaces are lured by the media and the social influences of our milieu, which define our choices, snatch our attention and shift our values. Content management, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience all intervene with how we perceive, think, and make decisions; they blur our comprehension of the truth and ultimately influence who we really are. We

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Desiderata

    Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,  and remember what peace there may be in silence.  As far as possible, without surrender,  be on good terms with all persons.  Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,  even to the dull and the ignorant;  they too have their story.  Avoid loud and aggressive persons;  they are vexatious to the spirit.  If you compare yourself with others,  you may become vain or bitter,  for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.  Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.  Keep interested in your

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Saint Francis d’Assisi and Reviving the Old Values

  The patron saint of ecology, Francis d’Assisi’s love of nature, and new ways of living together set forth by the eminent neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik Living in times of an unstoppable disease pervading the earth, it has become imperative to peruse our fragile relation with nature, and  to “collectively revive our old values”  says the eminent neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik : Crises are very common in the human condition. We have already known many epidemics which have forced cultural revolutions… With each epidemic, or natural disaster, there has been a cultural change. After the trauma, we are forced to discover new

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The Magical Light of the Eye

  Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.  The one of a kind artist and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), driven by his rigorous quest for knowing the truth pertaining the human body and the spirit, and its place in the universe, dedicated his life on his art and research. He amassed profound knowledge in anatomy, botany, mathematics, engineering and physics. The corpus of his work and scientific findings is preserved in nearly thousand drawings. Some of his rare  notebooks and masterpieces were exhibited at the Louvre Museum in 2019 to commemorate the 500th

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The Sacred Tree

So the story goes … long long time ago, a big contest was going to be held for winning the patronage of the city of  Athens and its surrounding territory, Attica. The contest was to take place under the presiding witness of King Cecrops at the Temple of Parthenon which rose on the rocky hilltop overlooking the city of Athens. The two candidates of the glorious contest were Athena, the goddess of justice, wisdom and war skills and Poseidon, the god of the seas. To win the guardianship of the city, Athena and Poseidon, each were to offer a gift

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Looking for the Shepherd’s Star

  “We are obliged to change and rethink the whole civilization,” says Boris Cyrulnik, the eminent neuropsychiatrist known for his work on resilience and trauma. Our culture has lost the compass, we navigate by sight, jostled by events […] We must take a new direction because we have just understood that man is not above nature, he is in nature.  Physically, psychologically and spiritually we are much more sculpted than we think by our natural space. He focuses on healing the soul in his latest book, Souls and Seasons, and marks “psychological ecology” as the  crucial component of the remedy

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The Music of the Solar System

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres. Pythagoras (circa 570 BC), the wise philosopher and polymath was born on the Greek island of Samos. Renown by his fundamental theory of mathematics and his studies on the pre-existing link between music and mathematics, he demystified the music of the planets of our solar system which he defined as musica universalis, the music of the spheres. Attesting to the fact that the planets and stars move according to mathematical equations, their movement correspond to musical notes and each emit their own

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My Good Friend, Routine

“We are routine beings, and arguably even more so at this time. And this is normal, although our brain likes to be surprised, it needs routine to avoid overheating, ” states Valentin Wyart, the acclaimed neuroscientist of École Normale Supérieure of France. Even more so nowadays, the routine allows us to structure ourselves when we have just spent a highly unstructured year with difficulties in planning. He affirms the restorative quality of routine in one’s daily life : These routines that we put in place allow at least the projection in the very short term: knowing what we are going

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Rumi, the Dancing Poet

One of the most read and quoted Persian poets of the 13th century, Mevlâna Mohammad Jalal al-dîn Rumi, known as Rumi was a savant and mystic. Born in Balkh (1207-1273), he and his family moved to Konya, Turkey after the Mongol conquest. Soon after his settlement in Konya, mystics, and Sufi dervishes gathered around him to benefit from his spiritual and intellectual knowledge. The spiritual life was embedded in the daily material life of the dervishes. Their gatherings were accompanied by spiritual music and dancing. It is during this period he is called “ Mevlâna” – meaning “our master”.  

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The War of Gods at Troy

“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another” wrote Homer in his timeless epic Iliad, which is considered as the invaluable pillar of ancient Greek literature. This outstanding masterpiece, presumed to be written around 700-800 BC, is set during the Trojan War, the ten year siege of Troy by the allied Greek kingdoms under the rule of Agamemnon. The myth begins with the beauty contest between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera. Aphrodite promises the jurist, Paris that should he elect her as the winner of the contest, then

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